For the last two months, dozens of witnesses have been testifying in support of government censorship as part of the House of Commons’ justice committee’s study of online hate.
But on Tuesday, when three free speech advocates were finally able to testify, the meeting devolved into proof of why freedom of speech and open debate are so paramount to fight for in Canada.
True North’s Andrew Lawton was in the meeting and was live to talk about what happened.
An anti-Semitic sign was among those at this year’s Al Quds day rally in downtown Toronto.
The flag at the annual rally threatened the elimination of Jews from Israel.
The banner in question depicted the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an important Islamic shrine, with the words “The last Khayber is ready.” The “Khayber” is a reference to a seventh century battle in the Middle East that led to the eventual expulsion of Jews from the area.
Despite explicit anti-Semitism year to year, the event has continued, this year welcoming nearly 500 attendants, watched over by approximately 100 police officers.
Other signage at the event called Israel an “apartheid state” and claimed that for the prior 16 years Israel has killed one Palestinian child every 60 hours.
Upon being elected, the Ontario Premier Doug Ford promised his government would put an end to the event.
“Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al Quds Day, which calls for the killing of an entire civilian population in Israel, are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario,” tweeted Ford last year on June 10, only three days after being elected.
Historically, other banners have alluded to the terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas, while speakers even denied the Holocaust and called for the eradication of Israel.
B’nai Brith Canada has filed a complaint against the event with the Toronto Police.
In another instance at Al-Quds day recorded by The Rebel, a participant was seen defending the execution of homosexuals under Sharia law and claimed that Canada will eventually be subject to the same rules as well.
Al Quds day was originally started by the Islamic Republic of Iran in support of the state of Palestine.
Sometimes I catch myself when I start complaining about my day-to-day life, when I’m venting about all the dishes and laundry I have to do or how much of a headache it’ll be to clean out the garage.
“Woe is me”? Get a grip. That’s what I tell myself if I briefly lapse into anything resembling self-pity or some sort of sense that I’ve got it hard in life. Because I don’t. Not at all. Few of us truly do.
This sort of griping came to mind while I was reading about all of the great D-Day 75th anniversary commemorations, the stories of what the fallen did and the stories of what the veterans who survived did, both on the battlefield and when they returned.
One of the most remarkable parts about all of these interviews with veterans, all of whom are well over 90 years-old now, is that they shrug a lot of what they did off. It was just their job, they say. It was what had to be done. They offer no complaints. No demands of others. No cries of victimhood, despite the injuries many sustained.
I read a plaque recently in a community centre, it was dedicated to one of the men who helped build the facility. It said he spent time in the war, then came back to Canada, spent a short time grappling with his demons (it didn’t outright say that, but you could read between the lines) and then dusted himself off and built the community centre. And by built I don’t mean he wrote snarky tweets on his iPad demanding that the government cough up the cash. I mean physically building it with his bare hands.
It’s truly remarkable that the group of people often called “the greatest generation” gave so much on the battlefield and then came home and gave even more to build our current middle-class society.
This is where the lessons for today come in.
We are encouraged to feel offended at the most minor slight. If we suffer a normal bout of anxiety we’re supposed to add ourselves to the growing tally of those who suffer from mental illness. While we can already get our hands on pretty much all of life’s basic necessities for free – from both charitable groups and government – we are still supposed to cry out that there is more for government to do for our already pampered lives.
It was at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech in 1961 that he said “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Good luck finding a politician willing to say that now.
Like the children of inherited wealth who squander their family fortune, not having done the hard work to first build it, we are at risk of turning our backs on the attitudes and conduct that made our society the best time and place in human history to live.
With RCMP border interceptions decreasing but the overall number of asylum claims increasing, its evident more individuals are coming to Canada under false pretences rather than illegally crossing the border.
Foreign workers, foreign students and tourists are arriving in Canada and then making refugee claims upon arrival.
Canada is no longer one of the world’s top 10 most competitive economies, as a new report finds Canada’s competitiveness is in freefall.
The 2019 edition of the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking places, which annually ranks 63 countries in terms of their economic competitiveness, put Canada in 13th place.
This is Canada’s worst score since the rankings began in 1997. A far cry from the consistently high scores seen in previous years — as high as 5th place in 2014.
“We’ve seen less money coming into Canada, it’s not attracting its fair share of foreign capital,” said Craig Alexander, chief economist at Deloitte Canada
IMD ranked free-market oriented Singapore as the most competitive economy in the world for 2019. With Hong Kong and the United States close behind.
Canada, on the other hand, has fallen far behind traditionally weaker economies like Qatar and Ireland.
Canada’s decline in competitiveness can be attributed to both low global oil prices and poor policy decisions like the federal carbon tax, which increases the cost of conducting business in Canada.
