On the request of the provincial government, Canada's federal government has exempted public spaces from British Columbia's pilot drug decriminalization program.
May 07, 2024 - "On January 31, 2023, a subsection 56(1) exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) related to personal possession of certain controlled substances came into effect in the province of British Columbia (BC). After a thorough assessment, this exemption was granted by the federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Associate Minister of Health to support the province in implementing its comprehensive public health response to the overdose crisis. The pilot project was planned to be in effect until January 31, 2026.
"Under the original exemption, adults aged 18 years of age and older in BC could not be arrested or charged for the possession of a cumulative amount of up to 2.5 grams of opioids (e.g. heroin, morphine, and fentanyl), cocaine (including crack and powder cocaine), methamphetamine (meth), or MDMA (ecstasy) for personal use. Exceptions to this exemption were included so that it did not apply in places where the provincial and federal government determined that personal possession would create undue public safety concerns (e.g. airports, daycares, schools, etc.).
"As the first exemption of its kind in Canada, ongoing monitoring was conducted to inform whether it contributed to its objectives, which included reducing stigma and substance use harms and increasing access to health and social services for people who use drugs in BC.
"In September 2023, at the request of British Columbia, the original exemption was amended to prohibit possession in additional areas designed primarily for youth including, within 15 metres of a public outdoor playground, spray pool or wading pool, or skate park. This came into effect on September 18, 2023.
"Since the exemption came into effect in January 2023, a number of BC municipalities, law enforcement officials, health sector workers, and community members have raised concerns about increasing public drug use and that law enforcement does not have tools to address public drug use. On April 26, 2024, BC submitted an amendment request to address these concerns. As of May 7, 2024, we are granting BC’s request to prohibit possession of controlled substances in public spaces.
"Exemptions will continue to apply in private residences, healthcare clinics as designated by the province of BC, places where people are lawfully sheltering, and overdose prevention and drug checking sites.
"This exemption is an additional tool that the federal government is providing to BC to help support a balanced public health and public safety approach to addressing the overdose crisis and substance use. The Government of Canada continues to take a comprehensive approach to addressing substance use harms and the overdose crisis."
Canada's Trudeau gov't has been reluctant to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (which has killed Canadian citizens) or Samidoun (which supports Hamas, which has killed Canadian citizens) as terrorist entities. Yet it did not hesitate to apply the designation to an alleged "far-right" group of Canadians with zero history of violence.
May 13, 2024 - "The Justin Trudeau government is still agonizing over whether to 'responsibly list' Iran’s murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.... The IRGC’s thousands of innocent victims include 63 Canadians killed when the IRGC shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS572 near Tehran’s airport. The Trudeau government is even less interested in going after Samidoun, a pro-Hamas terrorist-linked group that’s actually headquartered in Vancouver. Yet it hesitated not at all in crushing a small group of Canadian oddballs who had broken no laws and disavowed violence and racism.
"These were the Canadian wing of the Proud Boys, a mainly U.S. organization some of whose members participated in the U.S. Capitol Building riot three years ago. The Canadian group was pronounced a 'terrorist entity' a month later. But new Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) research recently conducted by a fellow researcher and myself, and published for the first time here and in C2C Journal, reveals virtually the entire surrounding Liberal narrative as exaggerated if not false:
Neither the Proud Boys’ Canadian chapter nor any of its members are known to have broken any laws before or since the organization’s terror entity designation on February 3, 2021;
There’s no indication Canada’s Department of Justice prepared the dossier of evidence that, as Public Safety Canada’s anti-terrorism-related web pages explain, is required before any group can be designated a terrorist entity.... There’s no evidence this was done afterwards, either. There’s no evidence any such dossier exists at all;
Trudeau’s ministers held no other apparent evidence to substantiate their heated public accusations that the Canadian Proud Boys had engaged in violence, were planning to do so and posed a substantial threat thereof;
The Trudeau government showed no interest in the Proud Boys until after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot....
Following Canada’s terrorist listing, Public Safety officials were unable to muster any compelling reasons or hard evidence in support despite persistent questioning from news media;
Substantially all of their “evidence” comprised U.S. news media reports pertaining to events and organizations in the U.S.; and,
The terrorist designation did not trigger any known law enforcement action against the Canadian chapters or their former members....
"Ottawa urgently needed to act, insisted Public Safety Minister Bill Blair.... But the Liberals had nothing on the Proud Boys. No violent acts, no criminal records, no bomb-making plans, no law-breaking at all. Their most aggressive act came when five of them – five – expressed concern over the impending destruction of a statue of one of Canada’s most important historical figures in Halifax on Canada Day 2017, offending some Indigenous activists. For this – and for not hating Western civilization – the Proud Boys were routinely maligned as 'white supremacist', 'misogynistic' or 'far-rightist'....
