On Monday, a man was arrested by First Nations police in rural Manitoba after illegally crossing into Canada via the U.S. border. As has become the norm, there was barely any news coverage. Much of the media didn’t bat an eye.

Over the last three-and-a-half years, tens of thousands of people have illegally walked across the border in between official ports of entry — of those, 58,054 have been arrested and detained by the RCMP.

Since 2016, Justin Trudeau’s first full year in office, 156,155 people have arrived in Canada under false pretenses — walking in illegally, using fake documents or pretending to be tourists — only to make asylum claims in the hopes of becoming refugees in Canada. This is according to data from the Government of Canada on asylum claims from January 2016 to June 2019.

This staggering figure is in addition to Canada’s planned annual intake of immigrants and refugees, people who apply in advance, wait in a queue and come to Canada through official immigration channels.

The problem of illegal entry into Canada has shown no sign of slowing down.

Back in 2017, when the illegal border crossings really started to surge, the media was all over it. They wrote sympathetic stories of migrants looking for a better life in Canada; painting them as hapless victims and omitting the fact that many were breaking Canadian laws.

Journalists invented their own narrative about the situation, claiming that somehow these migrants were fleeing U.S. President Donald Trump.

The reality was far more complicated. Many of these migrants were taking advantage of lax U.S. tourist visa rules that allowed them to travel to North America without any previous background screening and gain access to Canada’s generous asylum system.

Far from fleeing Trump, a common migrant route was to fly from Lagos, Nigeria, to New York City (a flight that usually costs about $2,000), then on to Plattsburgh, N.Y., where human smugglers would transport them to Roxham Road along the border with rural Quebec. From there, the migrants would enter Canada illegally, get arrested, make asylum claims, then go on to Montreal or Toronto where they would start receiving tax-payer funded social welfare benefits.

After a lot of hype in the media, and a bit of scrambling by the Trudeau government, they created a new cabinet position for “border security and organized crime reduction” and began outreach in migrant communities to dispel false rumours about Canada’s immigration policies. The issue slowly faded out of sight.

Canadians could be forgiven for believing the crisis has been resolved. But the opposite is true. In the first six months of 2019, 26,860 people entered Canada illegally or under false pretenses to make asylum claims.

That number is higher than the first half of 2018, when Canada received 25,225 claims, and the first half of 2017 when 18,445 claims were filed. It’s more than the total number of claims in 2016: 23,870.

In other words, Canada is on track to have more asylum seekers this year than any of the past four years. And the average number of asylum seekers per year under Trudeau has been significantly higher than any previous government in Canadian history.

Trudeau’s #WelcomeToCanada virtue-signaling on social media led to a huge jump in illegal border crossings and asylum claims.

His government’s changes to the asylum system — rubber stamping migrants from the most dangerous countries and eliminating fast-tracked deportations for bogus asylum claimants from safe countries — has opened the floodgates to those who seek to take advantage of our generosity.

This week saw two more mass shootings in the U.S. They seem to have become so commonplace that, though we are horrified at the loss of innocent life, we are to a point inured to the emotional devastation.  

The citizens in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are mourning loved ones who never came home. Unfortunately, there is the typical knee-jerk response to blame guns and the gun culture in the U.S. Worse still were those who called the National Rifle Association murderers. To my knowledge no member of the N.R.A has ever been involved in any mass murder event. 

I should also point out that the weapons used in both of these events were acquired legally. In all fifty states to purchase a weapon from a Federal Firearm Licensed dealer you must undergo a background check. This is federal law. 

The problem is the background check looks at only criminal record checks. Anyone with a felony on their record cannot legally purchase a gun. Issues of domestic violence or stalking also preclude anyone from legally obtaining a weapon. 

Canada’s laws are much more restrictive that those in the U.S. But we still see mass shootings in this country. On the surface of things that would seem to neutralize the gun control debate as it is relative to mass shootings. 

But there’s much more to this. 

A few years ago, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut I was speaking with a federal law enforcement friend in the States. He sent me some information that was enlightening. 

This chart looks at school shootings in the U.S. over a 20 year period. 

When, in every case you have the suspect being on some form of psychotropic medication it’s fair to say that may be the problem. 

Now, I don’t know whether the El Paso shooter or the Dayton, Ohio shooter were on some form of psychotropic meds, but given what I’ve read about both of them, I’d say it’s a good bet. 

