News roundup, 5 Dec 2023

- Pierre Poilievre wants you to believe that he's standing up for the little guy by calling for an end to the carbon tax. However, since this would also mean an end to the rebates, it would actually be the wealthy who benefit - 94% of households with incomes below $50,000 receive rebates that exceed their carbon-tax costs, while only about 55% of households with incomes above $250,000 do. Sadly, Poilievre's recent polling numbers seem to indicate that people are sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la la I can't hear you".

- Wab Kinew is now the most popular premier in Canada, with a 57% approval rating. In contrast, Heather Stefanson languished in the 21-28% range, and Brian Pallister was at 32% by the end of his tenure.

- The Kinew government is cleaning house at Manitoba Hydro. In a better world this would not be necessary, but given that the Tories are widely suspected of having had plans to privatize the utility, it's best to scrub the place of their appointees.

- The Winnipeg Police Service are giving additional attention to retail theft after a spike in threatening and sometimes violent incidents, most recently the stabbing of a store employee by a shoplifter. Until the MLCC's security upgrades, most of these incidents took place in liquor stores, but since then there's been a shift.

- Winnipeg Transit employees are voting on another contract offer and suspending their refusal of overtime until the vote. Results are expected on Friday. Meanwhile, in New Brunswick, civil servants could be headed towards a wildcat strike after the provincial government introduced a bill to unilaterally rewrite their pension plan.

- A court in BC has upheld the dismissal of a doctor who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. This is a good move, since she clearly either doesn't know her stuff, or else is so ideologically committed to libertarianism that she's willing to put the public at risk for it. Either way, not someone you want working at a hospital.

- Some more goodish news on the climate front - Indonesia is closing a major coal power plant seven years earlier than anticipated. And California's Salton Sea conceals enough lithium to make 375 million electric vehicle batteries. This is also good news for the local region, which has struggled economically in recent years. Less favourable is a reality check about the recent test flight of an airliner powered by biofuel - it's unlikely that you could produce enough biofuel to sustain anywhere near the amount of flying we like to do. "Fly less" (and probably a lot less) is going to have to be a rule to live by for the foreseeable future if we want to seriously tackle climate change.

- Boris Johnson reportedly considered a military raid on a Dutch pharmaceutical plant to get vaccines that would have been readily available to the UK if Brexit hadn't happened. Fortunately his handlers talked some sense into him.

- A former chief prosecutor of the ICC is among those now calling Israel's actions in Gaza genocidal.

- In Akron, Ohio, a man was shot in the face after refusing a request for some of the potato chips he was eating.