Radical calls to cancel Canada Day, toppling statues and renaming street names is not a productive path forward.
What’s rarely discussed are the positive stories about First Nations people. The successes and accomplishments are worth talking about and worth celebrating.
Anthony Furey discusses in his latest video.
A new report by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) found that on average, Canadians’ share of federal and government debt totalled $57,500 per person.
The 2021 Canada Day Debt Report was based on 2021 federal and provincial budgets.
When broken down based on provinces, Canadians in Newfoundland and Labrador held the highest amount of federal and provincial debt with $65,200 owed per person. Ontario followed closely behind with each person having a $61,600 share of government debt.
“Governments have been borrowing too much money for too long and now they need to start addressing the red ink before taxpayers get clobbered,” said CTF Federal Director Franco Terazzano in a news release.
“Canadians don’t have tens of thousands of dollars lying around to pay for this mountain of government debt, and that’s why it’s so important for politicians to find savings like everyone else.”
According to the CTF, interest charges alone will cost Canada between $1,100 and $2,400 per person in 2021.
“Interest charges alone will cost more than $1,000 per person this year, and that money isn’t being spent on health care or lowering taxes because it’s going to bond fund managers,” said Terazzano.
“Canadian governments are up to their eyeballs in debt and taxpayers are going to get walloped if politicians don’t figure out ways to save money.”
Canada’s federal debt surpassed $1 trillion dollars this year following a frenzy of pandemic spending by the ruling Liberal government.
There’s a little bit of delicious irony to hear Liberals and leftists today calling for the country to “cancel Canada Day.” The Liberals and leftists, after all, are the ones who created Canada Day, among many other new Canadian symbols in an effort to erase Canada’s British history and traditions.
There are certainly some conservatives out there chuckling saying, sure, cancel Canada Day — and bring back Dominion Day!
True North’s Candice Malcolm breaks down all the ways the left has tried to change Canada by introducing new symbols and whitewashing our past, and how their version of Canada has never stood up to scrutiny.
Tune into a special Dominion Day edition of The Candice Malcolm Show.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE CANDICE MALCOLM SHOW
In an effort to reduce police response times for communities in rural Alberta, Alberta Sheriff highway patrol officers will have expanded powers to respond to traffic incidents.
The expansion, first announced on Friday, is part of the Rural Alberta Provincial Integrated Defence Response (RAPID) initiative.
With the new changes, an additional 260 officers will be able to respond to traffic incidents.
Originally, Alberta traffic sheriffs only had the power to enforce Traffic Safety Act violations and investigate collisions but now they will be able to engage with criminal offences like impaired driving.
“We are taking action to address the very real issue of crime in rural Alberta,” said the province’s justice minister Kaycee Madu.
“We know Albertans have been frustrated with response times in rural areas, and we are committed to making sure they feel safe and protected in their communities,” Madu added. “More boots on the ground means authorities can respond more quickly when Albertans need them. It will also deter crime and make our highways and communities safer.”
In recent years, the Alberta government has introduced several measures in order to crack down on the problem of rural crime.
Provincial and wildlife officers were granted new powers to respond to RCMP calls for backup in April as part of the RAPID initiative. Since being in effect, the program added an additional 140 peace officers who can help respond to rural crime incidents.
According to Statistics Canada, rural residents in the Prairies are impacted by higher rates of property crime than those living in urban areas.
“As with most property crimes, rates of break and enter and motor vehicle theft were higher in the Prairie provinces, especially Alberta. In 2017, police reported 978 break and enter incidents per 100,000 population in rural Alberta,” claimed a 2017 Statistics Canada report.
The story of the day for Canada’s mainstream media seems to be that Justin Trudeau shaved his pandemic beard.
A bare-faced Trudeau appeared at a media availability Wednesday, sparking a flurry of tweets and giddy election speculation from Canada’s press.
On Twitter, journalists from the Canadian Press, Global News, the Wall Street Journal and CityNews all joined in to fawn over Trudeau’s lack of facial hair.
