Wexit Saskatchewan has applied for official status as a political party ahead of the province’s election this year.
The party is the newest contender to attempt to make a dent in federal and provincial politics as western separatist sentiments have reached an all-time high.
Wexit Alberta, which also seeks separation from Confederation, was approved by Elections Canada as an officially registered federal party last year.
According to Wexit Saskatchewan registration coordinator Eric Hill, the party is seeking “equality” from Canada and is threatening separation if it is not met.
“We threaten secession if there’s no equality in this confederation. Very polarized between the Saskatchewan Party and what this new party stands for,” Hill told National Post.
Voters head to the polls by Nov. 2, to cast their ballots for provincial legislators.
On its Facebook page, Wexit Saskatchewan has targeted Saskatchewan Party leader and premier Scott Moe by painting him as a liberal in disguise who has harmed the province’s resource sector.
The page has a following of 26,306 people and regularly posts political content attacking Moe.
Hill says his party intends to run candidates in all of Saskatchewan’s ridings and hopes to have a convention soon to elect a leader.
“Everybody thinks that we’re nuts, but that’s okay. We’re on the cusp of something big,” said interim leader Jake Wall.
When Canadians were polled whether their province was better off separated from Canada, Alberta and Saskatchewan had the highest number of people agreeing.
In Alberta, 33% of people polled agreed with separation, while in Saskatchewan 27% of people wanted to separate.
If granted official status by the province’s election watchdog, Wexit Saskatchewan would be able to offer tax credits for political contributions and receive reimbursements for a portion of their election expenses.
A freight train in Kingston, Ont. went off the tracks Wednesday morning, leading to road closures and an evacuation of the area.
The incident happened on Bath Road on the outskirts of the city. Police say that Bath Road between Queen Mary and Armstrong will remain close to traffic until further notice.
Kingston Police say no one has been hurt and they have several officers at the scene.
Police are evacuating the area as one of the train cars appears to be leaking. The contents of the car are not yet known.
Several of the train’s cars appear to be laying on their side.
Kingston – Emergency services are on scene of a train derailment with multiple cars off the tracks just West of Queen Mary Road on the Dupont Spur line.
Liberal Minister of Transport Marc Garneau confirmed in February that protesters have been tampering with railways by disabling the signals at road crossings.
The minister’s confirmation came shortly after True North exclusively reported on a handful of far-left websites that instruct activists to sabotage Canada’s rail systems and other critical infrastructure.
One far-left website titled North Shore provides step-by-step instructions on how to destroy signal boxes and create thermite to destroy steel rails.
Last week, near Belleville, Ont., protesters threw rocks, poured gasoline on tracks and lit wooden crates on fire underneath a moving train in an attempt to disrupt CN rail services.
The cause of the derailment in Kingston is currently unknown.
Is the OPP being ordered to stand down?
True North's @primetimecrime says we are witnessing a period of lawlessness in Canada and increasingly, police forces who are declining to do their duty.
It is not at all difficult to find a story amongst parenthood magazines, websites, and blogs that is centered around the supposed dichotomy of the working mom versus the stay-at-home mom. Who has it harder? Which is better for the children? Which lifestyle is healthier for you?
Since having my now 11-month old son, I have worked outside of the home in various temporary and contract gigs, in addition to working from home doing two fellowships where I write, do research, and make videos.
I’m also my son’s primary caregiver — my partner and I do not have daycare, a nanny, or a live-in grandparent.
I consider myself a working stay-at-home mom.
A working stay-at-home mom is a mother who is the primary caregiver of her children, but who also performs paid work either outside of the home or remotely and earns an income on the side. The nature of this work could be part-time, weekend, casual, overnight, contract, short-term, online work, or running a small business from home. Picture a mom that takes care of her children from 7:00am to 6:30pm, and then trades the kids off with her partner so that she can pick up an evening shift as a waitress, or write and answer work emails until midnight, or take photos of products for her e-commerce business.
