Video footage from the 1990s shows Catherine McKenna bribing her way into a cockfight and chowing down on dog meat in Indonesia. Is criticizing this fair game or does it simply fuel cancel culture? True North’s Andrew Lawton discusses.
Also, another climate apocalypse deadline has come and gone and we’re still here, plus a look at the New York Times’ nothingburger story on Donald Trump’s tax returns. Ontario member of provincial parliament Randy Hiller joins the show to talk about the courage deficit among Canadian politicians as another lockdown looms.
US President Donald Trump has approved a massive rail link between Alaska and Alberta that will help oil and other resources get to the Pacific Ocean.
On Saturday, Trump announced via Twitter that he is using his executive powers to approve the A2A Cross-Border Rail.
Based on the strong recommendation of @SenDanSullivan and @repdonyoung of the Great State of Alaska, it is my honor to inform you that I will be issuing a Presidential Permit for the A2A Cross-Border Rail between Alaska & Canada. Congratulations to the people of Alaska & Canada!
When completed, the A2A rail project will stretch 2,570 kilometres from Delta Junction in central Alaska to Fort McMurray, Alberta. According to A2A, the project will create 18,000 jobs in Canada throughout its lifetime.
When completed, Canadian oil, potash and ore will be able to be transported to the Pacific Ocean through Alaska.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s office told CBC they are pleased to see the cross-border project get American backing.
“The Government of Alberta is glad to see the approval of the A2A rail project in the United States,” said spokeswoman Christine Myatt.
“We support the development of trade corridors that can unlock new markets for Alberta’s products.”
In order to get approval, A2A will have to go through an environmental impact assessment. The project will also need the approval of the provinces and territories it will travel through.
A2A President J.P. Gladu says that U.S. approval means that a major regulatory hurdle has been passed.
“You need certain lines of support from governments – federal, provincial, territorial and even Indigenous governments – and this is one of those great moments for A2A with regards to support in signalling this project is indeed a real project.”
While other proposed projects to transport oil have faced significant opposition from some jurisdictions and activists, Gladu hopes that A2A’s route may prove less controversial.
A2A says it is already consulting with communities along the proposed path, with the company considering giving Indigenous communities a stake in the project.
Gladu hopes that the possibility for transport of commercial goods and passengers will entice communities and indigenous groups to sign onto the project.
After 33 years of operation, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) still does not conduct risk assessments on corporate loan applicants.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, a recent audit found that ACOA does not impose serious terms on businesses looking for loans. In 2019, ACOA had a loan portfolio valued at $422.9 million.
“Agency funding agreements were standardized and not considerate of risk,” the audit reads.
The audit determined that ACOA does not require applicants to prove that loans will have a benefit to taxpayers, and adds that most ACOA loan contracts often leave out basic terms such as the duration of the loan.
Providing costing and project activity details is optional in the ACOA loan process, according to the audit.
“Once a project is funded, the Agency has limited control over the realization of a project’s results or ultimate outcomes.”
In recent years, ACOA has engaged in multiple bad deals, including $638,360 to a Nova Scotia call centre that went bankrupt in 2018 and a $444,154 loan to a Prince Edward Island ethanol plant that went under in 2019.
Last year, ACOA forgave the remaining balance on a $7.4 million loan to Atlantic Wallboard. Atlantic Wallboard is owned by James Irving, a New Brunswick business magnate with a net worth of around $6 billion.
ACOA has never revealed how much of the loan Atlantic Wallboard paid back.
Last September, it was reported that $43.2 million worth of ACOA loans were in recovery, representing over 10% of ACOA’s portfolio. This rate of default is much higher than other federal loan agencies.
In an ideal world, politics and the police should be arm’s length. Politicians should not interfere in the business of policing. Unfortunately, that is far from the truth in Canada’s largest city.
Shootings have been going up steadily in Toronto since John Tory became Mayor in December of 2014.
This year, Toronto is on track to exceed last year’s numbers and if things keep up the way they have been in the past month, they will beat it by a lot.
In 2015, Tory seemed to side with the politically correct left and began his interference in the operations of the Toronto Police Service (TPS). He directed them to end the practice of “carding” – street checks – and disbanded the anti-violence street section called the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS.)
With that blinding stupidity, Tory opened the door to increased gun violence in Toronto to appease the politically correct hand-wringers in city hall.
The resulting years have seen a steady rise in shootings and murders and associated gang violence culminating in 2019 with record numbers of shootings.
This past week was no different. On Thursday the city was shocked by multiple shootings across the city which left one dead and four wounded. Earlier this month, there was a brazen shooting in a bakery where six people were shot just for trying to buy bagels at Spence’s Bakery on Eglinton Avenue West.
Thus far, this year there have been 363 shootings and 173 persons killed or wounded. This is just in the city of Toronto and does not include Peel, York or Durham Region.
After the custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis which sparked life into the Marxist organization Black Lives Matter which is still affecting cities across North America, Tory doubled down on stupid when he tabled a motion to “detask” the Toronto Police Service on June 25th.
Tory’s proposal cut the police budget and mandated “alternative models of community safety response.” Ostensibly, the proposal directed city officials to create alternate responses to incidents such as mental health calls where neither violence nor weapons were an issue.
In suggesting this nonsense, Tory neglected the fact that many of these incidents escalate from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. Who would make the decision that police would not be needed for any particular incident? What might result if the wrong decision is made? How many deaths might occur because of ridiculous politically correct decisions?
John Tory should leave policing priorities and where and how they deliver their services to the professionals – the police. He should keep out of those decisions.
