We all know that real victims — of war, genocide, mistreatment — certainly exist, but when are we seeing a “victim cult” that is focused on the past over the present, at the expense of the future? When does the victimhood narrative become debilitating and pathological?
True North’s Lindsay Shepherd is joined by public policy analyst and author Mark Milke, PhD, to discuss victim narratives, public apologies, “20-something totalitarians” who stifle speech on campus, damaging notions of “pure culture”, and success stories of groups who have overcome the victim narrative.
Beginning next year, the Quebec government will start requiring new immigrants hoping to live in the province to take a “democratic values and Quebec values” test.
Premier François Legault highlighted the need for immigrants to be in-line with the province’s values and recently implemented secularism law, otherwise known as Bill 21, which bars public servants from wearing religious symbolism to work.
“I think it’s important if somebody wants to come and live in Quebec to know that, for example, women are equal to men in Quebec,” said Legault.
While the test doesn’t apply to refugees or asylum seekers, economic immigrants hoping to live in the province will have to get a grade of 75 per cent or higher. In its entirety, the test will be composed of 20 questions.
Bill 21 and Legault’s values test took a front seat during the 2019 election and campaign. While several candidates spoke out and said they were personally opposed to the religious symbols law, including NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, they maintained that they would not intervene in the court challenge to the legislation if elected.
During the French language leaders’ debate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood by the province’s decision to impose a values test on new immigrants.
“Quebec has a lot of power over immigration, more than any other province, and that’s a good thing because of the Quebec identity and because of the need to protect the French language,” said Trudeau during the debate calling the test “appropriate”.
When a similar type of test was suggested by Conservative Leadership Candidate Kellie Leitch on a federal level, the mainstream media and fellow politicians expressed outrage over the plan.
According to her such a system should screen new immigrants for “intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms.”
Outlets like the CBC, Buzzfeed and the Toronto Star took Leitch to task when she first proposed the idea. In one Buzzfeed article titled “Here’s How 11 Muslims Feel About the “Canadian Values” Debate,” one respondent called an attempt to define Canadian identity and values “fruitless”.
In another article, Toronto Star columnist called the idea of a values test “anti-Muslim” and Macleans called it “full of baloney”.
A sold-out Toronto speech featuring renowned feminist speaker Meghan Murphy was targeted by a mob of LGBT protestors who hurled insults at event-goers and barred them from leaving the venue on October 29.
The subject of Murphy’s talk centred around women’s rights in relation to transgender activism which she states ignore the biological reality of sex.
“I will not stand by and allow people to claim that protecting women’s rights is bigotry,” said Murphy during the talk.
“None of this is about transphobia … it’s about women’s rights to say no to (biological) men.”
Murphy and other women have been the target of threats and intimidation for simply stating that they don’t believe biological males can be females.
Earlier this year, the Vancouver Rape Relief centre was vandalized with the message “KILL TERFS” and had dead rats nailed to its doors in a prior incident over their “woman-only” policy. A “TERF” or “trans exclusionary radical feminist” is a derogatory slang word detractors use to label feminists who don’t prescribe to gender identity ideology.
Meghan, who is a Vancouver resident, has had a past event in her hometown similarly protested when the public library there also stood by its decision to host her. She has also had her account suspended from Twitter for tweeting “men aren’t women”.
Several attempts were made to have the Toronto speech cancelled, including condemnations from the city’s mayor, John Tory, who requested that the Toronto Public Library would reconsider the booking.
Despite the intimidation, the public library stood by their decision to rent the room out to Murphy citing a need to uphold “the principles of intellectual freedom”.
“As a public library and public institution, we have an obligation to protect free speech. When Toronto Public Library (TPL) makes meeting rooms available to the public we serve, we need to make them available to all on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use,” said City Librarian, Vickery Bowles.
Murphy will be speaking again on Saturday, November 2nd at Simon Fraser University, where protests are also being planned ahead of her appearance.
A Nigerian man who plead guilty for peddling child pornography in the United States is being held in Canada after he managed to escape into Quebec through Roxham Road.
51-year-old Adesanya Prince has been in Canada for 19 months and is fighting the Canadian government so that he doesn’t have to be extradited to Texas where he will serve a sentence for his crime.
Prince’s lawyer, Marie-Hélène Giroux, is arguing that his extradition order should be thrown out because he could be deported back to Nigeria if returned to U.S. custody and he would have to face poor conditions in a Texas prison.
According to court documents, while Prince worked as a security guard in January 2017 he sent a female co-worker bestiality videos and a film of a two to four year old girl being raped.