The second shift, reversed
Anyone who has taken an introductory course in sociology or gender studies is probably familiar with the term “the second shift,” coined by Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild. In the 1980s, women entered the paid workforce in droves, leading Hochschild to study the lives of these working women and their partners by interviewing, observing, and reviewing time diary data of 50 couples. She found what she called a “double day,” where women spent their workweeks doing full days of paid work only to come home and do an unpaid “second shift” of housework and childcare. Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift, describes the exhausting and frustrating lifestyles of these working families.
But what about the reverse second shift? Rather than spending nine-to-five in the workforce and coming home to do childcare, dishes, laundry, and cooking — as was common for Gen X mothers — what if your nine-to-five was the childcare, dishes, cooking, and laundry, and evenings and weekends (and baby’s nap times) were reserved for working?
The latter scenario describes, more or less, my life as a working stay-at-home mom.
Indeed, it is a lifestyle of little sleep and little to no free recreational time. So why do it?
Speaking for myself, I had my son at 24, right after graduating with my M.A. I have student loans to pay off. But aside from debt, I enjoy the fulfillment of working and enjoy contributing financially to the household.
I made a Youtube video on this topic in October 2019 and put out a call for “working stay-at-home moms” to answer a survey where they could share their circumstances and experiences with me.
I received 154 responses between October 1, 2019, and December 31, 2019.
I was impressed by the grit and insights of working stay-at-home moms. They are tutors, bakers, artists, writers, piano teachers, waitresses, and school crossing guards and lunch monitors. They do freelance bookkeeping, run home-based daycares, sell thrifted clothing online, and operate Airbnbs. Some work while ensuring they can still be in the vicinity of their child, by teaching group fitness classes at gyms with a drop-in childminding service or by working at a summer camp that their own child attends.
Legend has it that being a stay-at-home mom is a luxury only afforded to upper-class women who don’t have to work because their husband’s income is enough to support the household. But in a time when wages are stagnant, housing costs are rising, many are still burdened with large student loans, and childcare costs are sometimes equivalent to paying a second mortgage or rent, being a stay-at-home mom can be an economically-motivated decision.
The cost of childcare
Let’s say you’re a Torontonian mother-of-two earning a $45,000 after-tax salary — that would be $3,750 a month.
If you’re paying the average full-time childcare costs in Toronto, Canada, that will be $1,685 a month for your infant and $1,150 for your preschooler — $2,835 a month. Maybe you’ll get a 5% discount for enrolling both of your children in the same daycare.
You’ll have about $915 left over every month after accounting for daycare costs.
To be a working stay-at-home mom, then, would be more of an economic payoff even if you brought in a relatively modest $1,000 a month, and you don’t have to worry about missing important milestones in your child’s life.
There are other motivations besides economic ones for wanting to be working stay-at-home mom: Alyssa, 25, states “I find being a mother to an infant to be a lifestyle centered around consumption. Working allows me to produce so I don’t feel like my entire life is about consuming…just buying diapers, formula, baby food, necessities, groceries, repeat.”
Some other motivations for working part-time include intellectual engagement, socialization, or balance and mental health maintenance.
It is worth noting that just because some mothers work, that doesn’t make them better than a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t do paid labour outside the home. Many worthy pursuits are unpaid, such as volunteering for a food bank or being on a parent’s committee, or just trying to raise your own children! Certain circumstances must also be in place in order to be a working stay-at-home mom, such as having the support of a partner or a second caregiver. A single mother, or a mother of a child with special needs, for example, likely wouldn’t find the working stay-at-home mother lifestyle feasible.
The working stay-at-home mom lifestyle
Rachel, 29, is a mom of two who sells crafts on Etsy and at craft fairs and who formerly taught preschool. She notes, “It is and was extremely difficult to work these jobs… I read once that it’s impossible to be a good housewife and mother who is in shape, keeps a beautiful house, and has a good paying job. For some silly reason, that felt like a challenge to me and I actually think I can do most of those things very well, though after child number two I’m letting my Etsy shop go a bit.”
Rachel remarks she stopped teaching preschool, what she went to college for, “because the irony of needing someone to watch my kids while I go out and watch someone else’s kids is not lost on me.” In her case, she wasn’t working out of financial necessity — her husband has a well-paying job. “My jobs actually made life more difficult since he had to watch the kids while I was teaching at the preschool or at a craft fair.”
