Sunday, 20 August 2023

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO CANADA?

 

It’s been a really busy several months since I last posted. A good kind of busyness. For a few weeks now, beginning on Canada Day, which I spent in Regina, I have been thinking about how crippled Canadian functionality has become by the ill-informed policies of the Liberal/NDP federal government.

Here in Victoria, the homeless have proliferated beyond the toleration of many people. There is public pressure on municipal government to do something, even if it is simply making property more vandal-proof. What are people supposed to do when they have no housing? And how will they have housing with rents as high as they are?

I have never lived on the street, but I can imagine how time consuming it would be to find a place safe from humans, animals, and weather, and then maintaining a claim to it. I can imagine how difficult it must be to find employment with no fixed address, no place to bathe, and no facility in which to press clothing. It would be challenging to eat nutritiously and to maintain a positive and realistic enough attitude to systematically look for employment. Doing so depends on wanting to do so, and that somewhat depends on optimism --- rather elusive, I expect, when one has been beaten to the knees in Trudeaupia.

We seem to have economic policy specifically designed to destroy the morale of Canadian residents. It is reported that one in six people go hungry in this country. Let’s have people live in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

A couple earning a quarter of a million dollars annually has an almost impossible time finding an affordable starter home in major cities, even mid-priced ones such as Calgary. Prices in Vancouver and Toronto are bizarre. But the amateur federal government should keep spending money like it has no value. And it doesn’t, thanks to the proliferation of dollars by a Bank of Canada that tag-teams with the government. At least not enough value to meet people’s needs. Yes, let’s have people living in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

Let’s open the borders to a flood of people who are not like us and who will not be assimilated by us, but who will eventually want to assimilate us --- people who consume more than they produce because we basically do not allow them to ply the professional skills they bring with them. Let’s have them also depending on a whimsical government for help, further adding to price inflationary pressures. And let’s have those people also living in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

I like the idea of immigration. We need it. As a people transition from rural to urban bases, the birthrate falls. Agrarian people have lots of kids: kids are an asset. In the city, kids are expensive pets. So people have less of them. We are now, and have been for many years, possessed of a birthrate that is way below the approximately 2.1 kids per couple that is needed to maintain a population quantum. You can find various figures for Canada’s birthrate, but it seems to be a bit over 1.4. So we need people to do the work that is necessary to enable the huge number of Canadian seniors (the big baby boomer generation) to not work in their old age. Having well educated immigrants and enabling them to practice the occupations for which they have been trained, is different than having a target of 500,000 immigrants per year and putting hurdles in the immigrants’ way that keep them from adding to the wealth of the country.

I have seen a couple of disturbing videos recently, and I don’t know which is worse. The first was of Justin Trudeau creepily asking moms to leave a room so he could talk to their kids. I saw another video, this one not disturbing, of Trudeau talking with kids in what seemed to be a classroom. Maybe the video occurred later in the same session where he told the moms to leave. One of the kids asked him why he painted his face black (or maybe the child said “brown”). His reply was that he should not have done so, but he didn’t know better. He has received a huge amount of what I think is undeserved flak. I am sure he did not see anything offensive about it. I recall playing the part of Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet that was an all-male cast, as was the practice in the bard’s day. Should I be pilloried for it? I don’t get why Trudeau should be as attacked over what seems to have essentially been playing a role. He has real scandals that could use that attention.

The second disturbing video was of Chrystia Freeland apparently addressing a graduating class and their guests and raising the question of whether the concept of a capitalist democracy is viable.  What does she know of capitalism? Capitalism depends on having a free market, and her government has run crippling interference with free markets from the time it took office. Canadian governments typically have interfered with markets, but her government is an outlier at the extreme interference end of the range.

Happily, the polls are consistently showing that Canadians have generally had enough of Trudeau and his globalist agenda. Sadly, he will likely be dissuaded from calling an election before 2025, but who knows? Jagmeet Singh may come to see that he made a huge mistake in abandoning the role of being in His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Nothing loyal about an Opposition propping up the worse federal government in Canadian history. The role of the Opposition is to energetically and creatively attack proposed legislation so that only the best legislation receives Royal Assent. When an Opposition rubber stamps everything a government decides to do, especially when the government is as inept and amateurish as ours, that Opposition, in this case the NDP, do the country a big damage. Nothing loyal about that. Well, maybe loyal to the desire to be in office the minimum six years required for collecting a pension.

Wednesday, 1 March 2023

Pierre Poilievre: Not a Bad Record

It's disappointing to see Pierre Poilievre throwing some of his MPs under the bus for having spoken to Christine Anderson. So far as I can tell, her reputation as a Nazi sympathizer is unearned and is built on Liberal propaganda.  Pierre has been batting close to 1000 so far, so I guess he's allowed a lapse, but I wish it wasn't something we'd expect from Erin O'Toole. If Pierre doesn't avoid using the Liberal playbook, he's not going to differentiate himself to the electorate, and Maxime Bernier will be the last man standing.

Monday, 22 August 2022

Charest and the WEF

I received an email from Kevin O’Leary today. Not a personal email, but one sent to people he or someone else on Team Charest  thinks might be supporters of Pierre Poilievre for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. O’Leary’s pitch was that while Poilievre is electable as leader, he is not electable as Prime Minister. His reasoning: Poilievre is too right wing --- not middle of the road enough --- to win a federal election. Does it occur to O’Leary that the people who will choose Poilievre as leader of the Party will also vote in a Federal election? And does he accept that, for each person who agrees enough with Poilievre to cast a vote in his favor in the current CPC leadership race, there are who knows how many more that don’t vote for CPC leader because they are not Party members, but who will support Poilievre for Prime Minister? 

The Poilievre team has done a masterful marketing job. I say that as someone with a doctorate that was heavy on marketing theory and a business career that has been heavy on implementation of marketing principles. It would be a blue moon event for him not to win the CPC leadership race. Poilievre has positioned himself as the common man’s champion, in contra distinction to Trudeau who is positioned as the champion of the elite whoever they are. I think Poilievre can win a federal election as PM.

Did I tell any of this to O’Leary? No, but I did reply. My short reply included this link: https://www.weforum.org/people/jean-charest --- reflective of a situation that is enough to disqualify Charest from holding high public office in this country, in my opinion. The WEF, which would be better described as the WTF, embraces goals that are counter to what is good for Canadians. How Freeland can be a trustee of such an organization so detrimental to humanity and still be Deputy PM of Canada without being guilty of treason is beyond my intellectual reach. Charest, a past Liberal Premier of Quebec, appears to be a pea in the same pod as the smug and off-putting Freeland.

Sunday, 21 August 2022

Falling Walls Gives Axolotl Special Recognition

 I was delighted to learn that Axolotl Biosciences Inc. was selected by the Berlin-based Falling Walls competition (https://falling-walls.com/) as one of 25 science “start-ups / venture” winners (https://falling-walls.com/science-summit/science-summit-winners-2022/), and the only one from Canada. Axolotl has a motivated and competent team organized and supervised by Dr. Stephanie Willerth and Dr. Laura De la Vega. See https://gordonfeil.blogspot.com/2022/07/axolotl-biosciences-inc-advancing.html for more details.