Conspiracy-minded Esther McVey was appointed "minister of common sense" by the UK's Conservative PM (not her real title, but the one provided to the Sun newspaper in an advance briefing)
Edited to add: she'll be “leading the charge on the government’s anti-woke agenda” 😬
"If I were running that centre, I would be a millionaire" - #DougFord gives a for-profit clinic more funding to perform OHIP-covered surgeries than it gives #Ontario's public #hospitals to perform the same operations.
Ford and his health minister [#SylviaJones] have pitched this expansion as a cost-efficient way to get more surgeries done and reduce wait times.
🤣
The rates paid to Don Mills Surgical Unit Ltd. have never before made public.
Increased use of private for-profit surgery clinics came to light earlier this year:
as much as $23.4 million has been set aside for private and for-profit health care providers to assist with Ontario’s hospital recovery over the 2022-23 year.
“We’ve got operating rooms in the public system that are not operating and instead they’re going to fund these private clinics, which will cost more and fragment the system,” said Ross Sutherland from https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/
And late last year, Global News reported that talking points offering a forceful denial of privatizing Ontario health care had been removed from the minister of health’s house binder.
in August 2022, however, the document was amended and the key phrase, “No, we are not privatizing healthcare” was scratched out. The commitment was never uttered by Ontario’s minister of health.
"At this moment, the Jewish community is under attack in Montreal" - Valérie Plante, Montreal Mayor
Premier François Legault said his heart goes out to Quebec's Jewish community, adding "every effort will be made to find and punish the culprits."
Pearl Eliadis, [from McGill University] said, "We need to stand against antisemitism. We need to stand against Islamophobia. We need to stand against all forms of racism wherever they occur."
"The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George #Soros: How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest #antisemitic#conspiracy theory" (2019)
Finkelstein, "the merchant of venom" and a mentor to Roger Stone, worked for Richard Nixon, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, & Stephen #Harper.
With his protege George Birnbaum he helped #Netanyahu in Israel and #Orban in Hungary to victory. (So they have more in common than the #IDU 🤔)
“In addition to saving truckers time and money and saving #Ontario taxpayers billions of dollars, the 407 trucking option can be implemented almost immediately, resulting in instant relief rather than years of construction,” said Peter Miasek of #TransportActionOntario.
“In fact [#highway413] would be nothing but another favour to friends of Premier #DougFord who stand to benefit from sprawl at the expense of the rest of Ontario,” said Tim Gray of #EnvironmentalDefence.
The #UCP has become a #FarRight coalition of rural grievance merchants, COVID skeptics, & anti-LGBTQ activists - @maxfawcett
None of this is good for the millions of Albertans who live in its cities and suburbs and want to see their government focus on things like the economy, education and health care. But as the UCP made abundantly clear over the weekend, they’re just not interested in what those people want anymore.
@myeyesaredim@maxfawcett I was talking with my partner last night who knows a lot more about Alberta: "They think they're all going to be oil millionaires so they are saying fuck it to universal programs."
Since the petition launched on October 10, it has been aggressively shared by groups and influencers in far-right and conspiratorial corners of social media.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition had received over 46,000 signatures.
The channel created an accompanying graphic featuring an assembly of world leaders sitting in a circle around a giant glass pyramid covered with human skulls that emits a shiny light and reads: “The future does not belong to the globalists.”
"When mainstream media gives right-wing extremists airtime, viewers are more inclined to agree with those views and to believe that those views are widely held... the decision to consistently platform far-right figures and extremists in the media as part of a “both sides” paradigm of journalistic objectivity is a disaster for democracy."
Canada's federal #prison system has kept Indigenous people over-incarcerated for too long, watchdog says in second part of a two-year investigation.
10 years ago 25% of federal inmates were Indigenous people: now it's 32%.
The steady and unabated increase in the disproportionate representation of #Indigenous peoples under federal sentence is nothing short of a national travesty and remains one of #Canada's most pressing #HumanRights challenges
“Keep your mouth shut and stick to it” & “in for a rough ride, hold the line ‘it’s all about housing’” - quotes from #RyanAmato in documents released on #DougFord's #greenbelt scandal
There's also an intriguing reference to Cherrywood, the site owned by TACC’s Silvio #DeGasperis and the largest single chunk of land taken out of the Greenbelt. An attendee at a briefing with the housing minister’s office said the ministry was doing “just what (the) owner asked for.”
HungerCount report shows food bank usage at highest level ever surveyed
Rev. Canon Maggie Helwig, who helps run [a volunteer program] out of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields church, said it regularly serves 130 people for dinner on Fridays — compared to the two dozen they saw a few years ago.
"Every week we run out of food and start foraging in the cupboards and in the freezers for something that we can give to people. It's terrifying."
These people are nuts, but unfortunately also dangerous. They really believe this nonsense.
“And then when you combine that with the WEF and the UN and the WHO and they’re pushing the ‘Minor Attracted People’ is okay and they’re pushing for kids to have sexual experiences at the age of toddlers and all these things should be normalized and then you look in the schools and you look at the curriculum they’re starting to push on these kids about sex ….”
They are definitely dangerous @Greengordon but the threat this time was less due to lower support than 2022 (some more extreme groups declined to get involved with this particular convoy).
And what they say may sound "nuts" but is commonplace in some media environments. Key words & phrases signal group membership or affiliation, and attract supporters (and funding), but don't always express beliefs.
The far-right authoritarianism lurking behind the "woo" is the real danger.