The World Health Organization’s Bruce Aylward has ignored a second request by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health to testify on the agency’s handling of the coronavirus.
Instead of flying to Ottawa to testify, the WHO sent a lawyer in his place to notify the committee that they could send written questions to the organization directly, according to the Globe and Mail.
“Over the past weeks, WHO has received requests for information from several different governments, parliamentary bodies and officials. With a view to facilitating the work of the committee, WHO has offered to consider any list of technical questions from the committee,” WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told the Globe and Mail.
Aylward, who is a Canadian citizen, first shirked his duty to testify once called upon by cancelling his appearance at the last minute earlier this month.
In a statement published online, Conservative MP and health critic Matt Jeneroux called the move “unacceptable.”
“Dr. Aylward decided not to appear before the committee at the last minute and did not offer to be rescheduled for a later meeting. This is unacceptable,” wrote Jeneroux.
“There is no doubt that the WHO has been slow to recommend concrete measures, negatively impacting Canada’s response to the virus. The WHO has back-tracked on every position they have taken, meaning the Canadian government has back-tracked as well.”
Aylward is not only known for ignoring requests to appear before parliamentary committees but also for apparently ignoring reporters’ questions on Taiwan.
In a widely shared video interview with the Hong Kong outlet RTHK, Aylward is seen not responding to repeat questions regarding Taiwan’s membership in the UN body.
1/ SHAME: Asked by @yvonne_tg@thepulse_rthk about #Taiwan's participation in the U.N.'s World Health Organization, its official Bruce Aylward says "I can't…could't hear"; then hangs up; and then when called back & asked again, he quickly shuts down the interview. #Covid_19pic.twitter.com/fKDtt6cFlX
After claiming that he had not heard the question initially, Aylward tells the reporter “no, that’s OK, let’s move to another one then,” after she asks him the question again before apparently pulling the plug on the video conference.
Critics of the WHO have accused the organization of kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party and initially spreading false information about the severity of the coronavirus.
One tweet by the WHO from January 14 spread the false claim by Chinese officials that there was no “human-to-human transmission,” despite warnings from Taiwan that it had been detected.
A Conservative MP has suggested that unemployed youth seek out farm jobs rather than collecting coronavirus-related government handouts.
As first reported by Blacklock’s, Conservative MP Gérard Deltell asked Finance Minister Bill Morneau at the House of Commons’ first virtual sitting whether the Liberal government has considered putting young adults to work in the agriculture sector, rather than making them stay home.
“If we want to restart the economy, people have to get back to work, they can’t stay at home doing nothing,” he said.
“People can go work in the fields. We know that’s important. We just can’t shut down the farms at five o’clock on Friday; students may be tempted to stay home rather than going to work on the farms.”
Deltell added that employers in his riding are having difficulty getting staff to return to work because of the generous pandemic-related handouts.
“I talk to entrepreneurs every day in my riding and they have a labour issue,” he said.
“It wasn’t there before the COVID-19 crisis. There are many workers who are saying that with $2,000 a month, they are making more money staying home doing nothing.”
Morneau responded by recognizing the importance of incentivizing people to work, but did not specify how the government will do that.
Deltell’s concerns were echoed by Liberal MP Wayne Long, who said that employers in his riding were also having trouble getting staff to return to work.
“There are still some things we need to talk about,” said Long.
“We need to fine-tune and tweak some things.”
According to research by Blacklock’s Reporter, the latest youth unemployment rates range from 11% in PEI to 20% in Alberta.
Last week, CBC’s Rosemary Barton burst into laughter at a guest on her program who expressed interest in farm work.
The idea that this young man wants to work on a farm, and is willing to "roll up his sleeves" and work hard is, apparently, HILARIOUS to this CBC journalist. pic.twitter.com/unH4HqveCX
True North’s founder Candice Malcolm wrote in her latest column, “If you’re laughing at a young man wanting to work on a farm, you’re also laughing at the very idea of an honest day’s work.”
Malcolm called on the government for the creation of a national work program for young Canadians.”
Many Canadians are still raised to be tough as nails, many young people work incredibly challenging and laborious jobs — from oil rigs and fishing boats to logging camps and warehouses. These young workers could certainly handle a summer on the farm,” wrote Malcolm.
Ontario and Quebec have both created programs encouraging residents to take up farm jobs to ensure that Canada’s food supply remains stable.
However, rather than propose a similar program, the federal government is spending $50 million on quarantining temporary foreign workers for 14 days upon arrival in Canada so that they can stay and work.
I resent the idea that young Cdns are too weak & fragile to work on farms. I grew up with guys who fought in Afghanistan, worked oil rigs, or as loggers, fisherman, millwrights, etc.
