Former veterans affairs minister Erin O’Toole has been elected Conservative leader on the third ballot after a campaign in which he positioned himself as a “true blue conservative” complete with pledging to defund CBC, deriding cancel culture, and standing up for independent media.
True North’s Andrew Lawton talks about the campaign, O’Toole’s win, and what Canadian conservatives can expect moving forward.
Justin Trudeau is planning a sweeping overhaul of the Canadian economy to introduce more spending, more programs and more government.
Is Trudeau really going to try to sneak an entirely new far-left political agenda into the same confidence vote that contains the renewal of COVID-19 measures?
True North’s Anthony Furey says if Trudeau is now embracing far-left progressivism, then he needs to seek a mandate from the people to enact it.
A large crowd of people marched on Quebec’s national assembly on Sunday to protest mandatory mask requirements.
Among the members of the protest, parents took issue with the province’s compulsory mask requirement for kids when they return back to school in the fall.
“We want to show our children that we have to stand up strong and stop letting pieces of our freedom be taken away. The financial health of our children will already be affected and we will leave them psychological traces,” Amélie, who is a mother of three children told Le Soleil. Amélie’s comments have been translated into English.
“I am against the mask yes, but above all against the fear that it inflicts on us. The disease is not worth that. We are talking about compulsory vaccines, to trace us with the phones… How far will it go?”
According to recently announced plans, students in the province can expect to return to the classroom soon.
The government of Quebec has reversed an earlier position that would require students to wear masks in the classroom. According to the official back-to-school plan published by the Government of Quebec, the only reference of mandatory mask use is for preschool teachers and staff. As for students, kids from Grade 5 and up are required to wear masks in common areas but not while in class.
“A distance of 2 metres must be maintained at all times between students and school staff, except for preschool (Kindergarten for 4-year-olds and 5-year olds) where physical distancing will not be required between students and teachers. However, personal protective equipment (mask or visor) will be mandatory for preschool teachers,” claims the government’s plan.
“In the classroom, staff members at other levels of education are not required to wear face coverings if they remain 2 metres away from students. However, they must wear face coverings at all times when moving around the school.”
Recently, the Quebec government moved to block school boards and administrations from making masks mandatory for students.
“School boards don’t have the public health powers and can’t, under the powers given to them under the Education Act, require all students to wear a face-covering under all circumstances at school,” Quebec’s Ministry of Education told CBC News.
Hand in hand with the anti-mask protests, those who were in favour of mandatory mask requirements in schools rallied in front of the Minister of Education’s offices to call for stricter enforcement ahead of the school year.
Erin O’Toole edged out fellow candidates Peter MacKay, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan and secured the winning vote on the 3rd round of voting with 19,271 votes.
Out of all of the candidates who ran for the leadership, only Sloan and O’Toole currently hold seats as MPs in the House of Commons.
The results of the first ballot were first announced past midnight with MacKay coming out ontop at 11,328.55 points, followed by O’Toole with 10,681.40 points. Sloan finished last with 4,864.67 points, while Lewis continued through to the second round with 6,925.38 points.
O’Toole ended up winning the leadership spot on the third ballot with 19,271 points vs MacKay’s 14,528. Meanwhile, Lewis finished in third place on the second ballot with 10,140.30 points.
The leadership announcement was delayed by several hours after party headquarters experienced technical issues with envelope opening machines which were tearing apart the ballots.
Thousands of ballots were allegedly damaged in the incident.
“What’s been happening is the machine is ripping or cutting some of these ballots,” leadership campaign co-chair Lisa Raitt told CBC News.
Outgoing leader Andrew Scheer appeared prior to the results announcement to give a farewell speech.
“I have been so honoured to serve as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and as leader of the official opposition in the House of Commons leading our amazing team,” said Scheer.
“We rolled up our sleeves and reminded voters that Conservatives are the only party fighting for hardworking Canadians.”
Shortly after failing to unseat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the 2019 federal election, Scheer announced he would be resigning from his position as the party’s head.
The Conservative leadership race commenced shortly after on January 13, 2020.
“Please stay involved, be bold, think, challenge the mainstream media. Don’t take their narrative as fact. Check out smart independent organizations that are growing all of the time like The Post Millennial or True North,” said Scheer.
“After tonight let’s all rally behind the new leader and do everything we can to make sure that the next leader of the conservative party becomes the next prime minister of this great country.”
As the newly elected leader, Erin O’Toole will be facing off against Justin Trudeau in the next election. Some have speculated that a snap election could follow as Trudeau’s minority government reels from the WE Charity scandal and the resignation of former finance minister Bill Morneau.
Earlier this month, Trudeau announced that he would prorogue parliament. The Liberals will present a throne speech on September 23rd and a confidence vote will follow.
The husband of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff lobbied the government to change emergency coronavirus funding to benefit his company.
According to Vice, the Senior Vice-President of the mortgage firm MCAP Rob Silver met with ex-finance minister Bill Morneau to propose a change to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS).
Silver is married to Katie Telford, who has served as Chief of Staff to the prime minister since 2015.