Studies show that dads are more involved than ever in childcare, a change that enables moms to put in more working hours. Additionally, more dads are staying at home than ever before: according to Statistics Canada, stay-at-home fathers accounted for approximately 1 in 70 of all Canadian families with a stay-at-home parent in 1976. By 2015, the proportion had risen to about 1 in 10.
Married couple Chris, 38, and Maria, 47, were ships passing through the night for many years.
Would Maria consider being a SAHM her primary occupation? Yes and no.
As Chris explains, “My wife and I chose to work opposite shifts. I worked my 8:00am to 4:30pm and she worked as a server from 5:00pm or 6:00pm until close. We did this until our youngest son was ready for kindergarten.”
“This worked out really well for us,” he goes on. “I got to cook for the kids most nights, help them with homework, give them baths, get them ready for bed and read to them…We struggled for a long time, but it was worth it!”
Chris and Maria’s case demonstrates the blurred lines between a stay-at-home parent and a working parent.
Dads are doing more care work, part-time childcare is becoming more popular, shifting cultural norms expect mothers to be earning an income, debt levels are growing, and the internet and social media are presenting women with more opportunities to work from home. With all of these factors present, the stark dichotomy of the “working mom” and the “stay-at-home mom” may well be on its way to obsolescence.
Lindsay thanks everyone who participated in the Working Stay-at-Home Moms survey for sharing a snippet of their lives with her.
It’s interesting that we’ve had hundreds of newspaper stories and radio and television segments about Indigenous issues the past few weeks but none of them have been about their success stories.
Instead, they’ve been stories about the blockades that mostly cast a negative light on what First Nations people are doing in this country and their lot in life.
The Conservative Party of Canada has accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of trying to legalize hard drugs with a private member’s bill.
Bill C-235 was introduced by Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith on February 26. Under the bill, drug possession would be illegal for traffickers but legal for users.
Though the bill promptly died and was not passed, Conservative MPs John Brassard and Bob Saroya spoke out against the attempt.
“Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are looking to legalize hard drugs like heroin, crack cocaine and crystal meth. These drugs are extremely dangerous; they tear families and our communities apart and do lasting damage to people who use them. They should remain illegal,” said the two MPs in a joint statement.
Brassard and Saroya pointed out that this was not the first time that the Liberals have attempted to legalize hard drugs for consumption.
“At the Liberal Party’s last policy convention, Liberal members overwhelmingly supported a call to decriminalize all illicit drug use in Canada; and just last year, Liberal members of the Standing Committee on Health put forward a recommendation calling on the federal government to decriminalize the possession of dangerous hard drugs,” said the pair.
According to Erskine-Smith, his bill would “end stigma” around drug abuse and addiction.
“I will not shy away from advocating for decriminalization, but I am aware that early on in this Parliament, I have this opportunity to introduce a bill that will be debated and voted on. In the context of the opioid crisis that has taken so many lives, I want to ensure that a measure is passed that will improve our laws and will help Canadians in need,” said Erskine-Smith.
Erskine-Smith once admitted to consuming cannabis recreationally. Shortly after marijuana became legal in Canada in October 2018, Erskine-Smith told CBC News that he vaporizes cannabis in his free time.
“It would be silly for me to stop now wouldn’t it?” said Erskine-Smith. “Just as someone might have a glass of wine or a scotch on a Friday night, I would turn to my vaporizer.”
The Conservative Party of Canada disqualified social conservative organizer Richard Décarie from the leadership race. He joins True North’s Andrew Lawton to share what happened.
Also, how coronavirus fears are overblown (but only somewhat) and why courts aren’t the answer to anti-conservative bias and censorship from big tech.
Illegal border crossers in Toronto are costing Canadian taxpayers $77 million a year in service and housing costs.
According to documents obtained by iPolitics, the City of Toronto estimates asylum claimants will cost $76.9 million annually in 2020 and for “future years.”
