Both Sweden and Florida avoided full lockdowns throughout the pandemic.
Lockdown activists constantly bring up the COVID-19 numbers in Sweden and Florida as proof of why lockdowns work and are necessary to curb the spread of the virus.
But what do the numbers actually reveal? Anthony Furey takes an in-depth look.
A common misconception about human trafficking is that it involves an individual transporting people across international borders, but during the pandemic, the truth of modern day slavery has reared its ugly head and proven that it can happen in a child’s bedroom within your own home.
The coronavirus lockdowns have resulted in many humanitarian organizations to pause their operations. As a result, human trafficking atrocities have surged during the pandemic.
Mattea Merta reports on this heavy and cumbersome topic.
Quebec residents are officially under a curfew of 8pm – 5am until at least February 8th.
While the government lists a few exceptions for the curfew, violators could face fines between $1,000 to $6,000.
On Saturday evening, dozens of videos of Quebec police enforcing the curfew emerged on social media.
“While I was walking my dogs, I witnessed the #Montreal #police pull over a car for the crime of being out past the 8 p.m. curfew,” tweeted Marie Oakes.
In another video, police cars can be seen patrolling neighbourhoods with their sirens blaring.
On Saturday morning, Premier Francois Legault said imposing a curfew was a difficult decision but necessary in order to limit the chances of “illegal” social gatherings.
“The main reason for the curfew is to prevent gatherings, even the smallest ones,” wrote François Legault in a social media post. “It’s the addition of all the small breaches of the rules that feeds the virus.”
Not all Quebec residents complied with the curfew. In Montreal, dozens of people took part in a protest against the government’s restrictive measures. While no protesters were arrested, police said 17 tickets were handed out.
Quebec is not the only province to consider this extreme measure. Ontario is expected to announce more restrictive measures next week, possibly including a province-wide curfew.
Last week, when Premier Ford was asked about the potential of a curfew, he said “everything is on the table.”
Several Christians have been arrested under a new law discouraging people from converting to Christianity in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
According to Morning Star News, three Indians and one South Korean missionary were arrested in late December. The four had been giving out aid packages to help residents get through the coronavirus lockdowns.
The arrests came after a local resident accused the group of offering her money to convert to Christianity — an act which is illegal under a law in the state which prevents coerced conversion.
“We have proofs of our distribution and names and phone numbers of our beneficiaries, who can testify that we have not asked any of them to change their faith or religion,” said Raj Kumar Masih, the group’s organizer.
“All beneficiaries were distributed ration kits, but none were promised any kind of money.”
Multiple states in India have laws that limit how one can change their religion. According to International Christian Concern, many Christians have been falsely accused of pressuring people to convert.
Masih says that the accusation against the volunteers is false, adding that two of the volunteers that were arrested are not Christians.
“Nobody even bothered to ask the arrested their side of the story,” Masih said.
“What is shocking is that the driver Umesh Kumar and Sandhya are not even Christians. The local media have falsely reported them all to be Christians.”
Open Doors USA ranks India as the tenth most dangerous country for Christians. There have been multiple instances of Christians and churches being attacked in the past year.
Over the past couple months multiple preachers have been attacked for converting Hindus.
In the first week of 2021, the US Capitol was breached and the tech giants wheeled their power by banning US President Donald Trump from their platforms.
Closer to home, Trudeau hinted at a snap election despite his abysmal record and a gloomy economic forecast.
True North’s Leo Knight recaps this week’s past news.
Five medical experts published a letter in the Canadian Medical Association Journal urging for an end to wide-sweeping lockdowns.
The letter was co-authored and signed by the following specialists: Infectious Disease Specialist, Jennifer M Grant, Respirologists, Jane Batt, Infectious Diseases Specialist Martha Fulford, Medical Microbiologist Jocelyn A Srigley and Respirologist Nick Vozoris.
“It is impossible to accurately describe the social and economic impact for all people,” they wrote.
“Places with heavy lockdowns and severe limitations of economic activity have still seen high case transmission continue despite these measures. Furthermore, having moderate rates of transmission correlates with little, if any excess mortality.”
The letter goes on to describe how lockdowns only add to growing inequality.
“The ultimate fate of COVID-19 is most likely to become seasonal, with iteratively smaller waves. Vaccines will likely get us there faster. A no-more-waves strategy will exacerbate inequality and cause significant health harms; it is an indefensible equation,” the letter reads.
This is not the first time that medical professionals have spoken out against public officials’ willingness to plunge their citizens into lockdowns.
In October, World Health Organization official Dr. David Nabarro urged global politicians to not use lockdowns as the primary way to control the virus.
“We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” said Dr. Nabarro at the time.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
By: Jasmine Moulton (@moulton_jasmine)
The federal government’s economic statement contains the word “child” 238 times, but it doesn’t include a serious plan to reduce the national credit card bill our kids and grandkids will be stuck paying.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is spending $1.8 billion per day. That’s more than $20,000 per second. The national debt is about to surpass $1 trillion, and by next year it will have doubled since Trudeau became prime minister in 2015. Doubled.
While some increased health-care spending during a pandemic is reasonable, much of Trudeau’s spending has been unrelated to the health and economic crises, such as raises for MPs or corporate welfare handouts to multi-national corporations such as the Ford Motor Company. Worse, this government is using the pandemic to double down on expensive pre-pandemic plans, such as its national childcare plan.