"Canada’s Proud Boys appear to have been designated terrorists mostly because incoming U.S. President Joe Biden needed help in building the Democratic narrative that the J6 riot was a 'violent insurrection'. Canada’s move, indeed, was instant news in D.C. and, the ATIP documents show, was discussed in a cabinet-level meeting between the two governments....
"Further circumstantial evidence that it was a purely political act is the absence of subsequent law enforcement action against the Proud Boys. Normally, a terror designation unleashes the legal hounds of hell upon the target, everything from property and asset seizures to placing members on no-fly lists, to comprehensive surveillance and harassment, and onward to criminal charges. But none of this happened.... Nor is there any criminal or civil case law involving Canadian Proud Boys members indicated on Canada’s free case-search website....
"Still, the Trudeau government crushed Canada’s Proud Boys (who announced their dissolution in May 2021, reiterating they were never a white-supremacist group). Based not on a carefully assembled dossier of hard evidence, but on ideological prejudice and media reports – many exaggerated, distorted or plain false – about a U.S. group whose Canadian affiliate had nothing to do with any of it. If that’s how things now work in Canada, one can only ask: who might be next?"
In March, Canada's Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a Manitoba court ruling that public health officials should not be "second guessed" on whether lockdown policies were a justifiable violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
March 14, 2024 - "The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is disappointed that the Supreme Court of Canada has decided not to hear the appeal of the challenge to Manitoba’s lockdown restrictions. The decision was announced on Thursday, March 14, 2024. The Leave to Appeal application, under the name Gateway Bible Baptist Church et al. v. Manitoba et al., was filed on September 18, 2023.
"Five Manitoba churches, a pastor and a deacon [had] asked the Supreme Court of Canada to hear their appeal of the lower courts’ dismissal of their constitutional challenge to closures of churches and restrictions on outdoor gatherings during Covid lockdowns in late 2020 and 2021. Included in the application was protester Ross MacKay, who had been ticketed and who was seeking to appeal the lower courts’ dismissal of his constitutional challenge to the outdoor gathering limits.
"Through public health orders, Manitoba had closed churches while permitting businesses to continue to operate. Taxis, in-person university classes, film and tv productions, law offices, and liquor stores were allowed to remain open. The Winnipeg Jets could meet and train indoors with their extended crew, and summer Olympic competitors were allowed to train indoors. Outdoor gatherings were reduced to no more than five people, while at the same time hundreds of people could legally gather indoors at big box stores.
"The initial case was heard in May 2021 before the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench. The province did not produce any evidence that Covid spreads outdoors, or that outdoor gatherings were risky activities. That hearing did produce a significant admission from a government expert witness, Chief Microbiologist and Laboratory Specialist Dr. Jared Bullard, who, under questioning from Justice Centre lawyers, admitted that 56 percent of positive Covid cases were not infectious.... The Manitoba Court of King’s Bench ruled that the government’s public health officials should not be 'second guessed' and that the government need not meet a high threshold of providing persuasive evidence to demonstrably justify that violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were reasonable.
"The Manitoba Court of King’s Bench did not order the unsuccessful Applicants to pay court costs, finding there to be significant public interest in having this case adjudicated. In December 2022, the Applicants appealed. The appeal was dismissed by the Manitoba Court of Appeal in June 2023.
"In the Application for Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, lawyers provided by the Justice Centre argued that the case raised issues of national importance. For instance:
How are constitutionally protected activities to be juridically measured against comparable non-constitutionally protected activities?
What is the proper approach to the minimal impairment stage of the Oakes analysis with respect to public health orders that fully prohibit Charter-protected activities (e.g. In- person religious worship) while permitting comparable non-Charter-protected activities[?]....
Does reliance on the 'precautionary principle' satisfy the state’s onus under Charter section 1 to provide 'cogent and persuasive' evidence to justify Charter-infringing measures?
"The Applicants’ legal team believed the case was critically important, as it could have served as guidance for governments in crafting public health measures on efforts needed to accommodate Charter-protected rights and freedoms. Allison Pejovic, lawyer for the Applicants, stated,
Our clients are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear their appeal. It was past time to have a conversation with Canada’s highest court about whether Charter-protected rights such as rights to worship and assemble ought to be prioritized over economic interests, such as ensuring that the Winnipeg Jets could practice indoors and that movie productions could continue. It was also critical to hear from the Court on the importance of respecting the Charter during a declared ’emergency’. Governments urgently needed the Supreme Court of Canada’s guidance as to the degree to which they should accommodate Charter rights during a future pandemic or other emergency proclaimed by government. Leaving that issue undecided at the highest level is a grave injustice for all Canadians."
March 15, 2024 - "In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
"The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
"Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob....
"Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
"Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts. Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
"Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.... Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
"The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
"In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called 'high fructose corn syrup,' why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
"In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
"What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
"This used to go by the name 'crony capitalism' which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream.... That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
"Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry. This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications. Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
"How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes....
