We’re heading into week 3 of the SNC-Lavalin debacle, and some Canadians might be growing tired of this story and that’s probably what the Trudeau government wants. They want this story to go away.
But the fact of the matter is, the foundation of the integrity of our democracy is at stake here.
True North’s Anthony Furey says the Justice Committee isn’t enough. We need a public inquiry or even a RCMP probe to find the truth.
Despite a shortage of blood plasma in Canada, the Saskatchewan NDP is trying to ban private clinics that pay plasma donors.
David Clement of the Consumer Choice Center joins True North’s Andrew Lawton to explain why this is such a dangerous move.
As the old saying goes, it’s not so much the crime but the cover-up. And the attempt to cover-up, or at least explain away, the SNC-Lavalin mess is a lesson in how not to do things.
After the story first broke in The Globe & Mail that Jody Wilson-Raybould, when Attorney General, was pressured to drop charges against the firm, here’s what Trudeau said: “The allegations reported in the story are false. At no time did I or my office direct the current or previous attorney-general to make any particular decision in this matter.”
Reporters on the ground immediately pounced on how the question wasn’t whether he directed the AG but whether he pressured or influenced the AG. Trudeau stuck to his story though, not offering clarity but still claiming it was “false”.
The PMO then sent out a number of MPs to parrot this line of defence and Trudeau himself kept it up. That was all two weeks ago. Then a week ago, Trudeau said something different:
“There were many discussions going on. Which is why Jody Wilson-Raybould asked me if I was directing her, or going to direct her, to take a particular decision and I, of course, said no, that it was he decision to make and I expected her to make it. I had full confidence in her role as attorney general to make the decision,” the PM said.
A funny line, that. He’s admitting that they talked about the broad idea of how he could be directing her to make a certain decision but denies that he specifically did direct her to make that decision. And we’re supposed to buy that?
It brings to mind those scenes in crime movies when the mob boss says “The choice is up to you, I will keenly await your decision” as a bunch of goons stand around cracking their knuckles.
All that went out the window on Thursday though, when Michael Wernick – Canada’s top public servant who is tasked with implementing the PM’s agenda – basically fessed up that there was indeed pressure but it was “lawful advocacy” (whatever the hell that means) instead of “inappropriate pressure”.
See what happened there? The story has gone from “false” to “yes, it happened but we don’t think it’s a big deal”. Talk about an excuse unravelling in real time.
Now it would be one thing if this story was, say, the one about Trudeau groping a reporter 18 years ago. Like with this story, the PM was shifty in how he described the event. But the two scandals are very different.
The grope one is about whether the PM is a hypocrite on his feminism and whether or not he applies different standards to others accused of sexual harassment and assault than he does to himself.
The grope story isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things in terms of rocking people’s faith in our public institutions.
The SNC-Lavalin story however?
It’s about questions over whether or not top politicians and bureaucrats can attempt to influence the justice system and get away with it. And now we’ve seen their side of the story unravel.
A man who attacked officials at a military recruitment centre with a knife, and was later acquitted due to mental illness wants the privilege to attend college.
On March 14, 2016, Ali attacked soldiers at the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in North York. He punched a soldier in the head then stabbed him with a large knife, leaving a three-inch wound on his arm.
In 2018 the Ontario Review Board granted Ayanle Hassan Ali permission to attend Mohawk College despite still being detained at a secure Hamilton hospital.
Now the Crown must justify to a judge why Ayanle Hassan Ali, a schizophreniac with radical Islamist beliefs, should not be allowed to attend a public college.
The Crown is also arguing that Ali should be banned from being near anyone in uniform as they believe he is too dangerous to be near any military personnel.
The Crown argues that while addressing the respondent’s mental illness and reintegrating him in a way which would not put the public in danger, the Board failed to consider the potential risk to public safety Ali may have if he were allowed in an educational community.
“The board, however, only cited the needs of the accused and his reintegration when addressing indirect supervision in the community for educational purposes, and failed to advert to, or give adequate consideration to, the paramount factor of public safety,” the Crown argued.
On March 14, 2016, Ali attacked soldiers at the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in North York. He punched a soldier in the head then stabbed him with a large knife, leaving a three-inch wound on his arm.
The Ontario Review Board believes he should be allowed to attend Mohawk college because he is not a terrorist. Despite this, his doctor does believe he has “potential to act out on political, or radical ideas.”
Due to his schizophrenia, Ali was found not criminally responsible for the charges of attempted murder, assault and weapons offences.
