Opinion
Olympics approves two men to box against women
From LifeSiteNews
The Olympic Committee approved two male boxers to fight as ‘women’ after previously failing gender tests and being disqualified for having male chromosomes: Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria.
“This is France!” Emmanuel Macron crowed on X as the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris unfolded. That, unfortunately, was what everyone was afraid of.
The ceremony featured a blasphemous representation of the Last Supper, featuring drag queens as the disciples and Barbara Butch, an overweight lesbian DJ, as the Lord Jesus Christ. The International Olympics Committee has already issued a pseudo-apology and deleted the video from its YouTube channel, but Butch was quite clear that this was a deliberate inversion.
There was more, but suffice it to say that after that ceremony, it is no surprise that the Olympic Committee has approved two male athletes to compete as “women” who were previously disqualified from the Women’s World Boxing Championships in March 2023 in New Delhi, India, for having “XY chromosomes”: Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria. At the time, president of the International Boxing Association (IBA) Umar Kremley announced that a number of boxers were being disqualified after “a series of DNA-tests” conducted “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”
IBA released a public statement announcing that “a boxer from Algeria, Imane Khelif, was excluded from the IBA World Boxing Championships due to the failure to meet the IBA eligibility criteria.” The Algerian Olympic Committee called the IBA’s decision a “conspiracy” to deny Algeria a gold medal and noted at the time that they hoped Khelif could fight in the Paris Olympics.
After the disqualification, Mexican boxer Brianda Tamara posted about her experience boxing Khelif at the championship on X. “When I fought with [him] I felt very out of my depth,” Tamara said. “[His] blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men. Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely, and it’s good that they finally realized.” There are now serious concerns that female boxers could be injured by Khelif and Yu-Ting. Here is Khelif fighting in an earlier match—clearly far stronger than the opponent:
🚨Beating women is now a spectator sport
We have never been more aware as a society of male violence against women
Why are the #Olympics allowing this male to enter the boxing ring with a woman? #Paris2024 @fairplaywomen pic.twitter.com/I4gKzvigJt
— Katherine Deves Morgan 🇦🇺🚺 (@deves_katherine) July 30, 2024
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, who previously won five gold medals in women’s boxing tournaments, was also disqualified and stripped of a bronze medal. Now, at the Paris Olympics, Khelif is scheduled to fight Angela Carini of Italy on August 1, with Yu-Ting to be paired off with a female fighter the following day.
Marshi Smith of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) spoke with Reduxx about the issue:
The IOC’s decision to end sex-verification screening in 2000 has caused distrust and confusion in women’s sports ever since. Its 2021 decision to offload the responsibility for international eligibility criteria to individual sporting bodies has resulted in varied standards and widespread chaos among athletes, coaches, officials, and the public. In boxing, the recent contentious split between the IBA and the IOC has now placed Olympic eligibility power into the hands of national boxing federations, allowing countries like Algeria and Taiwan to set their own standards and continue placing male boxers in the ring with female athletes in combat for women’s Olympic medals.
This, said Smith, has led to a truly ugly scenario. “The physical abuse of women on an Olympic stage eliminates the integrity of all Olympic events and risks lifelong injury or even death for female athletes. This deceit cannot be allowed to continue.” A 2020 study by the University of Utah concluded that a man’s punch is, on average, about 160-170% more powerful than a woman’s punch.
From the Montreal Economic Institute
The federal government’s growing regulatory burden on businesses is holding Canada back and must be urgently reviewed, argues a new publication from the MEI released this morning.
“Regulation creep is a real thing, and Ottawa has been fuelling it for decades,” says Krystle Wittevrongel, director of research at the MEI and coauthor of the Viewpoint. “Regulations are passed but rarely reviewed, making it burdensome to run a business, or even too costly to get started.”
Between 2006 and 2021, the number of federal regulatory requirements in Canada rose by 37 per cent, from 234,200 to 320,900. This is estimated to have reduced real GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points, employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points, according to recent Statistics Canada data.
Small businesses are disproportionately impacted by the proliferation of new regulations.
In 2024, firms with fewer than five employees pay over $10,200 per employee in regulatory and red tape compliance costs, compared to roughly $1,400 per employee for businesses with 100 or more employees, according to data from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Overall, Canadian businesses spend 768 million hours a year on compliance, which is equivalent to almost 394,000 full-time jobs. The costs to the economy in 2024 alone were over $51.5 billion.
It is hardly surprising in this context that entrepreneurship in Canada is on the decline. In the year 2000, 3 out of every 1,000 Canadians started a business. By 2022, that rate had fallen to just 1.3, representing a nearly 57 per cent drop since 2000.
The impact of regulation in particular is real: had Ottawa maintained the number of regulations at 2006 levels, Canada would have seen about 10 per cent more business start-ups in 2021, according to Statistics Canada.
The MEI researcher proposes a practical way to reevaluate the necessity of these regulations, applying a model based on the Chrétien government’s 1995 Program Review.
In the 1990s, the federal government launched a review process aimed at reducing federal spending. Over the course of two years, it successfully eliminated $12 billion in federal spending, a reduction of 9.7 per cent, and restored fiscal balance.
A similar approach applied to regulations could help identify rules that are outdated, duplicative, or unjustified.
The publication outlines six key questions to evaluate existing or proposed regulations:
- What is the purpose of the regulation?
- Does it serve the public interest?
