The government should not pick winners and losers in the economy.

For as long as I’ve been following politics and public policy, I’ve heard this phrase emphasized and repeated — especially in fiscally conservative and libertarian circles.

The idea is that the free market should determine which businesses succeed — based on pricing, how well they serve their customers, and so on — and the government should not be in the business of subsidizing businesses.

The underlying idea is that if a company receives a government handout, they have an unfair advantage over their competitors.

In Canada, in practice, however, the opposite is true.

Look at Bombardier Inc., the Montreal-based aerospace manufacturing company.

In 2017, the Trudeau government bailed out Bombardier with a $373-million federal loan. At the same time, the Liberal government in Quebec also provided a taxpayer-funded bailout to the tune of $1 billion.

But Bombardier is anything but a winner. About 18 months after receiving bailouts and favourable loans from their friends in the Liberal party, Bombardier announced it was cutting about 5,000 jobs globally — 3,000 of them here in Canada.

This week, shares in the company dropped to an all-time low after Bombardier acknowledged its 2019 revenues failed to meet targets. The price plummeted by one-third of its value in a single day.

Bombardier is not alone.

A year ago, grocery giant Loblaw received a $12-million handout from the Liberal government to replace its refrigerators with new low-emission alternatives. Loblaw is a $25-billion company and the largest food retailer in Canada.

Why on earth would a profitable and successful corporation need a bailout from taxpayers to improve its own technology?

It was a slap in the face to taxpayers and employees earlier this month when Loblaw pointed to its own technology as the cause of major job cuts.

The company announced it would be laying off 700 workers and closing two distribution centres in Quebec and Ontario, noting the positions would be replaced by automation.

Was it the same technology that the federal government just “invested” in?

This brings us to our friends in the media, who are also cursed when it comes to government handouts.

This week we learned CBC’s ad revenues fell by over 37% in 2019, falling by $65 million from 2018.

Businesses are no longer interested in buying ads on CBC because Canadians, by and large, are no longer tuning into the state broadcaster. Fewer than 1% of Canadians watch local evening news on CBC.

CBC’s overall market share is down to just 5%, while its dedicated news channel, CBC News Network, has just a 1.4% market share.

Fewer Canadians than ever before are watching CBC and, meanwhile, the state broadcaster receives more money than ever — a $1.2-billion annual subsidy.

Taxpayers are paying CBC to remain lazy, biased and, worst of all, uninteresting.

Instead of learning that the government should not be funding and bailing out media companies, the Trudeau government instead should set up a new scheme to extend taxpayer handouts to more even journalists.

Last fall, it announced a $595-million slush fund to bailout establishment newspapers (including Postmedia, which owns the Sun).

If these media companies are run anything like other corporate welfare-receiving firms, it will likely lead to more complacency, more mistakes and more layoffs to come.

Partnering with the government is a lose-lose situation. Taxpayers are on the hook for bailing out failing businesses and those businesses continue with bad habits that lead to more failure.

Politicians may not learn their lesson, but perhaps business owners will. Partnering with the government is the kiss of death.

The Ottawa Catholic school board wants to increase the diversity of literature being studied in their Grade 11 English courses throughout the district. But rather than featuring literary works drawn from many different genres, historical periods and cultures, the school board has decided that the mandatory “English” class will be renamed “English: Understanding Contemporary First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Voices,” and only feature indigenous writers, at the exclusion of all other cultures and ethnicities. 

An article in the Ottawa Citizen earlier this week proclaimed the Grade 11 English students at the Ottawa Catholic School Board will be “ditching Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood in favour of studying literature by Indigenous authors like Richard Wagamese and Tanya Talaga.”

I should have reached out to Margaret Atwood for comment, and ask her how it feels to be an award-winning, iconic author that has been abruptly “ditched.”

The switch to a 100% indigenous reading list will be instituted across the Ottawa Catholic school board by 2022. Ottawa’s English public school board has already made the switch to an all-indigenous Grade 11 reading list, and the Greater Essex County District School Board has vowed to change its curriculum by the end of this year.