Canadians are tough as nails, despite what ppl in downtown Toronto thinkhttps://t.co/ySlCnzvbE5
Liberal Minister of health Patty Hajdu has stood by her praise of the Chinese government and past comments arguing against border closures to contain the coronavirus.
During a CTV Power Play segment, Hajdu said that her praise was directed to the Chinese Communist Party’s “historic containment efforts” which included confining millions of people in their homes.
Liberal Minister of health Patty Hajdu is standing by her praise of the Chinese communist government and her past comments arguing against border closures to contain the coronavirus. #cdnpolipic.twitter.com/KS3f6bDcHo
“The praise I offered China during the early days was based on their historic containment efforts. Don’t forget that there were millions and millions of Chinese people under, essentially confinement, if you will, for a very long time and in fact in some of those cities people are just getting back to normal and that was a public health measure that was never seen before,” said Hajdu.
“Those containment efforts ultimately failed and I will point to the fact that I stand by the remarks that I made around borders. We now have stronger measures on our borders, it became very clear that other countries did not have a good handle on what their outbreaks were looking like including countries like Iran and Italy who were struggling.”
Throughout the pandemic, Hajdu has downplayed the effectiveness of border control several times despite her government’s eventual decision to clamp down on travel in and out of Canada.
On March 4th, Hajdu suggested that borders were becoming less relevant as the virus was spreading.
“The more countries that have outbreaks, the less relevant borders become. A virus knows no borders,” said Hajdu.
Shortly after, Hajdu said that border measures were “highly ineffective” for curbing the spread of the virus.
“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.
Several days later, the Liberal government announced that it was restricting international flights and on March 17 Canada and the US reached a mutual agreement to close their land borders to non-essential travel.
Even after China admitted its numbers were wrong, Patty Hajdu refuses to admit she was wrong to trust China. She's renewed her claim to the Politburo Patty nickname, for sure. pic.twitter.com/x9v1XPJeQZ
In another instance, Hajdu accused a reporter of “feeding conspiracy theories” after he asked her about the veracity of China’s coronavirus case data despite the fact that officials from Wuhan have openly revised and changed the figures on the number of reported cases and death.
“There’s no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified any way,” said Hajdu during a federal coronavirus update on April 2.
“Your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet and it’s important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we’re not willing to work together as a globe.
A Chinese state media chief later called Hajdu a “role model” for her defence of China’s data on Twitter.
The City of Ottawa has told locals that they can no longer visit family members in long-term care homes through window-side visits.
A memo from the director of long-term care Dean Lett told families to stop the window visits “to help ensure that physical distancing remains in place for all our residents,” according to the Ottawa Citizen.
Families were saddened by the news and called the practice cruel, claiming that the visits are one of the only forms of contact they have with loved ones in care homes.
“I think that my father’s visits with my mother are keeping her alive. Her seeing him is keeping her will to continue on,” Diana Pepin told the Ottawa Citizen, regarding her 92-year-old father’s daily window-side visits to her 89-year-old mother Viola Surkan.
According to a statement by Lett, the new rule “is based on prioritizing the safety and health of residents and staff. We have experienced a number of situations where families have visited and have not respected the requirement for physical distancing as directed through public health agencies.”
Vulnerable populations in elderly care facilities have been the hardest hit by the coronavirus, making up 79% of the reported deaths across the country.
This is not the first time Ottawa’s questionable coronavirus measures have been put under the national spotlight.
A 17-year-old teenager was fined $700 for playing basketball alone outside an Ottawa community centre earlier this month.
William Vogelsang, the teen in question, recalls being approached by two city bylaw officers who called the police on the teen after he was not able to provide ID. The bylaw officers then proceeded to ticket the young man, despite his offer to leave the area after being told he was not supposed to be there.
“I’ve never gotten in trouble like that before,” he said. “It was a big incident. Everyone’s walking past with their dogs. I was getting nervous and embarrassed. I was scared,” Vogelsang told the CBC.
Vogelsang’s father, Robert, called the bylaw department’s conduct “disgusting” and a form of “bullying.”
“A warning would have been sufficient to scare William off,” said the teen’s father.
Canada can reopen the economy and Canadians can be trusted to do it responsibly and safely. This is the message that we need to send to federal and provincial politicians.
Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and other provinces have already started setting dates on reopening and identifying specific businesses that can start up again. Unfortunately, the federal government and a few provinces refuse to treat us like adults.
Facing potential prosecution, Pastor Henry Hildebrandt joins Andrew to discuss his stand for religious freedom after he clashed with police in Aylmer, Ontario for holding socially distant drive-in services in the church parking lot.
Also, a recap of the glitchy first virtual session of the House of Commons, and a concerning proposal that would force social media companies to subsidize the mainstream media.
