The News Rundown

Alberta Restriction Exemption Program and Restrictions

On Thursday Alberta announced the opt-in Restriction Exemption Program. For weeks various people in the province have been calling for some proof of vaccination requirements.
Starting September 20th businesses can opt into the Restriction Exemption program and operate normally. Those that do not will be subject to gathering restrictions.
Mandatory masks remain in effect even for those taking part in the Restriction Exemption Program.
As with other provinces and our past discussions, this puts Alberta on the path towards a segregated society.
As a reminder, those from racialized communities such as the Indigenous population or Black Canadian population have drastically lower vaccination rates than the population at large.
The full list of restrictions for those businesses that do not implement the program can be found in our linked supplementals at westerncontext.ca.
For some businesses though, there is no choice. Restaurants, bars, and pubs for example must cease in person dining, limit outdoor dining to a party of 6 per table, and liquor sales must end at 10pm.
Retail establishments that do not implement the Restrictions Exemption Program need to limit capacity to 1/3 and attendees need to be household members only or close contacts.
There are also flexible restrictions placed on social gatherings. Vaccinated people are limited to a single household plus one other household to a maximum of 10. And unvaccinated people are not permitted to gather.
Places of worship are limited to 1/3 capacity and masks are required.
The problem with this though is two fold, first employees of said businesses are not required to show proof of vaccination unless the employer mandates it.
Second, about 23% of new and active cases are fully vaccinated. That means that even if an establishment lets someone in there is the possibility of breakthrough cases being transmitted.
Now, breakthrough cases are less deadly and less severe due to the vaccine and are what we’ll be dealing with for the years to come as the pandemic moves to a more endemic problem and a COVID diagnosis eventually becomes like shingles or chickenpox, then the flu, then the common cold. That’s the trajectory for this virus.
The Spanish flu emerged in 1918 and circulated for 30+ years until disappearing in the early 1950s. That’s likely the path we are on here.
The province also neglected to mention any exemption for those preventing natural immunity since in the months after an infection when combined with a vaccine, that person has perhaps the best defence against COVID.
The Premier said on Thursday that Alberta Health will be making this a priority and ensuring people have documentation for this case.
The unfortunate side out of all of this is that our society's tendency to divide and wedge one another against each other continues with this.
By bringing in the Restriction Exemption Program, the province only creates more skeptics and more people who are hesitant to get the vaccine.
Albertans got documentation either when getting the jab from AHS or a pharmacy. The province prior to this announcement announced a QR code based mobile phone solution would be on the way by early October.
It was the government's position that businesses should be the ones to determine if they ask for proof of vaccination. THAT HAS NOT CHANGED.
If we look at what has changed, the only thing that has is that businesses that don’t enforce vaccine restrictions have to operate themselves with restrictions.
This raises a very big question and it shows that the media and their visual nurses and doctors and the opposition really didn’t mean business with their whole proof of vaccination requirement in the first place.
If businesses really wanted vaccine based restrictions they would have already implemented them.
The technology and documentation before and after the Premier’s announcement is exactly the same.
If businesses wanted this, they would have done so. If the adage of “we’re all in this together” is true and it was believed this would help, why didn’t we see an uptick in businesses requesting proof of vaccination?
Are businesses that want a vaccine restriction program so timid that they require the government to tell them what to do? And those that aren’t timid will have already done it or won’t implement the program.
Going forward, businesses in rural Alberta won’t enforce and the amount of work the RCMP and AHS would need to do in monitoring would be extreme.
This announcement this week is nothing more than a play to make people in Edmonton, Calgary, and other large municipalities feel better and give them the buy in necessary to implement a vaccine restriction program if they want.
The bigger question out of all of this is, why does 222 people in ICU and about 900 hospitalized with COVID break our system?
Kentucky, a state similar in size to Alberta with a privately run healthcare system has a capacity of 1,800+ ICU beds. Presently the state which has gone back to normal in most cases sees an ICU occupancy of 1,175 beds.
The state itself has a capacity of 13,357 inpatient hospital beds.
Alberta has a better vaccination rate than Kentucky. The only difference is the implementation of our healthcare system. Even in a system where the state is largely open, they’re able to cope.
The big difference is how healthcare is structured in the US and that it’s an actual industry that’s rewarded for creating capacity.
After this is all said and done, we need to have a serious discussion about the implementation of our healthcare system with the possibility of reform.
And in a final note on this story, Alberta has become a national punching bag yet again.
The Toronto Star ran a cartoon split down the middle, one side showing Jason Kenney, the other Erin O’Toole. The implication that if you elect Erin O’Toole on Monday, the pandemic across Canada will look like what it is in Alberta right now.
Of course the regular reader will be terrified by that and forget that health is a provincial responsibility.
Though I guess it’s not a surprise as most in the Laurentian Elite media are stenographers for Justin Trudeau and the Liberals as this is the exact same talking point that Justin Trudeau made on Thursday.
Put simply, nothing has changed in Alberta and it’s going to be up to the businesses to decide what they do going forward.
Supplementals:

