The NDP recently released their federal election campaign platform, but it seems like nobody noticed. Is the NDP fading into irrelevancy? Could Canada be heading towards a two-party system?
True North’s Anthony Furey discusses this latest development, and the potential repercussions of the NDP’s dwindling popularity
A Malaysian politician who’s made repeated calls for laws that would prosecute people for things they say online was given a prime speaking slot at the first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom, co-hosted by Canada and the United Kingdom in London. True North’s Andrew Lawton, who broke the story, weighs in on the host governments’ hypocrisy in allowing Minister Gobind Singh Deo to speak, given his track record of wanting censorship.
This coverage was made possible by True North donors. Please support our independent and accountable journalism with a charitable donation: https://tnc.news/support-andrew-lawton/
American citizen and Smuggler’s Inn owner, Robert Joseph Boule, will have his legal fees paid for by the Canadian government.
Boule, who is facing 21 charges related to smuggling seven illegal migrants into Canada through his Blaine, Washington property, will stand trial from January 13 to February 15, 2020.
After preliminary hearings, the 69-year-old has been released on $15,000 bail and is allowed to return to his home in the United States, although he reports to a bail supervisor in Canada twice a month.
Despite being able to afford bail through donations and contributions from members of his community, Boule filed a “Rowbotham application” with the B.C. Supreme Court to have his legal fees covered by Canada. In a rare circumstance the application was approved by the presiding judge.
The crown is seeking to prosecute Boule under Canada’s Criminal Code and Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which prohibits anybody from “aiding and abetting” somebody’s illegal entry into Canada.
According to court proceedings, the smuggling took place through his bed and breakfast business which is located directly on the border with Canada.
As reported on by True North, the unguarded border which is separated only by a ditch sees several people cross into Canada illegally every month.
Boule has been ordered by the court to remove all references to a phone number for his business off the internet as well as put up a sign intended on dissuading migrants from crossing into the country through his property.
However according to Boule’s neighbours, migrants continue to pass through the area and are even picked up by taxi cabs or family members waiting on the other side despite the presence of RCMP patrolling the area.
Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver is located in the historic Japantown part of the Downtown Eastside. It was opened in 1902 and for many years has been host to the Powell Street Festival put on by the local Japanese community celebrating their culture.
For the first time this year there will be no Powell Street Festival. It’s too dangerous.
The park you see has been taken over by the homeless, drug addicts, dope dealers, hookers and other various ne’er do wells.
I drove by there last week and you’d be hard pressed to find a patch of grass not covered with a squatter’s tent. The state of the place is shocking.
On Wednesday evening at 10:30, Vancouver Police officers patrolling in the area heard shots fired. They immediately entered the park and found a man suffering from a gunshot wound. The suspect fled on foot and as I write this, has yet to be found by police.
Earlier the same day a female officer was injured trying to protect city workers trying to clean up some of the filth discarded by the inhabitants.
In a press release on the shooting, VPD Sgt. Jason Robillard itemized the number of 9-1-1 calls the police get every day to the park. “We want people in the park to be safe and currently, the environment there is not safe, even for our officers,” said Robillard.
Why is that?
Politics I’m guessing.
The city has had a left-wing Mayor and Council for the past decade. The Mayor is nominally the head of the police board.
The VPD along with a couple of city workers with trucks could clean it up in an afternoon. Officially, the VPD say they are “consulting” with the city about the issue. Translation: they are being handcuffed from doing their job.
Instead of dealing with the problem they are playing whack-a-mole with the problems as they arise.
Robillard said, “In June alone, there were 92 emergency calls for police response in the park, and in May, there were 87. This is up significantly from 2018 when there were 56 calls for service in June and 56 calls in May.”
But Vancouver is not the only place we are seeing this. Yonge Dundas Square in downtown Toronto has declined significantly since it’s launch in 2003 to much fanfare.
Shootings and stabbings are becoming routine in the past few years. Originally conceived to be something like New York’s Time Square, it has all the neon and blinking giant signs, but lacks the police presence prevalent in Times Square.
Drug users and their dealers abound, possibly attracted by the nearby Victoria Street safe injection site, but they are there nonetheless. And they are a blight on the city.
Toronto Police are playing the same game of whack-a-mole as VPD.
The reality is that it is going to take some political mettle to deal with these situations. And I’m not talking on the part of the police. I am talking on the part of the squishy lefty politicians. The police are the professionals. Take the handcuffs off of them and let them do their job.
The solutions to these problems aren’t difficult. But they can be messy. The police know that and they are always prepared to get their hands dirty when needed. The politicians should let them do their job and stop interfering.
The citizens would be very grateful.
