It's a weekend that makes me glad that I'm Canadian. As bad as Mr. Harper seems, at least we don't have a country tearing itself apart over weather or not to ban assault rifles.
Good on Andrew Scheer, the Speaker of the House. He layed the hammer
down on his own party that seems intent on re-writing the rules of
Parliament. Maybe he should lead the party?
Hallelujah! One guy has admitted that a robo-call stopped him from voting. Does this mean the lawsuit can go forward?
The Conservatives have come up with another way to battle the robo-calls accusations without actually addressing the robo-calls accusations.
This time they say that the case should be thrown out because the
organization representing the individuals in court (footing the legal
bills, etc.) has a vested interest in the outcome and sought out
applicants to bring the cases forward. Wow. How evil. Somebody made
people aware that they had standing to bring a case to court after they
were victims of an illegal action.
Oil lobbyists have met 2733 times with public officials in the last 4 years. Enbridge and
other pipeline companies have had 52 meetings with cabinet ministers.
During the same time, there was 1 meeting with Greenpeace.
Apparently "temporary" foreign workers means "only foreign workers will be hired for four years and then will remain for another ten years after that". But that's okay. Jason Kenney insists everything is okay.
Even worse, many of them are unskilled and forced to pay recruitment agencies a large chunk of their earnings. There was a
CBC Radio story a few days ago that interviewed some of these miners.
They talked about how this was a "chance of a lifetime" to make decent
Canadian wages to send back to their families. I softened a bit on this
program. But knowing that most/some of this money is going back to
unscrupulous recruiters completely kills this whole thing for me. No
jobs for Canadians. No finanical windfalls for the Chinese workers. No
actual "advanced skills". This whole program is crazy.
Oy. Fighter Jets. I can't even begin to follow what is going on any
more with the Fighter Jets. What was the original price estimate? What
did that include? This timeline sets some of it out. The government has released a "revised" number of $42 Billion, and announced that they are putting things on hold. Is this the official 3rd Party number? And we'll see how long it takes to
blame this on the Liberals/NDP.
And...not just a fiasco in costs. It looks like all of the financial "benefits" in the forms of construction contracts aren't really based in reality either.
A bit of a Tyee link dump.
First, an article that highlights some of the problems with the Oil Sands and the CNOOC deal. Man, there's
some crazy numbers in there.
Here's a pretty fucked up article about our foreign relations with the Congo.
Key points: The Congo has perhaps the greatest mineral wealth of any
country on Earth. Yet it is dead last in per capita GDP. We aren't
really helping much.
This is a pretty great little story from CBC about bad behaviour in Parliament. My favourite, and I can't remember if I posted this last
year...was Justin Trudeau becoming unhinged when Peter Kent suggests that opposition members would be better informed if they had attended the UN Climate Change Summit in Durban...after they had campaigned for
months to be included in the UN Climate Change Summit in Durban. I
think I did talk about that but it still is just an awesome example of
how clueless these guys can be.
I don't really have an opinion formed on this story. On one hand, Federal Government Employees have seen some significant wage/benefit increases in the last few years. On the other hand, many of them are
going to lose their jobs.
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