Ontario Conservative MPs held an emergency meeting on Tuesday and demanded that CPC leadership candidate MP Derek Sloan apologize for his remarks about Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam.
The 36-member group met and voted to request that Sloan retract and apologize for his comments after the mainstream media accused the rookie MP of racism.
Sources close to the meeting told the Toronto Star that if Sloan refused the request, MPs would ask for a vote to have him removed from the party caucus.
Sloan’s comments originated in a video posted on his social media, in which he criticized Tam for having “failed Canadians,” and asked that Tam be fired or to resign.
In the video, Sloan also inquires whether Tam was “working for Canada or working for China,” due to her connections to the World Health Organization, which has received flack for parroting China’s original false claims about the coronavirus.
“Canada needed a Chief Public Health Officer who would investigate all the pertinent information and then recommend policies to protect Canadians,” said Sloan in a statement on the matter.
“But instead we got Dr. Tam, who dutifully repeats the propaganda of a CCP government obsessed with political control and saving face.”
Shortly after Sloan posted the video, several left-wing and mainstream publications labelled the MP a racist, while others called to have him removed from his position.
Since the mainstream media pile-on, Sloan has stood by his remarks saying that they had nothing to do with Tam’s race or ethnicity.
“My comments were about serious mistakes made by Dr. Tam early on in the COVID-19 crisis and had absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or gender,” said Sloan.
“There were red flags in late December coming from Wuhan, China about the seriousness of the virus and both Dr. Tam and the World Health Organization ignored those and just repeated whatever Communist Party officials in China were telling them.”
New Brunswick will not be allowing any new temporary foreign workers into the province as a precaution against the coronavirus.
At a press conference on Tuesday Premier Blaine Higgs said the province is not willing to risk accepting foreign workers while coronavirus continues to spread around the world.
“Under normal circumstances we welcome temporary foreign workers in our province. They play an important role in New Brunswick’s continued economic growth,” Higgs said.
“Right now the risk of allowing more people to enter the province is simply too great.”
Higgs said the province will work with businesses that usually use temporary foreign workers to try and fill the gaps with temporary foreign workers already in New Brunswick.
“Let’s find a solution together,” Higgs said.
“If there was ever was a time that people were needed to step up and be part of the solution now is the time.”
On Friday New Brunswick became the first province to start lifting coronavirus restrictions.
While most public health orders remain in place, religious services, golf courses and some postsecondary programs have been allowed to open as the province begins to return to normal.
More restrictions will be lifted in 2-4 weeks.
The Trudeau government says it is opposed to New Brunswick’s move to ban temporary foreign workers.
New Brunswick Liberal MP and cabinet minister Dominic LeBlanc said the move will hurt some businesses in his riding. LeBlanc also suggested that hiring locals for jobs on farms and fish plants is difficult.
“The idea that we can find local workers to replace these temporary foreign workers is not as easy as it seems,” he said.
This opinion was shared by CBC’s Rosemary Barton, who burst into laughter at a guest on her program who expressed interest in farm work.
In a recent column by True North’s founder Candice Malcolm, she says the claim that young people are too fragile for farm work is counterproductive and harmful.
‘Many Canadians are still raised to be tough as nails, many young people work incredibly challenging and laborious jobs — from oil rigs and fishing boats to logging camps and warehouses. These young workers could certainly handle a summer on the farm,” Malcolm wrote.
Higgs said he had discussed the decision with the Trudeau government and will proceed despite their opposition.
“I won’t apologize for protecting New Brunswickers,” Higgs said.
The Trudeau government has refused to stop temporary foreign workers from entering Canada despite the risk that coronavirus has to Canadians.
Rather than relying on unemployed Canadians, the Trudeau government has pledged funding to help quarantine workers as they arrive in the country.
CBC News echoed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda in a story about an Epoch Times report suggesting the CCP bears responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic.
CBC implied that the Epoch Times’ exclusive report titled “How the Chinese Communist Party Endangered the World” was “racist and inflammatory” for suggesting a link between the CCP’s negligence and the coronavirus’s spread.
I'm sorry but this reckless reporting needs to stop. For months this has been happening, where ignorant white liberals in the West bizarrely accuse Chinese dissidents of being racist for not supporting Xi Jinping's regime. https://t.co/RJjJPPWL2N
The special edition of the Epoch Times newspaper was delivered to various homes throughout Canada and included a number of investigative pieces that question the CCP’s handling of the coronavirus.
The leading article by the paper’s editorial board, Why The Coronavirus Should Be Called the CCP Virus, accuses the Chinese government of “wanton disregard of human life” and a “consequent spawning of a pandemic that puts untold numbers in countries around the world at risk.”
