A survey conducted by the Department of Public Safety found that after last year’s climate marches and the climate activism of Greta Thunberg, kids in Canada are severely worried about the issue of climate change.
When asked to rate the threat climate change causes to their safety, 57% of kids from the age 16 to 25 said it was an “extremely serious threat” to the safety of children, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
Kids in Canada have ranked the issue of greenhouse gas emissions as more threatening than guns and gang violence, hate crimes, cyberbullying and illegal drug use.
“Youth are significantly more likely to identify climate change as an extremely serious issue, but they are less likely to identify illegal drug use as an extremely serious issue,” claimed the survey titled Human Trafficking Public Awareness Research.
The federal government paid $106,720 to the Environics Research Group to poll 2,236 people across the country.
The survey was conducted several months after climate alarmist Greta Thunberg gave a speech before the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on September 23.
During the speech, Thunberg accused members of stealing her childhood and dreams due to the global inaction on climate change.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with our empty words, and yet I am one of the lucky ones,” said Thunberg.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
During Canada’s own climate marches, Thunberg attended several rallies in major Canadian cities including Ottawa where she met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
If there’s one positive change as a result of the pandemic, it’s the fact that we’re hearing less from climate activists and how the world is going to end.
The shutdown caused by the pandemic is exactly what climate activists have been demanding for years and it’s clear Canadians don’t like it – we want to return to some form of normalcy.
True North’s Anthony Furey says we’re better off without the constant maddening lectures of climate activists.
Canadians are being gaslit. The narrative we’re being told by the “experts” no longer resembles real life and there is a growing disconnect between everyday people and the expert class who tells us what to do and tries to tell us what to think.
For more than four months, Canadians were told there was a serious and unprecedented health crisis that required us to stay in our homes with no contact to the outside world.
We couldn’t visit loved ones in the hospital, mourn the death of a family member through a funeral service, send our children to school or even go to work — unless you were lucky enough to work from home.
Then, suddenly, the experts changed their minds.
In June, after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed man, everything changed.
The same experts who spent months demanding we stay inside swiftly changed their tune. Fighting an incident of police brutality in another country took precedent over all other health concerns.
Dozens of “public health and disease experts” signed an open letter in support of Black Lives Matter protests that broke out across North America. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue and predates and contributes to COVID-19,” said the letter.
Even when the protests turned violent, and viral videos of rioting, looting, arson, assault began circulating online, the experts insisted these were peaceful protests.
For Canadians, in the midst of all this chaos, we learned the Trudeau government had borrowed half a trillion dollars in just 90 days. Included in all that debt were countless sweetheart deals given to friends of the Liberal party.
Nearly a billion dollars was sent to a charity that had paid Trudeau’s family members half a million dollars for various speaking gigs and travel perks. Another $84 million went to a firm with an executive who happens to be married to Trudeau’s chief of staff and $113 million went to a Quebec firm with no assets in Canada.
Canadians have every right to feel frustrated, disillusioned and betrayed by the way the expert class has behaved.
Many Canadians are angry. And some of this anger, regrettably, has led to uncivil and vitriolic reactions — both online and occasionally in person. The media has begun pushing news stories about Liberal politicians being subject to verbal lashings and an apparent uptick in online threats towards the prime minister.
Queue more gaslighting by the expert class.
Many pundits were quick to jump in and point a finger. But they didn’t point it at the COVID-19 lockdowns, the flattened economy, all the hypocrisy and conflicts of interest. Instead, these pundits blamed it on conservatives.
“Responsibility lies at the feet of the CPC leadership,” wrote Macleans journalist Scott Gilmore on Twitter.
Gilmore, who is married to a Liberal cabinet minister, said the growth in hatred towards Trudeau is “an indicator of how much damage Conservative rhetoric had done to Canadian society over the past few decades,” without providing any examples, data or proof of causation.
But if Conservatives are truly to blame for the apparent uptick in online threats, how do Liberal activists like Gilmore explain the barrage of hatred faced by Conservatives?
Ontario PC cabinet minister Lisa McLeod is now under police protection after receiving credible threats and having her personal vehicle targeted. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner gets constant abuse online and Rebel News journalist Sheila Gunn Reid has been assaulted at least twice — on camera — while trying to do her job.