Anonymous sources told Vice that Silver went so far as to propose specific wording of the changes, adding that the change would have benefitted few companies other than MCAP.
Silver, who is not a registered lobbyist, reportedly made Morneau’s former staff “very uncomfortable” with his attempts to influence government decisions. Silver’s proposal was ultimately not accepted by Morneau.
In a statement to the National Post, MCAP did not deny the claims against them but says they strive to follow Canada’s lobbying rules.
“MCAP, through counsel, consulted with Canada’s Lobbying Commissioner in January to establish proper screens and protocols around any engagement with government. MCAP and its employees and officers have strictly complied with the letter and spirit of this guidance and all applicable laws,” an MCAP spokesperson said.
The Lobbying Act requires that groups which have employees “whose duties is to communicate with public office holders,” are required to register as lobbyists.
Failure to follow the Lobbying Act could result in fines of up to $200,000 or up to two years in jail.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that Silver’s firm received an $84 million contract from the Trudeau government to manage the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance Program (CECRA). The CECRA contract was similar to the one the government made with WE.
The PMO and Morneau’s office confirmed to the National Post that Silver had reached out to them but refused to give details on what was discussed.
For both CECRA and CEWS, the PMO says Telford subjected herself to a voluntary conflict of interest screen.
“Ms. Telford has not been involved in any discussions related to MCAP. The Prime Minister’s Office takes all its obligations regarding ethics very seriously & follows the rules. Any questions about MCAP or any other company should be directed to that company,” the PMO said.
The Conservative Party is electing a new leader tonight and we will have real-time coverage of the results.
The leadership election results will be broadcast on True North and we’ll have our own election coverage and analysis as well.
Our coverage starts at 5:30pm ET tonight — Candice Malcolm and Andrew Lawton will be your hosts!
Warning: The following story contains graphic details.
On Wednesday in a Montreal courthouse, Sofiane Ghazi, 40, was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 15 years after pleading guilty to second degree murder just two days into his trial on first degree murder charges.
Mr. Justice Jean-Claude Buffoni called his crime “extreme cruelty” and “committed in the context of extreme conjugal violence,” before pronouncing the sentence.
But this was no garden variety case of domestic violence. Ghazi stabbed his wife 19 times with a carving fork. She survived the attack, yet he pled guilty to murder. It seems she was 36 weeks pregnant with a son at the time and of the 19 stab wounds, 12 were on the left side of her stomach and at least 9 wounds were caused to the fetus in the womb.
While the baby was born at the trauma centre where the mother was taken after the attack, the cause of death given to the court was trauma caused by a sharp object in utero.
This raised the legal question: is a fetus a human being?
The pro-choice crowd would have us believe that the fetus is just a clump of cells. Clearly the learned judge did not agree with that, finding that the baby was fatally injured “in utero.”
The Criminal Code in Section 223 (1) defines a human being as: “when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother, whether or not it has breathed, has an independent circulation or the navel string is severed.”
In this case, the trauma doctors worked to deliver and save the baby, but the injuries caused “in utero” were too severe. The legal question then for the case to be considered murder was essentially did the newborn infant draw a breath?
The accused told the court he accepted the fact “the death of the baby occurred after he’d become a human being.”
If he had not, then the burden would have been on the Crown to prove the baby had drawn a breath. No easy feat.
But aside from this particular case, what might this mean to the abortion question in this country? If a fatal injury can be caused ‘in utero,” could that essentially render some cases of abortion murder?
The American journalist James O’Keefe who runs the group Project Veritas, spent months working undercover and videotaping conversations with people in Planned Parenthood about how they make money selling fetal parts from abortions. One of the things they learned was some babies were born alive. Frightening stuff.
It triggered an attempt in the U.S. Senate to pass the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” which failed to get passage.
There is no similar legislation in Canada.
Why not?
Quite simply, no politician wants to broach the subject. Even for the socially conservative Andrew Scheer, the outgoing leader of the Conservatives, the question of opening the abortion debate at any level, was a line he would not cross.
It is typically the third rail in Canadian politics.
There is precious little information in Canada about failed abortions or babies being born alive in a terminated pregnancy process. A 2015 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S. found that of the abortions performed in the United States 1.3 % were performed after 21 weeks gestation. But it had no data on if any of those were born alive.
Only a handful of states keep born alive statistics. In Florida, in 2018 there were six reported born alive cases out of 70,083 abortions. That may seem statistically insignificant, but they do occur. Each is a life and given the decision in the Ghazi case in Montreal, could result in a murder charge against a medical practitioner.
An interesting legal question but not one that’s likely to be talked about in Parliament anytime soon even with a new Conservative leader.
Ghazi’s wife of 12 years was in court to hear the decision. She hopes she and her other two children will be able to get on with life although she did say both she and the children were traumatized for life by events.
No doubt.
This may have been Justin Trudeau’s worst week since he became prime minister — and that’s saying something.
The week started when Trudeau clearly fired his most qualified and experienced cabinet minister Bill Morneau, although we were told it was a resignation that had nothing to do with the giant dumpster fire inside the PMO.