The auditor general of BC, who is responsible for auditing over 150 organizations that are controlled by, or accountable to, the provincial government, has made a damning report, saying that the BC government has not effectively overseen the safety of the 1,900 dams it regulates across the province.
Auditor General Michael Pickup said the Ministry of Forests, Land, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development has not adequately verified or enforced dam owners' compliance with key safety requirements.
But don't panic. We're not going to see a catastrophic failure of dams unless the situation deteriorates. Pickup says: "I'm trying to balance making sure that it's clear to people that we're not suggesting, you know, dams are unsafe. But at the same time we are suggesting, and indicating, that by concluding they're not effectively running their program and doing what they said they would do, the risk has increased related to dam safety and public safety."
The audit period was from Jan. 1, 2019 to Dec. 31, 2020, and didn't include dams that are being built, like Site C, the megaproject crossing the Peace River just west of Fort St. John.
Dams that hold back water offer significant benefits, such as electricity, irrigation, flood control, wildlife habitat and recreation, said the report. But dams must be properly maintained to minimize their risk of failing. Failures can be caused by a single catastrophic event, such as an earthquake, or, more often, by a series of factors or events, it said.
For about 1,000 of the 1,900 dams, it said a failure could kill people and damage the environment and property. The rest of the dams could end up damaging the owner's property, the report said. Since the early 1900s, there have been two recorded fatalities in B.C. from structural dam failures, one in 1912 and the other in 1948, it noted.
The report said officers with the ministry found that new landowners sometimes didn't know their property had a dam on it for a year or more after becoming the owners when they received a bill for the water licence. Dams are not on the land title, and smaller dams can look like a natural body of water, it added. While the owners of the dams are responsible for their safety, the ministry has a mandate to see that they comply with provincial regulations, it said.
The report noted 87 high-risk dams with “significant deficiencies” in 2020. Among the 87 identified with deficiencies, the audit said that one required “immediate attention” by the dam owner, 24 needed “considerable work” despite having an owner that was not actively working to correct deficiencies, and 62 had owners that were actively working to correct deficiencies with “considerable work” needed to be compliant.
The audit also found that these dams, on average, had been at a high risk level for 7.5 years. But the location of the high-risk dams remains a mystery. Neither the Office of the Auditor General of B.C. nor the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development would say what areas were at risk.
The report also said the failure of 1,000 dams overseen by the ministry “can kill people and damage the environment and property.” “For the remaining 900 dams, the impact of failure is lower, only damaging the owner’s property.”
AG Michael Pickup said: “We don’t want people to be alarmed and we weren’t out there looking at the particular safety of unique dams or anything like that. But this is a large government program … that is not working, frankly, as it is intended to by government — and I think people need to have a discussion around this with elected officials.”
Pickup said the report doesn’t identify the 87 dams with serious deficiencies because it covers the period from January 2019 to December 2020 and he wasn’t certain whether they were still at risk. “Presumably a number of things would likely have changed since the audit period. So my suggestion would be if you’re looking for an up-to-date accounting … of how that 87 has changed … ask government themselves where this now stands.”
The auditor general also found that the ministry did not have a complete inventory of dams, and the information on the ones it regulates was not always complete or accurate because the database was introduced in 2010 and has expanded to include more material.
But officers with the ministry have not prioritized updating the database records as part of their already heavy workloads, the report said. They also feel the database doesn't meet their workflow needs and is inefficient to use, it said. Four out of 10 officers said there was a backlog in the average time between reports being submitted and the ministry accepting them, which was about 20 months, although some had taken eight years.
The report concluded that "The backlog was a result of officer workload. The officers told us their schedules rarely allowed for the uninterrupted stretch of time they needed to review these complex technical reports."
Furstenau said the findings point to the chronic under-funding of the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.
Furstenau said: “As indicated in this report, there is a lack of staff and capacity to do this work. And this is just one segment of that ministry’s responsibilities...this ministry seems to be deeply under-resourced. It’s yet another Auditor General report that identifies that this province is not doing what it needs to do when it comes to oversight regulation and enforcement of activities that are happening on the land base — and particularly industrial activities.”
Furstenau also pointed to a 2016 audit that found the government’s mines monitoring and inspection program was woefully inadequate and did not protect the province from significant environmental risks.
The auditor general made nine recommendations, including improving processes to verify compliance, all of which have been accepted by the ministry. Pickup said the response from the government did not include details in terms of actions and a timeline, but it did agree with all the recommendations.
BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau offered a blunt assessment of Pickup’s report, calling it “alarming” and urging the BC NDP government to address public safety concerns: “And the way that they can do that is to be transparent. To be proactively providing information about the dams that are not meeting these standards and communicating clearly about what steps they’re going to take to properly do their job as a regulator and properly protect the public.”
Dams are an incredibly valuable part of BC's infrastructure. Roughly 90% of BC's electric capacity and generation is produced by hydro. It's such a ubiquitous term that most British Columbians refer to their power bills as "hydro bills". Many will know just how important these dams are to our economy, as well as our renewable energy projects.
Hydro power will not be going away in BC anytime soon, and with the arrival of Site C on the scene by the middle of the decade, will indeed increase to meet population demands with some left over for export to Alberta and the US.
With that in mind, we need our government to protect these valuable resources much better, and for the ministry involved in overseeing the 1900 dams, the BC NDP needs to give the officials involved more resources to be able to better manage their charges.
I get that with a pandemic, a housing shortage, opioid crisis, and a hundred other problems (many of which the government seems to be ignoring anyway) dam structural safety is probably pretty low on the list of priorities for John Horgan's government. But with so much importance tied to our hydro-electric infrastructure, it is vital that our government does its job, and looks after the dams so that BC's energy future is secure. Otherwise, the consequences could be pretty damning.
Supplementals:

Vance will not face military service charges; source cites his four-star rank

The military police investigating General Jonathan Vance ended their investigation this week with no charges despite him facing a criminal charge of obstruction of justice in relation to the ongoing investigation.
The question was whether or not Vance broke service code by having an inappropriate relationship with another officer.
The investigation ended with no charges because under the current rules, it is legally impossible to try someone who has Vance’s rank.
The rules say that because Vance is a 4 star general, he has to be tried by someone of higher rank. There is no one of higher rank.
This story has been going back and forth since February and in July he was charged with obstruction of justice.
It was also revealed this week that General Jonathan Vance is indeed the father of one of Major Kellie Brennan’s children.
Vance is a 99% match with a child born after he said he had a relationship with Major Kellie Brennan.
Vance denied any inappropriate behaviour and he did admit that he had a relationship with Brennan but as we’ve covered in the past on Western Context, Brennan told an entirely different story.
A story involving inappropriate behaviour and General Jonathan Vance using his higher rank to put as many as 4 women in vulnerable positions.
Vance was supposed to go to trial on the 17th (Friday of recording) but the trial has been adjourned until next month. As to why this happened? A military police spokesperson pointed to a recent report from former Supreme Court of Canada justice Morris Fish, which warned it was “legally impossible” under the current rules to try someone of Vance’s rank in the military system.
What this means is that anyone of high enough rank is untouchable by the justice system and as such the political leadership must step in and move these people away which happened but justice as we know it, can’t be carried out.
What has happened with regards to General Vance and Admiral MacDonald has set fire to what is seen in most camps as a crisis within the military.
Sexual misconduct has been a problem in the military as of recently and former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps outlined in her report a culture hostile to women and LGBTQ2 members.
A recommendation she put forward was to create an independent reporting system that would operate outside the chain of command.
The Trudeau liberal government did not implement this recommendation and liberal leader Justin Trudeau has not answered questions on if or when he would implement such a system.
Recall that the Liberals can’t do anything about sexual misconduct. Not in their government or within their candidates or the military, because if they do, Trudeau himself needs to be held accountable.
What this means is that everyone suffers because Trudeau himself has to be protected.
As of Wednesday this week there have been 9,198 claims in the military sexual misconduct lawsuit.
This is a cultural problem within the government of Canada as a whole and it has to change through the elected officials but that is unlikely if the Liberals return.
The Liberals also have another candidate in Spadina-Fort York candidate Kevin Vuong who was asked to suspend his campaign on Friday after a sexual assault charge was revealed.
It’s clear that something in Canada’s institutions has to change.
Supplementals:

https://globalnews.ca/news/8195276/canadian-forces-sexual-misconduct-crisis-jonathan-vance/

Firing Line

Chinese PLA general collaborated with fired scientist at Canada’s top infectious disease lab

A high-ranking officer in the People’s Liberation Army, recently lauded by President Xi Jinping for developing a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, collaborated on Ebola research with one of the scientists who was later fired from Canada’s high-security infectious disease laboratory, the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.
The joint research conducted by Major-General Chen Wei and former Canadian government lab scientist Xiangguo Qiu indicates that cooperation between the Chinese military and scientists at the NML went much higher than was previously known. The People’s Liberation Army is the military wing of China’s ruling Communist Party.
Maj.-Gen. Chen and Dr. Qiu, who until recently headed the vaccine development and antiviral therapies section at the Winnipeg lab, collaborated on two scientific papers on Ebola, in 2016 and 2020. Those papers did not identify Maj.-Gen. Chen as a high-ranking officer and the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist and virologist. Instead, she is identified as Wei Chen, who held a PHD and worked at the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, part of the Academy of Military Science. It has been confirmed that those are indeed the very same person.
The Public Health Agency of Canada was asked if it is standard practice for scientists at the NML to work with high-level military medical researchers in China. PHAC spokesperson Anne Génier said “While the NML does not have institutional agreements with the Chinese military, Canada’s scientists have collaborated with Chinese scientists to contribute to the global public health fight against deadly diseases, such as Ebola. These collaborations have yielded vaccine and treatment candidates for diseases, as documented in peer-reviewed journals.”
Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, says the People’s Liberation Army is unique among the militaries of great powers today because it is loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, not the constitution or duly elected government: “Research for the sake of scientific inquiry is not a part of the mission of the People’s Liberation Army and its scientific or other employees. Scientific and other research being carried out by the PLA are meant first and foremost to support the missions of the People’s Liberation Army in protecting state security.”
And that is why the collaboration with Chinese PLA scientists is so dangerous. The research involved will not benefit science, or Canada, but the Chinese Communist government.
Last week, PHAC would not say whether Maj.-Gen. Chen had ever visited the Winnipeg lab, a Level 4 facility equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases. The agency said it does not release visitor records and that privacy laws prevent it from saying whether Maj.-Gen. Chen had been there.
Three NML scientists who participated in the two Ebola research projects told The Globe they had no idea that Wei Chen was a major-general and China’s top virologist. They said Dr. Qiu did not share information with them about her collaborations with Chinese scientists.
Health Department spokesperson Mark Johnson “However, all visitors including researchers collaborating with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) must adhere to Government of Canada and PHAC security protocols, procedures and policies and must be escorted by an employee with a secret clearance at all times.”
Interestingly, The Globe and Mail article on this story refers to the two different spokespeople from the PHAC differently. It calls Mark Johnson a "spokesman" and Anne Génier as a "spokesperson". Food for thought, as we march through a time where referring to gendered occupation titles is a big no-no in Canadian journalism these days.
Back to the security implications: Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said Canada should not allow this type of collaboration: “If I was the director of CSIS at the time and I had that information in front of me – would it have rung an alarm bell for me? Absolutely.” CSIS had no comment on the matter, citing an ongoing RCMP investigation.
Elcock said federal health officials may not have been alarmed by this collaboration in 2016 because it was taking place in a different international environment – before relations between the West and China soured. “China is what it is. It’s an authoritarian state. We’re not at war with China, but China is not our friend. Why we would share this kind of sensitive information with the Chinese, I don’t know.”
Retired lieutenant-general Michael Day, who led the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command and was the chief strategic planner for the future of the Canadian Armed Forces, said it doesn’t appear PHAC had proper security measures in place: “Why is it that our only national Level 4 lab does not work through proper security protocols and actively monitor what was going on there, given the consequences of going astray? The fact that we have failed to properly vet scientists who go in there is mind-boggling.”