Are the Trudeau Liberals trying to connect the Conservatives to white supremacy? Did they update the list of designated terrorist entities to include far-right groups in an effort to connect this to the Scheer conservatives?
True North’s Leo Knight discusses the history of these partisan tactics used in Canada and the reality of the current situation.
The Alberta government has announced that they will be launching an inquiry into the foreign funding of anti-oil organizations in Canada.
“There’s never been a formal investigation into all aspects of the anti-Alberta energy campaign. The mandate for Commissioner Allan will be to bring together all of the information,” Premier Jason Kenney said Thursday.
Evidence has been building for a long time of funding, particularly from wealthy Americans, going to organizations which are trying to see the Albertan energy sector destroyed or extremely limited.
“I believe having foreign interest groups funnel tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign designed massively to damage our vital economic interests is a matter of the greatest public concern,” Kenney said.
“The energy industry and the emissions challenge are global. The question then is, why is the anti-energy campaign so overwhelmingly and disproportionately focused on one major producer?”
The research of independent researcher Vivian Krause, showing definitive proof of a money trail from American philanthropists (some of whom have vested interests in the American energy sector) and Canadian anti-energy groups have worried many in the province about the extent foreign interests are attacking Albertan jobs.
One especially strong group, the Tar Sands Campaign, has been connected by Krause to the powerful Rockefeller family and their Foundation.
“The Tar Sands Campaign has been running for more than a decade with financial help from the US$870-million Rockefeller family philanthropic foundation. The goal of the campaign, as CBC reported in January, is to sabotage all pipeline projects that would export crude oil from Western Canada to lucrative overseas markets,” she wrote.
This unsettling reality could not be properly addressed in Alberta under the previous NDP government because, as Krause claims, the NDP was trying to benefit from leftwing organizations funded by the Tar Sands Campaign.
The currently seen crisis in the energy sector is mostly driven by a lack of pipeline capacity to get oil and gas to market, True North has reported on the disastrous loss of income this has put on both the industry and the taxpayer.
Billions have been lost on both sides due to the postponed and cancelled pipeline projects.
The legal challenges, protests, and other forms of sabotage initiated by these foreign-funded groups have hugely contributed to the tribulations seen in the sector.
Kenney has made it clear that he wants to see how far the foreign influence goes, and how it can be stopped.
A report from the inquiry is expected to be ready early July of 2020.
A new report suggests that the majority of Canadians are highly critical of current immigration patterns in Canada.
The study by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue, commissioned for the CBC, found that 57 per cent of Canadians believe our country should not accept more refugees.
The study also found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of those surveyed believed that illegal immigration has become a serious problem in Canada.
While Canada is often considered to be a welcoming country for immigrants, many Canadians are starting to question the immigration policies of the federal government.
In True North’s Candice Malcolm’s 2016 book, Losing True North: Justin Trudeau’s Assault on Canadian Citizenship, Malcolm predicts that disastrous immigration policies will turn the public against immigration as a whole.
Events and decisions since 2016 have only intensified public concern.
In 2016, Candice cited the process of bringing in 50,000 Syrian refugees to Canada as a key policy mistake by the Trudeau government.
Syrian refugees were fast-tracked with poor vetting, leading to serious security concerns.
These concerns increased when a teenage Canadian girl was murdered by a Syrian refugee in Burnaby in 2018.
The girl’s killer, Ibrahim Ali, is currently on trial.
Another policy Canadians are paying the price for is the decision of the Trudeau government to accept thousands of illegal border crossers from the United States.
The asylum seekers, many of whom cross into Canada illegally, are allowed in despite the fact that the United States is a safe country where they can claim asylum.
The cost of housing and caring for these migrants has gone into the tens of millions, all at the taxpayer’s expense, and overwhelmed the social services in the cities they have been sent to.
As Malcolm highlighted in 2016, the decision to end the triage system which fast-tracked the deportation of bogus refugee claimants coming from safe countries has indeed come back to hurt Canadians.
Despite these recent policy failures, the government has made it clear that they will follow their own course regardless of public opinion.
“My wish is that we continue to increase levels in our immigration system for refugees. I’m very open to saying that, and I will do whatever I can, in whatever position I am in, to continue to push for higher refugee numbers every single year,” Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen recently said.
At what was supposed to be a conference promoting freedom of the press, the Canadian and British governments demonstrated they’re more interested in a glossy show of support for press freedom without conducting themselves in a way that fosters it.
I’m in London, UK for the first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom, co-hosted by Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s foreign ministers, Chrystia Freeland and Jeremy Hunt. Despite the summit’s mission, several sessions were completely closed off to the press and public, and the politicians running things were been scarcely available to journalists.