Mohawk College says that they have heard from many concerned students and staff about the possibility of Ali being in their school.
Mohawk added that, if Ali were to become a student at their school, they would probably find a way for it to be done remotely.
The social justice warriors are noticing they no longer have momentum on their side.
More importantly, they’re no longer framing the debate. As Doug Ford phrases it, Canadians are sick of “crazy marxist nonsense”.
True North’s Anthony Furey explains.
Canada became a little freer this week. In the midst of corruption and obstruction of justice questions circling against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office, Trudeau’s top aide and close friend Gerald Butts resigned on Monday.
If Butts stays true to his word, and will no longer be advising Trudeau, Canada will be a freer, stronger, more united and more prosperous country.
Butts is best known for being Trudeau’s brain-trust as well as a raving ideologue and radical environmentalist. He’s also known for his snide partisanship on social media, where he obnoxiously pushes Liberal talking points while talking down to Canadians and desperately trying to shape a media narrative.
Perched from the most powerful position in government, Butts punched down, belittling working Canadians and smugly name-calling those with whom he disagreed. His petty vitriol was sometimes aimed at writers here at the Sun. Butts seemed to despise our paper, and the people who read it.
But he didn’t just call us names. He imposed his fanatical ideology over all of us. With the fervor of a religious zealot, Butts was willing to kill jobs, destroy our economy and cut the lifeline of our civilization in order to address an abstract, theoretical global conundrum.
Rather than taking a cautious, pragmatic approach to an incredibly complex problem, Butts, convinced of his own intellectual and moral superiority, seemed to believe he had a blank cheque to erase Canadian industry and re-write the laws of economics in pursuit of his utopia.
Even his resignation letter — about his role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal — couldn’t resist the opportunity to virtue signal and lecture us about his obsession with global warming.
This isn’t Butts’ first kick at the can. Fifteen years ago, he was the architect of the Ontario Liberal’s Green Energy Act, which shut down the province’s coal industry, gave lucrative green energy contracts to Liberal insiders, and put Ontario on track to become the global poster-child of why green energy schemes fail.
Ontario’s program was lauded by all the fancy environmentalists, but even on the surface, the plan made no sense. It relied on risky energy sources — wind and solar — that quickly proved unreliable for the power grid.
The Liberal government resorted to building new gas plants, which they then canceled in the middle of an election campaign for entirely partisan reasons, leading to billions in debt and a Liberal staffer sentenced to jail.
The costs kept piling up and Ontario ratepayers were stuck paying inflated prices for failing energy sources. The government plunged the province further into debt, borrowing at high interest rates to give ratepayers a subsidy on their own energy bills.
Ontario became the most indebted sub-sovereign government in the world.
After doing irreparable harm to Ontario’s economy, racking up ungodly amounts of debt and bankrupting thousands of homeowners who could no longer afford to pay their electricity bills, Butts was at it again, this time with all of Canada in sight.
He blocked pipelines, changed the regulatory environment, unilaterally imposed a tax on carbon and destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.
The likes of Butts apparently know how to restructure the entire global economy and adjust the earth’s climate hundreds of years from now. Talk about a God complex.
Butts is gone, for now.
Good riddance, now let’s get back to work and try to build some pipelines.
Three men staying at a 24-hour homeless shelter in downtown Toronto told True North they were not offered hotel or motel rooms to live in like the many refugee claimants who illegally entered Canada have been provided by the City.
True North has previously reported that refugee claimants are staying in four hotels and an undisclosed number of motels for upwards of six months at a time.
Learn more: tnc.news/2019/02/19/gordon-ho…gal-border-crossers/
As we watched the theatre of the absurd unfold on Parliament Hill this week with the Prime Minister doing everything possible to avoid answering questions in the burgeoning SNC-Lavalin scandal, a few hundred energy workers drove up Wellington Street in front of the Hill blasting their horns in protest of the Trudeau government’s energy policies which have decimated the oil and gas sector with the loss of thousands of jobs and an exodus of investment to friendlier economic climes in the U.S.
The protestors who drove across the country in a convoy dubbed United We Roll, picked up more support in every town and city along the way. Indeed, they were even joined by supporters making their way to Ottawa from the Maritimes. Yet the Toronto-centric CBC managed to disparage them as “angry Albertans.”
For the entire term of the Trudeau government, he has been preaching about climate change and shifting energy policies to ensure Alberta oil was land-locked.
