GD's Political Animal

Friday, February 3, 2023

Canada delays assisted dying rollout to mentally ill

Justice Minister David Lametti says delay to 2024 is necessary because 'safety of Canadians just comes first' | CBC News - Peter Zimonjic

February 2, 2023 - "The Liberal government is introducing legislation to delay by one year the expansion of the medically assisted death (MAID) law to cover those suffering solely from a mental illness ... Justice Minister David Lametti said Thursday.... Lametti said the delay will allow ongoing studies of the risks of extending MAID to this group of people to be completed....

"The government passed MAID legislation in 2016. The Superior Court of Quebec struck the law down in 2019 because it was limited to those whose deaths were 'reasonably foreseeable.' Bill C-7, which passed Parliament in March 2021, removed that requirement, in line with the court's ruling. The legislation also temporarily pushed out the expansion of MAID to cases involving only mental illness to March 2023....

"Lametti said the extension will also give the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying time to complete its final report on MAID for those suffering solely from mental illness. The committee delivered an interim report in June of last year, which concluded that it was racing against the clock to get its recommendations published in time for the expansion of MAID legislation.

'Although some work is already underway … there is concern that more remains to be done to ensure that all necessary steps have been taken to be ready by the March 2023 deadline,' the interim report said.

"Mental illness" in the new legislation refers to conditions that are primarily psychiatric, such as depression and personality disorders. It doesn't cover neurocognitive or neurodevelopmental disorders, or related conditions. People with neurodegenerative diseases that lead to dementia can qualify under current rules for MAID, officials said.

"If Bill C-39 is not passed by March 17 of this year, MAID for people solely suffering from mental illness will become law in Canada. The legislation cannot be passed after that date because the two-year time limit will have ended. Lametti said he's confident the legislation will pass in time and has already secured the assistance of the NDP and the Bloc in the House of Commons....

"Conservative MP Michael Cooper called for the expansion of MAID to be scrapped. Later, in the House of Commons, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre also condemned the expansion to MAID in 2024."

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Minor drug possession decriminalized in B.C.

Simple possession of up to 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, MDMA, and methamphetamines have been decriminalized in British Columbia as a three-year pilot project.

What you need to know about the decriminalization of possessing illicit drugs in B.C. | CBC News - Akshay Kulkarni:

January 30, 2023 - "Starting Tuesday, it is no longer a criminal offence to possess small amounts of certain illicit drugs in B.C. for people aged 18 or above. It's part of a three-year pilot by the federal government, which granted B.C. an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) on May 31, 2022.

"While advocates for drug users say decriminalization alone won't stop thousands of people dying from a tainted drug supply, others say it is a step in the right direction when it comes to how drug users are treated. Here's what you need to know about B.C.'s drug decriminalization pilot....

"Under the exemption, up to 2.5 grams of the following four drug types can be legally possessed:

Cocaine (crack and powder).
Methamphetamine.
MDMA.
Opioids (including heroin, fentanyl and morphine).

"Fentanyl and its analogues were detected in nearly 86 per cent of drug toxicity deaths from 2019 until 2022, according to the latest report from the B.C. Coroners Service.

"The exemption pilot is set to last for three years until Jan. 31, 2026, unless it is revoked or replaced before then....

"Anyone caught selling drugs or trafficking them will still face criminal penalties in B.C. Trafficking illegal drugs or possessing them for the sake of trafficking (not for personal use) could land a person in prison....

"Possessing illegal drugs at schools, child-care facilities, and airports remains illegal. Multiple municipalities, including Vancouver, have bylaws that prohibit drug use at city facilities and private areas like malls or cafes. 'However, adults removed from private establishments would not be subject to federal criminal charges for their personal possession of up to 2.5 grams of the illegal drugs listed in the exemption,' the B.C. ministry of mental health and addictions said."

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

UK military spied on lockdown sceptics

"A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government's Covid lockdown policies," reports the Daily Mail.

Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we've obtained official records that prove they were right all along | Daily Mail - Glen Owen:

January 28, 2023 - "Military operatives in the UK's 'information warfare' brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response. They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.

"Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office. But the most secretive is the MoD's 77th Brigade, which deploys 'non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries'. According to a whistleblower who worked for the brigade during the lockdowns, ... British citizens' social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.

"Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering 'disinformation' and 'harmful narratives... from purported experts', with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to 'scrape' social media for keywords such as 'ventilators' that would have been of interest. The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings. It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines....

"Mail on Sunday journalist Mr Hitchens was monitored after sharing an article, based on leaked NHS papers, which claimed data used to publicly justify lockdown was incomplete. An internal Rapid Response Unit email said Mr Hitchens wanted to 'further [an] anti-lockdown agenda and influence the Commons vote'. Writing today, Mr Hitchens ... says: 'The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring, let alone protesting. Now is the time to demand a full and powerful investigation into the dark material Big Brother Watch has bravely uncovered.'

"The whistleblower from 77 Brigade, which uses both regular and reserve troops, said: 'I developed the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering any potential foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened.' The source also suggested that the Government was so focused on monitoring critics it may have missed genuine Chinese-led prolockdown campaigns.

"Silkie Carlo, of Big Brother Watch, said: 'This is an alarming case of mission creep, where public money and military power have been misused to monitor academics, journalists, campaigners and MPs who criticised the Government, particularly during the pandemic.... Contrary to their stated aims, these Government truth units are secretive and harmful to our democracy. The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation.'"

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Peterson proposes populist alternative to WEF

Jordan Peterson has plans to start a populist alternative to the World Economic Forum, which he hopes to launch this fall.

Dr Jordan B Peterson Tells Joe Rogan Of Plan For Alternative To World Economic Forum | Daily Wire - Greg Wilson:

January 28, 2023 - "Dr Jordan B Peterson laid out his plan to take on the globalists on 'The Joe Rogan Experience,' telling the podcast king in an extended interview posted Saturday that he is considering starting a populist alternative to the World Economic Forum [WEF]. Peterson told Rogan that he will be gathering a consortium this October/November in London as a kind of rival to the WEF. This group will discuss six questions pertaining to global philosophy and policy. While this first conference will be invite-only, it will be public, and Peterson noted that if successful, he would like to expand yearly.

"Some of the ideas — which are aimed at providing an 'alternative vision of the future … an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that’s being put forward, at least implicitly, by organizations like the WEF' — are as follows:

How to get 'energy and resources at the lowest possible cost, as rapidly as possible, to the largest number of people around the world.'
Engaging in a 'pro-human view' of earth stewardship.
Putting forward a 'vision on the family policy front to facilitate the encouragement of and the maintenance of longterm, monogamous couples who are child-centered.'
And discovering our 'story,' specifically as it relates to “voluntary play” rather than “the spirit of power” ruling.

"Peterson ... also took a clear shot at the globalist group that gathers in Davos to formulate progressive policies to impose on the world.

I’ve been trying to understand the driving ideas underneath this globalist utopian tyranny that seems to be developing from the top-down, and I think it’s driven at least in part by this religious vision that I already described — you know, that you have to construe culture itself, especially industrial culture, as the tyrannical father raping and pillaging everything in its way, which is [an] unbelievably dangerous way to think — too one-sided....

"Peterson blasted the progressive elites, who hint darkly at population controls and push policies that make food and energy expensive for the world’s poor.

>I’ve already felt that I’ve been at war for the last six months, and I would say it’s war because what I observed happening in Europe when I was there last was that … it’s pretty damn clear that the globalist utopians are willing to sacrifice the poor for the sake of the planet, you know, and they’re doing that by cranking energy prices up through the roof, and that means that people die....

"Peterson has clashed with leftist authoritarians in the past, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is a WEF regular. Peterson is also currently sparring with a psychology trade association that sought to sanction him for tweets it deemed offensive. The College of Psychologists of Ontario ordered Peterson to undergo 'social media communications retraining' or face a hearing on the potential suspension of his license to practice clinical psychology. Peterson made it clear he has no intention of submitting to the group’s demand."

