War memorials matter to Canadians. They matter to the people who served, they matter to the people who returned, they matter to the families of people who did not return.
There has been public outcry about the Afghan War Memorial and how the government opened it in secrecy. This is wrong.
True North’s Anthony Furey says the Afghan War Memorial needs to be made public.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tyrannical tendencies are ramping up as his incompetent government unravels remarkably fast: the Liberals are rashly throwing out dirty tricks from their sleeves in an attempt to try to put their government back together again as the election day of judgement approaches.
Recently, three more bright red flags have been raised on a field littered with them.
“A Digital Charter”
The first cardinal sign of dangerous state meddling popped up when Trudeau pronounced Canada would be getting a new charter to regulate the internet.
The Trudeau government has been talking for years about possibly regulating the tech giants (Facebook, Twitter and Google) that control what the vast majority of Canadians now see while surfing the web. But up until recently, Trudeau and co. were content hiring former tech giant execs to join them as colleagues and host meetings with Facebook big shots — unregistered lobbyists at the time — as ways to have their interests heard and, presumably, met.
But with an impending election, it appears the Trudeau government wants to suddenly legislate and bend the interweb closer to their will.
What exactly this government means by “hate” and “disinformation” has not been clearly and unequivocally defined. But this government has repeatedly proven it struggles to distinguish truth from fiction. These same actors — or anyone in power for that matter — being the architects of regulating the internet should give all Canadians a cold tingle in their spines.
Media Bailout
Yet the Trudeau government isn’t just looking to get the tech giants onside. They’re also offering $595 million to the legacy media over the next few years, of course leaving most of the payout for after the election, essentially bribing the media like they did last time around with the CBC, which was a resounding PR success story for them.
Although this was announced late last year, new information — and the second major red flag — came to light last week that the Trudeau government is going to use friendly proxy organizations to ostensibly decide what media organizations deserve to divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars Trudeau’s now splashing on the table.
This week the Trudeau government brazenly revealed those proxies. In the mix: anti-Conservative union Unifor and four Quebec-based organizations (Fédération nationale des communications, Association de la presse francophone, Quebec Community Newspaper Association, Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec) make up five of the eight groups chosen to decide who is eligible to be a government-approved journalism outfit.
Unifor alone, nevermind the other seven players with major conflicts of interest, proves the entire process is a political sham. Unifor President Jerry Dias has been doing a stupendous job demonstrating why his union representing 12,000 journalists and media workers shouldn’t be anywhere near the media bailout table. On Friday he tweeted twice attacking Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, dropping any pretense of impartiality.
But the selection process is all for stupid show anyway. Trudeau’s government ultimately has the final say on who gets what payout. “The government will decide whether or not to change certain criteria,” Maude Lavoie, Finance Canada director general of business tax programs said in a Senate national finance committee — reported by scrappy startup Blacklock’s Reporter, which is declining any bailout money and has been relentlessly covering the bribery scandal affecting its colleagues.
One organization still with a shred of credibility is the Canadian Association of Journalists, who is considering dropping out of the media fairy godmothers’ bribery committee because of the secrecy of the process.
Speaking of Blacklock’s Reporter, the news outlet drags out embarrassing secrets and incompetence of the government and its bureaucracy on a regular basis. How do you think the Trudeau government has treated these watchdogs compared to the lap dogs? With contempt of course.
Blacklock’s Reporter has been in years-long process of suing different federal departments and agencies for their sketchy bypassing Blacklock’s Reporter’s paywall to read their copyrighted material instead of buying bulk subscriptions like they do for friendlier publications like iPolitics (now conveniently owned by TorStar).
Partisan hacks have tried to dismiss and discredit the investigative outlet as “copyright trolls” (a charge a federal court judge threw out in their last case) or Conservative cheerleaders. Neither is true. But that a journalism organization that outperforms (for its size) iPolitics et al. in Ottawa for scoops (excluding government-fed ones) is treated so poorly by the government for doing the tedious and thankless job of digging up unflattering stories (via access to information requests, a process the Trudeau government neutered) about said government tells you everything you need to know about why this government should have no place in preferentially giving certain news outlets vast sums of money.
Instead of just settling Blacklock’s Reporter’s cases the Trudeau government has sat back as the Crown (which Trudeau obviously exerts influence over: Google “Mark Norman” and “SNC-Lavalin”) has done everything — including dubious shenanigans I’ll expand on in another piece — to delay the cases from seeing the light of a courtroom.
To further elaborate on how deranged it is for anyone to think this government bailout of the media makes any sense for the health of our democracy, look no further than one Liberal MP who recently said the Toronto Star, CBC and Globe and Mail are the only reliable news outlets in all of Canada that are trustworthy. Or how about the B.C. NDP’s vice president designating moderately right-of-centre digital news outlet The Post Millennial “online hate”. True North founder and Sun columnist Candice Malcolm was charged with writing fake news by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna when Malcolm called the federal carbon tax a tax grab. Citizens cannot trust politicians to decide what is and is not legitimate journalism because their judgment is compromised and biased. The prime minister himself claimed it was fake news that he or his underlings meddled in the SNC-Lavalin and Vice-Admiral Mark Norman scandals. Both examples of gross political interference in the justice system ended up being true.
Fake News Hall Monitors
Finally — and the third major red flag raised in recent weeks — the Trudeau government’s $7 million set aside for selected organizations to create “digital, news, and civic literacy programming” during the election is smelling increasingly fishy. Who these government-selected fake news hall monitors have not been made public yet however, there are pretty big clues as to who will be on the take from the government to proselytize to Canadians what is and isn’t news.
A spokesperson for Canadian Heritage told True North the $7 million will go to “digital, news and civic literacy education to support work in building citizen resilience against online disinformation.” Although what exactly that entails isn’t clear, but Blacklock’s Reporter revealed last year one party trying to get some of the money was Liberal-tied “non-partisan” think tank Public Policy Forum.
Their application to the government said they wanted to “expose” inaccurate coverage. Now left-wing publications are lining up news hall monitors, including BuzzFeed, the Toronto Star, National Observer and CBC. They have all assigned journalists to monitor the internet this election for disinformation and fake news.
A spokesperson for Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould told True North that CBC and the Toronto Star will not be receiving any of the $7 million (although CBC already receives well over a billion annually from the federal government and TorStar will undoubtedly soon be receiving millions as well). The spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said who the funding recipients are will “be made in the coming weeks to inform Canadians.” Some news outlets will more than likely receive some of the $7 million because organizations already receiving federal funds from the Canadian Periodical Fund are eligible to apply.
“This initiative supports Citizen-focused activities, including digital, news and civic literacy programming and tools,” said the Canadian Heritage spokesperson. What exactly that means time will tell. But when the National Observer suddenly hires a journalist to monitor disinformation who once professed her love for Justin Trudeau on Twitter it doesn’t look promising. I have my doubts that these journalists will be looking into bureaucrats running anonymous troll twitter accounts attacking Conservatives or the Liberal Twitter shamrock club amplifying government talking points.
Trudeau has paid a lot of lip service to journalists, buttering them up with flattery. But when the majority of the interviews he does are fluff or with friends — meanwhile running away from the real and hard questions in the midst of scandals — no one should be fooled by his phoney pandering. Like despotic world leaders, which Trudeau more and more resembles, he only wants coverage that lionizes him.
I typically refrain from writing emotional commentary and reporting in covering our country’s politics. But sometimes the only proper response to deceitful dirty dealings is with full-hearted ire.
When Trudeau decided to corrupt and discredit the entire fourth estate responsible for holding him accountable the only appropriate response from self-respecting journalists is a variation of: “F*** you and the high horse you rode in on.”
Correction: A previous version of this column included BuzzFeed as a publication that just hired journalists to cover disinformation and fake news during the Canadian election cycle. In fact, BuzzFeed partnered with the Toronto Star to look at disinformation campaigns with two BuzzFeed journalists based in Toronto who already focus on fake news and disinformation — but predominantly in an American context — will be shifting their attention to Canada during the election. We regret the error.
Stay with us on this one, because we’re just as confused as you. A spokesperson for Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says that when the Conservatives attack the federal government’s carbon tax, it’s, somehow, like “taking money out of (Canadians’) pocket.”
This statement comes as Alberta becomes the latest province, under Premier Jason Kenney, to abolish its provincial carbon tax and pledge to fight the federal one in court.
True North’s Andrew Lawton has the latest.
BY: LEO KNIGHT
The death of Colten Boushie on August 9, 2016 and the subsequent acquittal of farm owner Gerald Stanley on February 9, 2018 triggered national discussions on the issue of rural crime and highlighted many other instances of rural property owners being charged criminally for trying to defend their homes, property and families.
Last week, the Liberal dominated House of Commons Public Safety Committee released a report after studying the matter and hearing submissions and testimony from groups and affected individuals. The salient part of the report was only three pages and left pretty much everyone unsatisfied.
Conservative MPs called it “an insult to all Canadians.” Even NDP MPs weighed in saying, the “incomplete” report fails to take into account the difficulties witnesses described in the committee’s hearings.
Two witnesses, Eddie Maurice and his wife Jessica of Okotoks, Alberta released a statement quoted in the National Post which said, “The witnesses brought in by Liberal Committee members supported the story that the Liberals wished to find — a story that supported gun control and their firearm-related policies and bills outside the mandate of this study.”
They further said, “They do not understand what it means to live miles from the RCMP station which is understaffed and unable to protect us.”
There are a couple of key points in all of this and the Maurices nailed it.
Eddie Maurice was thrust into the public eye when in February of 2017 he fired warning shots at alleged burglars on his property. One of whom was hit by a ricochet. Police were called and arrested Maurice for various firearms-related offences.
The incident triggered lots of support for them in Alberta and protests showed up at the courthouse for his appearances. The Crown ultimately announced they were dropping all charges.
What many Canadians would like to see is a strengthening of Canadian self-defence laws so folks living in rural Canada would be supported if they used force to defend themselves, their families and their properties.
Many people in rural Canada, especially the prairie provinces, feel like they are under attack as cases like the incident with Colten Boushie and his drunken friends invading the property of Gerald Stanley highlights.
In Saskatchewan in 2016 a group calling themselves Farmers with Firearms was formed on Facebook and has had thousands of likes and follows. There’s no doubt that this is an issue for Canadians.
But as Maurice observes the report of the Public Safety committee does nothing for them. The Liberals want more gun control and even tacitly agreeing with folks who want to have the ability to defend themselves and their loved ones goes against their narrative.
The reality, also noted by Maurice, is the issue of the distance when many live far from those paid to protect them. In urban areas a 9-1-1 call deemed urgent will get a police response in minutes. In rural areas in the prairies that response is typically measured in hours and sometimes even days.
Maurice also hits the nail on the head mentioning RCMP understaffing. I have been writing about this problem since 1999. While it’s difficult to nail down the numbers with any certainty, officers I have spoken to estimate they are understaffed by a minimum of ten percent of authorized strength.
Add that to members away on course, leave, illness and the force has serious issues across the board. Those problems are exacerbated in rural Canada where smaller detachments have difficulty meeting calls for service to start with never mind the distances they have to travel. And the bad guys know this. Coulten Boushie knew this and so did Gerald Stanley.
It was tragic that Boushie died. But, there will be more tragedies like that if the government and the RCMP don’t take action to address the real issues.
More gun control is not the answer.
The question is much more complicated and the Liberal dominated committee report did not seem to take any of it seriously. They have their own agenda and it has nothing to do with protecting Canadians.
In wake of the Green Party’s by-election steal from the New Democrats, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has gone all-in on climate change alarmism.
“The future of our country cannot involve fracking,” he said. “It cannot involve the burning of any fossil fuel.”
The NDP, Green Party and Liberals have all been taking increasingly hard-line positions on Canada’s carbon emissions, which are minuscule compared to the rest of the world, but Singh’s newest statements reach a new extreme.
In his recent statement of climate change, Singh promised to reduce carbon emissions by 40 to 50 percent, and oppose the planned LNG plant and pipeline in BC, which he previously supported.
The plant and pipeline proposed by BC’s NDP government already has the support of nearly all communities and indigenous governments involved.
To strengthen his new position, Singh put forward a motion in the House of Commons calling on the government to declare an “environment and climate emergency,” end any government aid to the energy sector, and cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline that the government spent $4.5 billion to buy.
Rather than call out Singh’s absurd motion, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment Sean Fraser used his time to promote the Liberals’ similarly worded motion that they will be soon moving.
“I expect, given that this motion was tabled just a few days after we had our own announcement that there would be a debate about climate change as an emergency, I expect that this is more political gamesmanship than it is actually an attempt at substantive policy debate,” Fraser said.
The Trudeau Liberals and the NDP have a track record of flirting with anti-oil activists to win the votes of the far-left.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once told a crowd that Canada needs to “phase out” the oilsands, and he created laws like Bill C-69, which some say are designed to destroy the energy sector.
Leading up the federal election in October, it appears that the Liberals and NDP are both attempting to appease the far-left with their radical positions on Canada’s energy sector.
An estimated 400 Mexican cartel members have entered Canada using fake passports since Justin Trudeau lifted visa requirements for the country, according to Quebec news outlet TVA Nouvelle.
Shortly after Trudeau was elected prime minister, the federal government stopped requiring Mexican citizens to apply for a visa before visiting Canada in 2016. Currently, anybody hoping to enter Canada through an airport must attain an Electronic Travel Authorization, which costs about $7 and takes a few minutes to complete.
Stringent visa requirements for Mexico were implemented by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2009.
Despite calls from officials warning the federal government that the visa lift would result in criminals taking advantage of the situation, the Trudeau government carried on with the reform.
Authorities have been hard-pressed to track the cartel members after they have entered Canada, while some suspects have evaded police entirely. Authorities have reason to believe that among them there are “sicarios” or hitmen, as well as drug traffickers.
One known suspect, Romualdo Lopez-Herrera, who was a known hitman for the cartels arrived in Canada through the Toronto Pearson Airport without being intercepted or spotted by authorities. Lopez-Herrera was later arrested for extortion in Canada but has since evaded authorities and is roaming free in the country.
According to the Canadian Border Services Agency, the visa changes have led to an 80% increase in drugs seized along the Canada-U.S. border, while inadmissibility has risen by 500%.
Overall, asylum claims have also gone up due to lax border regulations as reported by True North. In 2018 alone, over 3,300 asylum claims were made in Canada by Mexican citizens.
Other suspects believed to be in Canada who are involved with Mexican drug cartels are Peruvian cartel member Carlos Joel Borrego Mendoza and Colombian hitman Fredi Gil Rodriguez.
It is estimated that half of the 400 cartel members are currently residing in the province of Quebec.
It’s been a tumultuous six months for the government of Justin Trudeau. But they keep making decisions that demonstrate how politically tone deaf they are.
True North’s Leo Knight explains.
BY: ANTHONY FUREY
There’s been quite a disconnect happening within the Liberal cabinet in recent weeks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has for months now been going on and on and on about the need for social media giants to clean up their act when it comes to ambiguous terms like hate speech and misinformation or face his legislative wrath.
It seems the fix may have been in from the start, as it’s unclear what specific instructions companies like Facebook and Twitter were even given. Regardless, it looks like their time is up and the Liberals are determined to bring in the restrictions.
Little problem though. They’ve offered no specific definitions of these terms.
There’s an old joke that goes: “What’s hate speech? It’s speech we hate!”
Is Trudeau trying to just ban people from saying mean things about him, people wonder. It seems at first like a ludicrous question, something no mature politician would do. But it needs to be asked if only because the issue is still so vague that nothing can be ruled out.
Trudeau seized about the issue of the Christchurch mosque tragedy to ramp up his calls for banning hate speech. He used his attendance at a conference in France to highlight these imminent regulations, allowing the mass shooting to act as something of a shield for these regulations.
Then earlier this week Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains announced the new Digital Charter, that covers a whole pile of changes to the rules that govern our online lives. Hate speech, misinformation and electoral interference are just one small part of that plan.
Here’s where the disconnect comes in.
While Trudeau is going on non-stop about hate speech, Bains hardly mentions it, more focused on industry issues around privacy and copyright.
Then there’s the new Justice Minister David Lametti, returning to the hate speech issue in a recent interview with The Toronto Star: “He said the purpose of Trudeau’s Paris commitment was to begin to share information with France and New Zealand and call on other countries to join the Christchurch Call. Lametti said several solutions are under consideration, from using the courts, changing the criminal code, creating a regulatory body or advancing the powers of existing regulators such as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.”
Hold on.
Those are some pretty broad options under consideration. Changing the criminal code? Creating a whole new regulatory body to police hate speech? We’re going to need more specifics on this.
Canadians take free speech quite seriously. They understand those old slogans that there is no such thing as freedom from the offence or that one may not agree with that someone has to say but they’ll fight for their right to say it. This appears to be a departure from that spirit.
What would these criminal code changes be? It’s already illegal to slander and libel someone. It’s also illegal to make threats and to incite violence. How broad will the laws become?
There’s a lot in the Digital Charter. But it now appears there’s also a whole lot coming that isn’t in it. And that’s what we should be worried about.
The cost of dealing with Justin Trudeau’s open border policies has become even higher as the government has committed $6 million to provide temporary housing to asylum seekers in British Columbia.
The $6 million is the latest huge sum the feds have doled out to provinces struggling with the influx of migrants since Justin Trudeau’s infamous tweet.
True North has been keeping track of how much Justin Trudeau’s invite to the world’s migrants has cost Canadian taxpayers.
“Our partnership with the Province of British Columbia has been invaluable as we work together to find sustainable solutions for vulnerable individuals in need of shelter,” said Bill Blair, Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction.
“We remain committed to working collaboratively with our partners to address the challenges provinces face as a result of increased global migration.”
The illegal border crosser situation in British Columbia is not as widely known, as most illegal crossings occur in Quebec, but several thousand migrants have ended up in BC.
According to the non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Officer, processing illegal border crossers alone will exceed $1.1 billion this year.
This does not include money given to municipalities, which have absorbed much of the front-line costs of asylum seekers. The federal government has given $26 million to the city of Toronto to deal with the shortage of shelter for migrants.
This only compensates a fraction of the $65 million the City has spent dealing with housing migrants.
The situation has gone so out of hand that the mayor of Ottawa had to practically beg the federal government for financial assistance with the housing crisis in Trudeau’s own backyard.
Taxpayers appear to be indefinitely on the hook for the cost of Justin Trudeau’s invitation to the world’s migrants.
Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Bill Blair has indicated that the Trudeau Liberals might resort to a federal order to implement a controversial handgun ban, meaning a sweeping change could come without a vote in the House of Commons.
Blair, who was put in charge of studying the potential implications of a handgun and “assault rifle” ban suggested an order-in-council is one of the potential avenues the federal government could use to get the law through in time before the next election.
An order-in-council is a controversial measure that allows the federal government to pass a law through the authority of the governor general, bypassing the ordinary legislative and political channels.
As a result of his study, Blair found that Canadians are split on the issue of gun control.
“Overall, participants were strongly polarized on the issue of banning handguns and assault-style firearms,” claimed the report.
The federal government has cited the Christchurch mosque shooting as one of the reasons behind its recent push to further regulate legal gun ownership. The New Zealand parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of an “assault weapon” ban shortly after the attack.
Independent MP Tony Clement was the first to raise alarms about a potential ban in the House of Commons.
“The prime minister plans to announce this ban at the Women Deliver Conference, where New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern will also attend – can the prime minister confirm or deny this zero accountability, secret plan?” asked Clement.
The Women Deliver Conference is slated to take place from June 3rd to June 6th. The Prime Minister’s Office denied Clement’s accusation, but it was only a couple of weeks later that Blair refused to take an order-in-council off the table.
Recently, Trudeau-appointed Senator Marilou McPhedran attempted to put forward an amendment to Bill C-71 “to add handguns to the “prohibited firearm” list” in the Canadian Criminal Code. However, the amendment was shut down by a Senate committee in a six to two vote.
