Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Saint Patrick's Week: Mid-Week Post





Lousy Snowmageddon...




I've said this before:

It’s time for a tax revolt in Canada – and not just the phony tax revolt promised (and long since forgotten) by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2015 federal election campaign.
The problem with taxes in Canada is not that they are too high on the middle class and not high enough on the “rich.”

That was Trudeau’s phony tax revolt. The rich, he charged, were skipping out on their obligations to society by avoiding the level of taxes imposed on those of us who can’t afford tricky lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes.

Trudeau promised his revolt would make those lazy, greedy fat cats pay their “fair share,” so he could give tax relief to hard-working, overburdened middle-income Canadians. It was dishonest. It ignored the reality of Canada’s progressive tax system.

The top 1% of income earners in Canada (there are about 260,000) earn a minimum of $190,000 a year and an average of $361,000. Together, they earn about 11% of all the income in the country. And their income comes mostly from practicing their professions, running businesses (their own or corporations) or working in the senior public service. It is not mostly from inheritance or investment dividends.

And, importantly, the One Percenters pay more than 23% of all federal and provincial income tax.
The top 10% – those who earn over $80,000 – earn 35% of all income, and pay 55% of income taxes.
By comparison, the bottom 50% of Canadian income earners (those earning under $35,000) earn nearly a third of all income, yet pay just 4% of all income tax.

So if the rich are already paying their fair share, how come we middle-classers aren’t getting ahead?

Trudeau couldn't define what or who was middle-class prior to the election. After the election, he continued trotting it out as a tired, oft-repeated campaign promise as a distraction from the fact that he was running the country into the ground (like rehashing the dead Mike Duffy affair instead of answering for his pandering to Aga Khan). It is the middle and working-classes who will end up bearing the brunt of the insane carbon taxes, inflation and the ever-growing debt Trudeau is amassing.

If those classes were smart, they would let Trudeau know with whom he is messing.





But ... but ... the Narrative!

It has come to my attention that despite my best efforts to divert you from my disastrous economic record by playing the “Islamophobia” card, too many of you still aren’t getting the message.

Why, just the other day I read the results of a Forum Research poll that said 44% of you believe that we should not allow asylum seekers who enter Canada illegally to seek asylum in Canada.

That compares to only 36% of you who believe we should allow asylum seekers who enter Canada illegally to seek asylum in Canada, and 20% of you who are undecided.

**

Hyper-sensitive to criticism that the Trudeau government is doing nothing to secure Canada’s borders, Goodale told CTV’s Question Period Sunday: “I guess what the Conservatives are saying is maybe we should line up the RCMP at the border, they should all link arms and shoo people away, or maybe [use] fire hoses or whatever, to keep people from crossing at the border.”

Fire hoses?

First, no one is saying that. Second, the concerns aren’t confined to Conservatives.

Jean-Pierre Fortin, president of the Customs and Immigration Union, told Postmedia Network’s Anthony Furey last week on National Post Radio: “Right now the world is watching us. People are saying, ‘We didn’t know it was that easy to come across the border’ ... I can tell you that my members are calling me on a daily basis and it’s a crisis. The government and senior management are saying this is business as usual – it is not.”

But Goodale’s response is standard operating procedure for the Liberals when they are criticized on just about anything, which is to demonize their critics as Islamophobic, bigoted, racist, heartless, etc.
The reason thousands of asylum seekers are entering Canada illegally at unmanned border crossings in Quebec and Manitoba is due to a quirk in Canadian law.

If they show up at manned border crossings, they’re turned back under our Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S.

But if they cross at unmanned sites, they can launch their refugee claim in Canada and remain here while it slowly goes through the system.

This is protected by the 1985 Supreme Court of Canada Singh decision, which said if an asylum seeker gets a foot inside Canada, the Charter applies to his or her refugee claim.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t help the situation when, virtue signalling during the controversy over U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration bans, he tweeted Canadians will welcome refugees, regardless of their religious faith.

Except most of these people aren’t refugees.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Friday during meetings with Trudeau’s government in Ottawa, that most were in the U.S. legally and, “many ... have only been in the United States a few days, before they made the trek north ...”

Fortin said of the Quebec crossings: “People are leaving from different countries and flying into New York City and they’re taking a bus”.

The bus lets them off near the Canada-U.S. boundary, at which point they take a cab up to the unmanned border and walk across.

So they’re not exactly the wretched of the Earth.

