Ice hockey, maple syrup, gender, diversity and inclusion, Niagara Falls, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dancing at Pride parades. These are just a few of the things Canada is famous for. But increasingly, Canada is becoming famous for having an incredibly and increasingly low fertility rate. Here’s the latest data from Statistics Canada. At a current rate of 1.33 births per woman – What is a woman? Canada doesn’t know – but one thing that is clear, this is the lowest total fertility rate in more than a century. It’s the lowest on record. Some might call this a crisis, right? How do you think Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is dealing with this? Well, in a recent tweet, he said, “Women should be free to choose the contraceptives they need without cost getting in the way. So, we’re making contraceptives free.” Look, I’m not here to debate whether contraceptives should be free or not, but when your birthrate is plummeting, is this the right course of action? Making it easier for people to prevent pregnancy? This can only have one result, right? Further declines in the fertility rate. There’s no way this would result in the opposite. It can only result in a fertility decline. I’m not suggesting that Justin Trudeau is intentionally trying to reduce the birth rate, but what else will this logically result in? Of course, when he says contraceptives will be free, he means the taxpayer will fund people’s contraception. Perhaps a more accurate tweet would have been: “all Canadians will now share the cost of birth control for those that can’t afford it.” Obviously, nothing in Canada is truly free, except perhaps the cold. Some cynical people might suggest that Trudeau’s announcement for free contraceptives could be translated as: “We want women to work and not have families”. Despite the dramatic fall in the fertility rate, the population of Canada has been rapidly increasing. For the first time in history, the population grew by more than a million in a single year surpassing 40 million. Why do you think this might be? Immigration, of course! This historic pace of population increase is being driven by immigration and the need for workers, but it’s also causing the already dire housing crisis to get even worse. The solution, according to Justin Trudeau, is not to reduce immigration, but to just build millions of more homes. Whether that’s feasible or not, I don’t know. Time will tell I suppose. But the message is clear. Fertility is going down, while immigration is ramping up. I don’t know if this what Canadians want, but that’s what’s happening in Trudeau’s Canada. MUSIC Allégro by Emmit Fenn ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4HynN5IHic

For those of you who don’t know, Path of Exile is a free-to-play online action RPG. I first started playing it back in January, 2016. I created a Ranger who was good at using a bow and started playing in the Standard league. The Standard league, for the unacquainted, allows the character to be resurrected in the last town if they die. There is no limit to this, so my Ranger died literally 100 or more times before I was able to finish the game. After finishing the game, your character would be allowed to start the game again, except at a much higher difficulty level (that is, at the Cruel and Merciless difficulties). These difficulty levels have since been abandoned in Path of Exile 3.0 – Fall of Oriath. They have been replaced with six new acts instead. Anyway, after completing the game on Normal, I found that I had become bored with my Ranger, and I didn’t really want to play through the game again on Cruel. So I stopped playing Path of Exile, at least for a while. In June of 2016, a new challenge league was released titled, “Prophecy” ... I decided to give Prophecy a go and created a Duelist. I found the Standard league quite boring, so made the decision to only play in the Hardcore league ... Anyway, very quickly my Duelist died, so I made a Shadow. My Shadow got a bit further in the game, but also died. I then tried a Witch, and she died as well. My characters were typically dying from the new content in Prophecy, that is, the actual prophecies themselves. Prophecies are granted by a non-player character named Navali who dishes them out for a cost of one Silver Coin ... Over a period of about two months, I went on to make many, many characters. Maybe about 20 or 30 or so. By the end of it, I was exhausted. I felt like I was wasting my time and had very little to show for the hundreds of hours I had invested. So I had a break from the game. It wasn’t until August 2017, upon the arrival of Path of Exile 3.0 and the new challenge league “Harbinger”, that I decided to give the game another go. This time, I decided to make a character that I knew would survive. I created a Marauder in the Harbinger Hardcore league who used a mace and shield, and relied on the totem “Ancestral Warchief”. Yeah, he was quite boring to play, but I was surviving! All I wanted to do was get to the new game content, the first being Act V. I managed to gain the Ascendancy class, “Juggernaut”, for my Marauder. He felt unstoppable. I was smashing through hordes of beasts. Nothing was getting in my way. And then what happened somewhere in the middle of Act V? I died at the hands of a Harbinger and his minions. I felt so disappointed. I felt like deleting the game right there and then, but I didn’t. I went on to play a couple of more character ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z682sJR3c60

