Check It Out: No exaggeration needed
By Joan Janzen
Occasionally you may find a news headline that is unintentionally funny, such as this one found in England’s Daily Echo. “Stolen prosthetic arm discovered in a secondhand shop”. Or this headline: “Warehouse worker packing stress balls punched his boss in the face”.
Other headlines state the obvious ... “Federal agents raid gun shop, find weapons”. And then there’s headlines like the following one, that just don’t make a lot of sense: “County to pay $250,000 to advertise lack of funds”.
When Saskatchewan’s You Tuber, Quick Dick McDick (QDM) featured his latest comic news report, he didn’t need to utilize a comic’s favourite tool - exaggeration. And you’ll soon see why.
He begins by telling about Saskatchewan’s finance minister taking a private plane to attend a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in North Battleford. The 8-hour road trip cost taxpayers $8,000, because the finance minister wanted to make the trip in a timely manner in order to get back to her constituency in Humboldt.
News anchor, QDM informed his viewers of the Governor General’s $100,000 inflight catering costs while on a flight to Dubai, for herself and 29 passengers. Meanwhile, in real life news reports, Franco Terrazzano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) wasn’t kidding around when he said Canadians have a right to feel disrespected. He also said the CTF would love to see a full break down on the costs from the entire trip.
Those with the title of Governor General get a salary of close to $300,000/year, get a pension of $150,000/year, no matter how long they served as Governor General, and have a $200,000/year expense account for the rest of their lives. You can see why there is no need for exaggeration.
Continuing to the next news topic, QDM reported Canada’s Public Safety Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister announced they’re implementing an importation ban on all handguns without parliamentary approval. He summarized the situation saying, “Trudeau announced a freeze on legal RCMP vetted handgun transactions causing the largest sale of legal handguns in Canadian history. Then he comes up with a permanent loop hole to keep these empty shelves from being restocked. We’re banning RCMP vetted legal purchases of handguns while planning to remove mandatory minimum sentencing for those charged with gun smuggling and selling of illegal guns in Canada.”
Rick Igercich of the National Firearms Association (NFA), Canada’s largest advocacy group, tried to make sense of the government’s buy back program. “My understanding of buy back is you have to own something in the first place in order to do a buy back,” he notes. But even more alarming news is taxpayers will be paying for the buy back.
The next news flash for QDM involved Sask Power’s plans to beef up their power transmission with their American counterpart, the Southwest Power Pool, with a $52 million tariff to buy power for our excess needs. The comic news anchor explained the Estevan area power station uses carbon capture in the industry. Meanwhile plans are to phase out coal fired generating stations, replacing them with wind and solar. However we don’t know how much wind and solar power is produced daily because Sask. Power doesn’t publicly release this data, claiming it would “be disadvantageous business wise”.
QDM summarized the situation. “So we’re going to phase out our Canadian coal powered generation and switch to wind and solar. And when they’re not producing enough when it’s minus 35, we’ll buy power from the US, which uses 50 percent coal fired power. We’re phasing out coal generation here in Canada, and putting Canadians out of work, just to turn around and pay a $52 million/year tariff and then buy coal fired power from the US where there’s no such thing as a carbon tax. Am I taking crazy pills here?” QDM asks.
Terrazzano from CTF said: “I think there’s two things Canadians expect. We expect people in leadership to use some common sense. And we need our leaders to have respect for our taxpayers’ money.” Our leaders seem to forget they are first and foremost public servants, employed by taxpayers.
After about ten minutes of commentary, QDM ended his news report. Unfortunately, there are many more recent crazy Canadian government news stories he could choose from. And no exaggeration is needed.