Gary Kobinger, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist who worked at the NML with Dr. Qiu until 2016, said he wasn’t aware of the scientific collaboration between the Winnipeg lab researchers and the Chinese officer. “I didn’t know about that woman, who is definitely very high in the Chinese military structure.”
He said scientists are sometimes oblivious to the affiliations of other scientists with whom they conduct research.
“For scientists, the main focus, if not the only focus, is science. Scientists don’t pay attention to military pedigree or political positions or even beliefs or affiliation. That said, maybe it’s something that should change … maybe more scientists should be a bit more careful or attentive to those potential issues because there are clearly perception issues.”
Dr. Kobinger shared a 2018 Governor-General’s Award with Dr. Qiu for groundbreaking research on Ebola before becoming director of the Research Centre on Infectious Diseases at Laval University. He was recently appointed director of the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas.
To recap the story that we've covered previously, Dr. Qiu and her husband, Keding Chang, were fired from their positions at the NML in January. The couple and an unknown number of Dr. Qiu’s students had their security clearances revoked in July, 2019, and were escorted from the facility. Four months earlier, the NML shipped Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a transfer overseen by Dr. Qiu.
We've talked before about how the RCMP are investigating whether the two dismissed scientists passed on Canadian intellectual property to China, including to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In June, the federal government even took House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to court to prevent the release of documents to MPs that could offer insight into why the couple were fired. The government dropped the court quest last month.
In September, 2020. Maj.-Gen. Chen was commended by Mr. Xi at a ceremony in Beijing for her contribution to China’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine, developed by CanSino Biologics Inc., a military-backed institute.
CanSino was given a licence by Canada’s National Research Council last year to use a Canadian biological product as part of an effort to jointly develop a vaccine. The plan was for a Halifax research team to work with CanSino to run the first Canadian clinical trials. China later reneged on the deal and blocked vaccine shipments to Canada. Trudeau put the CanSino deal ahead of partnerships with US based Pfizer and Moderna or the UK based Astrazeneca.
Is it any wonder, with our Canadian government's past of making deals with China, that the UK and US went ahead with Australia instead of Canada to forge a new defence pact meant to contain the military might of China in the Indo-Pacific? Not really surprising, when you see the lack of loyalty from the Trudeau government to our Anglosphere allies.
The pact, dubbed AUKUS after the three countries’ initials, does not include Canada, raising the prospect that Ottawa could miss out on intelligence-sharing between some of its closest allies.
The deal will see the countries share more military technologies and information than they currently do, some of it related to artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cyber capabilities. AUKUS’s first project will be to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.
“We have always believed in a world that favours freedom, that respects human dignity, the rule of law, the independence of sovereign states and the peaceful fellowship of nations,” said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who unveiled the deal in a video-link press conference Wednesday afternoon with President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The three countries, along with Canada and New Zealand, already share foreign intelligence through the Five Eyes partnership. It was not immediately clear whether the new alliance would serve purely as a vehicle for Australia to engage in additional defence projects with the other countries, or if the pact would supplant some of the work of the Five Eyes. The U.S. has repeatedly warned that it would stop sharing intelligence with countries that are not sufficiently tough on China. The Canadian government did not answer questions about whether Ottawa had asked to join the pact, wanted to join in the future or had chosen not to participate.
Eric Miller, a political and business consultant specializing in Canada-U.S. affairs, said the agreement represents an alliance between countries more willing than Canada to take on China. He said the pact could represent a “three eyes” subset of the larger partnership: “Those who are in the world of ‘we need to directly confront China, and use all of our assets and resources to do that,’ – they are essentially moving forward.”
Likely a reason why they're trying to move forward is because of the constant infiltration of the CCP into the Canadian governmental structures.
As recently as February, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service director, David Vigneault, flagged as “some of the most paramount concerns” efforts by China and Russia to “target politicians, political parties, and electoral processes in order to covertly influence Canadian public policy, public opinion, and ultimately undermine our democracy and democratic processes.”