Despite being considered a danger to Canada, Prince was released from custody by a Quebec court for three days and allowed to roam freely in Montreal. He was returned to custody after the U.S. filed a request demanding his arrest.
Only days after pleading guilty to the child pornography charge, Prince walked across the U.S. – Canada border through Roxham Road. Only after screening by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) did Prince’s charges become aware to border officials.
Over the past two years, approximately 50,000 people have been able to stroll into Canada and claim asylum through the illegal border crossing point. Traffic through the area is so regular that American taxi companies are offering specific rates from nearby cities in the U.S. to shuttle illegal border crossers to the area so they can enter Canada.
While Prince was able to be identified as a sex offender and immediately detained, illegal migrants, including those with criminal records have been known to disappear after entering the country.
Background checks and initial security screenings done by the RCMP and CBSA can take less than two hours depending on how much information is available about the individuals. RCMP records also show that a number of people with an “unknown nationality” are being processed by the federal police force and the CBSA.
Currently, Prince is being held in a CBSA detention centre north of Montreal.
One man has been charged after vandalism was reported at a Jewish centre in Ontario.
Saeed Ahmad, 35, of Georgina, Ontario has been charged with Mischief in Relation to Religious Property.
York Regional Police announced the arrest following an investigation into reported vandalism on October 19 at the Chabad Jewish Centre in Georgina.
Ahmad is alleged to have damaged the Centre’s sukkah, a ceremonial hut created for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Ahmad is also alleged to have damaged a sign on the Centre’s property.
Despite being arrested by the York Regional Police Hate Crimes Unit, Ahmad has not been charged with any hate crime.
Police said in a statement that Ahman will remain in custody until his bail hearing.
The vandalism in Georgina is just one of several acts of vandalism targeting the Jewish community of Ontario over recent years.
Earlier this month a synagogue in Hamilton was targeted with anti-Semitic graffiti, with swastikas spray-painted around the building.
Another instance saw a glass door smashed at a synagogue in Thornhill.
York Regional Police reiterated their zero tolerance policy towards hate crimes.
“York Regional Police does not tolerate hate crime in any form. Those who victimize individuals based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or mental or physical disability will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
One of Canada’s largest energy companies, Encana, is redomiciling to the United States. While its CEO insists the decision is not a political one, its former CEO says it’s unavoidable with the “destructive” nature of Justin Trudeau’s energy policy. The decision was made to open the door to more American investment, raising the question of why people don’t want to invest in Canadian energy companies.
My belief in the importance of Canada-headquartered companies goes back to the early 1970s when, as a young engineer, I joined the Canadian subsidiary of a Nebraska-based oil and gas company. While I was treated well and given substantial responsibility, I yearned to work for a company where the decisions were made in Calgary, not Omaha. That opportunity came with a new startup called the Alberta Energy Company. I joined AEC to head the building of the oil and gas division.
The company grew quickly. But five years later, the entire oil and gas industry was struck a huge blow by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program that capped oil prices below world levels and slapped a confiscatory tax on the gross revenues of energy companies. Canada-headquartered companies were supposed to benefit from cash grants, provided we shifted our drilling to federally owned lands. But most of those lands were in the Arctic where drilling costs were prohibitive and access to pipelines non-existent. After the Mulroney Conservatives killed the Trudeau policies in 1985, AEC got back to the job of company building.
Not long after I became the company’s CEO in 1994, American takeovers of Canadian oil and gas companies began accelerating. Having grown AEC into one of the two local energy companies with the largest market value, rivalled only by PanCanadian Petroleum (a member the venerable Canadian Pacific group), we managed to avoid that fate. But market intelligence revealed we were on the radar screen of the big global multinational majors, the only players with the capacity to take us out. We knew that the best defence was to become an even larger, nationally important energy company. On Jan. 28, 2002, Alberta Energy and PanCanadian announced a $27 billion “merger of equals” that would create the world’s largest publicly traded independent oil and gas producer.
Given my career-long belief in the importance of Canadian-controlled companies, it was important that the name of our new company symbolize its status as Canada’s flagship energy company. Hence the name Encana — from the words “Energy Canada.”
Our merger announcement set off a two-month regulatory period for gaining shareholder approval. During those two months, both companies would be, in stock market lexicon, “in play” and vulnerable to takeover attempts from one of the global majors.
Meanwhile, then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government was facing criticism for the continuing loss of Canadian head offices to foreign takeovers. Without the merger, there was a very real possibility that both of Canada’s largest energy companies could fall into foreign hands. We urgently needed the federal government’s help to keep that from happening. Hence, when David O’Brien and I embarked on our mission to convince shareholders to vote for the deal, our first stop was the prime minister’s office.
