Brad Kirbyson

Avid follower of news, politics, diplomacy and life in general. A friend to America. Tweets are my own.

[Richard Dias @RichardDias_CFA]

Since Q3 2015, Canada's Real GDP per capita has been the worst in the G7. 🤬

[Jonathan Kay @jonkay]

the “Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal” was a publicity stunt run by an Ontario lawyer with a suspended licence, featuring a dude in a leather jacket ululating in front of a wall of shoes. Aside from a CBC hack taking dictation, there were about half a dozen people in the audience

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

@jonkay Because their readership, such as it is, keeps eating it up.

[Royce Koop 🇨🇦 @RoyceKoop]

NEW COLUMN: Time to tackle shoplifting, before it turns into even more crime

Winnipeg's shoplifting crisis is shutting down businesses and we're all paying the price. Yet another 7-Eleven is closing due to shoplifting.

Some call it a "survival crime," but police data tells a different story: much of it is organized, profit-driven theft. And the costs don't disappear. They get passed straight to consumers, fuelling the very grocery inflation used to justify stealing in the first place.

The "broken windows" theory warns us where this leads: small crimes ignored become big crimes normalized. It also tells us what’s needed: real enforcement, real consequences for repeat offenders, and a culture that stops making excuses.

Stealing is wrong. Full stop.

https://t.co/hC1pmDkpaV

#cdnpoli #cdnpolitics

[Martin Pelletier @MPelletierCIO]

TD report on CANADA's BRAIN DRAIN is really interesting.

Canada is quietly losing its top talent to the United States in what economists call a silent brain drain. While Canada does a strong job educating highly skilled workers in STEM, engineering, and entrepreneurship, it struggles to keep them due to higher taxes that kick in at much lower income levels, limited opportunities to scale companies, weaker commercialization of ideas, and much better pay and growth potential south of the border.
-> Talent leaves mainly through temporary US work visas rather than permanent moves
-> Outflows are heavily concentrated among the highest skilled, especially in tech and advanced degrees
-> Onward migration is worst among immigrants and top university graduates
-> Canada has a missing middle of medium sized firms, relying instead on many tiny businesses and a few large ones
-> Personal tax rates often exceed 50 percent in major provinces and apply at much lower thresholds than in the US
-> Complex corporate tax rules push entrepreneurs toward tax planning instead of growth

All of this weakens productivity, innovation, and domestic returns on education, making Canada a feeder system for the US economy
REPORT: https://t.co/fA0VzaJDSm

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

Despite what you might have heard, Brexit is not the cause of Britain’s woes. France & Germany are faring even worse. https://t.co/7x3bRNOyrC

[CIC Winnipeg @TheCICWinnipeg]

The CIC sponsored a Round Table for students from diverse disciplines & backgrounds to reflect on how the war in Ukraine has shaped their studies, research & academic opportunities.
#ukrainianstudies #internationalrelations #humanities #universityofmanitoba #globalaffairs

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

@kajakallas Europe is a nice place to visit but I don't want to be a part of it.

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

It's pretty much undeniable at this point - Canada has lost significant ground on the rest of the world in the last decade on a wide range of indicators.
National Post https://t.co/8rKOypZsqp via @nationalpost

[Kevin Vuong 🇨🇦 @KevinVuongxMP]

On a per capita basis, Canada has the highest penetration of #CCP United Front entities, 5x more than the US; 3x Germany; 4x the UK.

Of the 575 ID’ed entities:
— 51 are media;
— 18 policy/political;
— 42 professional;
— 76 student;
— 21 educational;
— 109 business;
— 76 cultural; and
— 182 are identity-based.

Our adversaries are exploiting our openness to target our political systems through influence operations, diaspora pressure, and elite networks.

They take advantage of legal and transparency asymmetries, and the result is not only the advancement of their nefarious agenda but also erosion of trust in our democratic institutions.

We desperately need more leaders like MP @shuvmajumdar to treat this with the seriousness & urgency it deserves, and for them to counter our adversaries without abandoning the openness & democratic values that define us.