He then appointed a former journalist to the most serious and important post in government. Journalists can be incredibly competent people, but Chrystia Freeland was not a financial writer nor an investigative reporter — she wrote fawning profiles about powerful men, and when she was given the chance to run part of the business side of a news organization, she bankrupted the project.
Freeland is very smart, no doubt about it, but she doesn’t seem to be very good with money. At age 45 — when she returned to Canada to run for office after mostly living abroad since she was a teenager — she needed her parents to co-sign her mortgage. She bungled her very first press conference as finance minister, bizarrely announcing that she was going to “decarbonize” the economy — a concept thoroughly rebuked in a recent column by my colleague Lorrie Goldstein.
Meanwhile, we learned the RCMP is looking into Trudeau’s ongoing WE scandal and the Trudeau-appointed Governor-General is undergoing her own crisis of confidence with more whistle-blowers denouncing her as incompetent, untrustworthy and mean.
In the midst of all this chaos, Trudeau made the rash decision to prorogue Parliament, which shuts down the committee investigating the WE scandal and gives him a month to come up with a new story to justify the huge mess he finds himself in. And he’s going to need it.
Right before the WE scam committee was dissolved, it received a document dump of emails from the civil service. Not only did bureaucrats cavalierly joke about the endless pit of money Trudeau gave them to spend, their communications made it clear that they only started working on a WE proposal after Trudeau and his top ministers met with WE, were lobbied by WE and Trudeau himself announced the details of the program.
This flies in the face of Trudeau’s excuse that he was simply following the advice of the civil service when awarding the massive contract to WE Charity.
Some in the media like to claim that Trudeau is like teflon — scandals and screw-ups slide right off of him. If this is true, it’s only because of the way that some in the media treat Trudeau during times like these.
When Trudeau announced that he was proroguing Parliament, CBC host Rosemary Barton appeared quick to play the role of his press secretary by pushing out his partisan talking points: “PM says the difference between his decision to prorogue Parliament and Stephen Harper’s is that Conservatives did it to avoid a confidence vote… whereas he will have a confidence vote when Parliament returns on the date it was scheduled to return.”
Every time Parliament is prorogued the new session starts with a confidence vote, something high school students are taught in social studies.
When Harper prorogued Parliament back in 2010, the media howled with outrage. CBC posted the headline, “Academics slam suspension of Parliament.”
This time around, the CBC headline simply said, “Trudeau to hit parliamentary reset by proroguing Parliament amid WE Charity controversy.”
When some Canadians started questioning Freeland’s experience and readiness to be finance minister, CBC brought on former prime minister Kim Campbell to defend the Liberal appointment.
“Do you think that inherently is sexist?” asked CBC’s Vassy Kapelos, of the criticism Freeland is facing. Kapelos’ leading question prompted exactly the response you’d expect: “That’s really how sexism operates,” said Campbell, allowing CBC to run headlines concluding that criticism of Freeland is a product of sexism.
That’s how media bias works, and that’s how a scoundrel prime minister survives a terrible week in office.
The Trudeau government’s deficit has almost reached a whopping $400 billion, exceeding the previous record for the largest deficit by seven times. In 2010, the previous record for deficit spending was $55.6 billion.
In July, the government projected a $343.2 billion deficit in the upcoming fiscal year. The added debt will bring the net federal debt to $1.2 trillion by next March.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, newly-appointed finance minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters that the deficit will be another $39 billion more than presumed due to increased spending measures.
“Our government has taken on more debt so Canadians didn’t have to,” said Freeland.
Freeland, alongside Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough, made several announcements on Thursday. Among them was a freeze on Employment Insurance premiums and changes to EI eligibility criteria.
When asked whether she would put forward a budget before the House, Freeland said that she wouldn’t “make any grand policy pronouncements.”
Trudeau moved Freeland into the top cabinet position after the abrupt resignation of former finance minister Bill Morneau in the wake of the WE Charity scandal.
Earlier this week, Trudeau announced that he would be proroguing parliament. The prorogation effectively shut down a number of parliamentary committee investigations into the Liberal government’s relationship with WE.
Recent document disclosures indicate that the Prime Minister’s Office and the Trudeau cabinet had a role in pushing the public service to select WE for the $912 million Canada Student Service Grant contract.
One email from the assistant deputy minister of finance Michelle Kovacevic indicated that the PMO was “weighing in” on the grant decision and that there was “positive communication with WE.”
The evidence seems to contradict Trudeau’s testimony to the House of Commons finance committee, where he suggested under oath that the public service was solely responsible for the contract.
“There was never any direction by or attempt to influence from me or my staff that the public service recommend WE Charity,” said Trudeau during his testimony.
The Trudeau government released 5000 pages related to the WE scandal earlier this week. True North’s Leo Knight spent hours combing through these documents.
Although hundreds of the pages were redacted, one thing is abundantly clear – WE Charity has a very close relationship with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Trudeau government.
Leo discusses in his latest video.