The result was an unprecedented statement in the House of Commons by the minister of natural resources that the creation of EnCana was in the national interest. Then-Finance Minister Paul Martin also made strongly supportive comments a few days later. These statements were critical to repelling potential takeover attempts that would have derailed our merger.
Employees of the two companies united in our mission of “energy for people.” When I retired four years later, Encana was our country’s largest energy company and also the largest of all Canadian companies by stock market value. My dream of building a Canada-headquartered energy company, invulnerable to takeover, had become a reality.
I could never have imagined that, a dozen years later, the company would decide to export itself.
Over the past three years, Encana has shifted much of its multi-billon-dollar capital program to the United States. Then last May, Encana CEO Doug Suttles moved from Calgary to Denver. This month came news of Encana’s $7.7 billion acquisition of U.S. producer Newfield Exploration. That will mean that Encana’s largest production region will now be the United States, not in Canada.
Reluctant to state that stark reality in so many words, Encana’s CEO has instead said the company will now be “headquarterless.” But with half its board of directors, 60 per cent of its production and the vast majority of its capital program south of the border, it’s impossible to deny that Canada’s flagship energy company has now become Americanized.
Disappointed as I am by this turn of events, I cannot blame Suttles. He and his board have a responsibility to invest shareholder capital where production can be delivered and sold at international prices. The day of the Newfield announcement, Canadian oil was selling at US$19.10 a barrel, while prices were US$63.10 in Texas. Canada’s captive-market discount gives away $200 million a day as a gift to American buyers.
The past few years have been a nightmare for the Canadian industry, where every light at the end of the tunnel has turned out to be train driven by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau barrelling at us from the opposite direction. His oil tanker ban in northern B.C. and his refusal to allow a pipeline in the Great Bear Rainforest killed Northern Gateway. And his introduction of a post-regulatory hearing requirement to consider “upstream emissions” forced TransCanada to abandon its nation-building Energy East Pipeline that would have replaced foreign oil. Meanwhile, hundreds of tankers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries make their way up the St. Lawrence without any such emissions reviews.
That left the now-stymied Trans Mountain expansion as the only hope of getting Canadian oil to tidewater. As if this weren’t enough to deter investment in Canada’s oil and gas industry, Bill C-69, the so-called Impact Assessment Act, now before the Senate, will make the chances of accomplishing resource infrastructure projects seem near impossible to investors. And then there are carbon taxes that will hit the industry particularly hard. These are the disastrous actions that are killing what has long been Canada’s most economically important industry.
The story of Encana’s creation and rise features the important actions of one Liberal government, many decades ago, that, whatever its other mistakes, at least believed in the importance of a strong domestic oil and gas industry. And now the sad story of Encana’s Americanization features the actions of another Liberal government that is ideologically opposed to the industry’s very existence.
A British Columbia journalist was fired just eight
days into the job, after his editors uncovered tweets critical of the
mainstream media and in support of the People’s Party of Canada.
Alan Forsythe had just started work on Oct. 9 at the Hope Standard, a weekly newspaper
published Black Press Media, a BC-based chain operating over 170 titles in western
Canada and the United States. On Oct. 17, he received a letter from editor Ken
Goudswaard terminating his employment.
“A recent review of your story on the all-candidates meeting led me to have concerns about your ability to perform the duties of a journalist in Hope,” the letter says. “Upon further investigation I learned that you had posted concerning statements on social media including, just days after you began employment with Black Press, a posting about ‘corrupt, bought off media” and which expressed partisan views with respect to federal political matters that you were covering as a journalist.”
The referenced story is about a community debate with candidates standing for election in Chilliwack—Hope. It remains available on the outlet’s website, though Forsythe’s byline does not appear on it.
The article
exhibits no apparent bias. All candidates in the debate are quoted favourably. Forsythe
told True North that one paragraph from his submitted version was removed,
however.
That paragraph
quoted PPC candidate and local teacher Rob Bogunovic as saying, “I’ve been called
a Nazi and misogynist by Paul Henderson in the Chilliwack Progress,” in
response to a question about his treatment by the media.
A Sept. 13 tweet by Henderson directed at Bogunovic does, in fact, accuse the PPC of “the language and technique of the Nazis in the 1930s,” adding, “It’s all eerily similar.”
It was this allegation that sparked the post singled out in Forsythe’s termination letter.
“The corrupt, bought off media tell you the PPC are Nazis, a slap in the face to the candidates running and we who support them,” Forsythe tweeted. “Let the MSM know, Canadians are sick of their lies and we are taking back our country.”
The Chilliwack Progress is also owned by Black Press Media.
