Generous Canadian taxpayers creating jobs in Finland shipyard

Good news, Canadian taxpayers! Your tax dollars are finally creating those good well-paying jobs we’re always hearing about. Unfortunately, the jobs are in Finland. But don’t worry. Once the hulls are complete, they will be towed to the Davie yard in Quebec for outfitting. By then you can bet your bottom dollar the cost will have doubled and the completion date will have been extended multiple times. That’s the Davie way; their motto; Blowing Up Budgets and Deadlines For 150 Years. Most reporting on this story implies Davie is a Canadian company. It isn’t. It is owned by Inocea Group. Take a look at their board of directors and you’ll find great depth of financial engineering expertise but a noticeable lightness on the naval engineering side. In 2017 the Globe & Mail published an investigation of Inocea. Here’s a quote from the story: A Globe and Mail investigation has discovered that Davie is owned by a complex web of companies that can be traced from Canada and the United Kingdom to the tax havens of Monaco and the British Virgin Islands. The paper’s journalists ran into a dead end trying to trace the beneficial owners of Inocea. They also own the shipyard in Finland where the hulls are being fabbed. Their modus operandi appears to be buy bankrupt shipyards and then lobby hard for government contracts. We’ve made multi-billion dollar commitments to a concern whose controlling investors hide behind a thicket of numbered companies registered in tax havens. Given their success in squeezing money out of governments, I’m guessing there’s some serious names hiding in those secret documents.

Stoop therapy

To put it bluntly, the last six months have been somewhat fucked up here at Falling Downs. In the wake of a brutal winter, which culminated in a vicious ice storm and a four day power outage, which caused the spoilage of two freezers full of food, I suddenly found myself grappling with shit that had hitherto never impacted me. In early April, after 70 years of near-perfect health, I’m told I have something called “congestive heart failure,” or as I’ve since learned the pros call it, CHF. The pros love their acronyms, don’t they? I don’t really get it, because in my view, it ain’t failure till it stops working, in which case I wouldn’t be writing this. That’s just one of my differences with the medical community. They gotta couch everything in acronyms and jargon and bullshit, whereas I’d much prefer they tell it like it is… “If you’re lucky you’ve got six months.” But that’s just my paranoia, I’m sure. A week later my dear father buys the farm. On top of all that, the world situation has been causing me nothing but anxiety and despair. I know it would probably be good for my mental health if I just focused on… I was gonna say the Leafs, but that’s a poor example if your hoping to shake off depression. I was sitting out on the stoop when I started this rant. I can only wallow in self-pity for so long, and there’s nothing like stoop therapy to snap you out of it. The coyotes started singing about 8:30. Maybe five years ago I hung up a couple of bird-boxes on the pine trees near the house. The birds shunned them. This year I see there’s a bird family nesting in the box nearest the stoop. I think it’s a house wren. Mama bird stops by the stoop with every worm and grub she’s taking to the nest. I tell her go feed your kids. There’s a hummingbird feeder about four feet from my head. It’s quite busy, and they are amazing to watch. Sometimes they hover a few inches in front of my face, looking into my eyes. Gotta hope my irises are not mistaken for Irises! Those beaks could do some serious damage. We’ve seen a lot from the stoop. The best story is probably the time the black bear wandered into the cow-calf pasture across the way. The cows gathered their calves together and surrounded them. Then four or five of the bigger girls took chase after the bear, who skedaddled outta there right quick! Stoop therapy! I feel better now… thanks for listening!

Canada claims it's only sending paintball ammo to the genocidal state

Canada's Foreign Minister claims no bullets shipped to Israel, only "paintball-style projectiles" Take that for what it’s worth. FM Anita Anand wants you to know Canada has taken a "hard line" against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and West Bank. Not that she used the g-word. That remains taboo among pols and journos in Canada, because you know… “antisemitism.” Besides, what possible harm can there be in shipping ammo for the IDF’s Airsoft sniper rifles? In fact, if all of Israel’s allies shipped only paintball projectiles there’d be a lot fewer dead children in Gaza, so it can be argued that Canada is a leader in making Israel’s war crimes less lethal. On the other hand, I think Anand’s press release could itself open her to charges of antisemitism. After all, Canada’s leadership class is unanimous in supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. Insofar as that’s true, and I have no reason to doubt them, surely they’d be sending more than paintball ammo!

With top talent like Newsom, Buttigieg, and OAC, Dem Party poised for comeback in '28

Globe and Mail thought leader Lawrence Martin gives the game away in the first paragraph of his op-ed today. The Dems are “our” party. This reflects the abiding conceit in much of the mainstream that the main problem with US democracy is Donald Trump. If only all those billionaire donors would come to their senses and write cheques to Hilary Clinton instead, dictatorship would be averted, democracy and decency restored, Putin vanquished, and American honour resurrected. Martin is giving us a pep talk. Let’s not lose hope, Canada; “our” party is poised to make a spectacular comeback. It’s all about the depth of the Democratic Party’s talent pool. Check out their bench. What is being overlooked by those attacking the Democrats is their talent pool. The party is stacked with talent. There’s California Governor Gavin Newsom, there’s former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Representative Ro Khanna, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. A roll-call of progressive America’s leading lights if ever there was one! Martin saves the best till last. That doesn’t include firebrand representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who political analyst Nate Silver and others are already touting as the favourite to win the party’s 2028 nomination. Hmm… Vance v. OAC in ‘28? That should be fun! Alas, much can happen between now and then. It is hard to imagine that the two wars America’s proxies, Israel and Ukraine, are busy losing today will not have been decisively lost. There’s nothing the “stacked with talent” Dems or anybody else can do about it. Assuming all-out world war can be avoided, which is far from a forgone conclusion, America’s global prestige will be totally down the toilet. It will be a failed state for the 99% and a gilded cage for the billionaires, although they may have decamped to more hospitable climes by then. It’s not Newsom or Buttigieg or OAC they have to worry about. It’s Luigi.

The future always looks fabulous!... from a distance

There’s a story on view at CBC today about the brand-spankin’-new Innuit-owned fishing vessel, the Inuksuk II. She’s a beauty. Largest Canadian vessel in our fishing fleet, a factory freezer trawler that clocks in at 80 metres long with a beam of 18 metres, and a hold capacity of 1,300 tonnes. The Inuksuk II will be plying the eastern Arctic for turbot and shrimp. The Nunavut government is optimistic. The new boat will provide employment opportunities not only for the crew, but for hundreds of Inuit on-shore fish plant workers as well. The future is bright with possibilities! Sixty years ago the National Film Board released a 20 minute doc called Trawler fishermen. It followed the crew of a state-of-the-art factory freezer trawler called the Cape Nova, at the time, the biggest boat in our fishing fleet. She was the first stern-trawler in Canada. Quadrupled the hold capacity of the side-trawlers! The future was bright with possibilities! The Cape Nova was such a success that Canada ordered another half dozen freezer-trawlers. Alas, there are only so many fish in the sea, and by the time the new fleet was fully deployed, it was landing at least 200% of a sustainable catch every year. Theoretically, that’s not sustainable. And it wasn’t. By 1976, a mere ten years after the first stern-trawler, the Cape Nova, was launched, the East coast fishery was showing signs of severe over-fishing. It wobbled along for another couple of decades, until it was shut down altogether in 1992. Between boat crews and plant-workers, almost 40,000 Newfoundlanders were thrown out of work. That led to the precipitous collapse of the population of Newfoundland, a collapse that, to this day, it has yet to fully recover from. Let’s hope the aspirations of the Inuit, and their hopes for the Inuksuk II and their Arctic fishery, fare better than their comrades in Newfoundland.