While our neighbours to the south are reducing red tape and making it easier for businesses to thrive, Canada seems to be heading in the opposite direction. The situation is so dire that the Canadian pipeline association called it a “competitiveness crisis.”
As other countries actively work to become more competitive, this report is a wake-up call for the Canadian government – create a friendlier business environment or more Canadian companies will relocate outside of Canada.
The Conservative members of parliament who supported an NDP motion to abort a justice committee video stream were directed to vote for the motion by Andrew Scheer’s office.
This information came to me directly from a Conservative source on the condition of anonymity, regarding Tuesday’s meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
Less than 10 minutes into the meeting during which the committee was about to hear testimony from Mark Steyn, Lindsay Shepherd and John Robson on free speech and online hate, NDP MP Randall Garrison introduced a motion to cancel the video broadcast in progress.
“None of the previous testimony by witnesses has been televised, and so it seems peculiar to me that only the last segment of this would actually be televised by the committee,” the British Columbia MP said before tabling the motion.
All of the justice committee’s hearings have been public. The decision to televise this particular session was sparked by a request from the committee’s Liberal chair, Anthony Housefather, citing significant interest.
Garrison’s motion was adopted unanimously, including support from the committee’s three Conservative MPs, John Brassard, Michael Barrett and Dave MacKenzie.
A whipped vote would suggest the Conservatives had prior knowledge of the motion. The source did not elaborate on the reason for the decision by the Office of the Leader of the Opposition but expressed frustration with it.
I sent two inquiries to Scheer’s spokesperson on Tuesday requesting a rationale for the whipped vote but received no response.
The Conservatives also all abstained from voting on Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault’s motion to purge from the record comments made last week by former justice committee vice-chair Michael Cooper, who was removed from the post by Scheer for those remarks.
A representative of Scheer’s office was present at the Tuesday morning meeting.
Caitlan Coleman, an American who spent five years as a hostage to the Taliban, is finally speaking out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her Canadian husband Joshua Boyle, and her fight to gain custody of their children.
“I think that Josh took a lot of the best years of my life from me,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been given another chance. A lot of my life was spent under Josh’s thumb.”
She has managed to take her children back to the United States with her, while her husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle, is facing 19 charges including sexual assault, domestic violence, and forcible confinement.
Despite alleged sympathies to radical Islam, Boyle met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill in 2017, three months after he returned to Canada.
Less than two weeks after Boyle and his family met with Trudeau, Boyle was arrested and charged.
Coleman claims to have suffered from horrendous abuse at the hands of Joshua Boyle both before and after their imprisonment by a Taliban associate group.
Boyle allegedly controlled all aspects of Coleman’s life.
“Josh scripted any interaction I was to have with media. He also scripted my interactions with his family or with my family, with doctors, with anyone,” she said.
Boyle, who is also the ex-husband of Omar Khadr’s sister, allowed himself and Coleman to be taken hostage after he took the pair to Afghanistan in 2012.
The two had been backpacking through Central Asia, but Boyle didn’t tell Coleman that he was taking her to Afghanistan.
“He wanted to go and get the real story on the Taliban. He thought they were misrepresented in the Western media,” she said.
Others have alleged that Boyle’s interest in radical Islam may have been the motivator for his trip to Afghanistan.
The anniversaries of two historic moments is coming up this week – the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the 30th anniversary of the massacre at the Tiananmen Square.
If we let these stories disappear and if we fail to recognize what happened, True North’s Anthony Furey says we will fail to learn the lessons of these important moments of history.
Neither Lindsay Shepherd nor John Robson nor Mark Steyn was censored today. In fact, they were all afforded a rare privilege for Canadians – the opportunity to testify before parliamentarians on a House of Commons committee.
But this is hardly worthy of celebration given how successful the efforts by members of parliament to diminish their platform were. These efforts were even supported by the Conservatives, who, despite inviting the three free speech advocates to testify as part of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights’ online hate study, backed a last-minute motion to scrap the video broadcast of the proceedings.
The meeting was scheduled to run from 8:45 am to 9:45 am Tuesday morning from Ottawa’s Wellington Building.
Committee members needed to address a procedural matter before turning things over to witnesses, appointing a Conservative to serve as the committee’s vice-chair. This was necessary after Conservative leader Andrew Scheer ousted Michael Cooper from the position for wrongspeak.
While Lisa Raitt was voted in as vice-chair, Barrie Conservative MP John Brassard ending up sitting in on her behalf for the meeting.
When it would have been time for the witnesses to begin speaking, things were delayed further by a motion from Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault to alter the official record and transcript from a prior meeting, purging it of Cooper’s citation of the Christchurch killer’s name and manifesto.
