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CDN/US Covid-related political discussion

stellarpanther said:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid19-restrictions-lockdown-1.5531482

Andrew Scheer is demanding a return of parliament, one his reasons is to hold the government accountable. Really?  These people have no shame, him Kenny and others like them are still playing from Harpers playbook.  Hell, Harper is probably still calling the shots. Do they not remember that one of the things that came out after the last election was that a lot of voters didn't like Scheer always attacking and being negative?  He clearly hasn't learned nor does he care. We don't need Parliament to be recalled and now isn't the time for the Cons to start with their BS.  I said not that long ago that if O'toole was the leader, I would seriously consider voting for them.  Seeing how they are acting now, I wouldn't vote for them if they were the only ones on the ballot.  The Liberals may not be doing everything perfect but they are doing a good job and now isn't the time for political crap!

They're politicians so it's always about the 'political cr@p. And those ads work so well:

Why attack ads work

“We pay more attention to negative information,” she says. “It’s more salient, it scares us, and we’re more likely to remember it.”

https://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/why-attack-ads-work.shtml
 
stellarpanther said:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid19-restrictions-lockdown-1.5531482

Andrew Scheer is demanding a return of parliament, one his reasons is to hold the government accountable. Really?  These people have no shame, him Kenny and others like them are still playing from Harpers playbook.  Hell, Harper is probably still calling the shots. Do they not remember that one of the things that came out after the last election was that a lot of voters didn't like Scheer always attacking and being negative?  He clearly hasn't learned nor does he care. We don't need Parliament to be recalled and now isn't the time for the Cons to start with their BS.  I said not that long ago that if O'toole was the leader, I would seriously consider voting for them.  Seeing how they are acting now, I wouldn't vote for them if they were the only ones on the ballot.  The Liberals may not be doing everything perfect but they are doing a good job and now isn't the time for political crap!

I'm a CPC member and in my view Scheer is completely tone-deaf. (Another example is in flying his wife and three kids back from Regina in a government jet (that was returning May and a liberal back from BC) thus filling all the seats). The sooner he's gone, the happier I'll be.

I'm not so sure about O'Toole though. I get at least one email a day from his team which is always a criticism of something someone else has done with a "I won't do that." So far I've seen hundreds of things he won't do and very little of what he will. MacKay is marginally better. The rest I wouldn't take a whizz on if they were on fire. I'm getting seriously depressed about this campaign.

:brickwall:
 
FJAG said:
I'm a CPC member and in my view Scheer is completely tone-deaf. (Another example is in flying his wife and three kids back from Regina in a government jet (that was returning May and a liberal back from BC) thus filling all the seats). The sooner he's gone, the happier I'll be.

I'm not so sure about O'Toole though. I get at least one email a day from his team which is always a criticism of something someone else has done with a "I won't do that." So far I've seen hundreds of things he won't do and very little of what he will. MacKay is marginally better. The rest I wouldn't take a whizz on if they were on fire. I'm getting seriously depressed about this campaign.

:brickwall:

I've become singularly unimpressed with O'Toole's blatant courting of the... we'll call it 'uninquisitive populist' demographic. Which sucks, because I've met him a number of times, and have engaged with him on veterans issues quite a bit- he had a bang on approach to that stuff. Sadly he's appealing to a pretty low denominator in how he campaigns. I personally hope MacKay pulls it off.

And yeah, Scheer needs to quit the games while this is going on.

There's a good chance this is going to be a very long minority government; I can't see the NDP being able to afford an election anytime soon, and if they get cranky the Bloc can prop the government all on their own. The CPC as in about as poor an official opposition as they can be short of an outright majority. They should be behaving accordingly, playing on side with the rest of the country for the time being, and then when things start winding down, become firmly and publicly seized with viable, tangible options for the rebuilding of our economy. They will also need to pick their battles on some of the inevitable social/economic reforms that will come form this, whatever they should be.
 
kkwd said:

“Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the WHO’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,”

He'll do anything to try and deflect his pooping the bed but he's also not wrong.

US spends $400 million a year on the WHO. That's crazy.
 
Jarnhamar said:
He'll do anything to try and deflect his pooping the bed but he's also not wrong.

US spends $400 million a year on the WHO. That's crazy.

In fairness to him he has been planning this for a while.  But I guess announcing now helps maybe to deflect from Meltdown Monday.

Edited to fix damn iPad auto correct.
 
Remius said:
In fairness to him he has been planning this for a while.  But I guess announcing now helps Mayberry to deflect from Meltdown Monday.

Absolutely. Too convenient to pass up.
 