Canadian Press reporter Mia Rabson claimed that Trudeau’s decision to shave his facial hair “is about to set off a new flurry of speculation” and called on people to brace themselves.
Ottawa correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Paul Vieira also took to Twitter to announce that Trudeau’s beard was in fact “gone” before plugging an article he wrote in 2020 about Trudeau’s beard.
Meanwhile, CityNews reporter Courtney Theriault also chimed in on the beardless Trudeau.
Trudeau’s appearance also caught the attention of US Wall Street Journal reporter Vivian Salama who also shared Vieira’s featured article about Trudeau’s beard.
Global News reporter and host Mercedes Stephenson also stated that Trudeau’s lack of beard was “totally on the election bingo card.”
Similarly, CBC reporter Travis Dhanraj took to his Twitter to exclaim that Trudeau’s “playoff beard” was gone.
This is not the first time that the media has obsessed over Trudeau’s appearance. As exclusively reported by True North last year, the CBC spent more time talking about Trudeau’s hair, socks and beard than they did about disgraced Liberals who were accused of sexual harassment or charged with assault.
The Canadian flag at the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill will be flying at half-mast, Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday.
“As people across the country continue to honour the Indigenous children whose lives were taken far too soon, and as we reflect on the tragedy of residential schools, I have asked that the flag on the Peace Tower remain at half-mast for Canada Day,” tweeted Trudeau.
According to the rules that govern how to display the national flag, half-masting the Canada flag is mandatory on several occasions including upon the deaths of the Queen, her family members, the prime minister of Canada, former prime ministers and other dignitaries.
Half-masting is also required on special days including on Remembrance Day, the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism and other similar occasions.
Trudeau’s decision to fly the Canadian flag half-mast on Canada Day comes as far-left activists have called for the national civic holiday to be cancelled altogether.
While a contingent of people have been calling for Canada Day to be cancelled for some time now, the recent announcements of two unmarked residential school burial sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have prompted dozens of localities to cancel their own celebrations.
In response to the findings, Trudeau has attempted to shift blame onto the Catholic Church. Most recently, the prime minister demanded that Pope Francis should apologize on Canadian soil for their responsibility in Canada’s residential school system.
“I have spoken personally directly with His Holiness Pope Francis to press upon him how important it is not just that he makes an apology but that he makes an apology to Indigenous Canadians on Canadian soil,” said Trudeau.
As reported by True North, nearly 20 cities and towns have cancelled or changed their Canada Day plans as of yesterday. Initially, on June 10, Victoria city council announced that it had unanimously decided to cancel its Canada Day plans for this year in favour of an event on reconciliation.
Victoria was then followed by other BC municipalities including Kelowna and Penticton and Port Hardy. Localities in Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Yukon and the Northwest Territories have also announced that they would be axing their own Canada Day plans as well.
The Liberal government’s Bill C-36 would let the Canadian Human Rights Commission prosecute people for online speech, and would also give courts the power to take away liberty over fear someone might commit a hate-motivated offence. Former human rights commission defendant Ezra Levant joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss Bill C-36, which Ezra says is the “legislation of cancel culture.”
SUBSCRIBE TO THE ANDREW LAWTON SHOW
A senator appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lectured Canadians on residential schools this Monday and launched into a tirade in which he defended the Chinese government’s legitimacy.
Senator Yuen Pau Woo echoed Communist Party of China’s talking points during a speech in which he called on fellow senators to not label China’s treatment of the country’s Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region as a genocide.
“The fact that China does not share our view of individual freedoms or, indeed, our interpretation of freedoms based on the Charter is not a basis on which to lecture the Chinese on how they should govern themselves,” said Woo.
According to Woo, some Canadians understand that China’s mass internment of approximately one million men, women and children was “motivated by the fight against terrorism” and a “desire to provide employable skills for minorities.”
Woo also went on to claim that while China’s legitimacy might not come from democratic elections and electoral representation, it instead comes from their “outputs.”