Cooper did so not to to support of condone the attack, obviously, but rather to correct blatant misinformation provided by a committee witness about the political persuasions of mass killers.
Boissonnault’s insistence that murderer’s names shouldn’t exist in public record seems rather shallow given, for example, the 21 instances in parliamentary records containing the name of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the terrorist who killed a soldier and stormed Parliament Hill nearly five years ago.
Mentioning the names of heinous people is an exercise of truth, not glorification. But this fact is lost on the Left, who allowing something to be uttered is the same as endorsing it.
Boissonnault’s motion served not only to embarrass Cooper and the Conservatives, but also to stall. NDP committee member Randall Garrison added to the delays by calling for a recorded vote for no other reason than to waste precious time.
Brassard aptly called the motion a “stunt,” yet the Conservatives didn’t vote against it. All of the Conservative committee members voted to abstain.
The Liberals and New Democrats have been mocking Conservative concerns about censorship as this committee’s study has waged on for the last two months, yet literally joined in scrubbing the official record of words uttered in a committee meeting, by one of their (former) colleagues.
It’s a dangerously poetic view of how these same legislators would love to view western civilization. Just band together and edit out the words, thoughts and ideas you think have no place in society. With Cooper, they even succeeded in editing the person out of the committee.
Liberal MP Colin Fraser attempted to hang on Lindsay Shepherd remarks made by other people, as though Shepherd’s support for one’s right to express an idea is tantamount to endorsing the expressed idea.
When it came to Garrison’s turn to ask questions, he used his entire block of time to give a monologue about his experiences as a gay city councillor-turned-member of parliament, chiding the witnesses for not living in the “real world” while giving them no opportunity to respond or offer further testimony.
Not that there was anything to respond to. He asked no questions, but kept eyeing the clock to make sure he didn’t stop talking until his time had elapsed, before turning it back to the chair.
It’s his prerogative as an MP to use the time how he sees fit, but it demonstrates that the NDP legitimately has no idea in hearing from those with whom it may have disagreements. Indeed, if he had his way, these panelists would not have been given a platform in the first place.
Only those witnesses agreeing with the NDP’s position on free speech and online hate should have been allowed to take the stand, the party clearly feels.
The procedural issues are always where the meat of censorship happens, because it’s so muddled in process and precedent that most people stop paying attention.
That happened early on in Tuesday’s meeting, when the committee’s most enthusiastic censor, the NDP’s Garrison, moved to cut off the video stream (which was already in progress) of the morning’s hearing.
Garrison said none of the prior testimony had been televised, so this hearing shouldn’t have been. He also rejected these specific panelists ideas being given a public platform after making the obligatory, half-assed statement that he isn’t against people having ideas – simply against them being heard, evidently.
I knew the motion would pass given the committee’s Liberal majority. What I didn’t anticipate was the egregious display by the committee’s Conservatives, who voted unanimously in support of the NDP motion, making it so no one in Canada could view video of these proceedings.
It wasn’t censorship. The meeting still happened, and an audio stream was broadcast and remains available. This doesn’t take away from the malodorous fact that MPs enthusiastically supported a barrier between ideas and an audience, endorsing the prevailing progressive view of free speech that even if you have the right to say something, no one should be able to hear it.
The Left says no one is entitled to an audience, which is true. What they don’t say so openly is how they endeavour to block those who wish to be an audience from doing so.
Garrison’s moral stand against videography became particularly hypocritical when an hour later he voted against a motion to cancel the television stream of Tuesday afternoon’s meeting with a Google Canada representative.
In 15 minutes of points of order and cross-partisan motions, before any of the witnesses had uttered a word, the Canadian free speech problem was on full display.
Most chilling for Canadians is that the Liberals, New Democrats and Conservatives were all on the same team.
This article originally appeared in the Financial Post.
As the federal election approaches, the Trudeau Liberal government’s record has become increasingly more difficult to defend. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise in the last election that he would run only “modest” deficits has burgeoned into a national debt increase that is bigger per person than that racked up by any government in Canadian history, outside of a major war or a recession. Trudeau promised to reduce taxes for “middle-class” families, but a Fraser Institute analysis calculated that 80 per cent of middle-class families are paying taxes at least $840 higher per year.
Then there’s Indigenous reconciliation. After a bungled inquiry into missing and murdered women left Aboriginal families angry and disappointed, what was left of the Trudeau government’s reconciliation agenda was then demolished by their sanctimonious attacks on and the firing of Jody Wilson-Raybould, a widely respected and Indigenous former attorney general.
Trudeau’s attempts to build greater trade with China have tanked, damaged by naïve attempts to rope Beijing’s autocratic leadership into joining his “progressive” trade agenda, and that was before China unleashed trade (and other) retaliations in revenge for Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. Meanwhile, the new NAFTA deal still isn’t signed and high U.S. tariffs on steel, aluminum and forest products continue to hurt Canadian industry.
So how does a government that can’t campaign on its record go about gaining re-election? By building its campaign around an issue where voters can see them as heroes fighting to save the planet against uncaring opponents. That issue is climate change and their weapon to fight it is carbon taxation. Winning re-election with this strategy requires convincing voters there’s a “climate emergency.” And so on April 1, the day the federal carbon tax kicked in on provinces unwilling to impose a tax that met the Liberals’ requirements, the federal Department of Environment and Climate Change released a supposedly independent report claiming “Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.”
From now until the election, Canadians will hear Trudeau and his cabinet members blame every weather event, wet, dry, cold or warm on climate change. And the urgent need for a carbon tax to stop it. When the prime minister recently visited flood-ravaged areas in Quebec, he called the floods “the new reality of climate change.” But experts attribute the recent flooding to one of the longest, coldest, highest-snowfall winters on record. Isn’t climate change supposed to be about global warming?
Let’s redirect those billions to risk mitigation and homeowner compensation
Convincing Canadians of the need for carbon taxation is just the first element of the Liberals’ re-election strategy. Their most powerful — and cynical — tactic is their promise to give most taxpayers a bigger carbon-tax refund than what they will supposedly pay in carbon taxes. How is that possible? The answer is that individuals will get the refunds, while businesses bear the full cost. In other words, tax the job creators and use that money to bribe the voters.
The principal gladiators leading the Liberal carbon-tax forces are Trudeau and his eco-passionate environment minister, Catherine McKenna. The defenders opposing them in the carbon-tax coliseum are the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick, along with federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer. Scheer will have most of the spears trained on him. McKenna recently accused him of “having no climate plan.” But unlike the Liberals, Scheer’s climate plan needs to be based on the fundamental fact that Canadians could all move to Mars tomorrow and it would have virtually zero impact on global climate change. Here’s why.
Many Canadians have been led to believe (with the help of Liberal misinformation) that oil is a sunset industry. But the consensus of authoritative forecasts sees growth in developing countries pushing world oil demand from the current 100 million barrels per day to at least 110 million by 2030. Here’s the question Canadians should be asking: If world oil demand is going up anyway, why should Canada cede the market for our most important export to Russia, Iran, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia — countries that don’t care about the environment and have horrendous human rights records? At the same time, hundreds of coal-fired power plants are under construction in China, India and Southeast Asia. (Vietnam, one of the smallest countries in that region, has new coal plants under construction that could end up producing more carbon dioxide emissions than all of Canada.)
As good little scout Canada struggles mightily to meet its commitments under the Paris climate accord, the vast majority of nations on the planet have already given up on the pact. Last year, global greenhouse gas emissions grew by an estimated 2.7 per cent. So if Canada’s economy had simply ceased to exist, our 1.6 per cent of global emissions would have been replaced in just seven months.
These are irrefutable facts. So the decision by the Trudeau Liberals to base their election campaign on the assertion that reducing our country’s relatively tiny emissions will help fight climate change can only be explained in one of two ways. First, Trudeau and his team are breathtakingly unaware of facts anyone can learn through an afternoon of Googling. Second, they choose to mislead Canadians in a desperate bid for re-election. That would mean they choose to base their election campaign on a known lie.
So what should Canada actually do about climate change? The clearest answer was recently offered by a man in hip waders, who was filling sandbags to help with the flooding in Central Canada. When he was asked by a reporter what should be done to prevent the floods, he said this: “Well, there’s all this talk about climate change, but I don’t see what Canada can do about that when China and other countries keep burning more. If that’s going to cause more floods, we’d better figure out how we can be ready for them.”
That’s the most common-sense analysis I’ve heard. Instead of throwing away billions of dollars subsidizing costly and impractical “green power” and handing taxpayer money to buyers of electric cars, let’s redirect those billions to risk mitigation and homeowner compensation. In the case of floods, dikes and dams need to be improved where practical. Homeowners in unprotected flood plains should also be offered the full replacement cost to move, as Alberta did after the floods of 2013. After all, it’s flawed government zoning that put people in the flood plain and created the problem; it’s only fair to homeowners that government make things right. Forest-fire risk can be mitigated by underbrush removal, regulatory setback distances and fire-resistant building materials.
A Conservative climate-change mitigation strategy based on the common-sense words of that flood worker would make Canadians much better prepared for climate change. And it has the added benefit of actually telling Canadians the truth about the climate-change challenge. That would be Andrew Scheer’s most important difference from Justin Trudeau.
Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of Encana Corp.