Instead of addressing this problem and others, Goodale, Trudeau and the Liberals attack the people pointing them out.

They condemn opposition to their “Islamophobia” motion (M-103) as bigotry, despite the fact a recent Forum Poll found 71% of Canadians surveyed disagree with its wording, compared to 14% who support it.

Ditto Tory leadership contender Kellie Leitch’s call for screening potential immigrants, refugees and visitors for anti-Canadian values, which a Forum poll last year showed two-thirds of Canadians support.

What’s next? Will Trudeau, Goodale and Co. start calling Canadians who disagree with them “a basket of deplorables?”

Short answer: yes.

When facts are not on one's side and no one is guilted into anything, it's time to pull out the big baby guns.





The demands of the workplace and the nature of learning will necessitate how people are educated and trained. To demand that students sit for seven hours in front of a unionised teacher who may or many not have an agenda (if not drive and ability to teach) is unrealistic and unfair to students for whom school is either a baby-minding centre or a puppy-mill:

In several other provinces, if parents send their child to an independent school, the provincial government helps defray the costs by contributing about 50% of the operating cost of educating a student in the government-run school system.

This puts independent alternatives within the financial reach of more families.

This lowering of financial barriers is likely one reason that one in eight students in British Columbia attends an independent school compared to one in 20 in Ontario, where independent school parents receive no support and must pay full cost for their child’s schooling — as well as the full tax bill they pay to support government-run schools.

It’s impossible to say definitively whether social justice education is good or bad.

It likely depends on specific teacher approaches and the needs of specific children.

But for families who do not feel well served by this approach in the classroom, or the government-run system generally, Ontario could do much more to make other options financially viable.

It's time to stop letting the corrupt, incompetent government take one's money and hand it out as an allowance. Parents should control their money and educate their children as they see fit.





In case one still thinks that China is just a frustrated parent to its North Korean enfant terrible:



Someone, presumably the U.S. Navy, recovered the pieces of a Kwangmyongsong missile North Korea launched in February 2016 and found that it contained “ball bearings and engraved Cyrillic characters … identical to those from the 2012 Unha-3, and a “camera [and] EMI filter” from a “Chinese manufacturer, Beijing East Exhibition High-Tech Technology Co. Ltd.” (Paras. 57-58.) That “someone” also discovered the Pyongyang had imported pressure transmitters from the U.K. and Ireland, via the manufacturer’s distributor in China, via middlemen in China. (Para. 59.) This suggests several layers of violations — China’s failure to expel North Korean representatives of sanctioned entities, to enforce export controls, or to inspect cargo going to North Korea.









The now-ousted President Guen-Hye Park has made yet another dog's breakfast.

No, really:

It was hard to imagine that ousted President Park Geun-hye could get any more unpopular in South Korea — until she moved out of the presidential palace and left her nine dogs behind.

Just days after being removed from office by the constitutional court over a massive corruption scandal, an animal rights group accused Park of animal abandonment for not bringing the dogs with her.

Park’s neighbours had given her a pair of Jindo dogs, a Korean breed of hunting dogs, when she left for the presidential Blue House in 2013. The dogs recently gave birth to seven puppies, which are now considered too young to be separated from their mother, Kim Dong-jo, a Blue House spokesman, said Wednesday.

Kim said the dogs would continue to stay at the presidential palace until they’re ready to be sent to new owners. Park told staff members to take good care of the dogs before vacating the Blue House on Sunday, he said.

Kim Ae Ra, who heads the Korea Alliance for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said the group filed a complaint Monday with South Korea’s Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission over Park’s dogs. The commission then asked the National Police Agency to look into the matter. Officials from the police agency couldn’t immediately confirm how the case would be treated.

It appears unlikely that Park not taking the dogs with her would qualify as abandonment under South Korea’s animal protection law, which defines lost or abandoned animals as those “wandering without an owner in public places” or “left deserted in paper boxes or other containers.”
 
Oh, let it go.  If your government turns leftist, Kim Jong-Un will turn those pups into fur coats.





No one has yet offered an alternative to Trump's ban other than to leave the doors wide open:

A federal judge in Hawaii has frozen President Trump’s new executive order temporarily barring the issuance of new visas to citizens of six-Muslim majority countries and suspending the admission of new refugees.

U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson froze the order nationwide.

Whatever federal monies going to states with these "sanctuary" cities or sympathetic judges should cease.




And now, quokkas because quokkas:



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