Hi everyone! This is your favourite Premier (and your favourite Queenslander I might add), Annastacia Palaszczuk! And I’m here with your favourite Chief Health Officer, Dr John Gerrard. Stupid Humans ▶ https://ebay.us/XzAsV4 “Greetings… Just look at all those letters after my name, I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!”. Thank you for that lovely introduction John. First of all, I’d just like to thank all Queenslanders for doing the right thing and going out and getting vaccinated. That’s the best way to end this pandemic as soon as possible. Now that the New Year is upon us, 2022, it’s time to give Queenslanders a little bit of a reward… That’s right, it’s time to mask up again! That’s the only way to keep us safe from this terrible virus. [Heavy breathing]. [Muffled speech]. Let me just take that off. As we all know, the new year needs some new rules, so we’ve created a whole bunch of new rules to make it even easier for you to stay safe. As you already know, masks are already mandatory in supermarkets, and air planes, and cinemas. But starting from today, you’ll also have to start wearing them in workplaces, pubs, and sports arenas, libraries, and nail salons. It’s really the only way to keep us safe now that we’re all heavily vaccinated. It should be noted that when you’re in a pub, club, or cafe (a place that unvaccinated people are not allowed to visit remember), it’s not necessary to wear a mask when you’re sitting down. As Dr John can testify, the virus loves spreading at high altitudes, as we can see with our previous rule for air planes. Whether your 30,000 ft in the sky, or standing up in a cafe, you must wear a mask. The virus loves heights. I can’t stress that enough. Isn’t that right Dr John? “Yes, Premier”. And what would happen if somebody were to stand up without a mask on in a pub or cafe? “They might DIE!”. That’s right Queenslanders! You don’t want to die, do you? So in order to keep everybody safe from death, and in light of the virus spreading in high places, we’ve made a few more rules starting from tomorrow. When doing a handstand, it is not necessary to wear a mask if you’re vaccinated, but you need to wear one if you’re unvaccinated. It’s all to do with relative height from the ground. If you’re doing a headstand though, you must wear a mask if you’re vaccinated, but not if you’re unvaccinated. This is all making sense, isn’t it Dr John. “It certainly is, Premier”. If you’re jogging less than 12km/h, you need to wear a mask, no matter what your vaccination status is. It’s all to do with relative wind speeds and so on. It’s all very scientific. But if you’re vaccinated and running between 12km/h and 16km/h, you need not wear a mask, but unfortunat ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADhrmLlXpks

For those of you who don’t know about the baby Asha story in Australia, here’s a rundown. Baby Asha is an asylum seeker baby born in Australia. (Her parents are both seeking asylum here). She has recently been staying at the Lady Cilento children’s hospital in Brisbane being treated for burns she sustained at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. This centre is used to temporarily hold asylum seekers to Australia and has had a long history of violence including rapes, assaults and rioting. The controversy around baby Asha is that the treating doctors and nurses at the hospital do not want to release her, knowing full well that the authorities will immediately take her and her family back to Nauru. They say that they have an ethical obligation to keep her at the hospital as long as the Australian government threaten her with deportation to the detention centre. The doctors have been threatened with arrest and possible prison sentences. Recently it was reported that the government are planning to send in security personnel to forcibly take the baby. Protesters have been surrounding the exit points of the hospital in a vain hope that this will prevent the security forces from entering. It has been said the security personnel will be plain-clothed officers, so it might be a bit hard to know who is who. Obviously the staff as well as much of the public think it is a bit cruel to send a baby back to the hellhole on Nauru. I happen to agree with them. However, I can understand the government’s dilemma. AFFILIATE LINKS* eBay Deals & Sales ▶ https://ebay.to/30UxyGE Rode NT-USB Microphone (My Mic) ▶ https://ebay.to/3iEZK6h Buy goods from the US with https://www.bigapplebuddy.com – For $10 off your first order, use checkout/promo code: DAILYRANT * If you click on these affiliate links and purchase something, I get paid a small commission. SOCIAL MEDIA https://www.facebook.com/DailyRantAustralia/ https://odysee.com/$/invite/@DailyRantAustralia:d https://twitter.com/RantAustralia