Tag Archives: April Fool’s Day

Canada agrees to sell Labrador to George Soros to pay secret debt to WEF

In what he called a “very difficult but necessary decision,” Canadian regime leader Justin Trudeau announced on Friday he has unilaterally agreed to sell the Labrador territory to U.S. billionaire George Soros to pay a secret debt to the World Economic Forum.

Under the terms of the agreement made public on Friday, Soros will approve a new constitution for Labrador and install its first government. Those who wish to leave the territory and remain Canadian citizens will be permitted to do so until Dec. 31, and those who remain will become subjects of Soros.

Canadian laws will remain in place, but all references to Her Majesty the Queen will be replaced by Dear Leader George Soros.

Happy Valley-Goose Bay will become the capital of this new quasi-independent nation.

Trudeau said his failed vaccine procurement racked up huge debts with the WEF, especially as the prices of semiconductors skyrocketed during the pandemic, making it much more difficult to acquire the 5G microchips from Bill Gates that were needed to make the vaccines work.

“George and I determined that the best option for him and Canada was to negotiate this sale, along with all natural resources rights, and a non-compete clause that would ensure Canada does not do any oil extraction east of Manitoba for the next 50 years.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “We will invite you to file an access to information request if you want to find out how much Soros paid us. Good luck with that,” Trudeau said.

“But at least we can go back to just calling the province of Newfoundland Newfoundland again.”

The World Economic Forum said it was happy that Canada had finally paid its debt, avoiding an “unfortunate” default that might have led to the entire country being sold off. But it said the suspension of Canadians’ fundamental rights to breathe germs on each other would need to continue for at least another six months, and would be re-evaluated thereafter.

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin said he was disturbed by what is going on in Canada and said his government was looking into sending a peacekeeping mission to Labrador to protect its citizens.

CPAC to introduce new daily sports betting show

CPAC, the Cable Public Affairs Channel, is broadening its horizons. Starting Monday, it’s launching a new daily sports betting show.

Hosted by Peter Van Dusen, Beat the House will explore all aspects of sports betting, previewing upcoming games, giving picks from Van Dusen and a panel of experts, and offering tips on how to get maximum value from your wagers.

“Our team and our sponsors are very excited to get into this space,” said CPAC spokesperson Avril Pescado. “We know demand for sports betting has been very high, and we think we have the best team of sports betting analysts ready to go.”

Once Beat the House gets settled in, CPAC says it will be looking at a political betting companion show, which will accompany viewers as they place wagers on things like who will form the next government and what politician will be the next one ejected from their party.

Pierre Bruneau begins post-retirement career as TikTok influencer

Pierre Bruneau, who anchored newscasts on TVA for decades before recently announcing his retirement, has announced what his next project will be: TikTok content creator.

“I loved my time at TVA, but I’ve been wanting for a long time to explore my more creative side,” Bruneau said in an interview. “Now I’ll have the time to really focus on my new TikTok career.”

Among the content he’s toying around with these days, there’s morning chats, random trivia, story times from his career as a journalist, cycling time lapses, stitches with fellow creators and fans, and live Q&As.

“I really want to get into fun transitions,” Bruneau said, mimicking the moves of some of his favourite fashion creators. “But, to be honest, I suspect most of my videos will just me of me dancing to my favourite songs. As they say in the industry: sueur, sueur, sueur.”

New report proposes “mobile water surface travel conveyances” to establish “troisième lien” in Quebec City

A new report just released by a consulting firm may have an innovative new solution to the political deadlock over a proposed third link between Quebec City and Lévis.

Published earlier this week on an obscure part of the Quebec government website, the report calls for the establishment of a “mobile water surface travel conveyance” (“moyen de transport mobile à la surface de l’eau”) that could connect a fixed point in the national capital (a spot in Basse-Ville has been suggested) with a point near downtown Lévis.

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Quebecor offers to help Ukraine with $5,000 worth of free advertising on AddikTV

Quebecor is doing its part to help the Ukrainian people by offering $5,000 worth of free advertising space for Ukrainian advertisements on its AddikTV specialty channel.

“Our hearts are broken for the people of Ukraine, and we hope this gesture will help,” the company said in a statement.

Den Smikhu of Ukraine’s tourism office said while he doesn’t know exactly what they will do with all that free advertising time, he’s grateful for Quebecor’s offer.

“We’re not in a position to shoot new ads right now promoting Ukrainian tourism, but hopefully when things get better we’ll have all sorts of ads promoting this beautiful country to all the Quebecers watching old dubbed episodes of The Rookie at 7pm.”

CityNews to change newscast to portrait mode, asks viewers to rotate TVs

Calling it an industry first, CityNews announced today it will begin producing its local and national newscasts in portrait mode — 9×16 instead of 16×9.

The switch to portrait mode will allow the news segments to more easily be ported to platforms of the future — Facebook video and TikTok in particular, the company said in a statement.

But what about those of us who still like to watch the news on our big-screen HDTV?

Citytv recommends those people rotate their television screens 90 degrees for the duration of the local newscast.