Apologists may argue that the mandatory all-indigenous course is only for one year, and that students have every other grade to study writers from other cultures and races. However, I would counter that Grade 11 and Grade 12 English are the last two English courses students will take in high school, which means for many students, those are the last two English classes they will take for the rest of their lives. Being exposed to works from a variety of traditions, eras and cultures should be a priority in the upper years of high school, when students have had the most time to refine their reading comprehension, critical thinking and writing skills. And after all, don’t we as a nation proclaim to “celebrate diversity” and affirm “diversity is our strength?”

It is also false to act as if Grade 11 students will not have encountered indigenous literature or indigenous history in prior years. These changes are being made because of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action, which includes mandatory age-appropriate curriculum on indigenous history and residential schools from kindergarten to Grade 12. By Grade 11, any student that’s actually showed up to class in the last decade will not be ignorant to Canada’s history of residential schools. (Here in British Columbia, I was helping my little brother with a worksheet on residential schools when he was in Grade 5). 

According to the Ottawa Citizen, literature commonly studied in the traditional English course at the Ottawa Catholic School Board includes either MacBeth or Othello by William Shakespeare; Night by Elie Wiesel; and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Students would also study short stories from authors that might include Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Sinclair Ross, and Jamaica Kincaid.

From the various English 11 course outlines available online, it appears students are reading everything from George Orwell’s Animal Farm to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

Strangely, while the new all-indigenous Grade 11 English courses are mandatory, the Ontario Ministry of Education simultaneously maintains that there is no mandatory or recommended reading list for Grade 11 English. The ministry only mandates that classes must provide material that reflects the diversity of Canada.

By all means, it should be assured that works by indigenous authors are included in English classes. But to make the mandatory Grade 11 English course study the works of only indigenous authors, at the exclusion of all other ethnicities and cultures? That isn’t consistent with the tenets of diversity and inclusion.

B.C.’s newly minted Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender thinks Canada should defer to the United Nations directive to abandon three resource energy projects including the TMX pipeline. 

Somehow in her mind Canada’s sovereignty should take a back seat to the hand-wringers and pearl clutchers at the UN. 

Given the countries appointed to sit on the UN’s Human Rights Council, it’s hard to take them seriously on any issue. Nor should Canada surrender her sovereignty to the UN.

Govender tries to cloak this intrusion into the policies and politics of a sovereign country by trying to paint energy projects as somehow racist. 

“I join CERD [Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination] in urging Canada to immediately cease the forced eviction of Wet’suwet’en and Secwepemc peoples, to prohibit the use of lethal weapons, and to guarantee no force will be used against them.”

Um, what?

She wants the RCMP to disarm when they are dealing with this blockade in a remote part of B.C. This after we learn the RCMP discovered bags full of gasoline-soaked rags and full jerry cans? There’s not a chance any member of the RCMP should go up there unarmed. 

Keean Bexte of the Rebel Media went up there this week and he reported on sabotaged trees called “widow makers” and tires filled with gas and other inflammables. And yet Govender thinks the RCMP should disarm to deal with these domestic terrorists.  Nonsense.

We also learned from Bexte that so-called Indian band staging the blockade isn’t, but a collection of hereditary chiefs who have broken with the elected Chief and Council and formed this non-profit group. They are being funded by the likes of the Tides Foundation and the Pembina Institute.  

This is yet another example of foreign-funded enviro loons trying to impose their will on Canadians and using bought and paid for First Nations for their nefarious purpose. 

What Govender conveniently ignores is how many First Nations groups support the energy projects to provide employment to their members and cash benefits to the bands. 

Govender has spent her career with a variety of left wing organizations including the Pivot Legal Society, the notorious cop hating, obstructive collection of fools that operate in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Speaking of Tides, yesterday the Prime Minister’s office announced the appointment of Sarah Goodman as Senior Climate Policy Director. Rather promoted to I should say. She has been working advising the Liberals for the past couple of years. 

The trouble is she is the former Vice President of the Tides Foundation, one of the organizations funding the scam that is the Wet’suwet’en blockade. 

So, a climate activist is now ensconced firmly within the government. Any pretence by the Prime Minister that he wants to work with Alberta has just gone up in smoke. And Tides Foundation fingerprints are on all of this. 

Make no mistake about it, the Tides Foundation is the enemy of the oil and gas sector and as such, the people of Canada. 

With the western separation movement gaining steam, this would seem to be an incredibly foolish move by the Prime Minister. He ignores the west at Canada’s peril.