Forsythe
relocated for the job, which required him to join Unifor. He indicated there’s
a double standard in how Black Press treated his political opinions versus Henderson’s.
“I was shocked
that after all the effort (Black Press) went to to get me out there, and all
the effort I made in moving there, they fired (me) after a week,” Forsythe
said. “I would understand a formal warning. After all…they had a reporter
slandering a local high school teacher, the union I was forced to join was very
publicly campaigning for the Liberals, but I’m the one summarily fired for a
tweet?”
In response to an inquiry from True North, Hope Standard publisher Carly Ferguson said “Black Press Media does not comment on personnel matters.”
Forsythe said
he would have worked with his employer had concerns been raised with him prior
to his dismissal, including deleting the tweet in question.
“That comment was in retrospect none too wise,” he said. “However, I was thinking of the CBC, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, where ridiculous, over-the-top, anti-PPC material was being published and ‘reported’ regularly. This wasn’t a matter of a difference of opinion on political philosophy; it was denigrating a diverse swath of Canadian citizens for daring to hold different ideas from the approved narrative. As a journalist, I find that distasteful.
A review of
Forsythe’s Twitter feed for the period in which he was employed by Black Press shows
numerous retweets of pro-PPC content, as well as his own criticism of CBC’s
mid-election lawsuit against the Conservative Party of Canada. He also made
clear that he voted for the PPC, though he told True North this wasn’t new
information.
“I was tweeting
(admittedly a lot) about the PPC before I was hired in the run up to the election,”
he said. “It was an exhaustive interview process, lasting three weeks. Since I was
already tweeting PPC support, I didn’t think too much about it.”
Forsythe
pointed out that Unifor, which represents thousands of Canadian journalists, was
tweeting explicitly anti-Conservative messages throughout the election.
“I’ve been a
journalist for a while now, working in newsrooms that were always, and I mean
always, uniformly left,” he said. “I’ve never made a secret of my right-leaning
biases, which I feel challenges me to be as balanced as I can in reporting
news.”
“The proof is
in the pudding,” Forsythe said, pointing to a lengthy interview he did with
former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock at the height of the sponsorship
scandal.
“This despite
the fact I had written anti-Liberal columns,” he said. “But I’d interviewed
Alcock several months earlier and had covered other stories…so he felt I was a
fair and balanced reporter.”
Forsythe said
he aims to launch a news-focused podcast, though he hasn’t ruled out legal
action against Black Press.
The massive wildfire in Northern Alberta that torched 2730 square kilometres earlier this year was caused by arson according to the RCMP.
The fire, which burned from May 18 to July 1 before it could be contained, resulted in the evacuation of several communities and first nations in Northern Alberta. Authorities are now looking for witnesses to the crime.
Out of the hundreds of fires that occurred in Alberta in 2019, the McMillan fire caused 31% of all damage to the province’s forests.
“To the families affected by this wildfire who were evacuated, and the forest industry who suffered losses, we will find the person responsible for the McMillian wildfire,” Alberta Forestry Minister Devin Dreeshen said.
“This is an important step in helping to build trust in Alberta’s justice system.”
In the wake of the wildfires, the Alberta government announced that they will be providing $30 million in disaster relief.
The conclusion that one of Alberta’s largest forest fires in 2019 was started by arson conflicts with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims that climate change is the real culprit.
Trudeau has said he believes forest fires are caused by global warming.
He said that people will have to live with the “new reality” climate change has brought in.
“To make sure that we learn how to protect people, how to protect livelihoods, and how we adjust to what is, unfortunately, a new reality of more extreme weather events across the province, across the country, and around the world,” Trudeau said last year.
Despite not having conclusive evidence, Trudeau claimed that his carbon tax would prevent forest fires.
“Extreme weather events are extraordinarily expensive for Canadians, our communities and our economy,” he said.
“We need to be taking real action to prevent climate change. That’s why we’re moving forward on a price on pollution right across the country, despite the fact that Conservative politicians are trying to push back against that.”
This claim was echoed by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, blasting the then newly elected Jason Kenney for ending the carbon tax, essentially claiming that his government was contributing to forest fires.
These kinds of predictions of impending calamity caused by climate change have so far been left unsubstantiated by both current observations and past records.
When Kellie Leitch proposed values screening for immigrants, the Liberals and Justin Trudeau called her racist and “fringe.” But when Quebec’s government does the same thing, Trudeau’s criticism is nowhere to be found.
While there’s merit to the policy, True North’s Andrew Lawton says it also reveals Trudeau’s double standard for what Quebec does compared to anywhere else in Canada.