>Out of curiosity, which emergency restrictions, specifically, do you consider ridiculous?

Some of the stuff mentioned here.  I'm sure other jurisdictions may have implemented some of the measures also.

"prohibit in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life"

"all public and private gatherings of any number of people occurring among persons not part of a single household are prohibited"

"No person or entity shall operate a business or conduct operations that require workers to leave their homes or places of residence except to the extent that those  workers are necessary to sustain or protect life or to conduct minimum basic operations."

"Close areas of the store..."

Basically, the hand is too heavy.  Some of the employment and activities I witness daily in my own community would be verboten.  And it's a one-size solution which doesn't need to be imposed everywhere.
 
Source for $400M per year?  I saw $58M USD plus 59M CHF.  https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/revised-2019-invoice/usa_en.pdf
 
The perfect moment for a 'Big Government' government, even if it's a minority....

Canadians Supportive of Wide-Ranging Measures to Battle COVID-19, Including Some Surveillance 

Majority Supports Stricter Physical-Distancing Measures and Fines (85%), Limits on Personal Freedom of Movement (76%) and Use of Cellphone Data to Track Movements of Those Supposed to be Quarantining (65%)

https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-and-polls/overview
 
dapaterson said:
Source for $400M per year?  I saw $58M USD plus 59M CHF.  https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/revised-2019-invoice/usa_en.pdf

I was loooking here.

It was not immediately clear if the order will cover all or part of U.S. government funding of the organization. The U.S. contributes over $400 million to the WHO every year, or 15 percent of the agency’s annual budget. (China funds 0.2 percent of the WHO’s budget.)
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-president-trump-halts-funding-world-health-organization-pending-review/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=20027546
 
Jarnhamar said:
I was loooking here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-president-trump-halts-funding-world-health-organization-pending-review/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=20027546

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/national-review/

Right biased but mostly factual.

Not sure where the 400 million comes from.  4 year projection?  Maybe other voluntary payments?
 
[quote author=Remius]

Right biased but mostly factual. [/QUOTE]
Neat. According to your website they rate higher on the fact scale than CNN.

Not sure where the 400 million comes from.  4 year projection?  Maybe other voluntary payments?
Not sure.
 
MarkOttawa said:
A lot of serious people, including a former Liberal justice minister, going after PRC/COVID-19 (and WHO)--further links at original:

Trying to cover up the coronavirus pandemic marks China‘s “Chernobyl moment,” according to a new open letter.

More than 100 international politicians and international policy experts have signed on to the letter, including former Canadian justice minister and human rights advocate Irwin Cotler.

And in the Globe and Mail:

Former Liberal justice minister urges sanctions against Chinese officials who covered up early COVID-19 outbreak

Former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler, a leading international champion of human rights, is blaming the Chinese government for the scale and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying he believes transmission of the novel coronavirus could have been dramatically reduced if China had acted earlier.

He also says the world would have been far more prepared to handle the outbreak if Chinese Communist Party officials had acted sooner, alleging government authorities covered up and hid early news of the outbreak.

Mr. Cotler is urging Canada to impose Magnitsky-style sanctions on Chinese officials who mistreated or silenced whistleblowers, including medical staff and citizens, in the early days of the pandemic. The Sergei Magnitsky Law allows Canada to impose asset freezes and travel bans on human rights abusers around the world.

The former minister said he expects there will be lawsuits to try and seek reparations from China but he said governments such as Canada’s need do to their part to hold Beijing accountable.

“The Chinese Communist Party has to be held accountable through naming and shaming, in the court of public opinion, in actual courts of law through international tort actions, and through Magnitsky sanctions,” Mr. Cotler said in an interview.

“We can target those who have been responsible for the disappearances of the doctors, such as Dr. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at the Central Hospital of Wuhan, who has now disappeared."

Dr. Fen shared her early concerns about the virus with colleagues and media. After Dr. Ai shared the information, eight doctors were arrested, including Li Wenliang, another whistleblower who later died of COVID-19.

Mr. Cotler said China kept information from the public at a crucial early period and cited a British study by the University of Southampton which suggested that 95 per cent of infections could have been avoided if China had acted three weeks earlier.

The virus outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

“For 40 days, President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party of China concealed, destroyed, falsified and fabricated information about the rampant spread of COVID-19 through its state-sanctioned massive surveillance and suppression of data; its misrepresentation of information; its silencing and criminalizing of its dissent; and its disappearance of its whistleblowers,” Mr. Cotler wrote along with Judith Abitan, executive director of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. Their column was published by the Times of Israel as well as by The Globe and Mail.

