Tree Equity, not bathrooms

"Don't look at me," said Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, "I wasn't mayor when Canada bid for the World Cup."

It was John Tory, who undoubtedly assumed he'd be re-elected as mayor by all the soccer-mad immigrants and migrants and lavishly wined and dined by FIFA.  Unfortunately, he tripped over his own willy and that was the end of that.

But Chow's mayor now and she completely bungled the handling of the match between Inter Miami and Toronto FC yesterday.  Overrun with crowds and traffic jams, the city was utterly and completely unable and ill-equipped to handle the crowds.  

Watching footage of this fiasco was a wakeup call for Chow to get her act together for when the actual World Cup starts.  Apparently, bathroom facilities were a disgrace and completely inadequate for what befell the town.  

Chow's priority seems to be something woke and green called 'The Tree Equity Program".  I am not kidding!  Here's the headline from an article by the 'Toronto Sun's' Brian Lilley: 

"LILLEY: Olivia Chow's Toronto adopts DEI for trees with new tree equity policy"

That's how insane it's all become.

“Toronto is the first municipality in Canada to utilize a 'tree equity' approach to prioritize canopy growth at the neighbourhood scale,” Chow proudly proclaimed in announcing the policy.

"Along with their policy, the city has released an interactive website that allows you to see your tree equity score. Bizarrely, there are areas of the city that have more trees, but are given a lower tree equity score and are considered a higher priority than neighbourhoods with fewer trees."

This is all based on who lives in the area and if it's mostly immigrants or poor residents, they need to have more trees.  In other words, such neighbourhoods can have a low tree density score, but a higher equity need for more trees.  This program is managed by a woman who is pulling in almost $500,000 a year!

Toronto's trees look in pretty good shape to me.

Reminds me of when Tanya Talaga claimed it was a lack of libraries in prisons that was behind the overwhelming imbalance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous inmates and the former's high rates of recidivism.  In this case, some neighbourhoods are poor because they don't have enough trees.

Huh!!??

Never mind that Toronto's transportation system is completely broken, never mind that crime is out-of-control, never mind that food banks are overrun.  No, Chow and council's priority is making sure all residents have an equally fair green canopy.

I loved living in Toronto in the late sixties and early seventies, when sanity ruled and I feared nothing when riding the "Red Rocket".  But I would not like to live there now -- especially when bedlam will shortly rule during the World Cup.  

Get the toilets ready, Mayor Chow.  The sky will soon be falling and the toilets will need flushing! 

Is there no one else?

Well, here we are.  This woman just keeps getting recycled into yet another Liberal trough post.  Now Louise Arbour has been named governor general.  She has been in every international post I can think of and now she lands as GG.  Nice gig!

She has always been a leftie and when asked if she were a Monarchist, she couldn't even bring herself to say she was.  HELLO LOUISE, YOU ARE THE REPRESENTATIVE OF KING CHARLES III, CANADA'S HEAD OF STATE, AND YOU CAN'T AFFIRM YOU ARE A MONARCHIST!!!!!!!!!!  Shameful!  Had you any integrity, you would have turned the job down.

It's me, Louise Arbour.  Again!

As I said, is there no one else?  The woman is 79 years old, for Gawd's sake! Useless.

Well, O.K., she's bilingual, which was a problem for Simon, who claimed she was bilingual -- just not in Canada's two official languages.  Simon, you will remember, was the GG who racked up more than $100,000 in airline catering on a couple of trips.  She also charged more than that on clothing.  The salary is $378,000 a year and she charges for clothing!!!  Judging by her appearance -- remember the blue and pink hair? -- that allowance didn't do her much good.

Inside reports say Simon was usually "over-refreshed" by 10 o'clock in the morning.  I guess that contributed to the gigantic catering bills she charged to the taxpayer, allegedly, reportedly.

Arbour is a career champion of human rights and mass immigration, so that'll be fun.  She should put her money where her mouth is and open up Rideau Hall and its vast grounds to the struggling migrants she champions -- something the Pope should also do at the Vatican.  We're already awash in legal fights over refugee claims and human rights cases, so expect more of the same from Arbour.  Two of her daughters are NDPers and have run for election.  Guess from whence come their woke politics?  

There are a lot of yahoos on line who say we should abolish the vice regal position.  They, of course, don't know the Canadian constitution.  To do so, the entire document would have to be thrown aside and re-written.  It would also need the approval of the Senate, the House of Commons and two thirds of provincial legislatures, representing at least 50 percent of the entire population.

As I said, never gonna happen.

So folks, we have another rabid, female, DEI, lefty, francophone, Jacobin (look it up) lawyer.  Carney has destroyed the Canadian economy (Note to self:  Never get a PhD in economics), forced millions into poverty and reliance on food banks and continues to weaken, taint and undermine posts like that of the GG.  Welcome to Europe, er, I mean Canada!

