National
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Crime
Canadian receives one-year jail sentence, lifetime firearms ban for setting church on fire
From LifeSiteNews
Jordan Willet was convicted of starting a blaze in February at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Regina, Saskatchewan.
A man who was charged with arson after trying to burn down a historic Catholic church earlier this year was handed only a one-year jail sentence for his crime but has also been banned from being able to possess firearms for life.
On April 9, a court sentenced Jordan Willet, 31, to 278 days in jail for intentionally or recklessly causing damage by fire or explosion to property and for not complying with a probation order. In February, LifeSiteNews reported that Willet had been arrested and charged with starting a fire at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Regina, Saskatchewan, on February 9.
He pleaded guilty to both charges and also received an 18-month probation sentence along with a lifetime firearm prohibition.
Over the weekend, Fr. James Hentges, the parish pastor, said he was “relieved he is in custody and is not a threat.”
The parish had posted footage of the February 9 attack on social media and put out a plea for anyone who had information on the event to report it to police.
The video footage of the attack, taken from a doorbell camera, shows Willet, in a mask, pouring fuel on the church before setting it on fire.
Fire investigators determined that the blaze was caused by a direct act of arson.
Since the spring of 2021, more than 100 churches, most of them Catholic, have been burned or vandalized across Canada. The attacks on the churches came shortly after the unconfirmed discovery of “unmarked graves” at now-closed residential schools once run by the Church in parts of the country.
In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.
Despite the church burnings, the federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done nothing substantial to bring those responsible to justice or to stem the root cause of the burnings.
The claims, which were promoted by Trudeau among others, lack any physical evidence and were based solely on soil disturbances found via ground-penetrating radar.
In fact, in August 2023, one such site underwent a four-week excavation and yielded no remains.
Despite the lack of evidence, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and others have continued to push the narrative, even running a report recently that appeared to justify the dozens of attacks against Catholic churches.
In January, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre not only condemned the rash of church burnings in Canada but called out Trudeau for being silent on the matter.
Business
Canada’s economy has stagnated despite Ottawa’s spin
From the Fraser Institute
By Ben Eisen, Milagros Palacios and Lawrence Schembri
Canada’s inflation-adjusted per-person annual economic growth rate (0.7 per cent) is meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent) over this same period. The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) is even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.
Growth in gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy annually, is one of the most frequently cited indicators of Canada’s economic performance. Journalists, politicians and analysts often compare various measures of Canada’s total GDP growth to other countries, or to Canada’s past performance, to assess the health of the economy and living standards. However, this statistic is misleading as a measure of living standards when population growth rates vary greatly across countries or over time.
Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, for example, recently boasted that Canada had experienced the “strongest economic growth in the G7” in 2022. Although the Trudeau government often uses international comparisons on aggregate GDP growth as evidence of economic success, it’s not the first to do so. In 2015, then-prime minister Stephen Harper said Canada’s GDP growth was “head and shoulders above all our G7 partners over the long term.”
Unfortunately, such statements do more to obscure public understanding of Canada’s economic performance than enlighten it. In reality, aggregate GDP growth statistics are not driven by productivity improvements and do not reflect rising living standards. Instead, they’re primarily the result of differences in population and labour force growth. In other words, they aren’t primarily the result of Canadians becoming better at producing goods and services (i.e. productivity) and thus generating more income for their families. Instead, they primarily reflect the fact that there are simply more people working, which increases the total amount of goods and services produced but doesn’t necessarily translate into increased living standards.
Let’s look at the numbers. Canada’s annual average GDP growth (with no adjustment for population) from 2000 to 2023 was the second-highest in the G7 at 1.8 per cent, just behind the United States at 1.9 per cent. That sounds good, until you make a simple adjustment for population changes by comparing GDP per person. Then a completely different story emerges.
Canada’s inflation-adjusted per-person annual economic growth rate (0.7 per cent) is meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent) over this same period. The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) is even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.
Why the inversion of results from good to bad? Because Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, growing at an annualized rate of 1.1 per cent—more than twice the annual population growth rate of the G7 as a whole at 0.5 per cent. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 29.8 per cent during this time period compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.
Clearly, aggregate GDP growth is a poor tool for international comparisons. It’s also not a good way to assess changes in Canada’s performance over time because Canada’s rate of population growth has not been constant. Starting in 2016, sharply higher rates of immigration have led to a pronounced increase in population growth. This increase has effectively partially obscured historically weak economic growth per person over the same period.
Specifically, from 2015 to 2023, under the Trudeau government, inflation-adjusted per-person economic growth averaged just 0.3 per cent. For historical perspective, per-person economic growth was 0.8 per cent annually under Brian Mulroney, 2.4 per cent under Jean Chrétien and 2.0 per cent under Paul Martin.
Due to Canada’s sharp increase in population growth in recent years, aggregate GDP growth is a misleading indicator for comparing economic growth performance across countries or time periods. Canada is not leading the G7, or doing well in historical terms, when it comes to economic growth measures that make simple adjustments for our rapidly growing population. In reality, we’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.
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