Canada

Revel in the joy of our grand tax holiday! There will be no sales tax on thousands of items, to boost your solstice spending power! Video games, so long as you don't buy them the normal way. Some beverages, depending on size and ingredients. Pencil crayons, if they're bought as part of a package that contains blue ones. What spectacular benevolence!

To Florida to be specific.

Happy Friday!

Animal shelters across the country are still dealing with the aftermath of ‘pandemic pets’ – animals that were purchased during the pandemic.

Archived version

When far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern was summoned to tell MPs about her part in an alleged Russian disinformation operation last month, she told them it was no big deal.

“If you were worried about this alleged Russian money unduly influencing Canadian issues — good news, didn’t happen,” she told the standing committee on public safety and national security, which includes Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Bloc Québécois MPs.

The Russians’ efforts to use Tenet Media as a secret propaganda tool were a failure, Southern told MPs. Few people watched the videos, she said, expert assessments of the project’s impact were inflated and the committee’s investigation was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

But researchers who reviewed Tenet Media and their related activities have a very different assessment of their impact on Canadian politics.

Southern’s testimony on Nov. 21 was part of the committee’s larger investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence politics in Canada. The hearings started in September in response to a U.S. indictment that alleged two employees of Russia Today, a Russian state media channel that aims to reach western audiences, had funnelled $10 million to a media channel called Tenet Media. Tenet featured YouTube, TikTok and other social media content made by six high-profile right-wing commentators.

[...]

Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon is sending the labour dispute between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to the Canada Industrial Relations Board.

MacKinnon said Friday that if the board determines negotiations between the parties are at an impasse, it has been directed to order striking CUPW members back to work under the existing collective agreement until May 22, 2025.

Money laundering has been an embarrassing part of the Canadian economy for decades, and contributed to the Vancouver housing bubble (at least). Weirdly, we seem to be making money laundering one of our exports.

Here's a quote:

Canada’s role in the international narcotics trade has been a subject of intense domestic scrutiny over the past decade. In 2022, the Cullen Commission warned about the “enormous volume of illicit funds” being filtered through the British Columbia economy, an amount estimated in the billions of dollars. Yet money laundering charges are rare, the commission found, because “police conducting investigations into profit-oriented criminal activity, such as drug dealing, are not investigating these offences.”

Original link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-canada-border-trump-drug-crime/

The incident unfolded on Aug. 2, 2022, after police received several 911 calls saying a man had broken into the municipal building and set several fires inside.

Officers arrived to find the suspect still inside the building, armed with a large machete.

Two officers armed with Anti Riot Weapon Enfield (ARWEN) devices shot the suspect nine times over the course of 35 minutes.

Despite undergoing surgery, the man lost one testicle. The other was injured and only a portion could be saved.

As of Thursday afternoon, Air Canada shares closed at $25.28 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, up 23 cents.

CTV News reached out to the federal transport minister's office and was referred instead to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland's office, who has not yet responded.

When asked about whether Ottawa selling its shares in Air Canada is in any way connected to the government's spending announcement on Monday, Lee says yes.

"There's an awful lot of buzz that they're going to crank up spending yet again. And so, the government needs money. They're rattling the cupboards to see what bits and pieces can be sold off."

The question that I have not seen asked is why are these guns being destroyed?

I may be ignorant to some reason why it is not possible, but wouldn't the best idea be to buy back all of these weapons for use in the military?

I hear our military could use millions of guns and parts, and it would actually justify the cost of the program. It would also be a massive increase on military spending our allies have been asking for and that we are in serious need of.

Premier Doug Ford says Ontario could cut off energy to the U.S. if president-elect Donald Trump makes good on a threat to impose steep tariffs on Canadian goods.

You never forget encountering your first wolverine. Mine was on the top of Grande Mountain outside Grande Cache, Alta., on a brilliant winter morning. It roared at me from the thick alpine bushes, then fled unseen into the wilderness. That exhilarating encounter was rare and is becoming rarer as Alberta and British Columbia’s wolverine populations rapidly decline.

Why do wildlife populations decline? Of all the things we do to nature, direct mortality — through hunting, trapping and fishing — lands the hardest blows. We often take too much, unaware of how much pressure populations can withstand.

In eastern Canada, past unrestricted trapping eliminated wolverines from the Maritime provinces, Québec and most of Ontario. In Alberta, the government has recently eliminated restrictions on how many wolverines, lynx, otters and fishers can be harvested in a year.

The rationale given was that too little is known about these species to justify a limit, and that unlimited trapping can provide the data needed to measure sustainability. Both of these assertions are dangerously incorrect.

The government of Canada has announced its plans for a temporary tax break by exempting GST/HST on certain items during the holiday season from Dec. 14, 2024 to Feb. 15, 2025. The legislation to enact the tax break has cleared the House of Commons and is now awaiting Senate approval.

Another key economic concern is the potential for “price stickiness,” where businesses fail to pass tax reductions onto consumers.

Some businesses will likely see a boost in sales, however. Since all types of restaurant foods — dining in, takeout or delivery — will be covered by the tax break, restaurants will have a unique opportunity to attract more customers.

There will be winners and losers from this tax policy, with the benefits disproportionately favouring higher-income earners. Wealthier households, who are less affected by inflation, are better positioned to take advantage of the tax break by spending more and saving more. These families will be able to more easily adjust their purchasing habits, such as stockpiling a year’s supply of baby diapers during the tax-free period. It’s important to note that many essential grocery items, like produce and milk, are already tax-free under Canada Revenue Agency rules. The tax break will cover taxed items like carbonated drinks, candies, snack foods and alcoholic beverages. This means higher-income households, which spend more on discretionary items, stand to gain the most from a reduction in sales tax benefits.

This holiday tax break could exacerbate economic inequity — contrary to its stated objective. Taxes play a key role in reducing inequality, and any changes to the tax systems should consider that. Unfortunately, this GST reduction appears to fall short.

Moreover, the benefits are not distributed evenly across Canadian provinces and territories. Consumers from provinces with HST will not pay any taxes for the items listed in the policy, but those with standalone provincial sales taxes will still have to pay that tax. Alberta, which only charges GST, will be tax-free.

Overall, B.C. was given a “B” grade by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in its annual report, released in July, on the status of interprovincial trade, but a dispute with Alberta over direct-to-consumer wine sales earlier this year indicates there is still room for improvement.

Jairo Yunis, a B.C. Business Council policy director and former director of B.C. and western economic policy at CFIB, said one example is that trucking in the province is essentially facing a five-per-cent tariff to bring goods into Alberta or other jurisdictions in Canada.

“There was an analysis done by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, months ago, that calculated the average internal trade cost for the trucking industry in B.C. was around five per cent,” said Yunis.

“I know that there is a working group looking at a pilot project to mutually recognize all these standards and regulations across all provinces. So that’s definitely something that would remove some of these internal trade barriers in some of those sectors, specifically trucking.”