As many Canadians begin enjoying life out of lockdown, it’s important to remember the government enforced ridiculous public health measures throughout the pandemic – and many are still in effect today.
For example, outdoor gatherings are still limited in Ontario and Manitoba. This law has led to many Canadians being ticketed and even arrested, as PPC Leader Maxime Bernier found out this week.
Anthony Furey discusses in his latest video.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre and Liberal MP Adam Vaughan have gotten into a public feud over Canada’s housing crisis.
On Friday, the two MPs grilled each other in the House of Commons on government affordable housing efforts as prices skyrocket and government-subsidized housing falls short.
Vaughan, who is the Parliamentary Secretary for Housing, accused Poilievre Poilievre and the late Jim Flaherty of mismanaging housing in Canada during the Harper government.
In response, Poilievre said Vaughan has done nothing to address housing despite five years as an MP and eight years prior as a Toronto city councillor, noting that there are ten thousand homeless people in Toronto today.
“Not only was he a city councillor in Toronto who prevented poor families from having homes by making it very difficult to get them built in the first place. After that he went to the federal level to contribute to the same problem,” Poilievre said.
“There’s no single person in Canada that is more responsible for the failing in housing than that member,” Poilievre said.
The two continued to spar on Twitter, with Vaughan arguing over how many housing units have been built.
At one point, Vaughan attacked Poilievre by showing pictures of himself with a bike and Poilievre riding a tractor in a bizarre attempt to compare their two constituencies.
Poilievre responded by accusing Vaughan of belittling rural Canadians.
Housing in Canada has become a serious issue over the past year as the average house price has jumped 30%, leaving many Canadians unable to afford a home in their communities.
According to a recent study, Toronto, Vancouver and Hamilton ranked as the three most expensive cities in North America for housing.
Federal authorities have fined individuals breaking COVID-19 travel laws a combined worth of $2,964,000 to date.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, an Inquiry of Ministry in the House of Commons reveals that 988 air passengers received tickets worth $3,000 for simply “refusing to go to government-approved accommodation” such as quarantine hotels when arriving in Canada. All of the tickets issued had to do with offences contained under the Quarantine Act.
A majority of the tickets were given out at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport (621) but tickets were also issued at the airports in Vancouver (194) and Montreal (173).
Other tickets issued include fines for forged COVID-19 tests. According to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), 62 people were found to have attempted to use forged COVID-19 tests, but only four tickets were issued totalling $3,000 each.
Additionally, the CBSA reported that 9,003 individuals were ticketed for not having proof of a valid test. Of those, 4,583 arrived by land and 4,420 arrived into Canada by air.
“This would include individuals who did not test at all, who were in possession of tests outside the required 72-hour time frame, tests that did not originate from the required country of origin, tests that are suspected fraudulent and other reasons,” the document claims.
The report also notes that the price tag on enforcement and “exact breakdown of costs” could not be publicly disclosed at the time.
Renewed attention has been paid to the federal quarantine program as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and senior members of his cabinet travel to the UK to meet other foreign dignitaries for a G7 summit.
Conservatives have called on the prime minister to follow his own rules and stay in a government hotel like all Canadians are required to by law.
According to recent reports, Trudeau and his team will have a hotel specially prepared for the prime minister for his mandatory two-week quarantine period.
The Ryerson Conservatives have taken up the lonely task of defending the school’s namesake, Egerton Ryerson, against the cancel mob. Club president Harrison Faulkner said on The Andrew Lawton Show the mob’s principal criticism, that Egerton Ryerson was an “architect” of the residential schools program, is just plain wrong, but that hasn’t stopped them from tearing the statue down. Faulkner says his club has asked for the statue since the Toronto university has no intention of putting it back up.
Watch the full episode of The Andrew Lawton Show.
More details are being uncovered about the perpetrator of the London Ontario attack that killed four members of a Muslim family.
On Sunday evening, the Afzaal family was out for a stroll when they were attacked. According to London police, a man driving a pickup truck deliberately rammed into them, killing four and sending a nine-year old boy to the hospital with life threatening injuries.
Police identified the suspect who was arrested as 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman. Veltman is currently being charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
Media, politicians and police officers all quickly jumped to the conclusion that this was a hate-motivated attack inspired by racism.
“There is evidence that this was a planned, premeditated act and that the family was targeted because of their Muslim faith,” said London Police Service Chief Steve Williams on Monday.
According to those who knew Veltman, however, there was little indication that he would murder a family in a hate-crime.
“Nate is not a radical terrorist. He is nothing like that. He is not an Islamophobe. That’s not who this kid is,” said a friend who is from the Middle East in an interview with the National Post.
“Nate was a very close friend and never said anything bad to me.”
Another friend described Veltman as “pretty calm” and having “never said anything hateful.”
“He’s Christian and has a great relationship with God… He was always pretty calm towards other people,” that friend told the National Post.
A co-worker of Veltman who worked with him at Gray Ridge Egg Farms told the Post that three days before the attack he had rode with him in his truck and Veltman complained about the vehicle’s steering.
“I actually drove with him on Thursday,” the friend told the National Post. According to him, Veltman was also “broken up” over a recent death in the family.
“He seemed broken up over it on Friday. That’s the last time I saw him.”
Meanwhile, court documents from Veltman’s parents’ 2016 divorce paint a picture of a “combative and argumentative” minor.
Documents show that Veltman was “frighteningly angry” towards his mother during the divorce and that he would take to “raising his voice and towering over her in an intimidating way, and pounding on doors.”
A CTV News report, which has since been removed, described how Veltman was “medicated for mental illness” and was being encouraged to seek therapy by his parents.
Veltman appeared for his first court appearance on Thursday morning. None of the charges have yet been proven in court.