[Royce Koop 🇨🇦 @RoyceKoop]

Extremely concerning update from Democracy Watch on the prime minister’s conflicts and his Swiss cheese approach to managing them.

This is a submission to the parliamentary ethics committee. The question is whether that committee will soon be stacked with Liberal MPs who will bury reports like this from respected groups like Democracy Watch.

https://t.co/KnLlfgZhI2

#cdnpoli #cdnpolitics

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

@RoyceKoop This report is so damning. The CPC should be handing it out at the doors.

[TrendingPolitics.ca @TrendPolCa]

NEW: Trudeau Liberals drove $1T investment exodus from Canada via regulations, killing GDP per capita growth to Depression-era lows — National Post

READ MORE: https://t.co/gIjpOCpPB7

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

@TristinHopper Newcastle

[Holly Doan @hollyanndoan]

REPORT: $4 billion federal prison system has a quarter more employees than prisoners in custody, new figures show. Staff @CSC_SCC_en outnumber inmates even with job cuts proposed this year.
https://t.co/gZOWrPY21v #cdnpoli

[Matthew Lau @matlau10]

Data shows education, location, and full-time work largely explain the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers' incomes — not “systemic anti-Indigenous racism” (as the gov't claims)

https://t.co/52uqv3Ghh6 via @nationalpost

[Peter Menzies @Pagmenzies]

Nothing quite says entitled Boomer like a Canadian who lives in Europe telling the generations beneath him they’d have to pay a reverse head tax to leave the country

[Smirkley @Smirkley]

MMIWG stand for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The media and politicians in Canada treat this as a genocide. One problem:

[Jonathan Kay @jonkay]

Canadian here, with four (count em) points of clarification on the “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” thing, which has now escaped its absurdist Canadian genderwang containment chamber, and gone viral internationally:

1) the speaker here is @LeahGazan, a fringe minor-party politician. She’s not in the government. She regularly calls for dumb things, such as criminalizing anyone who dares talk candidly about the 2021-era unmarked-graves social panic. CBC types treat her as a serious person because she’s indigenous and because she always talks in the tear-drenched idiom of white-settler colonial evilness. But she’s not.

2) MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is a mashup of two acronyms (each unique to Canada). Her decision to run them together is hilarious, which is why this has gone viral, but it’s not a common practice, even in rarefied leftist circles.

3) MMIWG refers to “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.” The problem of violence against indigenous women is a real and tragic issue. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, a bunch of activists produced a ridiculous report on the subject that called it a “continuing” (!!!) “genocide,”and demanded that we all call it that. The whole movement collapsed when it was pointed out that something like 80% of the indigenous women who are killed are killed by indigenous men, which is very much off-message from the whole white colonial G-word thing. But the acronym still gets name-dropped when people are indicting Canada for all its infinitely genocidey genociding of everybody

4) “2SLGBTQetcetc…” Americans always ask me what “2S” stands for. It stands for “2 spirited,” a term that white academics popularized 50 years ago to give expression to their mystical reveries about sacred indigenous elf-people living in some precolonial eden-like genderwang Nirvana where everyone has three penises and five vaginas. No one is allowed to ask what the term even means, but our government made it official policy to use ridiculous words like this under Trudeau, so we’re stuck with it. Basically, if you’re an indigenous guy who likes to wear eyeliner, or an indigenous woman with blue hair and sensible shoes, you call yourself “2 spirited” on your govt grant applications. No one is even allowed to ask whether it’s a gender identity or a sexual orientation. It apparently exists in some exalted state that defies this kind of rigid colonial typology, or something like that.

Back in 2022, I read a whole report about how to teach two spirited concepts to Canadian students, and it turned out that even the authors of the report admitted they had no idea what the term meant. I wrote about it for @Quillette:

https://t.co/qc2KcKFEpc

[Brad Kirbyson @bkirbyson]

@TristinHopper A bargain at twice the price! Elbows up!