A law professor and human rights lawyer, Mr. Cotler has drawn acclaim for his work as counsel to prisoners of conscience worldwide, from South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to Soviet-era dissident Natan Sharansky. Now an elder statesman of the Liberal party, Mr. Cotler was a Montreal MP for nearly 16 years before stepping down in 2015.

The Chinese embassy in Canada, asked for comment, referred reporters to an April 9 statement it made that rejects allegations that China covered up the virus outbreak as efforts to tarnish the Asian country and slander the Chinese Communist Party. “China has acted in an open, transparent and highly responsible manner in timely releasing the related data. Without China’s timely release of information, how could the U.S. side issue a health warning for travelling to Wuhan on Jan. 7?” the embassy said.

John McKay, the Liberal MP who chairs the Commons public safety and national security committee, said he would like to probe China’s conduct in the early days of the outbreak. “I would dearly love to confront this,” he said.

“I think the definition of security is much broader than we have previously thought of it. ... Now we have to think in terms of pandemic security,” he said. “The failure on the part of a nation to properly disclose its pandemic numbers and its impact in effect becomes a security issue for us all.”

Asked for comment on Mr. Cotler’s statements, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minster Francois-Philippe Champagne said Ottawa is working with China to “maintain co-operation and open dialogue” as the fight against COVID-19 continues. “As is always the case when the international community faces a common challenge, transparency and co-operation will continue to be critical to ensuring that we can confront this together,” said Adam Austen, deputy director of communications for Mr. Champagne.

Conservative MP Peter Kent said there is an abundance of evidence, including U.S. intelligence reports, of “cruel and deliberate suppression of the truth” by Beijing. Once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, the government should follow the recommendation of Mr. Cotler, he said.

Wenran Jiang, who teaches at the University of British Columbia’s school of public policy, said the accusations of a Chinese cover-up are being made without any proof.

“No doubt that there were serious missteps but there is little evidence to support a co-ordinated, systemic effort by the Chinese government to conceal or cover up the severity, the scope and the statistics related to COVID infection and death,” Prof. Jiang said.

He said it does little good for critics to attack China or the World Health Organization and suggested the scapegoating is being done to “hide the responsibilities of those governments that have failed to take adequate preventive measures.”

“For those who spread racist, Sinophobic and new ‘yellow peril’ theories in the disguise of criticizing the Chinese government, they simply cannot accept a scenario that China under a one-party state system could have pulled off a relatively more successful battle against COVID-19 than many Western countries,” he added.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-former-liberal-justice-minister-urges-sanctions-against-chinese/

Mark
Ottawa
 
Jarnhamar said:
Neat. According to your website they rate higher on the fact scale than CNN.
Not sure.

Well if they check out, they check out.  But I do like to check sources.
 
Remius said:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/national-review/

Right biased but mostly factual.

Not sure where the 400 million comes from.  4 year projection?  Maybe other voluntary payments?

There are are both "assessed" contributions (identified in previous posts) and "voluntary" contributions such as listed in this https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/funding/A71_INF2-en.pdf?ua=1
 
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-19-nato-ministers-1.5532089

Interesting aspects of NATO's response
 
daftandbarmy said:
The perfect moment for a 'Big Government' government, even if it's a minority....

Canadians Supportive of Wide-Ranging Measures to Battle COVID-19, Including Some Surveillance 

Majority Supports Stricter Physical-Distancing Measures and Fines (85%), Limits on Personal Freedom of Movement (76%) and Use of Cellphone Data to Track Movements of Those Supposed to be Quarantining (65%)

https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-and-polls/overview



Funny how nobody has ever polled or asked myself, or anybody I've ever known, for their opinions.  Where do these numbers ACTUALLY come from?

I highly doubt anybody would be okay with the government monitoring and spying on them via their cell phones, especially for an indefinite period of time. 

There already is a limit to personal freedom of movement.  Retail stores, movie theatres, malls, restaurants, social get togethers, etc are all closed.  Only grocery stores, drive through fast food, and pharmacies open here for the most part.  Other than that, people are just outside walking the dog or going for a jog.


Most Canadians have got with the program.  Yes, there are some issues in Vancouver & BC, as well as Toronto.  But for the most part, Canadians are doing a decent job of physical distancing & the curve is starting to flatten. 
 
CBH99 said:
I highly doubt anybody would be okay with the government monitoring and spying on them via their cell phones, especially for an indefinite period of time. 

Unless they provide supporting physical surveillance, it wouldn't work anyways.
 
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