A renewed wave of renaming places and removing statues is now underway after the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc nation of Kamloops, BC identified an apparent burial site at a residential school in the area. A report on the findings is due sometime in mid-June.
While statues and landmarks named after Canada’s founding prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald have been under attack for the last several years, there is now an increased appetite to erase anything and everything named after historical figures associated with the residential school system.
Navigate this interactive map to see all of the place names and statues that leftist activists want to erase from our collective Canadian memory.
If you think we missed something, please submit a tip in the form below and we will make sure to add it to our comprehensive list.
People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier has been arrested near St-Pierre-Jolys, Manitoba while on a cross-province tour protesting the province’s health restrictions.
True North has learned Bernier has retained a lawyer through the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) to represent him.
In a news release on the matter, the JCCF called the arrest a “shocking attack on democracy and the Charter freedoms of speech, assembly and association.”
“The Justice Centre will be appearing in Court on Mr. Bernier’s behalf to respond to charges that were laid under Covid public health orders, which are already the subject of a legal challenge in Manitoba as to their constitutionality. Mr. Bernier is presently awaiting the opportunity to have Justice Centre lawyers address his bail,” the news release claims.
A video of the arrest posted to Maxime Bernier’s Twitter page shows an RCMP officer approaching Bernier who is seated in a vehicle to inform him that he is under arrest.
“If I can get you to step out of the vehicle, I’m going to place you under arrest right now?” the officer says.
“Right now you’re under arrest under the provincial health orders. Okay, so if you can put your hands behind your back and face towards the vehicle? Do you have any weapons or anything on you, sir?”
“Weapon? No, no weapon. Only my words,” said Bernier.
A PPC news release following Bernier’s arrest claimed that the party leader was arrested “for opposing the unjustified, unscientific, and disastrous lockdown measures that have been imposed on Canadians for over 15 months.”
“The arrest and detention of Mr. Bernier for supposed “health offences” is an exclamation point on the continued outrageous oppression of Manitobans by the Pallister government. Few, if any, other places on the planet are still locked down as tyrannically as Manitoba,” said JCCF President and lawyer John Carpay.
“It is far past time for the judiciary to restore the constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, and end the arbitrary and oppressive diktats of Manitoba’s health regime. The Justice Centre stands ready to defend Mr. Bernier’s civil liberties.”
Victoria city council has voted to cancel its Canada Day celebrations due to the apparent discovery of a burial site at a former residential school in Kamloops.
In a motion presented on Thursday, Mayor Lisa Helps asked council to stop the city’s planned Canada Day broadcast, claiming that celebrating Canada would interfere with reconciliation efforts.
“The more we reflect, the more we understand that holding the usual Canada Day celebrations could be damaging to the city’s and the community’s reconciliation efforts,” the motion reads.
British Columbia’s capital had been preparing a televised Canada Day event to replace in-person events. Instead of a celebratory broadcast, on July 1 the city will host an hour-long show on reconciliation that, according to the city, “explores what it means to be Canadian, in light of recent events.”
“It was difficult, much as reconciliation is difficult work and hard conversations and grappling with the realities of the colonial — and in some cases, genocidal — past of the country,” Helps said.
“Together with the good things about living in Canada and together with a deep path of reconciliation, we’re walking with the Songhees and the Esquimalt nations.”
Helps said that some Indigenous people who have participated in past Canada Day celebrations had said they may not participate this year.
The move coincides with efforts to cancel figures and history that leftists perceive as problematic.
In late May, a group of BC municipal leaders proposed the province change its name, coat of arms and flag to reflect the province’s diversity.
In this special edition of The Andrew Lawton Show, Andrew does a deep dive into the campus free speech crisis with Laurier University professors William McNally and David Haskell, and Queen’s University professor Bruce Pardy. In this wide-ranging discussion, the panel takes on the ineffectiveness of Ontario’s campus free speech directive, institutionalized wokeness in the academy, and the permeation of critical theory throughout universities and society at large.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney defended his government’s decision to invest in Keystone XL after the Biden administration killed the project.
At a press conference Thursday, True North’s Andrew Lawton asked Kenney to comment after the Alberta NDP said the decision to invest in Keystone XL amounted to “mismanagement and complete incompetence.”
Kenney said the NDP is fundamentally an anti-pipeline party, and did nothing to advocate for pipelines when in power.
“The real reason the NDP opposed our investment to get Keystone XL built is because they’ve always opposed Keystone XL, just like they’re always opposed pipelines generally,” Kenney said.
“The NDP government did nothing to fight back when Justin Trudeau effectively killed the Energy East pipeline and so it’s not surprising that an anti-pipeline party would be opposed to a government trying to build pipelines.”
On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden revoked approval for the project, putting doubt on the future of Keystone XL.
On Wednesday, TC Energy officially terminated the Keystone XL Pipeline Project. The pipeline extension would have built upon existing infrastructure to transport 830,000 barrels of oil from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. The project had a price tag of approximately US$8 billion.
Last year, Alberta invested $1.5 billion into Keystone XL to get the project started. At that time, the Trump Administration had given approval for the expansion.
With the project terminated, the province estimates it will lose $1.3 billion of its investment.
Kenney says that it was the duty of his government to see its principal industry succeed, adding that the investment would have been successful if it had not been cancelled by the United States.
“That meant going to the wall, that meant taking risks, it meant being proactive, it meant not surrendering to the campaign by foreign funded green-left pressure groups to landlock Canadian energy,” he said.
“We made a strategic decision to invest in the project to keep it alive so it could move forward. Ultimately, of course, Albertans don’t control American electoral outcomes or the decisions of American administrations.”