“Going forward for 2020 and future years, the estimated annual cost of the temporary refugees response for families is $76.9 million, including an administrative cost to better reflect the increased administration costs borne by the City to deliver the program,” says a Nov. 14, 2019 briefing note prepared for Mayor John Tory.
Toronto is unable to foot the bill itself and Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said the influx of asylum seekers into the city is the federal government’s responsibility.
In addition to the annual cost, Toronto is also asking for $43 million to cover costs accrued in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017, Tory introduced a motion in council to reaffirm Toronto’s status as a “sanctuary city” in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s Middle East visa ban. Toronto has held “sanctuary city” status since 2014.
Around the time of Tory’s motion Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also responded to President Donald Trump’s decision by welcoming refugees and asylum seekers into Canada.
Since then illegal border crossers have been pouring into Canada through its border with the US.
According to official Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada statistics 54,739 illegal border crossers have entered the country since February 2017.
Provinces like Ontario and Quebec have had to shoulder the brunt of the costs. In September 2019, Quebec received a $250 million federal reimbursement for handling the situation. The province is estimated to have received approximately 90% of the country’s asylum claimants.
In Toronto, the steady stream of refugees and asylum seekers has put the city’s shelter systems under pressure and has forced Toronto to seek alternatives such as housing people in hotels.
By 2018, 40% of those occupying shelter space in Toronto were believed to be asylum claimants, growing from 25% in 2017.
While protesters were erecting illegal blockades across Canada, social media bots were promoting and sharing the trending #ShutDownCanada hashtag on Twitter.
True North used an AI algorithm to detect how many of the nearly 10,000 Twitter accounts that tweeted the hashtag over 40,000 times showed signs of being bots.
Out of 9,899 accounts analyzed from Feb. 20 to 27, 10% were flagged as having some or a high probability of being bots.
To conduct the study, information including usernames and tweets were pulled from Twitter’s API and analyzed using Indiana University’s Observatory On Social Media tool Botometer.
Botometer assessed around 1,200 qualifiers, including user activity patterns and social networks, to generate a “bot score” from zero to five.
For this study, accounts with a score ranging from two to five were considered as exhibiting some to high bot behaviour, while accounts that scored zero to two were viewed as most likely being authentic.
Out of the 1013 accounts that showed signs of being bots, nearly a quarter of them (213) scored four or higher, meaning the algorithm strongly suspected they were automated.
Most of the tweets using the hashtag were in support of the national blockade protests.
It is possible that the results included some authentic accounts as tweet automation, scheduling and hyperactivity could lead to the tool flagging an account as exhibiting bot behaviour. Due to past instances of banning or suspension by Twitter of authentic accounts due to reports on bot activity, account names were excluded from this report.
The first time the hashtag appeared on Twitter was on Jan. 12 in a press release by the Unist’ot’en Camp Facebook page shared by the Idle No More Twitter account. One day later blockades began popping up around the country, starting on Highway 401 and 403 in Ontario and then spreading elsewhere.
Among the earliest propagators of the hashtag was the Twitter account of North Shore Counter-Info which, as exclusively reported on by True North, provided instructions on how to destroy rail infrastructure and claimed responsibility for various instances of rail sabotage in Ontario.
Malicious bot activity is a social media phenomenon that has been known to spread misinformation and alter the public dialogue around critical issues.
As noted by the creators of Botometer, social bots can be used for a variety of purposes including for the spreading of terrorist propaganda and recruitment.
“Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate discussions, alter the popularity of users, pollute content and spread misinformation, and even perform terrorist propaganda and recruitment actions,” wrote the tool’s creators.
A similar study by The Guardian employing Botometer found that a quarter of all tweets about the climate crisis were believed to be produced by bots. Although in this instance, the bots were largely anti-environmentalist.
Canadians are recovering money owed to them from the government with a little-known Canada Revenue Agency program that lets them see uncashed cheques that have been issued to them.
The “uncashed cheques” button at the bottom of the right-hand task bar of CRA’s My Account portal will take taxpayers to a page showing the dollar value, date, and file number of uncashed cheques.
If you no longer have the cheque, you can complete a form to have the government reissue it.