“We considered doing a pillarbox format for broadcast, but you lose more than two thirds of the screen real estate that way,” said Citytv spokesperson Ngay Cathangtu.

Mathematically, a vertical HD image on a horizontal 16×9 screen would use up 607×1080 pixels, or a third of the 1920×1080 screen, so City’s suggestion makes sense. Unlike cellphones and tablets, televisions and cable boxes don’t come with automatic orientation detection that allows it to adjust video accordingly.

With a newscast that does pretty poorly in the ratings here, there’s not much for City to lose by trying this.

Music station announcer says seven-second break was “a real driveway moment”

They call them “driveway moments”, the segments so compelling that drivers will stay in their cars after they’ve parked because they have to hear the end of them.

For Ziua Pacalelii, who goes by “Zoo” on The Beat 92.5, one of those moments came earlier this week.

During a seven-second break between songs from 3:43:06 to 3:43:10 pm on Tuesday, Zoo gave the station ID, made a pun about Will Smith at the Oscars, asked people for their thoughts on Smith’s apology and teased music coming up from Doja Cat and Shawn Mendes when he felt an almost out-of-body experience. “It just felt like poetry pouring out of my mouth,” he said. “I could tell this segment was something special.”

Some of the text messages that came across after a particularly touching seven-second on-air segment this week.

“The part where I asked people what they thought really resonated with a lot of listeners,” Zoo told me the next day. “People were like ‘wow, no one has ever cared this much about what I thought before.’ That’s the best thing to hear.”

Zoo says he’s looking forward to a shift in a few weeks when the program director thinks he can allow up to 20 seconds of chat between songs. “I’m spending every waking moment preparing what I’m going to say. If I’m going to keep someone in their driveway for 20 whole seconds, I gotta make it worth it.”

Montreal police beat up white guy, detain him for a week to prove there’s no racial profiling

Montreal’s police department said on Friday it feels vindicated after officers savagely beat an affluent white man and kept him in jail for a week after mistaking him for a criminal suspect.

“I think this proves quite clearly that this department doesn’t engage in racial profiling,” said Capt. Manuel Di Adosbobos. “We treat everyone equally here.”

Richard Marc Lebanc was arrested on March 22nd while standing next to his car in an Outremont parking lot. Police said they were searching for a man fitting his description who was suspected of engaging in acts of fraud in the area.

“We didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt just because he was white,” Di Adosbobos said. “We said someone said it was him, we physically restrained him to protect ourselves, and we sent him to jail without a second thought.”

The actual suspect in the string of crimes, Mark R. White, was arrested a few days later and confessed to the crimes after a 37-hour interrogation. Two days after that, Leblanc was let go.

The police department said they were sorry that, for reasons beyond their control, Leblanc was the tragic victim of circumstance.

Corus launches new RACKTV softcore porn service

Introducing what it calls “new blood” into the online streaming space, Corus announced today the launch of RACKTV, a companion service to its existing STACKTV service, but with adult content.

“We’re combining the trusted quality behind STACKTV with Canadians’ insatiable thirst for the naughty stuff with our new RACKTV,” the announcement reads. “With thousands of hours of professional, tasteful, titillating and verified consensual content, we expect demand for this service to drive up … hard.”

RACKTV starts at $6.69/month, but with a free 30-day trial. Its content will be mostly exclusive to the service, not the kind of low-grade stuff you find on free websites. … Or so I’m guessing. I don’t watch porn, so I don’t know how it works.

Corus gave a long list of porn stars and services that are joining RACKTV on launch, none of which I recognize but I don’t watch porn, but at least three are misspelled.

I’ve been invited to review Corus’s new offering, which is available on Amazon Prime Video and Roku. I see it as a duty to try it out even though I don’t watch porn.

We’ll see how well it does, but then I’ll stop because I don’t watch porn.

Bell Media employee finally returns to office to discover she was laid off a year ago

Janet Possendevrille says she feels a little embarrassed that her post-pandemic return to the office didn’t go quite as planned. Instead of finding her desk with a layer of dust and maybe a rotting apple she forgot in a drawer, she found a notice on her desk telling her she was being laid off effective March 1, 2021.

The long-time Bell Media administrative assistant said she should probably have paid more attention a year ago when she lost access to her work email and didn’t have much work to do every day. “I just figured I’d get a notice when IT fixed the email problem, and without anyone working in the office I guess I thought there wasn’t much for me to do.”

After checking the voicemail on her office desk phone, she found several messages, including one reminding her of a mandatory virtual meeting on Feb. 28, and another from HR about her severance.

“I guess that’s why my bank account has less money than usual,” she quipped.

She said she holds no ill will toward her previous employer. “They wished me well in my future endeavours. How could I be mad at that? It’s so thoughtful.”

Man arrested after refusing to watch “must-see video”

A Montreal man was arrested on Thursday after repeatedly refusing to watch a video that he was told multiple times was “must see”.

Police have charged Mel Agi? Diena with two counts of failure to watch a mandatory video and one count of resisting arrest. She is expected to appear in court Friday.

In a Facebook post recounting his ordeal, Diena said she wasn’t interested in some video of a dog doing something cute and had better things to do with her time. “Who cares about some stupid dog?” she wrote.