We do have a problem with civility in our society, but to suggest it’s one-sided and coming only from the conservatives is ignorant at best, and at worst, it’s malicious partisan nonsense that further divides our country.
Canada’s expert class should spend more time looking in the mirror and less time misleading Canadians with half-baked explanations to fit their own narrow political objectives.
From the same folks who recommended we use gloryholes to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the BC Centre for Disease Control has recently released a “COVID-19 Language Guide” which aims to “destigmatize” the coronavirus.
The guide takes a sudden turn into issues of gender identity, drug use, prostitution and more.
Get the highlights with True North fellow Lindsay Shepherd.
Despite the prime minister being on yet another vacation, the Trudeau government continues to entangle itself in a bevy of scandals.
The Prime Minister’s Office attempted to mislead Canadians on the whereabouts of Trudeau, the WE Scandal continues to develop and the Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault finds himself in hot water.
In the past year, official complaints of obstruction of justice have been laid by two RCMP members – one retired and one still serving – against the Commissioner of the RCMP, the former Commanding Officer of “E” Division (BC) and various other senior officers who were involved in the decision making process following the death of Robert Dziekanski at YVR in October of 2007.
The two RCMP members started their quest for justice in 2013 after one of them, former Cpl. Monty Robinson, served 8 months in prison on a perjury conviction.
Since then, they have been filing Access to Information requests and showing dogged determination to get at the truth.
The officers know they acted appropriately in their dealings with Polish traveller Dziekanski. They know they followed all proper procedures and yet, after a public inquiry, the Braidwood Commission and the assignment of a Special Prosecutor, the four officers who attended the YVR incident found themselves charged with perjury.
The allegations resulted from an assumption made by Braidwood that he had no business or justification to make.
It was perpetrated by the Special Prosecutor and two of the four trial judges resulting in jail sentences against two of the four officers. The other two officers were acquitted. None of the circumstances changed. The two judges who convicted the officers “inferred” something not in evidence to convict the two officers. It was a travesty of justice.
But internally, the RCMP leadership of “E” Division knew the members acted appropriately but neglected to speak out publicly allowing the members to be scapegoated. The two members believe that constitutes an obstruction of justice. Had that information been provided to Braidwood and then the courts, all four members would have been exonerated.
In the intervening 7 years, Cpl. Monty Robinson and Cst. Gerry Rundel have received thousands of pages of emails and reports and associated other documents. But it was also clear to them that some documents were being withheld despite the duty of the RCMP to comply under the Access to Information legislation. They fought back and complained multiple times to the ATIP Commissioner who investigated and thus far, has made seven findings against the RCMP for breaching the act.
The national police force in charge of enforcing the law was found to be in breach of the law, not once, but seven times.
As they have fought for the truth, retired member Cpl. Robinson and Cst. Rundel have upset more than a few apple carts along the way. They forced the issue internally within the RCMP. A Professional Standards investigation was conducted out of Alberta’s “K” Division. The two officers pushed back hard when they didn’t get the answers they wanted and now the whole matter has been assigned to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) to investigate a criminal complaint against the Commissioner of the RCMP and several other senior officers.
The matter was reviewed by Assistant Commissioner Eric Stubbs and he found there was enough information to warrant a third party investigation of the allegations.
OPP Inspector Dan Nadeau has been assigned to conduct the investigation and it now looks as though matters are moving ahead.
It’s been a long, arduous process for the members who were just doing their job when they found themselves in a political sausage grinder – as described by Curt Petrovich in his book Blamed and Broken.
The former Chair of the RCMP’s Civilian Review Board Shirley Heafey, who has fought her own battles with the senior leadership of the RCMP, had this to say about the news that the OPP had been appointed to investigate the allegations:
“A/Comm Stubbs appears to have, so far, accomplished something unheard of insofar as attempting to make the top leaders of the RCMP, past and present, accountable for their neglect and failure to meet the lawful responsibilities they were sworn to carry out for the membership and the Canadian public. The scapegoating of the four members involved in the YVR tragedy where Mr. Robert Dziekanski died is unconscionable. The leadership must be made to face the consequences of their serious failures and, ultimately, their criminal conduct. This would be an historical first and long overdue.”
The federal government was slow to act on warnings by the public service that Canada’s National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (NESS) was low on supplies.