Monday, January 30, 2023

Economist's unrefuted case against lockdowns

Economist Douglas Allen, author of a 2020 report calling lockdowns one of Canada's greatest public policy failures, argues that it is important to keep making the case against them for the historical record.

Professor Douglas Allen still refuting lockdowns | Western Standard - Lee Harding:

January 29, 2022 - "Two years ago, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen published an academic paper condemning pandemic lockdowns as doing more harm than good. 'An examination of over 80 COVID-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of lockdown,' Allen wrote in April of 2021. 'The cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.'

"In an interview with Western Standard, Allen said his suspicions were already aroused a full year prior.... 'When the lockdowns first cane, ... I thought to myself, maybe I've misunderstood, we must be facing something that's three times worse than smallpox in the 17th century. I just thought I'd completely missed the seriousness of the virus,” Allen recalls. 'Almost immediately, I started doing my own research on this sort of stuff....

There was a group of economists in in UCLA, that by the end of the summer of 2020, had done such phenomenal work that really showed, I thought, that the lock downs were useless, that the virus was moving through populations exactly the same way, regardless of what the culture, the civilization, what governments were doing. And then I thought, ‘Okay, well, now it's over, right? There's no way we'll go back to lockdown in the fall.’ And of course we did.

"Allen said he got involved in a lawsuit to stop the lockdowns that was unsuccessful. 'I wrote a report that, when the lawsuit went nowhere, for nothing better to do, I posted it on my Facebook, I only have six friends on Facebook, but somebody shared it. I posted it on a Monday. And by Thursday, it went viral. And it was nonstop after that' Two journals asked him to publish reports, which Allen claims have been downloaded a “record” 70,000 times.

"The question remains why a paper so sought by the public was almost completely ignored by the media. 'The mainstream media was part of the message, right? Whether they were literally in bed with the state or not, they went along with the beginning. Again, you're telling people certain things, and then you find out they're not true, you can either admit that you made a mistake, or you can just carry on with that narrative,' Allen explains. 'I personally don't believe in big conspiracies, I just think it was in every person's interest'....

Here you are, you're a politician. By the end of April of 2020, there had been a loss of wealth in the country by a third the stock market value just crashed, you had destroyed a third of the wealth of the country. Oops. And you're going to admit that? Not a chance, right? What you're going to do is say, ‘Well, we thought it would be two weeks to bend the curve, it obviously wasn't. We're going to have to go for another two weeks and another two weeks, and you're just hoping and praying that this thing goes away. And you can declare victory....

"The very infectious, but less lethal Omicron provided the way out of lockdowns, Allen says, but the damage to the economy and the lives that this took cannot be restored.

> When you're unemployed, your income goes down your diet, quality of diet goes down, your anxiety levels go up, your mental health goes down, all these things contribute to a shorter life. In the United States, for the first year of the pandemic, lost life years, due to just the unemployment part, is about 800,000 lives. If you convert the unemployment into lost lives. My impression is each category of costs swamps the benefits of lockdown.....
Lost GDP. Certainly, that's important. But my goodness, that's just the starting of things. There has to be a full accounting of what you might even call the loss of livelihood, or the loss of living.... The deaths of despair, the overdoses, the suicides, and all these sorts of things have to be accounted for..... Deaths caused by lost cancer appointments or other health appointments, those sorts of things, the complete failure of the healthcare system has to be accounted for.”

Read study: https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Estimated 500 in Ottawa on Convoy anniversary

Parliament Hill police prepare for estimated 500 people to attend Freedom Convoy anniversary | National Post - Canadian Press:

January 27, 2023 - "The Parliamentary Protective Service expects 500 people to gather this weekend to mark a year since the Freedom Convoy occupied downtown Ottawa. The agency, which polices the precinct, says it will curtail some access to Parliament Hill.

"The public can still use the central and east gates to access the Hill lawn, but not the gates closest to the West Block, where the Liberals are holding their caucus meeting this weekend. The Parliamentary Protective Service says public tours have been cancelled and Ottawa Police will enforce the closure of Wellington Street to traffic. Ottawa city council voted this week to reopen Wellington Street to cars as soon as March, after a yearlong closure."