According to the CBC, Epoch Times’s special issue was “advancing a conspiracy theory” about the origin of the coronavirus by “exploring the idea that the virus that causes COVID-19 was created as a biological weapon.”
Epoch Times Canadian Editions publisher Cindy Gu called the allegations by the CBC “deliberately misleading.”
“The CBC headline focuses on a small part of our eight-pages-long special edition, a commentary article that discusses the history of top CCP officials talking about developing bioweapons. But this opinion article did not state that the Wuhan lab was developing bioweapons, contrary to the claim in the headline,” wrote Gu in a statement posted online.
“It is knowingly, deliberately misleading and intentionally excludes crucial information we provided to CBC prior to the publication of their report. The sole purpose seems to be to discredit our media and our reporting on the coronavirus.”
Shameful conduct by @CBCNews regarding @EpochTimes' latest report. Why is Canada's national broadcaster casting shade for the Chinese Communist Party, employing its favourite tactic of conflating legitimate criticism of the CCP with accusations of racism? https://t.co/H4f6UsWw5l
Both the US and the UK are considering the lab origin of the coronavirus as a legitimate possibility despite mainstream media claims that it is a conspiracy theory. A recent Fox News report citing sources close to the US government claimed that the lab origin theory is being viewed with “increasing confidence.” Officials within the UK government have also been looking at the possibility seriously.
True North founder Candice Malcolm was an early critic of China’s official narrative regarding the origins of the coronavirus.
“We were told to ignore the fact that China’s only high-security infectious disease laboratory — a lab infamous for controversial research and government’s secrecy — the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, is located minutes from the wet market,” wrote Malcolm.
“Anyone who raised questions about the link between the new coronavirus and China’s lone biosafety level-4 laboratory located in the same city were attacked and maligned, including myself.”
As Chinese communist officials ramp up their propaganda efforts, it’s more important than ever for Canadians to know the truth.
Recently, the CCP has been accused of conflating legitimate objective criticism with accusations of racism in an effort to divert attention from their initial coverup of the coronavirus outbreak.
In an exclusive True North report, Macdonald-Laurier Institute foreign policy specialist Shuvaloy Majumdar claimed the CCP’s responses to criticism have grown “sharper and more immature” in recent times.
“We’ve seen them conflate credible critiques with charges of racism and it’s silly to do that and they’re growing sharper and more immature in how they’re responding to it,” said Majumdar.
The CBC’s coverage of the Epoch Times’s article was similar in tone to a recent statement by the Chinese embassy to MLI’s criticism over its handling of the pandemic.
In response to an open letter by the MLI signed by over a hundred Canadian and world leaders condemning the CCP’s coronavirus coverup, a spokesperson for the embassy accused the institute of “collaborating with anti-China forces such as Falun Gong.”
Similarly, in their article, the CBC raises questions about the Epoch Times’ connection to Falun Gong, which was “declared illegal and a “cult” by the Chinese government in 1999.”
In her article critical of the CBC’s coverage, Gu called the CBC’s reporting on the matter “grossly irresponsible” and a misrepresentation of the religious group.
“The CBC report uses the persecution of Falun Gong to unfairly frame us as an agenda-driven media and then misrepresents that persecution,” wrote Gu.
It is grossly irresponsible reporting to say “Its followers say the Chinese government persecutes them and oppresses their religious rights,” as though the evidence for the persecution of Falun Gong depends only on what its practitioners say.”
Since publication, the CBC article has received 2132 comments, many of which were critical of the national broadcaster’s coverage of the Epoch Times issue.
The United Nations’ most powerful official is asking nations to refuse support to “carbon-intensive” industries like the oil and gas sector during the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking at a virtual conference Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that while coronavirus has caused significant harm for workers and businesses in all sectors, government support should only be given to “green” industries.
“Where taxpayers’ money is used to rescue businesses, it must be creating green jobs and sustainable and inclusive growth,” he said.
“It must not be bailing out outdated, polluting, carbon-intensive industries.”
Guterres also said countries should be actively punishing the oil and gas sector.
“Public funds should invest in the future by flowing to sustainable sectors and projects that help the environment and climate. Fossil fuel subsidies must end, and carbon must have a price so polluters will pay for their pollution,” he said.
Guterres cited the Paris Agreement on climate change and its goal of net zero emissions by 2050 to justify the need for more aggressive action, as well as asking rich countries to give more money to poor countries to fight climate change.
His statements came just a few months after former UN executive secretary Christiana Figueres, the chief negotiator of the Paris Agreement, encouraged civil disobedience to force countries to achieve the Paris Agreement’s targets.
The global energy sector has faced significant hardships in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic and the oil price war has resulted in detrimental results.
Last week global oil prices went negative in an unprecedented decline, putting more uncertainty on the already-battered Canadian energy sector.
