Last week, Justin Trudeau had the opportunity to show Canadians he was serious about the economy and that he had a plan to address the growing western separatist voices.

He did nothing of the kind.

Instead, Trudeau appointed some of his most loyal liberal hacks to cabinet.

True North’s Leo Knight explains in his latest video.

The B.C. government is currently looking into whether British Columbians who engage in “racist behaviour” can be ticketed and fined. 

Ravi Kahlon, MLA for Delta North, penned a letter to Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth formally requesting the province look into what authority it has to crack down on “racist and hateful behaviour.”

Kahlon is the same BC NDP MLA that piled onto the Mark Hecht controversy.

In September, Hecht wrote an op-ed for the Vancouver Sun titled, “Ethnic diversity harms social trust, economic well-being, argues instructor.” His op-ed, which reviewed research related to ethnic diversity and social trust, was eventually unpublished from the Vancouver Sun’s website after the newspaper was mobbed online and accused of spreading anti-immigration viewpoints.

Kahlon wrote in his own response op-ed that Hecht’s article was, “in short, racism and white supremacy wearing a thin disguise of academic bluster. It was every kind of wrong. I was floored. I was angry. I was sad. I couldn’t sleep.”

True North reached out to Kahlon and inquired about the real-world application of his proposal, and whether Mark Hecht and the Vancouver Sun would deserve to be ticketed. At the time of publication, True North had not heard back from Kahlon nor his office.

Many Liberal and NDP politicians are intent on punishing and censoring people whose views they do not approve of, whether those views are expressed online or offline.

Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, who was formerly a substitute member of the House of Common’s Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, proposed during the Justice Committee’s study on online hate that an administrative judicial system be created that could issue tickets for online hate the same way you’re issued a ticket “if you’re drunk in the street and disorderly.”

The Justice Committee published in their final report, Taking Action To End Online Hate in June 2019, that they recommend bringing back section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act in order to censor “online hate.”

Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which was enacted in 2001 but repealed in 2013, prohibited the electronic or telephonic transmission of “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

The federal NDP stated in their supplementary report that they agree with reintroducing an updated version of section 13 of the Human Rights Act.

Before it was repealed in 2013 after Conservative MP Brian Storseth tabled a private member’s bill, section 13 was used to attack and shut down the writings of conservative commentators Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn by hauling them into quasi-judicial human rights tribunals.

Seeing as the Criminal Code is already in place to prosecute hate propaganda and incitement to hatred, it is bewildering that Liberal and NDP politicians, at both the federal and provincial levels, are scheming to introduce such draconian legislation. 

These proposed laws would almost certainly cast too wide of a net and entrap people who are only guilty of expressing inarticulate concerns or non-politically correct opinions, not so-called hate speech.

“People are dying in the streets, they’re killing young people every night.”

That’s what a friend in Tehran told my family over the phone this week. “It’s a revolution, just like in 1979,” said another friend, who was there during the Islamic revolution.

Watching the news from Iran this week left one feeling both terrified and hopeful.

The protests are larger and more energetic than ever. According to a human rights activist I spoke to, hundreds of thousands of people have joined the protests in 165 cities.

The Iranian regime is imposing harsh and more tyrannical penalties against those taking a stand. They shut down the country’s internet to stifle the movement, and when that failed, they sent the Revolutionary Guards out to wage war on the protesters.

According to another dissident I spoke to on Friday, the regime has killed 251 people, injured 3,500 and more than 7,000 protesters had been arrested and detained.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic declared the protests are over, and the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamanei stated on Twitter that they had “repelled the enemy.”

Counter to the regime’s propaganda, anger continues to mount in Iran and the people seem determined to overthrow their autocratic rulers.

The people of Iran have been struggling for a generation, and every year public protests erupt in cities across the country. The mainstream media usually call these “economic demonstrations,” with some reports going as far as blaming “U.S. sanctions”. But the grievances of the Iranian people run much deeper than its socialist economy.

Iran is a theocratic dictatorship, with a horrendous human rights record. According to Amnesty International, Iran is a world leader in executions — imposing the death penalty on teenagers and minors, political dissidents, religious minorities and homosexuals.

“Trials were systematically unfair. Torture and other ill-treatment were widespread and committed with impunity. Floggings, amputations and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments were carried out,” read Amnesty’s 2018 Iran report.

The corrupt mullahs who run the country prefer to send the government’s limited cash to fuel war and terrorism in Syria, Israel and throughout the Middle East rather than take care of the basic needs of their citizens.

Hence why the protesters are chanting: “death to the Mullahs” and “death to [President] Rouhani” rather than “death to America” and “death to Israel” — the chants long led by the Islamist rulers.

Now is the time to stand by the protesters in Iran in their courageous fight against the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.

Instead of standing up for freedom and democracy in Iran though, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has yet to even acknowledge the protests. The world’s biggest virtue-signaller hasn’t even bothered to send out a tweet.

When mass protests broke out across Iran in the final days of 2017, some in the Trudeau government seemed to shamefully side with the Islamic Republic. Liberal MP Majid Jowhari urged protesters to respect the “elected government” of Iran, while pushing a government petition to allow Iranian officials back into Canada.

Calling the Islamic Republic an “elected government” is a slap in the face to those risking their lives in Iran, and to the hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving dissidents who have fled Iran — many of whom now live in Canada.

Canadians should stand with the brave protesters desperately fighting for freedom and liberty, and the Trudeau government should put an end to its efforts to build a friendship with a wicked regime that is now murdering citizens in the streets.