Canadians hear a lot about the many threats towards freedom and democracy posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump’s bombastic style, coupled with a liberal media obsessively twisting his words and often flat-out inventing a narrative, has resulted in endless hand-wringing and condemnation from the Canadian chattering classes.
But Canadians should be more concerned over the erosion of democratic values here at home.
Let’s look at the actions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the past six months.
Trudeau shut down Parliament in the midst of his heavy-handed economic lockdowns, claiming it was unsafe for Parliamentarians to gather in the House of Commons. While hidden away from the scrutiny of opposition MPs, Trudeau unveiled the largest increase in spending in Canadian history.
He spent hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of weeks, and did so without the usual Parliamentary oversight, transparency or accountability.
Trudeau didn’t need Question Period, explained some members of the mainstream media, since he was taking daily questions from hand-selected journalists — the majority of whom have their salaries funded through money from the Trudeau government.
One can imagine the accusations of authoritarian tactics if Trump by-passed congress to issue unilateral dictates while only allowing hand-picked, White House-funded journalists to ask him questions.
When the House of Commons finally resumed, the public learned about just one of those secretive spending schemes: a deal to give $912 million of spending to a charity to dole out that had given the Trudeau family half a million dollars in perks and speaking fees.
A Parliamentary committee began digging into this scandal, and quickly exposed the many falsehoods and contradictions in Trudeau’s explanation of events.
Things were not looking good for Trudeau, so he turned to a relic of our system: he prorogued Parliament to shut down the investigations into his ethics violations.
Instead of being met with consternation, the media downplayed the misuse of his power and pretended it was just another normal tool in the Prime Minister’s toolkit.
The media took at face value Trudeau’s claims that he needed to shut down Parliament in the midst of an ethics scandal investigation, and they nodded along when Trudeau said his new agenda was so bold and transformative that it needed a renewed mandate from Parliamentarians.
But when Trudeau released his Speech from the Throne on Wednesday, it was neither bold nor transformative. Expensive, yes. The type of agenda that justified shutting down the parliament for six weeks? Not at all.
Rather than unveiling a bold vision for rebuilding the economy or providing a realistic strategy for living with the COVID-19 pandemic, Trudeau trotted out a hodgepodge of previous Liberal campaign promises: a national child care system, expanded EI, government-funded pharmacare and more green energy schemes.
Rather than uniting the country and allaying fears around the virus, we heard doom and gloom climate alarmism, hectoring about ill-defined systemic racism, threats to regulate media and the internet, nods to radical left-wing identitarian theories and very little about resuming life during the pandemic.
And, we heard next to nothing about an economic recovery, Canada’s struggling natural resource industry or any kind of plan to rein in spending or pay back the enormous national debt.
Doing his best impression of Hugo Chavez, Trudeau demanded that TV stations give him a primetime slot to personally address the nation — something that has only been done in Canada during wartime or constitutional crises. Trudeau’s handlers assured the networks that Trudeau’s remarks were of “urgent national importance” and it was “not a political address.”
When Trudeau appeared on national television on Wednesday at dinnertime, he gave a political address, simply repeating the planks of his government’s Throne Speech and giving his Liberal pitch to Canadians.
This is another abuse of power.
Trudeau has been on a steady march of undermining Canada’s democratic principles and stomping on our Parliamentary traditions. It’s downright Trumpian.
Back in 2011, the BC NDP adopted an “equity mandate” that stated retiring male NDP MLAs must be replaced by either a woman, or an indigenous person, LGBTQ individual, visible minority member or a person with a disability.
Yet the BC NDP just acclaimed white male Nathan Cullen as a candidate for the upcoming BC election, even though an indigenous woman had submitted her nomination paperwork to the party HQ for the same riding. What happened?
While most Canadian universities commit to diversity and inclusion, very few are willing to commit to free speech according to the 2020 Campus Freedom Index.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms’ annual index released this week found that of the 61 Canadian public universities reviewed, very few espouse any commitment to free speech.
Only 21% of universities express willingness to uphold free speech through their policies, compared to 69% saying they support “diversity” and “inclusion.”
“Free expression and open inquiry are supposed to be the founding principles of higher education,” said Lindsay Shepherd, Justice Centre Campus Free Speech Fellow and True North Fellow.
“Yet most universities prefer to deploy buzzword terms like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’ abandoning the very values they were created to uphold. It seems that free speech is not even worth paying lip service to.”
The Campus Freedom Index grades both universities and student unions from “A” to “F” based on both policies and practice.
In 2020, only six universities earned an “A,” up slightly from 2019. At the same time, thirteen universities received an “F” and increase of five from 2019.
Only one student union earned an “A” grade, while a staggering 23 received an “F.”
According to Shepherd, many institutions behave inconsistently when dealing with issues of free speech.
“Results are sometimes very inconsistent. For example, UBC shut down an event featuring journalist Andy Ngo, but allowed an event with controversial professors Ricardo Duchesne and Mark Hecht to go forward,” she wrote.
“At the University of Alberta, many faculty supported free speech for a professor who denied the Holodomor famine-genocide of the 1930s, but the same people remained silent when a gender-critical feminist professor was fired from a chair position.”
In order to avoid a fall election, Justin Trudeau agreed to spend an additional $150 million to buy the support of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Jagmeet Singh has sold out Canadians by propping up the Trudeau Liberals. In May, Singh supported Trudeau’s decision to shut down parliament.
True North’s Leo Knight says the relationship between Trudeau and Singh is based on spending money that the country doesn’t have.
It’s not a rhetorical question. What is it that Canada’s political leaders and top public health officials are hoping to accomplish right now in managing the pandemic?