According to CBC News, the Public Health Agency of Canada alerted the government on February 13 that the state of the emergency stockpile was not prepared to handle a pandemic.
A powerpoint presentation dated February 13 by the agency notes that Canada only had a “modest supply of personal protective equipment including surgical masks, respirators, gowns and coveralls.”
“We anticipate increased demand and further requests, and also shortages, limits to availability and impacts on the global supply chain. We want to be as ready as possible to meet immediate needs,” notes the agency.
Despite the early warning, the Liberals didn’t act to acquire more medical supplies until the middle of March and by then, prices were already inflated due to a global rush for personal protective equipment.
Only a small number of contracts were documented for the month of February and don’t come anywhere near the size of the multi-million dollar purchases made by the government in the following months.
One contract from February 14 was issued for $150,997 for “medical equipment and supplies.” A few days later, another contract was signed for over $100,000 in gowns and nitrile gloves.
In comparison, by April the federal government was signing contacts worth $90 million for N95 masks at the height of the pandemic.
Critics have accused the Liberals of mismanaging the NESS prior to the pandemic. According to estimates by the Treasury Board, the federal government’s failure to keep the stockpile replenished cost Canadian taxpayers $1.8 billion on “payments to acquire protective gear and medical equipment.”
Due to a lack of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies, Canada was forced to buy supplies at prices 380% more than those prior to the pandemic.
During testimony before the health committee, Executive Director of the Public Health Association Ian Culbert said that the government’s handling of the stockpile has been its “largest failure” to date.
“I would say the national emergency stockpile is probably the largest failure as far as our response goes to date,” Culbert told the Commons health committee.
On Thursday, witnesses at the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations told parliamentarians that under Beijing’s new repressive national security regime in Hong Kong, Canadians could be arrested by secret police for speaking out against China.
According to law professor Michael Davis, the expansive nature of the new laws could implicate dual-citizens or Canadians currently in Hong Kong.
“Under the new law it doesn’t matter that what we are saying here today is not violating Canadian law and exercising freedom of expression,” Prof. Davis said.
“We could be charged if we advocate sanctions against China now. And there is a kind of secret police now. If security officials from Mainland China want to, they can render you to the Mainland for trial. So Hong Kongers, or foreigners in Hong Kong including Canadians, if they are arrested they can be taken to China.”
Democracy advocate and Hong Kong activist with Alliance Canada Hong Kong Jody Chan also confirmed Davis’ conclusions, saying that the new laws can apply to foreigners as well.
“Any Canadian, or anyone in the world who is highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party can be charged and arrested for ‘subversion,’” said Chan.
“Article 38 does not only target people of Chinese heritage. The accusation against and detention of former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor showed Beijing’s willingness to use similar legislation against any foreign entities.”
Since the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, China has ramped up pressure on Canada and retaliated by detaining several Canadian citizens.
Among those detained are Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were unlawfully arrested on trumped-up espionage charges shortly after Wanzhou.
Earlier this month, China also sentenced two other Canadians to death in a matter of two days, bringing the total number of Canadians who are facing the death sentence in the country up to four.
In the midst of pandemic woes, BC’s ailing forestry industry seems to be taking a positive turn.
A surge in lumber prices is bringing hope to forestry workers, who were facing layoffs and unemployment before the pandemic.
“Most of my members are working flat-out which is good because six months ago there were lots of layoffs and downtime. And now they are working six or seven days a week,” said wood council chair of the United Steelworkers Jeff Bromley.
“I’m just coming out of Castlegar and was with a union member there. That Interfor mill is talking about putting in an extra shift.”
According to the US National Association of Home Builders, the price of lumber has skyrocketed to $600 USD per thousand board feet.
“The housing market in the U.S. is really strong. Housing starts are annualized at over 1.2 million which is a good number,” said Bromley.
“It’s all positive for our members with lots of lumber trying to feed the demand, but that’s not sustainable, that won’t stay forever. Right now it’s bit of a bitter bittersweet story but a little bit better news for once.”
Before the pandemic, loggers were lobbying the Horgan government to intervene. Last September, hundreds of logging trucks descended on Vancouver’s downtown core in a logging convoy meant to highlight the plight of the struggling sector.
According to an exclusive True North report, organizers of the convoy claimed that the NDP government wasn’t doing enough to help the industry, despite the protests.
