Most Canadians of Chinese descent agree that China can’t be trusted when it comes to disputes, a new poll by the Innovative Research Group (IRG) shows.
Out of 579 people polled, 53% of respondents agreed with the statement that Canada shouldn’t trust China to act fairly.
“Chinese Canadians are often under-represented in public debates and the survey not only tells people what they think in these unprecedented times, it also sheds light on the diversity within the Chinese-Canadian community,” IRG research manager Vanessa Agrawal told Vancouver is Awesome.
Canada is currently in the midst of an international conflict between China and the US, regarding the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who is wanted by American authorities for breaching sanctions on Iran and other alleged fraudulent activities.
In retaliation to Meng’s arrest, China unlawfully detained several Canadians, including Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. The pair are being held in Chinese prisons and have been charged with various espionage crimes.
Recently, Canada’s Chinese community has spoken out regarding recent overreaches by the People’s Republic of China in Hong Kong.
Over the weekend, dozens of pro-freedom demonstrators assembled in downtown Vancouver to protest the PRC’s activities in the region.
Protesters accused some of ignoring China’s authoritarian power grab and even going so far as assisting their public international image.
“In social media, if I was captured by the CCP, the Communist Party of China, you are liable to be arrested and put in prison for your whole life,” an anonymous demonstrator told Global News.
“It includes all the foreigners, all of the human beings on earth. You or I are liable to be arrested.”
New legislation in Hong Kong adopted earlier this month threatens to dismantle Hong Kong’s autonomy as a region in China and uproot democratic freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong citizens for decades.
Canadian taxpayers have to foot $73,220 in travel expenses for Liberal Health Minister Patricia Hajdu.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Hajdu jetset between Ottawa and her home in Thunder Bay over several weekends while the coronavirus pandemic raged on.
Throughout this period, Hajdu and federal public health officials have lectured Canadians to practice social distancing and eliminate non-essential travel.
“We are asking Canadians really to conduct only essential business, going to the grocery store, going to the post office, going to the pharmacy,” said Hajdu on March 23.
Hajdu is believed to have travelled alone during these trips on board of a seven-seat Cessna that costs $1,400 per hour of travel.
When contacted about the numerous journeys, Hajdu’s office said the minister had pressing business to attend to at her constituency office in the area.
Hajdu flew home on four weekends while travel bans were in effect including the Victoria Day long weekend and for Easter.
This is not the first instance where Hajdu’s actions and remarks have raised eyebrows.
In the early stages of the pandemic, Hajdu told Canadians that border closures were “highly ineffective” in curbing the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly after she made those remarks, the Trudeau government announced it would shut all non-essential travel between Canada and the US.
“Canadians think we can stop this at the border. But what we see is a global pandemic, which means that border measures are highly ineffective and, in some cases, can create harm. We see that in countries that had the worst expressions, the tightest borders,” said Hajdu on March 13.
Ontario member of provincial parliament Belinda Karahalios was kicked out of Premier Doug Ford’s PC caucus after she voted against a bill that would bypass the Ontario legislature and give the government authority to act through emergency orders for up to two years. While the bill has been harshly criticized by civil liberties advocates, PC MPPs were whipped to support it.
Karahalios joins The Andrew Lawton Show to discuss her expulsion from caucus and rationale for opposing the bill. Also, Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms president John Carpay sits down with Andrew to talk about constitutional challenges facing lockdown measures such as social distancing tickets and mandatory mask orders.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approval rating has taken a hit since the WE scandal erupted earlier this month.
According to the Angus Reid Institute, Trudeau’s approval fell by six additional points. 44% of Canadians reported that they approve of Trudeau as prime minister.
More than half of Canadians polled have said that their opinion of the prime minister has worsened because of the latest scandal. Around 53% of people claimed that their opinion of Trudeau had taken a hit over the last month.
Regarding the severity of Trudeau’s actions, people polled were split on whether the incident constituted a criminal offence or not.
According to the poll, 37% of people believed that the incident was a “possible criminal act that should be investigated by police,” while another 43% called it an “unethical decision, but not a criminal act.”
Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau are facing increased scrutiny for their financial and personal dealings with WE Charity.
Reports of the pair’s personal interests in the charity emerged shortly after it was revealed that the Liberal government handed the company a $500 million contract to outsource a federal student grant program.
According to CBC News, the organization was earmarked a $900 million budget by the Liberals to handle the file, $500 million of which was intended for the grants themselves. The organization was set to receive up to $43 million for their involvement in overseeing the project.
The prime minister and his Chief of Staff Katie Telford have been called on by the opposition to testify about their involvement in the debacle.