Tweedledum and Tweedledee congratulating each other on a smug victory walk.

  

WTH !!??

Would someone please tell me why Carney is in Armenia to meet with European heads of government??!!  We do a measly $24 million annually with Armenia, that's it!  We need deals worth billions with the U.S!

There he goes again, off to somewhere other than the U.S.  Who's he waving to?  The baggage handlers?

His snobbery and elitism will be the ruination of Canada.  He is no more Canadian than the average guy in Timbuktu.  He's a Jacobin (look it up) and a Globalist.  His entire family lives in New York!  He needs to wake up and stay home, or travel to the U.S. and support all the provincial premiers trying desperately to do deals with them.

But, no.  Contrarian to the end, he thumbs his nose at Trump with all his useless trips -- 17 to 25 countries so far, yet hasn't set foot in most parts of Canada!  Time to kiss the ring of the U.S. president for the benefit of our struggling country.

He has ministers who can travel and meet counterparts who can actually make deals.  Why does he have to be the only one travelling?  Oh ya, the hubris of an insecure kid from Fort Smith who loves the limos, the private government plane, the servants and the fawning.

The guy should be run out of town, with Champagne tied to his bumper!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but this really riles me, while ill-informed Canadians fall for his hijinks!  Show a little pride in this country, renovate the once-magnificent 24 Sussex, move in and stick to your "net zero" pledge by parking our jet for a while.

Gawd help us all!

A complete botch-up

Or was it?  "Every time someone calls the Secret Service incompetent, I hear the word "conspiracy"," said Mark Groubert on 'America's Untold Stories', a YouTube podcast into which I tune regularly.

Groubert is an investigative journalist, who has uncovered various conspiracies, including the one allegedly orchestrated by LBJ to have Kennedy killed.  That one is very compelling and I urge you to have a gander.

According to Groubert, the latest attempt on Trump's life at the Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner was no accident.  Most SS agents detest Trump and seem to go out of their way to allow him to be assassinated.    

This was attempt number three.  Apparently, the agents didn't apprehend Cole Allen; they were looking at their phones when he simply tripped on his own shoelaces.  And, in spite of firing off several point-blank rounds, none of the agents managed to hit him.  They were firing at each other.  Keystone Cops anyone?  As with the golf course attempt, the area was wide open and again, five rounds missed the shooter entirely.

An agent looking at his phone, instead of at the scene.

The magnetometer was in the process of being dismantled when Allen simply jumped over it and fled in.  And why, asks Groubert, wasn't the detector at the front door of the hotel?  Why was it just at the entrance to the ballroom?  During the whole episode, hotel guests simply wandered in and out at will.  Security was basically non-existent.  "Anyone could have come in and done anything," he adds.  

First and foremost, of course, is that SS head Sean Curran needs to be fired immediately.  Groubert also says that the entire Protection Branch of the SS needs to be replaced with a small, military unit -- such as the Navy Seals or the Green Berets.  Another question he asks is why Vance and Trump, along with the top seven in the line of succession, were on the same dais at the same event.  "The president and the vice president are never to be at the same event," he points out.

The only protection officer who did his job was the one assigned to Vance.  That guy just yanked him, while the one assigned to Trump started having a discussion with him.  "That's an absolute no-no," said Groubert.

All good questions.  It's fascinating stuff and I'm becoming convinced there are a lot of people, whose job it is to protect Trump, who aren't really trying.    

Here we go again

As I have been banging on about for years, the predictable is happening.  In spite of Carney's magic "Major Projects Office" and promise of "building things at rates never seen before", the Indigenous blockades have started:  

The Indigenous are now going to court to block everything.

Well, of course they have.  Their funding does not depend on any major -- or minor -- project getting done; they get their money regardless.  Were it otherwise, projects would be humming along.

Was this predictable?  Well, of course.  Carney tried an end run by passing another fast-track bill, the Building Canada Act, but that too is running up against legal challenges in court.  Even PCO Clerk Michael Sabia has said that Indigenous court challenges mean decades lost -- not months or years, decades!

The Indigenous claim that meaningful consultations have not been carried out.  Will any consultations ever be meaningful for them?  Their lawyers just continue to drag things out for years.  And why not?  They get big bucks for every challenge!

So, as I've said many times, that's done-and-dusted for Carney's big visions and major projects.

_________________

On another Indigenous file, the search of the Winnipeg landfill for the remains of four Indigenous sex workers has at last been halted.  Two sets of remains have been found, but sense has filtered into the thick and deluded heads of the burghers of Manitoba:  The other remains will lie where they are.

Frankly, although Wab Kinew called any objections to the search "racist", these women knew the perils their profession entailed.  They risked their lives every time they went to work.  They must have known where they might end up and I doubt they would have expected the city and province to spend millions searching for them.