Society is too quick these days to allow our kids to be given psychotropic meds for all manner of behavioural issues like ADHD and the like. It’s too easy to blame some condition or other to explain why little Johnny isn’t doing well at school and the medical community has over the course of time been too complacent and go along. 

When I was in school, lo those many years ago, if you weren’t paying attention in class you were as likely to get a cuff across the back of the head and told to sit straight and pay attention. 

I am not saying we need to return to corporal punishment in our schools. I am saying that the proliferation of prescribing psychotropic meds to our kids is wrong and we, as a society, need to do a better job and not rely on lazy or quick answers to problems that have always existed.  

The self-designated police of fake news for the 2019 federal election mysteriously missed a major example of mis-/disinformation that occurred that spread like wildfire on Twitter this week. 

Mainstream media outlets BuzzFeed, CBC, National Observer and Toronto Star have all put reporters on the beat of monitoring disinformation online for this federal election. 

Some of these journalists thought it was important to report on the organic Twitter hashtag #TrudeauMustGo, one describing it as “a new wave of disinformation.” In reality it was overwhelmingly real accounts, not Russian bots, that were calling for the ousting of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this October. (Fake bot accounts always glom onto top trending hashtags on Twitter, which #TrudeauMustGo was.)

These journalists also like to suggest Russia will massively interfere in the Canadian election while largely ignoring the far greater threat of a far more influential China actually exerting its far bigger influence on this country. 

Journalists of the mainstream media largely ignore the connections between the Liberals and China, such as Liberal stalwart and recent ambassador to China John McCallum telling Chinese press that the Chinese government should go easy on the Liberals during the election because the Liberals staying in power will better serve Chinese interests.    

Disinfo reporters breathlessly reported about some bots joining in on #TrudeauMustGo, yet when an anonymous Liberal-partisan Twitter account tweeted out a bogus claim that the Conservatives had hired two actors to pose with CPC Leader Andrew Scheer there was nothing but virtual silence from these same journalists. 

Even Liberal partisans like the Prime Minister’s chief of staff’s husband and political commentator Rob Silver helped spread the disinformation. Lapsed right-wing commentator Charles Adler — who seems to be following in Michael Coren’s born-again Liberal footsteps these days — and Liberal MP Marlene Jennings also spread the disinfo that was retweeted by hundreds and liked by over a thousand. 

Neither the CBC, Buzzfeed, Toronto Star or National Observer published an article explaining this major piece of disinfo. 

What made this case all the more disturbing is that the anonymous Twitter account was able to hide the comments on its tweet from one of the actors they had falsely accused of being hired to pose with Scheer. The new feature allowing Twitter users to hide comments they don’t like is only available to Canadian users and was introduced in the lead-up to the 2019 election. 

The fact that it is being tested during an election raises major concerns that were just demonstrated by the Liberal-partisan anonymous Twitter user who was able to censor the truth while continuing to promote and spread their unsubstantiated claim far and wide.

Politicians (as well as other spin masters) like Environment Minister Catherine McKenna have started hiding some of the reasonable responses to their deceptive tweets, yet these disinfo journalists have not sounded the alarm over this major flaw with Twitter’s new feature that allows disinfo spreaders to go unchallenged directly.

Ironically, four of these same disinfo reporters from BuzzFeed and the Toronto Star spent months co-investigating right-of-centre news outlet The Post Millennial. Part of the hit piece focused on how one of its writers has affiliations with the Conservative movement in Canada, as if this somehow discredits the outlet as a whole, even though the mainstream press is littered with self-described objective reporters who are in actuality partisan hacks ignoring or downplaying the governing Liberals’ misdeeds. The CBC disinfo reporter also — independently of the others work — investigated and wrote about The Post Millennial.

It’s also important to note that the Toronto Star is now reaping millions of dollars from Trudeau’s bailout bribe of the media that his government unveiled in the lead-up to the election. CBC already got paid generously with an additional annual $150 million of taxpayer’s money shortly after its incredibly biased 2015 election coverage helped Trudeau assume power. 

The National Observer received nearly $200,000 in bulk subscription government contracts and will undoubtedly benefit from the Trudeau government’s media bailout. 

The omission of a major piece of disinformation by these reporters makes one wonder if they should be trusted at all to, in good faith, look out and call out fake information online. Right now it looks a lot more like they’re cherry picking and inflating some online disinformation while ignoring other disinformation in order to construct a false political narrative that benefits the party in power.