Last week, Morneau testified before the House of Commons Finance Committee revealing that he and his family went on two trips, which were partly paid for by the charity. On the same day he testified at committee, Morneau paid back $41,366 in travel expenses for the two trips.
“The error this time, even though I was not traveling in my role as minister should not have happened,” said Morneau last Wednesday.
The prime minister has been found guilty of two ethics violations in the past. The first was regarding his acceptance of a vacation to a private island, paid for by the Aga Khan, while the second violation was issued for attempting to pressure former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to interfere on behalf of SNC-Lavalin in a criminal prosecution.
Canada’s state broadcaster is chalking up its decision to cut a section from an interview with Conservative leadership candidate Erin O’Toole to time constraints.
During an interview on CBC’s The House, guest host David Cochrane asked about O’Toole’s plan to defund and privatize aspects of CBC.
The question and O’Toole’s response were edited out of the version that CBC aired. No other question was removed.
“I did an interview with CBC Radio, but they edited out the question where they asked me about my plan to defund the CBC. Seems the CBC doesn’t want Canadians to hear my answer,” tweeted O’Toole on Sunday.
I did an interview with CBC Radio, but they edited out the question where they asked me about my plan to defund the CBC.
Seems the CBC doesn’t want Canadians to hear my answer.
Luckily, my team recorded the full interview! Give it a listen and pass it on! pic.twitter.com/UxaqAN8x6B
“As is the case with every interview on The House, this one was edited for time but given there have been questions raised regarding this specific exchange, we have since posted the full interview between David Cochrane and Erin O’Toole,” CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson told True North.
In the unedited interview, O’Toole says taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for a service that is undercutting private media.
“Why would you seek to reduce the number of journalism outlets in the country when the industry is widely seen as being in a bit of a crisis?” Cochrane asked.
“I won’t get rid of, as you said, radio, and what we want to do with English television is privatize, David. So, I think, what we don’t need is Canadians spending millions of dollars to create The Family Feud Canada Edition. Is that where taxpayers’ money really should be going?” said O’Toole.
“The ratings show that very few Canadians watch the CBC. And so why should 100% of taxpayers subsidize it?”
Soon after O’Toole announced he would be stepping into the leadership race to replace Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, O’Toole unveiled a plan to significantly cut CBC’s budget.
According to O’Toole, if elected he would slash funds for CBC’s English-language television programming and other ventures with the eventual goal of privatizing those parts of the crown company.
“We will end funding for CBC digital and cut the CBC English TV budget by 50%. Our plan will phase out TV advertising with a goal to fully privatize CBC English TV by the end of our first mandate,” said O’Toole at the time.
“We will preserve CBC Radio – it is commercial-free and delivers public interest programming from coast to coast. We will also preserve Radio-Canada, which plays an important role connecting Quebecers and Francophones across Canada in their own language.”
The CBC receives approximately $1.2 billion in taxpayer funding annually. Critics of the national broadcaster have pointed to falling ratings and viewership as a reason to cut the amount of federal money it receives.
I have never had the urge to publicly celebrate someone’s death. If someone who I didn’t particularly like happened to die, I would not feel the need to gloat about it – I just wouldn’t say anything at all. The only circumstance where I might find myself happy about someone’s death is if they were a murderer, rapist, or pedophile.
But for regressive leftists, the death of a conservative Christian who made politically incorrect jokes on Twitter is cause for celebration.
Mike Adams was a tenured professor of sociology and criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). In May 2020, he made a coronavirus lockdown-related joke:
“Massa Cooper” is a reference to Roy Cooper, Governor of North Carolina. “Massa” is the African-American Vernacular English rendition of “Master.”
He had also previously tweeted, during the pandemic shutdowns, “Don’t shut down the universities. Shut down the non essential majors. Like Women’s Studies.”
An online petition titled “Fire Professor Mike Adams” was then created in June 2020, and it was signed by over 60,000 people.
Later in June, the petition signatories got their wish: it was announced that Mike Adams would be retiring early, effective August 1, 2020. He had reached a $504,702 settlement with the university.
UNCW Chancellor Jose Sartarelli stated, in regards to the settlement, “This resolution is less damaging to UNCW than leaving the situation unresolved…the settlement will prevent the continued disruption to our educational mission, reduce concerns around campus safety, and lessen the harm to the institution. Dollars are precious, but our institutional integrity is priceless.”
But days before he was set to leave UNC Wilmington, Adams suddenly passed away. It was reported on July 23 that the 55-year old professor was found dead in his home from a gunshot wound. Law enforcement is currently conducting an investigation into Adams’ death, though some are speculating it was a suicide after a friend revealed Adams had been acting erratically in recent weeks, and was under extreme stress.