“Now like most of you, I was brought up in the orthodoxy that input democracy through free and fair elections will, in the long run, outperform because citizens can always vote out a government that has not performed and in that way seek to improve outputs by changing the inputs,” said Woo.
“But we are learning the hard way that democratic elections and changes in government over decades have not consistently produced better outcomes for citizens in many industrialized economies.”
In his speech Woo also discussed residential schools, saying that Canadians don’t want China to make the same mistakes as Canada has in the past.
“We do so not because we have a superior moral position, not because we have the answers to the problems they are trying to solve and not because we want to embarrass China. We do it because of the pain we feel over what happened in our own country and for what we can learn from each other in not making such mistakes again,” said Woo.
“Let me be clear: I much prefer the vagaries of democratic choice to the certainty of authoritarian rule, but we cannot be smug about our preference for input legitimacy as the only way to validate state power. We also cannot deny that the Chinese state has its own claim to a kind of legitimacy, even if we don’t like it.”
Woo, who was appointed by Trudeau in 2015, also leads one of the largest organizations within the Canadian Senate, the Independent Senators Group.
This is not the first time that Woo has made controversial statements in support of China. In December 2020, Woo said that Canadians should wish China well and hope that it will succeed on the world stage.
It’s been nearly a week since the Liberals introduced their online censorship Bill C-36, and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has still not said a word about it. True North’s Andrew Lawton explains why this bill needs to be a hill to die on for politicians, and talks about its most concerning traits with exonerated “hate speech” defendant and Rebel News founder Ezra Levant. Also, why the “cancel Canada Day” crowd is just plain wrong.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE ANDREW LAWTON SHOW
A taxpayer rights group is demanding that the Liberal government immediately end its gun buyback program after a Parliamentary Budget Office estimate pegged the program’s cost at $756 million, nearly four times what the Liberals originally claimed.
“Using the number of estimated firearms and data from the Government, the estimated cost ranges from $47 million to $225 million. With the industry’s estimate and data, that range becomes $158 million to $756 million, owing largely to the variance in estimated non-registered firearms in Canada,” the PBO writes.
Tuesday’s PBO report, “Cost Estimate of the Firearm Buy-Back Program,” was written in reponse to an inquiry from Conservative MP Glen Motz.
Following the report’s publication, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) put out a press release slamming the program’s ballooning costs.
“Today we learned the gun buyback could cost hundreds of millions more than Canadians have been told and the government still doesn’t know the full costs,” said CTF Federal Director Franco Terrazzano.
“This is a huge sum of money and the people on the front line say the buyback won’t make Canadians safer.”
As noted by the CTF, the PBO’s report did not take into account administrative and other costs associated with running the program, so the final cost will likely be larger.
Similarly, Conservative public safety critic Shannon Stubbs also blasted the federal program for targeting law-abiding gun owners and sending taxpayers such a steep bill.
“Like the first Liberal government gun registry, the firearms buyback program is yet another billion-dollar boondoggle that does nothing to truly address increasing violent crime, gun smuggling, and gang violence in our communities,” Stubbs said in a statement.
“The simple fact is that every dollar spent taking a firearm away from a law-abiding firearm owner is a dollar not going to fight the true issue of firearm crime in Canada – illegally smuggled guns.”
The Liberals’ now-repealed long gun registry, introduced in the 1990s, was supposed to cost $10 million per year, but ultimately ran up costs of close to one billion dollars over ten years, before Stephen Harper’s government scrapped it.
Upon announcing that it would ban 1,500 kinds of rifles and firearms in May 2020, the Liberal government said its buyback program cost would only reach $200 million.
These concerns were echoed by True North’s Andrew Lawton, a licensed gun owner and producer of the upcoming documentary Assaulted: Justin Trudeau’s War on Gun Owners.
“The government’s initial figure was a joke,” he said. “Anyone familiar with the Liberals’ track record on firearms policy knew it. Yet that hasn’t stopped this government from politicking on the backs of lawful Canadian gun owners, no matter the cost.”