Things got so bad that at one point the entire delegation of Canadian journalists threatened to walk out of a scrum with Freeland after learning I and another commentator, The Rebel’s Sheila Gunn Reid, would be denied access.
Freeland’s media liaison initially blamed what she said was the small size of the room booked for the scrum, though refused to consider requests to hold it in another section of Printworks, the 16-acre facility playing host to the conference.
The principled stand from reporters and crew for CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail, Global News and Al Jazeera was truly appreciated. I’m sure we have numerous ideological differences between us, but there was a shared recognition that the hypocrisy on display from Freeland was unacceptable and threatened all media present, not just the two of us being expressly excluded.
Their decision to not participate in the scrum unless all covering it could left Freeland’s office with no choice. Her staff caved, and every outlet got a question, albeit with no follow-ups allowed.
I’ve no idea what Freeland had to fear as an experienced minister and former journalist herself. I asked my question without issue and she answered it; the exchange is precisely what the interactions between the media and politicians are supposed to look like. It just shouldn’t have been such an ordeal to get to that point.
The scrum was significant because only two pre-selected Canadian journalists were permitted to ask questions of Freeland and Hunt at a brief media availability on the first day of the conference. No private interviews were granted with either, and there were no other media access opportunities.
After a Thursday morning plenary session, Freeland was quickly extracted to a closed-off hallway as several staffers formed a human wall between her and the media.
Media were not allowed in the room for what may have been the most consequential part of the conference, a session with government representatives from around the world on “how to sustain the impact of the (Defend Media Freedom) campaign after the conference.”
I was kicked out the room moments before the event was to begin, by two polite aides who threatened to “escalate” matters if I didn’t leave.
I’m aware that freedom of the press is not an all-access pass to every meeting, just as it doesn’t conjure private access with a cabinet minister on demand. The issue here lies in that Canada, along with the United Kingdom, is speaking to the world about press freedom while refusing to honour the commitments it expects from other countries.
It was hypocritical, and cannot stand.
As the sessions went on, several speakers referenced George Orwell’s writings on totalitarianism. In fact, conference attendees on their way into the building had to walk by a large Orwell quote stencilled onto the side of a shipping container.
Orwell’s warnings on censorship and press freedom have been prescient. It’s a shame the conference’s organizers didn’t realize they were the ones about whom he was writing.
The Global Conference for Media Freedom is supposed to be a conference standing up for journalists and journalistic freedom, but it’s actually been rife barriers for members of the media trying to report on things.
True North’s Andrew Lawton reports from the summit on how Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office tried to deny True North access to the minister’s media availability, and how media were not allowed to enter the room where the most important sessions were taking place.
This coverage was made possible by True North donors. Please support our independent and accountable journalism with a charitable donation: https://tnc.news/support-andrew-lawton/
As the second day of Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s first ever Global Conference for Media Freedom, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt honoured a Malaysian politician he says is on the front lines of standing up for press freedom.
Malaysia is pursuing a “moralistic approach” to journalistic freedom involving regulation and legislation to deal with “fake news,” Malaysian communications minister Gobind Singh Deo said in his remarks Thursday morning.
Hunt didn’t mention that less than a year ago Singh Deo called not only for strict regulation of online speech, but also enforcement powers reaching even those not living in Malaysia.
Singh Deo appeared on stage alongside Hunt and Canada’s foreign minister Chrystia Freeland as part of the plenary session kicking off the London conference’s final day.
Last September, Singh Deo said hate speech legislation needs to have an “extra-territorial” approach, triggered by a remark made by a blogger living in London that took aim at a Malaysian police chief’s turban.
The British-born blogger, Raja Petra Kamarudin, had said the chief’s “turban must be too tight that it restricted the flow of blood to his brain.”
Singh Deo said it amounted to an attack on all Sikhs.
“It deserves nothing less than the highest degree of condemnation,” Singh Deo wrote. “It undermines the most basic values we Malaysians uphold, which is mutual respect for each other.”
Though the same post went beyond simply calling for a more respectful society.
“We cannot and must not allow such attacks against any one of us to go unnoticed,” he added. “This is an example of why it is we need to push ahead for laws which regulate hate speech. These laws must also focus on more effective and efficient extra-territorial reach so as to facilitate the prosecution of persons who commit such offences from overseas here in Malaysia.”
Singh Deo also said in March that he was mulling a new law that would hold news outlets responsible for “inflammatory remarks” made by people commenting on their news stories.
“Freedom of expression does not mean (freedom) to promote lewd, vulgar or sexist comments,” he said, according to a New Straits Times article.
More to come.