On Twitter, where the controversy began, reactions to Adams’ death included comments such as “Bye Felicia” and “So this racist misogynistic piece of sh*t Mike Adams killed himself yesterday. Thoughts and prayers.” One of Adams’ UNCW colleagues, professor LJ Randolph, said “Please do mourn Mike Adams’s death, but don’t sugarcoat his rhetoric as merely ‘controversial’ or ‘racially charged.’ He was blatantly racist, homophobic, and sexist, and his own words left no room for interpretation on any of that.”
A former colleague of Adams, professor Tim Gill, wrote on Twitter: “During my three years at UNCW, my office was two doors down from Mike Adams. Despite his loud online presence, he sort of faded into the background on a daily basis…I found his words reprehensible, and I just tried to avoid him. I couldn’t believe he was permitted to teach, to be honest, and I recently signed a letter against him and posted it here.”
While scrolling through the reactions to Adams’ death, I couldn’t help but see the parallels to how regressive leftists responded to legendary Canadian columnist Christie Blatchford’s death in February 2020.
Blatchford died at 68 after battling cancer.
While many politicians and journalists paid their respects to Blatchford’s career, the haters were loud about how much they were relishing in her death. Before (falsely) painting her as an anti-Indigenous homophobe, journalist Davide Mastracci wrote “Some people believe you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Others say you can, but not too soon. My rule is that when it comes to public figures with influence, criticizing them the day they die is justified, and often preferable.”
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education professor Rinaldo Walcott said on Twitter, “Christie Blatchford meant Black people in Canada and the world over no good. We should be clear about that. I have nothing nice or good to say about her anti-Black racism, her hatred of queer people and her shilling for the most extreme forms of white supremacy.”
These regressive leftists derive pleasure from the death of prominent conservatives and freethinking, non-politically correct people. They will jump at the chance to immediately smear these individuals in the most vile ways to damage their legacy, on the day they die.
The only moral of the story here is to remember that.
If you tuned into the Conservative Party leadership debates last month, and especially the media scrums following the debates, you could be forgiven for thinking the biggest issues facing Conservative voters are divisive social issues like abortion, same sex marriage and whether or not Canada is a systemically racist country.
These questions dominated the scrums, and the candidates were pestered with different iterations of the same question over and over again.
To Conservative voters, this is maddening. After all, the leadership will be determined by card-carrying members of the Party, true blue conservatives, and not the snarky and narrow-minded journalists who cover the Party like it’s some kind of a circus.
Herein lies the problem with much of the mainstream media in Canada. National media reporters are mostly from downtown Toronto or Ottawa — or they moved to downtown Toronto or Ottawa as soon as they could.
These journalists are often progressive, secular, cosmopolitan urban elitists who always cheer on the latest leftist causes. They universally support unrestricted access to abortion, open immigration and the radical political organization that is Black Lives Matter.
They likely don’t know many Conservative voters, let alone people with traditional or religious values. Some frankly don’t understand the basics of the conservative worldview, others see tradition and order as the enemy.
Some go out of their way to demonize and discredit conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Rex Murphy or Barbara Kay, and they convince themselves (and their audience) that conservative values come from a place of malice and ignorance.
As so, when these journalists go to a Conservative debate, all they can think about is how racist and bigoted these candidates must be. Their questions sound like a Margaret Atwood fever dream — every conservative is a secret fascist and each candidate harbours a hidden agenda to transform Canada into a real life Handmaid’s Tale.
Instead of having a debate about the topics Conservatives care about — jobs, economic recovery, resource development, pipelines, tax rates, government spending, debt, crime, trade, immigration levels, national security threats, relations with China, protecting free speech, improving health care, the military and Canada’s role in the world — we’re stuck hearing journalists obsess over whether or not Peter Mackay would allow candidates like Leslyn Lewis in his party or whether Erin O’Toole is secretly sympathetic to Derek Sloan’s more hardline positions.
These journalists are doing a disservice to Canadians by asking the questions they themselves care about, rather than trying to learn about conservatism and posing questions that matter to Conservative members.
It is in this view that earlier this month, I launched a new initiative, the Independent Press Gallery of Canada, to encourage more intellectual diversity and open inquiry in the media in Canada.
I’m proud that our very first event will take place this Wednesday — a live debate in Toronto (streamed online at www.IndependentPressGallery.ca) featuring all four leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of Canada.
Rather than demonizing the deeply held values of many of our fellow Canadians, this debate will seek to illuminate which of the four remaining candidates can best hold the torch for conservatism in the next election.
Who can best articulate and defend conservative values? Who has a vision for Canada that can appeal to mainstream, non-ideological Canadians? Who can repair the economic damage sown by the Trudeau Liberals after two reckless terms in office, and who can forge a new vision for Canada that unites all Canadians and mends the regional divides that have intensified under Trudeau’s watch?