While it may sound nice in principle, national childcare is a bad plan. The federal government is dangling Quebec’s childcare system in front of beleaguered parents across the rest of Canada. Those parents should be wary.
Firstly, nothing is “free.” Taxpayers always foot the bill. And Quebec’s childcare system is anything but cheap. The initial cost was estimated to be $250 million per year when the program was introduced in 1997. This year, it cost $2.7 billion. Despite the massive price tag, Quebec’s childcare system is still plagued with problems of access and wait times.
Quebec also has the advantage of hefty equalization payments. It received $13.1 billion in equalization last year, which helped the province to run a surplus in 2019 for the fifth consecutive year. It’s difficult to imagine how Ottawa or any of the provinces running massive deficits this year could afford such a program.
But the Trudeau government has a history of replicating failed provincial policies on a national scale. Its carbon tax is modelled on the unsuccessful policy from British Columbia. Emissions increased in that province by over four million tonnes or 6% in the 10 years it had a carbon tax before Trudeau introduced his in 2018.
Policies should be based on examples that actually work, so it should worry everyone that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told Parliament: “British Columbia showed Canada the way on pricing pollution [and] Quebec can show us the way on childcare.”
It’s true that childcare responsibilities disproportionately fell on women during the pandemic, and “employment among women with toddlers or school-aged children fell 7% from February to May, compared to 4% among men,” according to a report from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.
But a national childcare program wouldn’t have changed that. Only 5% of parents with young children used childcare services both during and after childcare closures in the pandemic, according to Statistics Canada. That rate remained constant across Ontario and Quebec – the province which the feds want to model their program on.
About 25% of parents said they won’t be sending their kids back to childcare and the vast majority said they made that decision due to health concerns for their kids or household, because they no longer needed childcare, or because they have friends or family to watch the kids.
Only 6% of that group said that the reason they won’t be sending their kids back to childcare is because they can no longer afford it.
Obviously, there are more efficient ways to target help to those parents rather than building a huge, deficit-financed, one-size-fits-all government daycare system.
Children born today will already owe almost $26,000 each as their individual portion of the federal debt. Ultimately, a deficit-fueled daycare will stick those children with their own daycare bills, plus interest. That’s wrong. Instead of dreaming up expensive new programs, Trudeau needs to limit spending to where it’s needed to stop Canada’s debt from spiralling out of control.
Jasmine Moulton is the Ontario Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Since the pandemic began, we have learned a lot about the coronavirus, including who the most vulnerable are – residents and staff of long-term care homes.
The government has rightfully prioritized the most vulnerable to receive the vaccine. But once they’re vaccinated, how can the government justify continuing the lockdowns?
Anthony Furey says don’t let the public officials shift the goalposts.
Liberal MP Adam Vaughan tweeted on Friday that the only kind of radicals he’s worried about are “Radical Conservatives.”
Vaughan made the comments in response to US Senator Kelly Loeffler’s statement that “The fight against socialism and the radical agenda of the left is very far from over.”
Vaughan has been an MP since 2014. In October of that year, Vaughan, along with the rest of the Canadian government, had to go on lockdown due to an Islamist terror attack on Parliament Hill.
The attack resulted in the death of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, who was shot while standing guard at the Canadian National War Memorial.
This is not the first time that Vaughan has sparked controversy for his comments.
In 2019, the Toronto area MP was forced to publicly apologize after saying “Let’s just whack him” about Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
However, Vaughan is no stranger to the effects of radicalism in Canada. In 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests raged in Toronto and elsewhere, far-left extremists defaced several statues near and around the MP’s own riding.
New data released by Statistics Canada show that the Canadian economy shed 63,000 jobs in December.
Unemployment also grew slightly from 8.5 percent in November to 8.6 percent last month.
With provinces ramping up lockdowns, these numbers could rise even further, analysts predict.
“Due to both the continuing rise in virus cases to open the new year and the further curtailments of activity since the last survey, another month of job losses could be on the horizon in January,” CIBC economist Royce Mendes told CityNews.
“The weak jobs report, combined with the recent appreciation of the Canadian dollar, will put pressure on the Bank of Canada to ease monetary policy further.”
In response to the job loss report, several Conservative members of parliament called for a new approach to restart Canada’s economy.
“Canada lost 63,000 jobs in December. These disappointing figures remind us that we need a plan coming out of COVID-19 to create jobs, get our economy back on track, and allow people to earn pay cheques. We cannot permanently put our economy on the national credit card,” the statement signed by Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre and employment critic Peter Kent said.
“Canada’s Conservatives, under the leadership of Erin O’Toole, are ready with a plan to unleash our economy, to create real jobs, across all industries, that will bring Canadians across the country bigger pay cheques.”
Among the initiatives proposed by the Conservatives is accelerated approval for job-creating projects like building factories and business centres.
“Canada should be the fastest country in the world to obtain a permit to build new projects,” read the statement.
“The federal government could fast-track decisions on the $14 billion LNG gas project in the Saguenay region of Quebec, on top of another $6 billion in similar projects awaiting sign-off across Canada. Approving the now-shelved $20 billion Teck Frontier Mine would allow Teck Resources — which threw up its hands after years of federal delays — to either restart the project or sell the permit to another company. These projects, and others like it, will lead to bigger pay cheques for Canadian workers.”