That explanation didn’t do much to assuage Facebook users, even some close friends, who insisted that she had to watch the video even if she didn’t like it.

“They said it was must-see Mel! They don’t joke about that,” one comment read.

The Crown prosecutor’s office said it will be asking the judge to order Diena to watch the video because “it’s just so adorable, you have to see it.”

Quebec begins selling NFTs of all 243,837 named places in the province

One of the lesser-known items in the provincial budget announced in March is a new source of revenue for the province: Quebec plans to sell non-fungible tokens for all 243,837 named cities, lakes, roads, parks, rivers, bridges and other places tracked by the toponymy commission.

Details are still to be worked out. Quebec plans to sell the NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, and hold a public auction for the sales starting in a few months. But no estimate has been made on potential sale prices or the potential windfall for the government.

Quebec’s digital and cybersecurity department stresses that the NFTs are symbolic and that owning the NFT for say, the city of Laval does not confer ownership of that city.

Among the NFTs expected to fetch the highest prices are large cities like Montreal and Quebec City, geologic features like the St. Lawrence River and Île-d’Orléans, and for-the-lulz places like Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha!

Andrew Scheer opens shelters for millions of Canadians left homeless by job-killing carbon tax

Saying he’s doing his duty as a patriot, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer opened up a series of shelters across the country to care for the millions of Canadians who have lost their jobs as a result of Justin Trudeau’s job-killing carbon tax.

The federal tax, which took effect on Monday, only applies to Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, and most of the shelters are in those four provinces, but Scheer said other provinces also have job-killing pricing on hydrocarbons, and people in Alberta and Quebec will also be able to make use of his party’s shelters when they inevitably get laid off from their jobs.

Scheer couldn’t say how much the shelters cost or how many people have taken advantage of them so far, but he noted the costs should be minimal because they’re only needed until October, when his removal of GST on home heating bills will turn the economy round. Enough food, mainly in the form of white bread and baloney, has been stockpiled to last that long.

Besides, he said, if the Liberal government could use taxpayer money to bring in cots for a late night marathon voting session at the House of Commons, surely that money could be better used on Canadian families.

“Be sure to use the words ‘Canadian families’ a bunch of times in your story,” Scheer said.

STM admits new underground construction at Côte-Vertu métro is just a giant Bitcoin farm

STM photo shows excavation of large tunnel near Côte-Vertu metro.

Though it was sold as a necessary infrastructure upgrade to allow more trains to be put into service on the Orange Line, the half-billion-dollar garage near the Côte-Vertu métro station is actually mainly a state-of-the-art Bitcoin mining operation, documents obtained through access to information reveal.Trains will still be circulating through the tunnels, but the main purpose isn’t to increase service as much as to provide air circulation to cool the thousands of Bitcoin mining machines lining the tunnel walls, explained STM chairperson Philippe Schnobb.

“At the current exchange rate of about $5,500 per Bitcoin, we expect this mining operation to pay for itself within eight years,” Schnobb said. “If Bitcoin goes even higher, which it obviously will when you look at its historical levels, we expect that number to go much lower. By 2025 we could be making a profit and by 2030 we could be getting most of our revenue through Bitcoin mining. By 2035 we should be able to drop fares to zero and actually pay dividends to the Quebec and municipal governments.”

This isn’t the first time the STM has gone into the blockchain game. It’s a common myth that the metro doesn’t need heating because enough heat is generated by braking and acceleration of the trains, but in fact it’s Bitcoin servers installed in the undercarriage of metro cars that generate most of the heat in the system these days. It’s the same on new hybrid buses. “We know what we’re doing,” Schobb said. “This is guaranteed to pay off.”

The new Côte-Vertu Bitcoin farm is set to begin mining in 2021.

Super fan of CBC’s 2017 series 21 Thunder anxious to find out when second season starts

Corey Kabongo has some unanswered questions. “Did Declan survive the stabbing? What happened with Junior’s long-lost brother? Are they going to come after Nolan? What’s going on with Lara and that match-fixing ring? Will the team find out what Davey tried to do?”

Kabongo says he’s been waiting since September 18, 2017, to get answers, after watching the first season finale of 21 Thunder, the sexy CBC Television drama about a Montreal under-21 soccer team filled with personal intrigues and tough moral choices.

CBC hasn’t announced a premiere date or even a start of production for the second season of the series, but Kabongo said he is keeping an eye out. “Since it went on Netflix last year, and Refinery29 called it ‘Canada’s answer to Gossip Girl‘, its popularity has only soared. Wikipedia says its reviews were ‘generally positive,’ which is high praise. I just can’t wait to be chanting ‘THUNDER!’ again with fans all over the world.”

Kabongo, who insists he’s not related to series star Emmanuel Kabongo and it doesn’t matter if he is because Manu is a great actor and even better guy, says he’s been in touch with some of the actors in the series and while they’re all busy on other projects, he’s hopeful production of the second season can be flexible enough to work around all their schedules.

The series says it’s working on getting a second season off the ground despite being cancelled by CBC a year ago.