And, perhaps most importantly, who can stand up to and hold their ground against those bullies and anti-conservative bigots inside the Parliamentary Press Gallery?
I hope you’ll tune in on Wednesday and find out.
The Independent Press Gallery will host the final Conservative Party leadership debate this Wednesday, July 29 in Toronto. It will be streamed online at www.IndependentPressGallery.ca at 7pm ET, 5pm MT
What do we want out of our military in the years ahead?
Canadians need to have a serious conversation about our safety and security on the world stage and at home.
True North’s Anthony Furey thinks there are two issues that need to be addressed – Canada’s arctic sovereignty and the growing presence of Communist China.
There has only ever been one COVID-19 death under the age of 20 in Canada. And because stats oddly include those who died of something else while simultaneously infected with COVID-19, even that one death comes with a question mark.
It’s important parents have these facts on hand as they reflect on what they want school to look like in September.
This is the second part of a series about the rise of Antifa in Canada.
As mentioned in the introductory part of this series, prior to the 2000s, Antifa evolved out of fringe and radical left-wing circles already existing in Canada.
Over the years, a growing and loosely affiliated network of groups and individuals influenced by anti-capitalist and anarchist streams of thought formed the precursory bedrock to Canada’s own Antifa movement.
To detail these groups, both small and large, would be an encyclopedic and tedious task which could fill a book from cover to cover. However, some of the more notable and well-recorded ones included the Quebec-based Anti-Capitalist Convergence and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), which had a hand in organizing the Queen’s Park riots of June 2000.
OCAP leader and organizer John Clarke was arrested and charged in the aftermath of the riot but had charges against him dropped several years later.
Over the years, anarchists and their allies continued to organize and streamline their tactics in Canada and abroad, slowly inching towards today’s characteristic Antifa brand.
Two national events which took place in 2010 would cement Antifa as a staple of militant left-wing radicalism within Canada.
The first of these was the Vancouver Olympics riot. In February 2010, hundreds of anarchist radicals descended on the city’s downtown to sow chaos. The vandals destroyed storefronts, damaged cars and intimidated pedestrians before clashing with the police.
The “anti-Olympic” group organized themselves according to Black Bloc tactics – Antifa’s preferred method of violent confrontation. The Black Bloc is a cohesive unit meant to protect the identities of its members as they commit criminal acts. Anarchists who engage in this strategy often wear concealing clothes, masks and purposefully engage police officers and others in violent confrontations.
“The demonstration involving a number of anarchists, some of whom dress all in black and employ a tactic called Black Bloc. This included a loosely organized group of thugs from Central Canada known to attach themselves to any cause, travel to any event that attracts media coverage and promote anarchy wherever they go,” claimed a statement given by Vancouver Police shortly after the riot.
Shortly after the riot, an ensuing debate regarding the use of political violence would emerge within the Canadian left.
In a rabble.ca op-ed dated to February 16, 2010, prominent Canadian left-wing activist and journalist Judy Rebick denounced the violent tactics employed during the riots and called for non-violent protest.
“If diversity of tactics means that people who aim to commit vandalism and sometimes violence can come into the middle of a demonstration with black face masks and break up whatever takes their fancy when the vast majority of people involved don’t want them to, then I draw a line,” wrote Rebick.
“It’s true that violent action gets more publicity, but it’s the wrong publicity that is about the violence itself, not about the issue.”
While some mainstream leftists distanced themselves and publicly denounced the militant violence brewing among their ranks, the phenomenon would become more frequent and vicious over the years.
The Vancouver riots would be replicated later that year during the G20 Toronto summit protests. Anarchists engaging in Blac Bloc tactics descended on the city causing havoc and widespread destruction of property. They hijacked formerly peaceful protests to fit their own ends and violently confronted the police.
One article contemporary to the times published by the Toronto Star on May 18, 2010, warned of “militant” protests being organized by Ontario anarchist cells.
During the rioting, anarchist violence cost the City of Toronto and local business owners millions of dollars in repairs and damages. Rioters firebombed banks and set vehicles on fire throughout the streets of Toronto as they waged a two-day anarchy spree throughout the city.
As a result of the clashes, 97 officers and 39 protesters were injured and over 1,000 people were arrested in connection with the chaos.
The G20 protests were a turning point and rallying call for anarchists throughout Canada. Moving forward, Antifa would emulate the actions and tactics of the G20 protesters, extending the scope of their targets beyond state authority and policing, to broader political enemies.
Today, many of the Black Bloc tactics honed throughout 2010 have been regularly seen deployed to censor speakers on university campuses and beyond.
