Tag Archives: Canada

News

Obama administration may miss deadline on Keystone pipeline approval

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Actress/Idiot Daryl Hannah protests low unemployment rate
Actress Daryl Hannah demands higher unemployment

From liberal Reuters.

Excerpt:

The State Department may miss a year-end target to approve TransCanada Corp’s Canada-to-Texas Keystone oil sands pipeline, a U.S. official told Reuters on Tuesday, risking a further delay to the most important new crude oil conduit in decades.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the State Department still hoped to make a decision by the end of this year, which has been its target, but that its highest priority was to carry out a thorough, rigorous review. The decision has already been pushed back once.

A further delay would not only be a blow to TransCanada, it could also prolong a massive gap between U.S. and global oil prices because oil traders are counting on Keystone’s 700,000 barrel-per-day capacity to relieve a build-up of crude in the Midwest, which doesn’t have enough pipelines to ship growing Canadian output to Gulf Coast refineries for use around the United States.

The ruling, which falls to the State Department because the line crosses national borders, is forcing President Barack Obama into a decision that effectively pits environmental safety against job creation and energy security.

The Independent Women’s Forum comments:

[B]usinesses actually want to do something with the oil that would be transferred on the pipeline, and the delay in moving the oil through the refining process and to market will impact those businesses, the energy supply, and ultimately energy prices and the broader economy.

Reuters describes the Administration’s dilemma in ruling on the Keystone pipeline as pitting “environmental safety against job creation and energy security.” That may be how some environmental extremists are trying to frame it, but it’s really a false choice. As I wrote before, Canada’s oil sands are going to be developed one way or another. The State Department’s decision is whether the U.S.—with our many environmental regulations—will being doing the job or if Canada will find another, much less environmentally-friendly, partner.

Barack Obama is blocking job creation in order to appease his environmentalist constituents.

News

Canada’s state run broadcaster fights back against probe of finances

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From the Toronto Sun. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The CBC — the mega-corporation that is demanding yet another $1.1-billion bailout from taxpayers this year, just like it demanded a $1.1-billion bailout from us last year — is panicking.

For weeks it’s been sweating about a parliamentary investigation into its bad behaviour, including its violation of the Access to Information law. That’s an important law to allow taxpayers to scrutinize how government agencies spend our money.

The non-partisan information commissioner has given the CBC a grade of “F” for its secrecy — but it still violates her order for it to disclose the truth. It’s spending millions in legal expenses to hide how it’s spending billions in other expenses.

This bad behaviour was coming to a head last week when Parliament was going to turn over some rocks and see what was going to go scurrying.

And so it panicked.

On the eve of the Parliamentary inquiry, it used part of its $1.1 billion — money that is supposed to go to journalism — to launch a crazy, personal attack on the president of Quebecor and QMI Agency, Pierre Karl Peladeau, one of Canada’s most successful private-sector media entrepreneurs.

Unlike the CBC, Peladeau built his company honestly and with his own efforts. He took a newspaper company started by his father, Pierre Peladeau, and turned it into Quebec’s most successful media company, Quebecor — and then joined with English-Canada’s biggest newspaper company, Sun Media Corp. And then he built the Sun News Network.

All without a billion-dollar-a-year bailout.

And so last week, the night before Peladeau’s testimony to Parliament, the CBC freaked out.

In an unprecedented move, it issued what can only be called an attack ad against Peladeau. It wasn’t a news story. It was a false and defamatory attack on our company, as vengeance for our questions about how the CBC spends taxpayer money.

If any other government department had done something like this, whoever responsible would be fired immediately. It wasn’t just unprofessional. It wasn’t just outside of its mandate of what it is given its government money for. It was an attempt to destroy a private-sector competitor.

Why is this interesting? Because it shows what happens when the government oversteps its bounds and starts to compete with the private sector in areas that are totally unrelated to its enumerated powers and specific responsibilities. Not only will you find corruption in nationalized corporations, but massive waste as well. Private sector companies face competitive pressures that government monopolies do not face. That forces them to root out corruption and waste, because there is always the firm next door looking to serve the customer better – with higher quality and at a lower cost.

We need to be very careful about handing money to people in government who simply don’t care as much about the needs of their customers. Do you think that the CBC could ever favor tax cuts or spending cuts or even more choices for taxpayers? Of course not. They have to tell people whatever causes them to vote for bigger government, because that’s where their money comes from.

News

Canadian Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal on infanticide case

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From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Supreme Court of Canada declined last Thursday to hear an appeal in the case of a mother who smothered two of her children. The decision means that a Canadian mother can continue to plead to the lesser charge of “infanticide” rather than “murder” when she ends the life of her newborn child.

The mother in the case, referred to as “L.B,” was 15 years old when in 1998 she smothered her 6-week-old son Alexander. She smothered another one of her children, 10-week-old son Cameron, in 2002.

[…]In a statement to the police, L.B. testified that 6-week-old Alexander’s crying made her “angry.” When he would not stop crying, she placed him in his crib, covered him entirely with blankets and a plastic cover, left the room, and began listening to music. She admitted that she was “very confused” but insisted that she “wanted to help Alexander feel better.”

L.B. also testified to police that on the day she killed her 10-week-old son Cameron, she was “very upset” and feared that she would do her child harm. Police heard how L.B. “wanted Cameron to die,” since she believed it was “the right thing to do.” As Cameron slowly suffocated, she told her son that he was “going to a better place.”

Here’s the prosecutor:

Jennifer Woollcombe, acting for the Crown, appealed Justice Herold’s 2008 decision, arguing that L.B’s “infanticide defence” was based on antiquated laws that were created to give juries an alternative to the death penalty for mentally unstable mothers who killed their children. The Crown argued that the “infanticide defence” constitutes an “unacceptable devaluation of the worth of a newborn child.”

“The trial judge found that these murders were planned and deliberate. There is no principled reason for acquitting her of murder. She made a choice to kill while her husband was at home, called an ex-boyfriend rather than 911 after killing him, maintained a facade that the babies died of SIDS, and accepted and sought out sympathy and attention.”

“The respondent intentionally killed two babies,” said the Crown brief during the mother’s trial, as reported in the Globe and Mail.

Recall the horrifying story about the recent slap-on-the-wrist handed down to the Edmonton woman who strangled her own baby. What is wrong with Canada on the life issue?