- What is the role of the federal government and is its intervention necessary?
- What is the expected economic cost of the regulation?
- Is there a less costly or intrusive way to solve the problem the regulation seeks to address?
- Is there a net benefit?
According to OECD projections, Canada is expected to experience the lowest GDP per capita growth among advanced economies through 2060.
“Canada has just lived through a decade marked by weak growth, stagnant wages, and declining prosperity,” says Ms. Wittevrongel. “If policymakers are serious about reversing this trend, they must start by asking whether existing regulations are doing more harm than good.”
The MEI Viewpoint is available here.
* * *
The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
Show me good loser and I’ll show you a loser— Leo Durocher
There’s an expression that goes, you’re not allowed to die until all the people in your life have disappointed you. That trenchant observation is particularly relevant to those who woke up on April 29 to discover that their neighbours and friends in Canada have opted to give the federal Liberals (under new leader Mark Carney) another four years to continue Canada’s descent into irrelevance.
These are the same Liberals sans Carney who were polling in the low 20s six months earlier. Their cabinet members were quitting in droves. In the finest Wag The Dog tradition, a sure victory for Canada’s Conservatives was then transformed into a humiliating defeat that saw the Tories leader Pierre Poilievre lose the seat he’d represented for 20 years. The debate in the chattering classes now is how much was Poilievre’s fault?
In a minor vindication the Liberals were seemingly denied a majority by three seats (169-144) . How they balance that equation to advance their pet projects on trade, climate, gender, free speech, native rights and Donald Trump was unknowable Which is why the Grits have turned to dumpster diving MPs like Elizabeth May and keffiyeh-clad NDP to achieve a workable majority..
Suffice to say that neophyte Carney, without any support system within the Liberals, is being highly influenced by the Justin Trudeau faculty lounge left behind after the disgraced three-term PM slunk off into the night.
It’s not all beer and skittles. No sooner had the Liberal pixie dust settled than Carney was hit with Bloc leader Yves-Francois Blanchet announced unequivocally that energy pipelines were still a no-go in electrified Quebec. Alberta premier Danielle Smith lowered the requirement for a separation referendum from 600 K signatures to around 170 K— a very doable mark in pissed-off Alberta.
Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe outlined his demands on Carney if his province is not to join Alberta. And former British PM Tony Blair, who’d worked with Carney in the UK, announced that Carney’s pet project Net Zero was a loser for nations. Finally RBC revealed it was moving beyond diversity toward “inclusion” by removing “unconscious bias” among its upper ranks.
Such is the backwash from April 28. If you listened to the state-supported media on election night you might think that Trump had picked on poor, innocent friend next door Canada. His outrageous 51st state jest did send the Canadian political apparatus into panic. A Liberal party that proclaimed Canada a postmodern state with no real traditions (lowerering flags to half mast for six months to promote their Rez School genocide hustle) suddenly adopted the flag-waving ultra-patriotic visage of expatriate comedian Mike Myers.
Instead the commentariat was spitballing about how to make the House of Commons function more smoothly or if Carney should depart for Europe immediately or in a month to meet his true constituents in the EU commentariat. China? Wassat’? Urban crime? I can’t hear you. Canada as fentanyl capital of the West? Not interested.
Astonishingly, many people who should know better bought it. It was Boomers waking from a long nap to impose their cozy values one final time on the nation they’d created via Trudeau. Comfy ridings like Oakville, Burlington, North Vancouver, Ottawa Centre and Charlottetown mailed it in for another four years. Academic hotbeds like Western (London), Laurier (Kitchener), Waterloo, UNB (Fredericton), U Calgary (Confederation) Alberta (Strathcona) and UBC (Vancouver) also kept the radical dream alive.
Meanwhile shrieks of “Panic!” over Trump decimated the Bloc (22 seats) and the NDP (7 seats) with their support transferred to a banker-led party that had been poison to them only six months earlier. You could not have written a more supportive script for a party who had neglected the essentials in traditional Canada while pursuing radical policies to please the globalists of the West.
Speaking of time capsules, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a more retro scene than the one produced by the legacy TV networks. With their emphasis on the horse-race story the tone, the panels, the hosts could have easily been teleported from 1990s. While many were interested in the micro of government finance, most listeners were expecting maybe a word or two on the collapsed state exposed by Trump’s aggressive negotiating.
As we’ve mentioned often before, Canada’s allies are appalled by the takeover of the country by malign actors, drugs traffickers, money launderers, real-estate manipulators and Chinese subterfuge. Trump’s generic reference to the border was a catch-all for the corruption swallowing the election process and the finance of the country.
That avoidance was echoed by pollsters who spent the night talking about how the final figures reflected their findings. Except for those that didn’t— Conservatives vote tally over 41 percent and Liberals well under 200 seats. What was avoided was the cumulative effect of highly inflated Liberal polling during the campaign, the “why-bother?” narrative they sold to voters appalled by the Liberals manipulation of the process to switch leaders and hold a micro-campaign of 36 days.
While Donald Trump has announced he’ll work with Carney on tariffs, it’s still highly likely that this was the final Canadian election fought by the old rules where the have-nots (Atlantic Canada) the haves-but-outraged (Quebec) and the indolent (Ontario) control the math for making government. The money pump (Alberta, Saskatchewan) will seek to attract eastern BC and southern Manitoba to their crew. In the worst case Carney may be the nation’s final PM of ten provinces plus territories.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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