15 vehicles towed, dozens of tickets issued as rally marks one-year anniversary of 'Freedom Convoy' in Ottawa | CTV News - Josh Pringle:

January 28, 2023 - "Ottawa police say there are 'no issues to report' as hundreds of people gathered in the Parliamentary Precinct to mark the one-year anniversary of the arrival of the 'Freedom Convoy' in downtown Ottawa.... As of 4:30 p.m., police and Bylaw Services officers had issued 81 parking tickets and 20 Provincial Offences Notices, while 15 vehicles had been towed from the downtown area.....

"On Saturday afternoon, a large group of people waving Canadian flags, U.S. flags and chanting 'Freedom' gathered on Parliament Hill. Drivers reported seeing a few people holding Canadian flags on Hwy. 416 overpasses heading into Ottawa. Two events were scheduled for Parliament Hill on Saturday, including a '1-year anniversary trucker arrival celebration' at 12 p.m., followed by a dance party....

"Another rally to mark the one-year anniversary of the Freedom Convoy is set for Parliament Hill at 12 p.m. on Sunday, followed by a dance party from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m."

Friday, January 27, 2023

Smith calls for Trudeau to scrap 'Justin Transition'

Alberta premier Danielle Smith has penned an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking him to meet with her to discuss his "Just Transition" program, which she warns faces "irrepressible opposition" in her province.

Smith asks Trudeau to agree on “Sustainable Jobs” alternative to “Just Transition” | True North - Rachel Emmanuel:

January 26, 2023 - "Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is proposing a sustainable jobs alternative to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 'Just Transition' proposal, which she says would face 'irrepressible opposition' from Alberta. The federal government has yet to table 'Just Transition' legislation, but Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said it would be a priority this spring.

"In an open letter, Smith said the leaders have reached a crossroads in Alberta’s relationship with the Federal Government. 'We can continue with the endless court challenges, legislation to protect jurisdictional rights and inflammatory media coverage over our disagreements,' she wrote. 'Or, as is my strong preference, Alberta and Ottawa can work in partnership on a plan that will signal to all Canadians and investors from around the world that our governments have cooperatively designed a series of incentives and initiatives.'

"Those initiatives, the premier wrote, would seek to achieve objectives of substantially decreasing Canada’s and Alberta’s net emissions and accelerating private and public investment in infrastructure that utilizes and develops Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage, Bitumen Beyond Combustion, Geothermal technology, petrochemicals, hydrogen, lithium, helium, zero-emissions vehicles and nuclear technologies. They would also seek to attract a larger skilled workforce to positions in the conventional energy sector and emerging industries and increase LNG exports and other responsibly developed conventional oil and natural gas resources to Europe, Asia, and the United States, she said.

"'Prime Minister, all of the above objectives need to be clearly articulated and integrated into any Federal legislation or policies your government seeks to implement in the coming months, or that legislation will face irrepressible opposition from Alberta,” Smith wrote. 'I genuinely do not want to see that happen,' she added, inviting the prime minister to meet with her in February to discuss the matter....

"Last week, Blacklock’s Reporter uncovered a June 1 briefing note to Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson which said ... more than 2.7 million Canadians face 'significant' disruptions in sectors that will be affected by climate change programs. 'The transition to a low carbon economy will have an uneven impact across sectors, occupations and regions and create significant labour market disruptions,' it reads....

"Smith has said 'Just Transition' is a social justice term meant to phase out the coal industry. 'To use that terminology, they’re virtue signaling to an extreme base that is openly advocating to shut down oil or natural gas,' she said last week. In her letter, she also implored Trudeau to drop the name 'Just Transition'....

'Vow that all provisions of any forthcoming legislation will be designed to incentivize investment and job growth in both the conventional energy sector as well as in emerging industries,' she wrote. 'Demonstrate that no provision of the Act will be designed to phase out or reduce Alberta’s conventional oil and natural gas sector and workforce.'

"The federal government has yet to respond to Smith’s letter."

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