Trevor Tombe: The 'Great Canadian Slump' is back - The Hub thehub.ca/2024-04-04/tre… “Since the end of 2015, total compensation per hour (adjusted for inflation) has grown by only 1.9 percent. That’s 1.9 percent over the entire period from 2015 (Q1) to 2023 (Q4), which works out to 0.2 percent per year..”

Jumping Jehosaphat!!!

“While working for Canada and surreptitiously transferring lethal virus samples to China, Xiangguo Qiu was enlisted to lead Wuhan Institute of Virology’s synthetic bat filovirus project…

https://twitter.com/mrbcyber/status/1764692903417237656

… with the institute’s Vice-Director, a senior Chinese scientist that worked in 2015 on a controversial United States ‘hybrid version of a bat coronavirus.’”

“A source with direct knowledge of the material said the information when uncovered would show that scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng provided confidential scientific information to China.”

https://twitter.com/globepolitics/status/1760608394988449937

So how are we doing? A few years back all you'd hear was: the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class are spinning their wheels. Rising inequality, stagnant incomes. It wasn't true then, as some of us tried to show. But what about now? Some charts... Poverty, first. By any measure, by any standard, poverty in Canada has fallen to *historic* lows. It's been falling since the late 90s, but in the last few years, thanks to the Canada Child Benefit, it's dropped like a stone (slight rebound in '21 most likely due to pandemic)...

Why is Canada's economy struggling? Why is per-capita GDP falling? It's not because of a year or two of rapid (by recent standards) population growth. It's because of a decades-long decline in GDP growth ... 1/n GDP used to clearly outpace population, even when population was growing as fast or faster than today. The difference was productivity: as productivity growth has fallen towards zero, the gap between GDP and population has narrowed.

Ashton here uses the rhetorical sleight-of-hand I call “rent-a-terrorist.” Thus: I want a fair deal for the Palestinians. Hamas wants what I want — a fair deal for the Palestinians — which is why it attacked Israel. Ergo give me what I want or there will be more such attacks.

https://twitter.com/pagmenzies/status/1713655854275477622

What is the evidence Hamas’s aims are limited to a fair deal for the Palestinians? There isn’t any. Hamas is quite explicit: it wants nothing less than the end of Israel. Why connect the two, then? Because it’s convenient. Ashton is effectively hiring Hamas to plead her case.

Fascinating to know what kind of game the NDP is playing here, as a sort-of-opposition, sort-of-governing party.

NDP confident inquiry into interference will come, but details still being negotiated | iPolitics ipolitics.ca/news/ndp-confi… It's clear the NDP has a different idea of what an inquiry would look like than the Conservative -- and that their version (a broad-ranging inquiry into every kind of interference, not just China's) hews closer to what the Liberals would prefer.

Guy wrote more than 50 books, described as hugely influential on his contemporaries, now all but completely forgotten. Vanitas vanitatum...

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1671330643085611009

Did you know, on the same subject, there was *another Winston Churchill, more famous in his day than the Churchill we know? An American novelist, he was perhaps the bestselling author of the early 20th c. Our Churchill added the middle S to his name so as not to be taken for him.

“On Friday The Globe asked the office of the ISR whether Navigator had pre-publication access to Johnston’s conclusions on Dong. It also asked whether the report was shared with Torys LLP lawyers who were not involved in the Johnston investigation…” theglobeandmail.com/canada/article… It would be interesting to know on whose advice Johnston and Dong each hired Navigator to represent him. It’s possible each made the same choice on his own. But it’s possible each had help.

This is the right decision. It was an error of judgment to have taken the job — but it was the prime minister’s idea to offer it to him. I am less inclined to put that down to simple error.

Johnston resigning as special rapporteur cbc.ca/news/politics/… It is the Prime Minister who bears responsibility for this mess, which could so easily have been avoided. He could simply have answered the still-unresolved questions about what he knew when. Or he could’ve called a public inquiry & consulted with the opp’n on who shld lead it.

"The classified docs TRUMP stored in his boxes included info re defense/weapons capabilities of US/foreign countries; US nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of US/allies to military attack; + plans for possible retaliation vs foreign attack."
nytimes.com/interactive/20… "The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued
viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods."

Impossible. We just spent $32 billion to ensure Canada would dominate.

Why China Could Dominate the Next Big Advance in Battery Power - The New York Times nytimes.com/2023/04/12/bus… “China is positioning itself to command the next big innovation in rechargeable batteries: replacing lithium with sodium, a far cheaper and more abundant material… Sodium, found all over the world as part of salt, sells for 1 to 3 percent of the price of lithium…”

Former Trudeau Foundation head says past leadership misled Canadians on Chinese donation - The Globe and Mail
theglobeandmail.com/politics/artic… So basically the recently resigned head of the Trudeau Foundation has just publicly accused the Foundation's former leadership of conspiring with an arm of the Chinese government to disguise the source of that $200,000 donation ...

Jack Mintz: Governments should end this destructive green subsidy war | Financial Post
financialpost.com/opinion/govern… "Overall, Canada is paying an astounding $4.7 million for each of the new 3000 VW employees."

Globe editorial: Only in Ottawa’s world: Go on strike and still get paid - The Globe and Mail
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editor… "It’s also not clear when the government would take the minimal step of clawing back overpayments. And there is the possibility – bordering on likelihood – of PSAC demanding as part of a contract deal that there be no clawbacks at all."

"Workers who participate in the strike will most likely have their pay clawed back after the strike... But it won’t be an automatic clawback – employees will have to submit an unpaid leave request through the federal government’s Phoenix pay system to process the pay deduction."

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1650950479994581032

Wait -- they have to *apply* to have their unearned pay clawed back? Is this real?

The details in this story are just utterly mind-blowing. This is a publicly-funded organization, to the tune of $125 million. But it appears to have been run like a cross between a college housepainting service and a Panamanian shell company.

https://twitter.com/RobertFife/status/1646341001089363970

Wait, you mean it wasn’t because of “politicization” by a barbaric and unfeeling press?

https://twitter.com/scoopercooper/status/1646107626806059008

“The reason given by the Foundation in the official statement issued on Tuesday, namely the "politicization" of this donation from China, "is a bunch of lies," one of the resigning members of the board of directors told La Presse…”

Fascinated by the “not a whistle-blower just a leaker” distinction. It’s uttered with some vehemence, even contempt, of a kind I don't recall the same people directing at leakers from, say, the Trump administration. /1 The gist of it seems to be that unless the leak exposes actual lawbreaking, it can’t be in the public interest. In the words of one critic, it’s just “lobbying.” /2

The attempts on here to defend the PM naming a friend to decide whether to call an inquiry into e.g. himself have been ... fun.
"Who ELSE could we have found?"
"You'd complain if he appointed Jesus."
"You're saying he's a traitor, is that it? Is that what (sob) we've COME to?" But I take their point. I mean, where does it end? If friends can no longer investigate friends, are we now to say friends can’t, I don't know, give government contracts to friends?
thestar.com/politics/2022/…

Not so much partisans, but the proverbial reasonable person. And the issue, again, is not his integrity, but whether his associations with the PM might colour his judgment. Which is a very different thing.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1636168576078848004

You can be the most upright, high-minded person in the world, and still have a hard time separating your prior good impression of a person, born of a history of personal & professional associations, from the possibly contradictory facts a rapporteur might be required to assess.