What did this all cost?  $18.4 million.

When-oh-when will the Indigenous start trying cooperatively to build Carney's "Canada Strong?"  Sorry, rhetorical.  Never.

A complete mystery to me?

Re-printed from 'The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights'

_________________________________ 

April 29, 2026

Besides an insatiable appetite for control, what defines the Left is an equally insatiable appetite for envy. No one epitomizes these vices today better than New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a young Muslim man born to privilege who has never had a real job. 

He recently stuck his face into a camera and said, “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich.” He had his proverbial snarky grin on his face, delighted with his decision to fleece the upper class. If he had any integrity, he would include himself and his parents in his rape-the-rich game.

Mamdani has made it plain that he supports the “abolition of private property.” Or as he likes to put it, “If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing—whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it a statewide housing guarantee—it is preferable to what is going on right now.”

Calls for the “abolition of private property” are what made Karl Marx famous. It is a basic tenet of communism. Now if Mamdani were honest, he would have to rid himself of his private property holdings, and those of his uber-rich parents. They all sing from the same communist playbook, but in real life they are capitalists par excellence.

Mamdani loves private property so much that he owns four acres of land in Jinja, Uganda. It is worth an estimated $250,000. Not bad for a plot of land with nothing on it (at least for the moment). As one Ugandan told a reporter, “One thing for sure is that Zohran owns not only one land here, but many.” He may not be required to report private property holdings that do not generate income, so he can skirt scrutiny. This is the kind of capitalist trick that if done by others would drive him mad.

The working class can barely afford to pay for one wedding, but Mamdani had no problem paying for three of them. The biggest one was in Uganda. He made sure to keep the riff-raff far away. He hired heavily armed men and masked special forces to guard his family’s estate, making ICE agents look angelic.

Mommy and daddy are filthy rich. Mira Nair is an international filmmaker and Mahmood Mamdani is a Columbia University professor. He makes $300,000 a year, which is not exactly chump change, especially for a Marxist. She is worth an estimated $5 million. She sold her Manhattan apartment in 2019 for $1.45 million.

Despite all his loot, he is driven by envy. Envy is not identical to jealousy. The jealous want what others have; the envious want to deprive others of what they have. That defines Mamdani.
 
The Catholic Church considers envy to be one of the seven capital sins. Robert Nisbet, the great American sociologist, got it right when he said, “Of the seven deadly sins, of all states of the human mind indeed, envy is the basest and ugliest. It is also the most corrosive of spiritual and moral fiber in the bearer and the most destructive of the social fabric.”

It is bad enough that Mamdani stokes the flames of envy, but what makes him even more detestable is his rank hypocrisy. Pope Francis did not know him, but he knew of his ilk. “Hypocrites are people who pretend, flatter and deceive because they live with a mask over their faces and do not have the courage to face the truth.”

Mamdani doesn’t have the courage to tell the truth about his enormous wealth. Instead, he pretends to be one of the masses. But he never was and he never will be. He is a nepo-baby foreign investor who is not subject to the consequences of his own economic policies. “Do as I say, not as I do” never sounded more obscene.

Family holdings in Uganda are extensive, going beyond Jinja. Their prize possession is a luxury 5-bedroom villa on two acres of land. It has a pool, gardens and a spectacular view of Lake Victoria. It is worth more than 1 million dollars.

____________________________

How did he get elected as Mayor of New York?  I still can't figure it out??

The magnificent New York.

Maybe it's just me?

Am I the only one who gets annoyed when the staff take up a table and eat in the restaurant in which you are paying good money to dine?  It just pisses me off. 

The other day, the head chef was sitting at the bar, chowing down.  Why?  Why wasn't she in the back eating?  Frankly, I don't want to be reminded that she eats for free and patrons don't.  The other bad idea about this scene was that she is very overweight -- not a good ad for how you will look if you eat what she prepares.

This annoys me.

Yesterday, the assistant manager was enjoying his lunch at the banquette next to ours.  He came over and said our meal would be a little delayed because there was a backup in the kitchen.  "I see you got your lunch," I smiled.  "Well, I had to wait a little too," he replied.  

Really?!  How annoying that you had to wait to eat your free lunch.  The nerve!  I thought, but didn't say.  (Yes, it happens.  Rarely, but sometimes I don't blurt out everything I think.)

I know, I know, it's my 'Upstairs Downstairs' mentality, but I think there has to be a separation.  That's why, when we had live-in nannies, my rule was you stay in your room and we'll stay in the rest of the house.  I bought them a TV and even loaned them my car, but the line was drawn; they didn't sit and watch TV with us.

Did I miss my era, The Gilded Age?  Apparently.

My true calling.