If Canada had a functioning free press, the whole embarrassing “Nazi applauded in Parliament” episode would have never happened. Allow me to explain.
During the Freedom Convoy, Liberal MPs and their allies in the legacy media were quick to paint the protesting truckers as extremists, radicals, racists, and yes, even Nazis.
The tens of thousands of Canadians who lined overpasses and gave the truckers a hero’s welcome for standing up against the ill-conceived, ineffectual and unconstitutional vaccine mandates were part of a “small fringe minority,” Prime Minister Trudeau told us.
And so, when a single, mysterious, yet-to-be-identified masked man arrived on Parliament Hill during the first weekend of the Freedom Convoy rally and, for a grand total of about five minutes, waved a Swastika flag, well, that was it. The Canadian establishment determined that the entire protest movement – every protester across the country, every trucker in attendance, every politician who endorsed the movement – they had all been exposed. They were ALL Nazis.
According to our brain trust, one anonymous, masked Swastika guy exposed the true Nazi colours of the Freedom Convoy.
Somehow protesting against heavy-handed government mandates and medical coercion meant that you hated Jews or something…
Trudeau then accused Conservative MP Melissa Lanstman, who happens to be Jewish and also happens to be the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, of “standing with those who wave swastikas.”
Nice.
Trudeau’s government-funded journalists gave him a pass, of course. They hated the blue-collar truckers in Ottawa as much as any Liberal civil servant or Parliamentarian, so Trudeau calling them all Nazis was perfectly fine and acceptable.
So imagine my surprise when, less than one month later in February 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was photographed at a Ukrainian rally in Toronto holding a banner representing a Nazi movement in Ukraine.
It wasn’t just that she was photographed, as I pointed out in my exclusive report at the time, she posted the photo herself on her social media pages.
Freeland is of Ukrainian descent. Beyond that, she considers herself a “Ukrainian Nationalist” and spent the early part of her career working in Moscow and Kiev. Freeland has a sophisticated understanding of the region, and its history, which makes it honestly surprising that she would be so callous and arrogant as to pose for and then post a photo holding a well-known Far-Right banner.
The red and black scarf represents the Bandera movement, a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group named after WWII Ukrainian leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Freeland’s team quietly deleted her original social media post, where she is seen proudly clutching the banner, and re-posted a sanitized version of the photo, sans Bandera scarf.
Freeland’s arrogance, I learned, was for good reason. The Liberal-aligned legacy media in Canada (the CBC, CTV, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and even Postmedia) all initially ignored the controversy. Nothing to see here!
When my news reports on True North started picking up steam and gaining interest on social media, several of these news outlets were forced to pick up the story. Well, story of.
Rather than reporting on the facts – Freeland waves a Nazi banner – the Liberal media reported that the whole thing was Russian disinformation!
“Why a photo of Freeland holding a black-and-red scarf sparked a firestorm online,” read a CBC headline, which acknowledged True North’s report but quoted Freeland’s spokesperson dismissing it as a “A classic KGB disinformation smear.”
Classic CBC.
Not to be outdone, a Toronto Star report entitled, “The controversy over Chrystia Freeland and the red Ukrainian scarf, explained” quoted an expert saying that the story was a “product of Russian propaganda and part of a pattern of disinformation.”
A journalist never reveals their sources, but I can confirm that my report was not the product of Russian disinformation. It was a friend from Edmonton – someone of Polish descent whose family was terrorized by Banera militias during the Second World War – who alerted me to the banner and its meaning.
Never let facts get in the way of a good narrative!
Finally, my favourite article from this news cycle came courtesy of our friends over the National Post. One Tristin Hopper, who blocked myself and my husband on Twitter for the sin of noticing this article, parroted Freeland’s comments that this was just “classic KGB disinformation” but then took it a giant step further by whitewashing the Nazi slogan “blood and soil.”
“The black represents the Ukrainian soil, while the red symbolizes blood — although Khanenko-Friesen (a scholar of Ukrainian folklore) said it’s not traditionally understood as blood in any violent context. “Blood as life, as blossom, and not as blood lost in battles,” she said. Red and black remains a common colour scheme in traditional Ukrainian embroidery.”
Hopper describes torchlit marches through Kiev, and explains away the complicated, nuanced history of Ukrainian Nazis.
The lone outpost of mild criticism against Freeland came from a small, once-independent (now Trudeau-subsidized) digital news platform called iPolitics.
“Freeland seen with scarf associated with Ukrainian far right,” read the iPolitics headline, which fairly and accurately described the situation, the controversy, and our True North reporting. It was written by an up-and-coming journalist named Rachel Emmanuel.
But then, suddenly a few days later, Emmanuel quit her job at iPolitics, and wrote on social media that the reason for her departure was because of this story.
I invited her on my podcast to tell us what happened, and her story reveals just how corrupted our media organizations are.
Emmanuel explained how Freeland’s spokeswoman had called her editor in a tizzy and demanded edits to her piece. The editor, being loyal to likely their largest donor, changed the piece without the reporter’s knowledge or permission.
Freeland says jump, the media ask how high?
Emmanuel quit in protest to this unethical behaviour, and I’m happy to report that she landed on her feet. She is now a reporter and host of the Alberta Roundup here at True North.
The moral of the story is that the legacy media proved itself completely inept and unwilling to scratch the surface when it came to diaspora politics and the Liberal’s alliances with foreign extremists around the world (the same can be said for the Iranian regime, CCP agents, Khalistani separatists, radical jihadists, and now we can add Ukrainian Nazis to that list).
Freeland can hold a Nazi banner, and no one bats an eye. The only scandal the Canadian media think to investigate is those pesky independent journalists who dare question our wise leadership class. Blame the Russians!
In a functioning democracy with an independent press, there would have been ten journalists just like me pondering the banner and its meaning, researching Freeland’s backstory and why she is so deeply aligned with extremist characters in Ukraine. They would have been skeptical of her dismissal of the whole episode, and been curious about her time as a Ukrainian Nationalist activist and the friendships she kept.
Editors would have assigned stories, investigations would have been initiated, relationships would have been scrutinized.
Instead, journalists at the Star, the Post and CBC dismissed it all as Russian disinformation and went to bed feeling proud. Freeland and her ties to Ukrainian Nazis never crossed their minds again.
Until, that is, that humiliating day in September 2023, when all of Parliament welcomed – and gave a standing ovation to – a Nazi war criminal, who no doubt was invited by one of the more incompetent members of the Liberal braintrust who was flipping through Chrystia Freeland’s rolodex.
Of course, the blame primarily lands on Trudeau and Freeland’s feet.
Ironically, if they hadn’t bribed the legacy media with billions of dollars in exchange for scrubbing stories like the 2022 Bandera banner, the free press would have worked its magic and gotten to the root of this problem before we invited an actual living Nazi for tribute in our highest house of government.
The whole episode shows a failing of our democracy on a level deeper than it originally appears.