You can view your uncashed cheques at CRA’s My Account portal
CRA spokesperson Etienne Biram says that the program is to help Canadians get the money they are entitled to.
“In order to help taxpayers reclaim these long lost funds, we recently soft launched this new feature to let taxpayers know if they have an uncashed cheque with the CRA,” he said.
As cheques issued by the government never expire, Canadians can receive their money regardless of how long ago the original cheque was issued.
Between 1998 and 2018 over $1 billion worth of government issued cheques went uncashed. According to the CRA, about one in five people have at least one cheque owing to them.
“There are many reasons Canadians may have an uncashed cheque from the Canada Revenue Agency. For example, someone may have moved and not updated their address, believed the payment was issued to them in error, or the cheque may have been lost, stolen, or destroyed,” CRA says.
The new feature went viral last week after Twitter user @3rdPeriodSuits shared his experience finding a cheque for $105 from 2017.
Other Twitter users have reported finding cheques owed ranging from a few dollars to over $10,000.
Last week, in an interview with the CBC, Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay stated that he is “personally opposed” to restricting access to all abortion services. While allowing caucus members to introduce legislation on the topic, he said he would whip his cabinet members into voting against such legislation, significantly reducing the chance any bill on the matter will succeed.
While some progressives applauded this decision, MacKay’s statements run contrary to a core founding policy principle of the Conservative Party of Canada, and if honoured under his leadership, would continue a concerning trend towards more centralization in the hands of political leaders at the expense of ordinary Canadians.
The Conservative Party’s policy declaration has long-recognized the importance of free votes on issues of moral conscience such as abortion and euthanasia, linking free votes to the importance of restoring democratic accountability in our House of Commons. Prime Minister Stephen Harper followed this approach closely during his near-decade in office, allowing both members of his caucus and his cabinet to vote on these issues. For example, over a dozen Harper cabinet ministers – including Jason Kenney and Rona Ambrose – voted for M313, a motion that would have formed a committee to re-examine the legal definition of when a fetus becomes a human being, despite Prime Minister Harper himself voting against.
In allowing these free votes on conscience rights, Prime Minister Harper correctly recognized that legislators have a larger role than just voting in a manner that is preferred by a party leader and their political staff. Legislators also have to represent the interests of their constituents – which sometimes can differ from the official stances of the political party of their representative – and also stay true to their individual convictions.
Striking the balance between loyalty to one’s party, constituents and conviction is no easy task, but allowing free votes on moral matters seems to be a safe way to encourage this as, unlike supply or confidence motions, these conscience bills will not impact a party’s ability to continue governing in the House of Commons.
Under Justin Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberals have taken a markedly different approach than that of the Harper Conservatives, including mandating that pro-life individuals would no longer be welcome in their government. However MacKay’s stance on prohibiting cabinet members from voting on abortion has, in effect, sent the same message to party members concerned with these moral issues: you either need to keep quiet and vote the way the leadership tells you – or you are not welcome.
Asking members of cabinet to vote against their convictions is frankly a wrong decision for someone seeking to lead a socially diverse Conservative Party, and seeks to put the party on a slippery slope to adopting the same authoritarian approach currently utilized by Justin Trudeau.
The problems of disallowing pro-life or other socially conscious MPs from serving in cabinet is exacerbated when you consider the importance of social conservatives to the conservative movement in Canada. They are some of the most active and organized volunteers at the grassroots level, contributing significantly to both fundraising and get-out-the-vote operations. One has to only look at how social conservative candidates performed in the 2017 leadership election to realize they are sizeable chunk of the party base, as they played a key role in helping then-MP Brad Trost place fourth overall beating a number of popular establishment candidates who disavowed social conservatism, such as Lisa Raitt and Michael Chong, and ultimately delivered the party leadership to Andrew Scheer over Maxime Bernier.
Ultimately, Peter MacKay needs to reverse course on this policy limiting conscience rights for cabinet ministers if he expects to successfully lead a united Conservative Party of Canada. Conservatives expect a Stephen Harper, not a Justin Trudeau, and that means working with members of your party and allowing them to voice their concerns – even when you disagree with them.