Earlier this year, Alliance Canada HK reported on China’s “unrestricted network of foreign influence” including elite capture, surveillance and intimidation of activists in Canada and the United Front Work Department’s activities.
Let's look at the Vancouver East riding. It's located in one of Vancouver's poorest ridings, and includes the Downtown Eastside, a region with likely the biggest homeless population in Canada, as well as the biggest struggle with the opioid crisis.
Outside of 2 elections going back to 1935, the riding has been solidly NDP (or CCF, the NDP precursor) and for Hong Kong born NDP MP Jenny Kwan to lose her seat, it would take a massive upset, likely from the Liberal star candidate challenger, Josh Vander Vies, a decorated Paralympian who was born without arms or legs.
But if he wins what would be a stunning upset in Vancouver East, it may be due to geopolitics and, some suggest, thanks to the help of people and organizations tied to the Chinese Communist Party — the folks who don’t think Kwan does enough to advance the CCP’s interests.
In late August, Fred Kwok (aka Guo Yinghua) invited members of the Chinese community to a free lunch in Chinatown to meet Vander Vies. Kwok said in a WeChat invitation written in Chinese to the event: “Throughout these years, the Chinese community and the Chinese people have long been neglected. We the Chinese people must show the voting power to the politicians. … When the future victory comes, at least there will be a few more MPs who would care about issues of the Chinese people.”
Kwok posted the invitation and paid for the lunch himself. But he acknowledged Thursday that it was a breach of the Elections Act, which limits donations to $1,650. Kwok said he put $1,500 on his credit card for lunch, and that was in addition to an earlier $1,200 donation to the Conservative party.
As a result, Kwok said he has been advised to register as a “third party,” which is defined as any person or group that “wants to participate in or influence elections other than as a political party, electoral district association, nomination contestant or candidate.”
Earlier this week, a lawyer for the NDP contacted Elections Canada and raised questions about whether Kwok had breached the Election Act provisions requiring third-party registration as well as the sections dealing with offering and accepting bribes.
Although Kwok modestly described himself as “an ordinary citizen,” he has a wide circle of contacts and influence as president of the Chinese Benevolent Association, head of the Chinese Freemasons of Canada, chair of the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Vancouver, and a member of the B.C. government’s advisory board on Chinese legacy initiatives.
The Chinese Benevolent Association and the freemasons are among the groups that took out ads in Chinese- and English-language newspapers accusing Canadian parliamentarians of interfering in Chinese affairs after parliamentarians unanimously declared China was involved in the genocide of Muslim-minority Uyghurs. (Liberal cabinet ministers abstained.)
The two organizations have also sponsored ads supporting imposition of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, condemning democracy marches, and supporting the “reunification” of Taiwan.
Foreign affairs — Afghanistan aside — has barely been mentioned during the election campaign. Getting it on to the agenda is why Gloria Fung’s group Canada-Hong Kong Link along with the Vancouver Society for the Support of Democratic Movement and Saskatchewan Stand with Hong Kong commissioned the Nanos poll. Fung said: “No matter which party wins, we are going to use this poll to hold all parties accountable. This is what we need to do.”
Why? Because foreign influence behind the scenes during this election is “very, very significant”, said Fung, who went on to note Kwan is not the only candidate who is being targeted.
This is a very serious issue, and I'm surprised that China has not become a bigger issue on the campaign trail. With just a few days ahead of the election, it likely will not, but the potential devastating influence of China on our country is worrying Canadians, and should be a big deal for whichever direction our government goes next week.
Supplementals:

Word of the Week

Audit - an official inspection of an individual's or organization's accounts, typically by an independent body.

Quote of the Week

“Why is it that our only national Level 4 lab does not work through proper security protocols and actively monitor what was going on there, given the consequences of going astray? The fact that we have failed to properly vet scientists who go in there is mind-boggling.” - Retired lieutenant-general Michael Day on the lack of PHAC security measures in place at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg

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Show Data

Episode Title: Damning Conclusions

Teaser: Alberta implements a ‘restriction exemption program’, the BC government isn’t overseeing the safety of 1900 dams in the province, and General Vance can’t face justice because he’s too highly ranked. Also, China’s influence in our elections continues.

Recorded Date: September 17, 2021

Release Date: September 18, 2021

Duration: 1:09:24

Edit Notes: Morris Fish and Winnipeg Lab

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX