oh Yeh I don’t think I remembered to post him here BUT i had the joy of commissioning @abdocado / tomto on tweeter for a Killer with the vague notes of ‘trans somehow pls’ and get back an utterly fantastic boy, wearing a trans flag and looking superbly happy and!!! just! I adore him!! :^)c
he is simply the best please everyone love and appreciate him as well
CANADA
JEFF GRAY QUEEN'S PARK REPORTER
TORONTO
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 24, 2024
Ontario has tabled legislation that would exempt its marquee proposed Highway 413 project from the need for a full-scale environmental assessment, prompting some critics to renew calls for Ottawa to do more to ensure the protection of endangered species along the 52-kilometre route.
Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria’s bill this week also includes new measures that would make it easier for government officials or contractors to inspect land they intend to expropriate for the highway. Under the legislation, anyone who tries to block a site inspection along the route of the 413 could face up to $10,000-a-day in fines.
In 2022, Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government made the planned 413, which would arc through protected Greenbelt land around the Greater Toronto Area west and north of Toronto, a centrepiece of its re-election campaign.
But efforts since to get shovels in the ground have run into roadblocks, including a now-abandoned move by the federal government to do its own lengthy, detailed environmental evaluation of the project. Despite demands from environmental groups and opposition leaders, Ottawa has so far declined to revive this review.
Ontario’s new bill, tabled Monday, would exempt the 413 project from the province’s own Environmental Assessment Act, which would have required a lengthy study that considered the highway’s impacts and looked at alternative options.
The new bill would still require the government to produce a report on how it intends to mitigate the project’s environmental effects. But it would also allow the government to keep any studies that “contain information about sensitive natural or cultural heritage matters” out of the public eye.
The construction of Highway 413 would negatively impact the environment, not help it, say scientific researchers
Speaking to reporters, Mr. Sarkaria said the legislation would allow construction on early works to start sooner. He also again declined to provide a cost estimate cost for the 413, citing the need not to tip off bidders for the contract to build it. The province’s Auditor-General pegged the likely bill at $4-billion in 2022, but critics say the final price tag could be double that.
Tim Gray, executive director of the group Environmental Defence, said that, while the government had long said it intended to streamline the environmental assessment process for the highway, this bill would essentially gut it.
“It’s pretty perfunctory window-dressing. They’re getting rid of any of the substantive work that they were actually planning on doing and just saying, ‘We’ll publish a report,’” he said in an interview.
Mr. Gray said the federal government needs to step back in and redesignate the project for more extensive environmental scrutiny under its newly rewritten Impact Assessment Act, an idea supported by Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles and Green Leader Mike Schreiner. In an e-mail, Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie would not say whether Ottawa should step in but said she would investigate the highway if she became premier.
Earlier this year, the federal government agreed to back off its battle with the province over the 413, after settling a court challenge that had been initiated by Ontario over whether the impact assessment Ottawa had imposed on the highway was overstepping. Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada had ruled that the federal Impact Assessment Act strayed too far into provincial jurisdiction, but Ottawa has since rewritten the legislation to narrow its scope.
The federal government had agreed to set up a working group to deal with Ontario on the 413 and ensure effects on endangered species are mitigated. And to build the highway, the province will still need to seek federal permits under endangered species legislation.
In an e-mail, Ottawa’s Impact Assessment Agency said Ontario’s bill would not affect the federal-provincial working group. However, the agency also said requests to designate projects for a full federal impact assessment would be addressed on a “case-by-case basis.”
Ontario’s new legislation also includes changes that would allow the government or its contractors sweeping powers to go onto land on or near the highway’s path to do site inspections, soil sampling or other such work – without any objection from landowners. Anyone who hinders such an activity would face up to a $50,000 fine for a first offence, plus fines of up to $10,000 a day. A second offence could cost up to $100,000.
The government would also be allowed to seek an order from a justice of the peace, rather than a Superior Court judge, authorizing it to enter a property or a dwelling or even take possession of land it “has the right to possess.”
Veteran Toronto expropriation lawyer Shane Rayman said the changes will likely speed up preliminary work and the land acquisition process. However, he said, the new powers would be “unusual” in Ontario and give the government more of an upper hand with landowners facing expropriation.
“This act gives the government remarkably broad powers to possess land, to enter properties and to put down resistance,” Mr. Rayman said in an interview. He warned that if the new powers are not exercised fairly, it could “be fairly harmful to property owners.”
Nothing to see here, folks, just Pierre and Danielle and Preston and their ol' buddy Steve heading off to a fundraising dinner in honour of that noted piece of shit Ted Byfield... and the launch of a new campaign to get his Christian propaganda publishing into schools. I'm sure a proudly homophobic opponent of abortion who was big on apartheid and school privatization will be a shining influence, particularly if the material in question also includes his views on survivors of sexual violence in general and residential school survivors in particular...
"The fundraising dinner’s website explains that the “school library sponsorship” to “sponsor a set of ‘The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years’ into a library” aims to ensure the book is “checked out and read up to five thousand times.”
“Every time one of these books is read, truth is absorbed and young minds are impacted at their most formative stage of intellectual development.”
The website concedes that “getting books into schools by no means guarantees, however, that the books will be read,” which is why funds will also go towards a program that “encourages school staff to champion the books and inspire student readership.”
Byfield’s children’s book series “The Christians: Their First 2000 Years” is sympathetic to the Crusades and concludes with the September 11 attack.
Promotional images on the website of the fundraising dinner headlined by Poilievre and Smith includes a photo of a plane crashing into the World Trade Centre on 9/11.
“Great societies collapse when they lose sight of what built them,” the image states, showing two school-aged children reading Byfield’s book. “Let’s help our young people discover who and what built Western civilization.”"
[...] while talking about health care, Rustad made a strange comparison. “A doctor I was talking to just last week, he is a specialist in spinal injuries and neck injuries — a specialist surgeon. He gets two days every two months at the facility he’s working at. That’s it — that’s all the time that has been allocated,” Rustad said. “One of his colleagues gets 12 days a month for doing gender-affirming surgeries. We can do better folks. We can figure out how to make sure that our professionals have the ability to go and provide the services that we need in British Columbia.” It’s the latest comment from Rustad on transgender people. In this fact check, we’re breaking down his claims and, as hateful incidents directed at trans people become more common, their potential impact.
Tagging: @newsfromstolenland
Fuck John Rustad.
Hey y'all. I'm sorry to do this again, but I'm stuck in a rough spot. My paid internship recently ended, and I'm struggling to find work. On top of that, my insurance was terminated for no reason. I can't afford to pay for my meds and other bills, and I really need help!!
My commissions are open, so if you can please commission me! If you don't want to or want to send a smaller amount, other ways you can donate are:
Thank you guys so much!!!!
READERS: FYI BOOKSHOP.ORG HAS FREE SHIPPING FOR ANTI-PRIME DAYS
This is a cool platform that gives back to local and small businesses so I'm affiliated with them. If you want to use my link to buy anything I'll get a small cut which is appreciated, but regardless this is still a neat opportunity to dodge Amazon's monopoly especially if you don't have prime.
can you believe it guys, dashcon 10 yr anniversary, just a week away
IT’S TODAY
A very questionable magnet found in Joensuu Finland
I held onto this for six whole months. It was soooo hard waiting.
i just feel.
so inescapably lonely lately
New Brunswick's attorney general says the province is asking to be an intervener in a court case over Saskatchewan's gender-identity policy for schools. The case, currently before the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, is already being supported by Alberta as an intervener. In a brief statement, posted around 4 p.m. Friday, New Brunswick Attorney General Ted Flemming said he had sent a letter to the Saskatchewan court that the province is seeking to intervene by the July deadline. "We believe in the principles of law. This is a constitutional issue about whether the notwithstanding clause is the final word when a legislature invokes it," Flemming said in the statement. "We believe that legislative assemblies have the right to make laws that are important to the people of their province, and that they have the right to protect those laws through the use of the notwithstanding clause, if necessary."
Tagging: @newsfromstolenland
I hate this shithole country
Real quick why would we allow anything to override human rights. Why would we want that. Are you fucking kidding me.
thnk u for birthday messages pals <3
I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.
(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)
You didn’t answer the key question things brings up: did she popularize the trope before or after the would-be butler tried to kill her?
according to wikipedia, before
There’s something glorious about the fact that the author who popularised “the butler did it” had a servant who a) failed to become the butler and then b) failed to do it.
If he’d been butler material, he’d have finished the job.
