Tan, we hardly knew thee...

Image: Back-scratching: Do what's best for your mates ...


Tan, we hardly knew thee...

Did Scratching get him Scratched? (Aren't words fun!) 

HillTimes:

• Rookie Liberal MP Geng Tan, who represents Don Valley North, Ont., and won the 2015 election with 51.4 per cent of the vote, has announced that he will not seek re-election in the fall federal election to “spend more time with his family.”

I might not have paid much notice if MP Geng Tan hadn't said his reason for bowing out is that he "wants to spend more time with his family". That phrase is a dead giveaway as a cover for something else, something bad else.  And wouldn't you think someone of such august personage as a Member of Parliament would deduce that?

So, what was this guy, an AI experiment?  Did somebody just turn him off and push the "family" button? Have we reached the future so soon?

When coupled with "and pursue other careers", the family thing looks doubly fake!  It's an admission of currently having no place else to go, but hoping he's made enough "friends" that there will be something waiting for him. If he's AI, it means he's being sent back to the shop for repairs and adjustments, and if unrepairable he'll be stripped down, reassembled, and sold as "used".

There are a lot of "used" Parliamentarians.

Too bad. He seemed like such a nice AI, what little we knew of him before now.

Tan's website says he is responsible for Canada's "Spring Festival".  China Daily wrote all about it, and apparently it was a big hit in Parliament, Motion 38, but I wasn't aware of that until now; were you?

The very number of the Motion (38) seems ominous. Tan should have checked his Chinese horrorscope before getting himself involved in that one. There is no number 38 in Chinese astrology, not even a number 11 (which one does find in numerology). This motion might end up being 86'd.

I do now understand that "Canada Spring Festival" is really just Chinese New Year with a Canadian name. Maybe China itself has Spring in February, but Canada not so much.

China certainly does put on a lovely New Year festival, though, with great astrological predictions (I'm a Dragon, but you probably already guessed that), and I see no reason why it couldn't have been left at just that.  Calling it "Canada's Spring Festival"(in February?) seems a bit disingenuous, and this year's event appears to have produced some very bad karma in that we, in Ontario at least, didn't have Spring until ... uh ... is it here yet?

It really bugs me when headlines and content don't match:

Canadaeh?: Canada Will Have Coldest April In More Than 100 Years

Then goes on to announce:

• Record-breaking cold ...

What record got broken? How cold was it in April 100 years ago?

Well, at least they didn't say "due to CO2".

So ... a rookie MP brings us Canada's Spring Festival and then decides his work is done? Not looking good, especially when you consider this:

GlobalNews: Liberal MP involved in second bare trust deal with client named in ‘transnational money laundering’ probe

• Embattled Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido continues to claim he has never been involved in a controversial legal service known as a bare trust agreement and that he did not participate in a secretive transaction completed by his law firm in 2011 that might have helped an alleged “drug boss” from China launder money in a Coquitlam, B.C., condo deal.
• “I’ve never been involved in a bare trust agreement,” Peschisolido said. “If you were to ask me how it works, I wouldn’t know.”

Lawyers in his firm "acted completely independently", he swears.

Hmmm, a lawyer who doesn't know how a "bare trust agreement" works.  I'm not a lawyer, (though I did work for 10 years for a federal prosecutor), nor am I high-finance literate -- but the Internet is such a lovely thing...

Here are the basics of what Peschisolido says he doesn't know as he points his finger like a little kid at his colleagues:

CWilson.com: The Naked Truth About Bare Trusts

• A man visits his lawyer to discuss the estate of his recently deceased mother, who had been residing in Hong Kong. Her estate includes a house in Vancouver, which she acquired 15 years ago when she lived in Canada for several years. When she emigrated back to Hong Kong, she transferred the house into the name of her son, a Canadian resident, who has held the property as bare trustee for her. He assumes that because the property is in his name, there are no tax consequences on her death and the house is not part of her legal estate.

Okay, I know Tan's in Ontario and Peschisolido is from BC, but ... gee, I don't know ... do you think the Chinese reference in the Bare Trust explanation may have spilled over onto Ontario's giver of Spring?  It's not like the two guys couldn't have had lunch together once in a while when The House was in session.

Peschisolido is a sociable guy judging from all his party hopping -- Liberal, Reform, Canadian Alliance, and now Liberal again. Just one of all the guys. A blender; maybe an AI kitchen blender that nobody would suspect is mixing something in with something else.

​An AI can malfunction when you least expect it.

You have to admit, though, the Bare Trust dealers aren't afraid to come right out and pretty much acknowledge they're crooks, so what could Peschisolido be afraid of?  It all seems perfectly legal, even if not moral.

Murfett: Use a trust to secretly buy your neighbour’s house!

• You have found the perfect property, however it’s your neighbour’s property. Your neighbour dislikes you and would never consider selling their property to you under any circumstance. What can you do? You can set up a Bare Trust and secretly and legitimately purchase your neighbour’s property.

There now, nobody, not even MPs, can say they don't know how a Bare Trust works.

Sadly, this is, more and more, how "democracy" alias "capitalism" operates. I very clearly recall the words of one of Pierre Trudeau's sons, years ago, quoting his Dad as having warned him, "Politics is a dirty business".  Would you believe I can't find that quote anywhere on the Internet?  But he said it, trust me. I have a memory like a steel trap, except when trying to find my glasses, stuff like that. But I can find my Chinese back scratcher in the dark.

I bought it at a Springtime Folk Festival in the early 80's, way back before "Canada Spring Festival" was thought of; a fun weekend where "new Canadians" of every kind displayed their art, costumes, music, dances, food and history. It was a lovely way to spend a sunny, warm Spring day, tramping around to all the colourful displays. Sigh ...

Simpler times?  Well, there have always been self-serving MPs. Is it only now that Canadians are realizing that?  It has nothing to do with race, religion or education; it's more like a Climate.