"It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities....
"[T]his corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
"This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
"How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
"And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
"We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
"This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets. I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
"Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."
4 May 4, 2024 - "Argentina has historically been a country of failed governments, economic collapses, and debt defaults. Yet incredibly there are signs that – against all the odds – the bold, free market reforms of its libertarian President Javier Milei are beginning to work. With inflation falling, interest rates coming down, and the peso on fire in one market, Milei is already proving the global Left-wing economic establishment – addicted to bigger government and endless deficits – wrong. Indeed, it may provide a template for other countries to escape from zero growth....
inflation has fallen to 11pc and Milei predicts it will fall further. While a monthly figure (this is Argentina after all), price rises may be coming back under control after soaring above 300pc annually.
Last week, Milei announced that the country had recorded its first quarterly budget surplus since 2008, a modest 0.2pc of GDP, but still an astonishing achievement in such a short space of time, especially for a country that has run deficits for 113 of the last 123 years.
Then, earlier this week, the central bank, which Milei has not yet gotten around to abolishing as he pledged, cut interest rates for the third time in three weeks. While they are still at an eye-watering 50pc, that will start to feed through into the economy very soon.
"Investors have started to notice. According to Bloomberg data, in the blue-chip swap market the peso was the best-performing currency in the world in the first quarter of this year, and the bond markets are rallying as well. It may also get better over the months ahead. With stabilising prices, and a rising currency, investment should start flowing again into a country rich in natural resources and hyper-competitive on wages costs. If Milei can make good on his promise to unlock the country’s vast reserves of shale oil and gas – using technologies that have proved safe and successful in the US – then the economy could even start to boom.....
"On Milei’s election, he was dismissed as a madman who would be removed from office within a matter of months, if not weeks. In proving that narrative wrong, he would show that even after the short-lived catastrophe of the Liz Truss government, free market reforms are far from impossible. So how is he en route to deliver such a massive shock to the stale economic orthodoxy? Fundamentally, he got three big calls right.
"First, even without a majority in parliament, he has been ruthless. Whole government departments have been closed down overnight, regardless of the immediate consequences. The Ministry of Culture was axed, so was the anti-discrimination agency, and the state-owned news service. Only last month, he unveiled plans to fire another 70,000 state employees. Milei hasn’t attempted to cut gradually, to control budgets, or to ease people out with early retirement, or hiring freezes. Instead, he has, as promised, taken a ‘chainsaw’ to the machinery of the state, yielding huge savings in the process.
"Next, he has been bold. The president massively devalued the peso on day one, taking the financial hit upfront, and then tore up rent controls, price restrictions and state subsidies. He pared back workers’ rights, reducing maternity leave and severance compensation, and allowed companies to fire workers who went on strike. He ripped away fuel subsidies, even though it meant a temporary spike in inflation. Sure, there has been some short-term pain, but the results are now becoming evident. Rents, for example, are falling by 20pc a year as landlords, freed from controls, put more supply on the market, instead of withdrawing it as they do in countries where the price is set by the government.
"Finally, Milei has never stopped making the argument. He promotes freedom, liberalisation and a smaller state with a messianic zeal. Many of the measures he has taken might be rough, but the president has never attempted to dismiss that, instead explaining patiently and persistently why the reforms are justified, and how they will create greater prosperity for everyone in the long run.
"Much of the developed world, and the UK in particular, are gradually slipping into Argentinian-style stagnation.... Governments are hooked on subsidies and price controls, trying to buy their way out of every challenge with higher spending. Deficits are allowed to rise relentlessly, with no meaningful plan for ever bringing them down again. A corrupt, crony capitalism is allowed to flourish, killing competition. But the Argentine leader is providing a blueprint for how to break free. The global economic elite keeps lecturing us on why we need more government and a more powerful state despite the painful lack of results. Argentina is challenging it in dramatic fashion. It is just possible that it is starting to work."
February 5, 2024 - "Business insolvencies in Canada jumped the most in 36 years of records in 2023, as debt costs rose and the economy weakened. The number of businesses that filed for insolvency was the highest in 13 years, according to figures out last week from the federal Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.... The rise was mainly due to bankruptcies, rather than a renegotiation of terms, said Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist for Alberta Central. Bankruptcies were up 75.6 per cent year over year, mostly in accommodation and food services, retail and construction.
“'Businesses have been struggling to cope with a myriad of financial challenges over the past year, including higher input costs, wage costs, and debt servicing costs, exacerbating the rocky footing many have been on ever since the pandemic,' said André Bolduc, chair of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP).... Business owners who were unable to pay back government pandemic loans known as CEBA by the Jan. 19 deadline now have to pay five per cent interest and make monthly payments on what was previously an interest-free loan with no monthly payments, CAIRP says."
May 6, 2024 - "Data released by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy on Friday shows that business insolvencies in Canada increased 87.2% between the first quarter of 2023 and 2024. The number of insolvencies between the two years increased from 1,070 to 2,003. Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, insolvencies increased from 1,521 to 2,003, a 31.7% increase.
"Consumers weren’t immune ... with consumer insolvencies increasing for the eighth consecutive quarter when measuring year-over-year increases, reaching the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2019. Insolvencies among consumers in Canada increased by 14% between the first quarter of 2023 and 2024. Consumer insolvencies increased from 29,725 to 33,885 between the two years. Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, insolvencies increased from 31,813 to 33,885, a 6.5% increase. On average, 372 Canadians filed for consumer insolvency daily in the first quarter of 2024.
“'A perfect storm of economic challenges is brewing, with high mortgage renewal rates, soaring rental prices, and elevated costs of everyday necessities. The high cost of servicing debts is also compounding the financial strain for many Canadians and leaving them grappling with insurmountable debt burdens,' said André Bolduc, Chair of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals....
"Business insolvencies surging 87.2% was the largest annual increase in 37 years of records from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, according to the CAIRP. 'We are seeing signs of a significant rise in distress among Canadian businesses. Many are still shouldering the burden of the pandemic, on top of high input and labour costs, declining consumer spending, and higher debt-carrying costs,' said Bolduc.
"The actual number of business closures is even higher, considering many business owners decide to cease operations without pursuing formal insolvency proceedings. Based on members surveyed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, only 10% of their members who considered closing their business would officially file for bankruptcy....
"The government’s decision not to extend the CEBA deadline was 'the straw that broke the camel’s back,' said Simon Gaudreault, chief economist and vice president of research at the CFIB. Gaudreault said that other factors contributing to businesses filing for bankruptcy included lost revenue from public health closures, supply chain challenges, inflation, increased costs, rising interest rates, and labour shortages.
"Statistics Canada’s most recent data shows that 43,121 businesses closed in January 2024."
During the Covid pandemic, the Canadian government spent $700 million to buy more than 27,000 ventilators, though just 500 were ever used in Canadian hospitals. Now they are selling off the rest as scrap metal.
April 13, 2024 - "The Trudeau Liberal government spent $169.5 million on a sole-sourced contract for emergency ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, which are now being sold off as cheap scrap parts. Ventilator parts were sold for as little as $6 a carton out of a Concord, ON by GC Surplus — a government-owned ... Department of Public Works division [which] sells used government-issue goods from autos to filing cabinets, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. The 'Canadian Emergency Ventilators' were listed for auction as 'scrap metal.'
"Luke Halstead, a paramedic from Petawawa, ON, bought 50 of the disassembled units at a bargain of $6 a piece. They were still in their original factory wrapping. 'I bought 50. About half of them were in their original shipping crates with the Canadian Emergency Ventilators stencil on the box. They were brand new. They even had the original factory plastic wrapping'....
"The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) contracted the 'Canadian Emergency Ventilators' from a Toronto-based company called StarFish Medical....
"Public Works would not say how much it paid for the devices, though the House of Commons Ethics Committee in 2020 was told the $169.5 million contract was payment for 7,500 devices, the equivalent of $22,600 apiece....
"Halstead ... was told by warehouse workers they 'continued to receive these ventilators well into 2022.... The warehouse workers told me they were originally shipped as parts and that the Public Health Agency was supposed to assemble the units. It was obvious the crates had never been opened. These parts were heavy grade sheet metal still in the factory plastic wrap. They still had the original shipping labels'....
April 22, 2024 - "Records show that the Public Health Agency auctioned off new ventilators, valued at just over $22,000 each, for $6 scrap, violating its own rules, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.... PHA directives forbids licensed medical devices to be sold as scrap metal.
“'They were sold for parts as the possible divestment option for unlicensed medical devices,' the agency said in a statement to Blacklock’s. 'The medical devices were no longer authorized.' But documents show the ventilators were sold as such as late as Feb. 8, 2023 while still licensed by the Department of Health. The ... licenses were revoked weeks later on March 22 after dozens of units were scrapped.
"StarFish Medical of Toronto was awarded a $169.5 million sole-sourced contract in 2020 to deliver up to 7,500 devices at $22,600 apiece. The devices were among $700 million worth of rush orders for ventilators placed by the Department of Public Works as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has declined comment...
"A total of 40,547 ventilators were ordered from various manufacturers but only 27,025 were delivered and only 500 ever used.... While most ventilators remained in federal warehouses, 839 were donated to hospitals in India, Pakistan and Nepal or sent to Ukraine as war surplus, according to a March 25 Inquiry Of Ministry, tabled in the Commons." Read more: https://torontosun.com/news/national/canadian-ventilators-sold-for-scrap-metal-report