His announced strategy to combat climate change is to force a carbon tax down Canadians’ throats. Trudeau is getting pushback from several provinces most notably the government of the most populous province, Ontario.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will leave the efficacy of this approach alone. But as Environment Minister Catherine McKenna jets all over the world with her entourage and personal photographer, many of us are stunned by the tone-deaf hypocrisy. Central to her argument is the “science is settled.” It isn’t and not by a long shot.
I will leave the explanations of the technical stuff to experts like Anthony Watts, Joe Bastardi, Dr. Judith Curry and Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace who left that organization in the mid 80s because of the political polarization of that movement and organization.
Now, I make no claim to being a climate expert. I’m a former police officer and have spent a career as an investigator. When we do investigations we rely on something called evidence to reach conclusions.
For the past 20 or so years we’ve been bludgeoned with the paranoia of so-called experts yet we see things like manipulated data to try and reach the conclusions they want. Well, that’s not evidence.
In fact, every single climate computer model produced in the past 20 years seems to have proven wrong. Every one.
So from an evidentiary perspective there doesn’t seem to be any reason based on that to gut the economy with a punitive tax that will achieve nothing.
But more to the point, the climate fraudsters like McKenna and Trudeau keep saying things like 97% of climate scientists agree. If that’s the case, who are we common folks to argue?
Well, let’s look at that claim.
In April 2008 University of Illinois grad student Margaret Zimmerman sent a 2 question survey on global warming to 10,257 earth scientists of whom 3146 responded. Of these about half did not agree with the statements made.
So, she selected 77 of the ones that did agree and sent them a further third ambiguous question about whether they believed human activity contributed to climate change. Of those two answered to the negative and 75 were in favour of the statement albeit with many caveats. Such as “You should have asked to what extent.” The conclusion she therefore drew was 97.4% of those agreed and with that the 97% lie was born.
It is of course, pure nonsense and certainly not in any real sense evidence that “97% of climate scientists agree” with where to go for coffee at their climate conferences let alone that man-made activity is contributing to anything relating to the climate.
So, it is with “evidence” like that the Liberals are imposing an unwanted tax on the country that will accomplish absolutely nothing and with its pipeline policies ensured that Alberta economy was brought to its knees.
SNC Lavalin may well be a scandal most folks can understand, but this is a much bigger scandal and is much more dangerous to the economic health and future prosperity of the country.
Armchair journalists, who didn’t bother attending the United We Roll protest in Ottawa claimed the protesters were racists and white nationalists.
However, the people True North spoke to on Tuesday were by and large ordinary blue-collar folk from across the country concerned about their and Canada’s economic future.
“I think [the Trudeau government is] doing a disservice to all Canadians. I mean let’s face it, the number one source of the economy in Canada is resources, oil being at the top of the list. And then Justin Trudeau came out awhile back, even on his Twitter account, and said he would like to see in his lifetime the oil sands shutdown. He’s not for oil at all,” said Brent Lockwood, an Ottawa man wearing a yellow vest who came out in the minus 20 Celsius weather to protest the Trudeau government because his two sons recently lost their jobs in the oil industry and are currently unemployed.
“Moving by rail cars is, as we’ve obviously seen, dangerous. The safest way is always by pipeline,” says Lockwood about why he thinks the government should do everything in its power to get more pipelines built. “I think [Trudeau] bought the pipeline knowing he won’t push it forward.”
Steve Bacovsky, a Calgarian in the tourism business, joined the convoy to show his support for his fellow Albertans.
“When it takes ten years for a pipeline not even approved — or approved and then disapproved — and all the politics that go behind it, when you have 54% of BC people wanting the pipeline… And governments are pushing for something different, and stalling it, delaying it, the delay tactics have to stop,” says Bacovsky.
“Every three to five miles there’s someone standing out on their driveway … when we were driving, all the time. I mean it was 34 below in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and it’s cold in Ontario, but people are out there… They’re not standing, watching this in a window, they’re coming out to show they have support for it.” said Bacovsky about the overwhelming support they received on the journey to Ottawa. “There’s a tracker on the motorcade so Canadians know when they’re going by.”
Some journalists on Twitter circulated a bird’s eye-view picture of the protest to cite how few people showed up. But that picture only showed United We Roll protesters on the field out front of Parliament Hill, completely cutting off all the trucks and protesters on the blocked off road.
“It’s a lot of expenses to get here from [Alberta], so it’s a good showing. I’ve seen a lot of protests here before, when you consider how cold it is it’s actually a pretty good turnout,” said Lockwood.
Journalists also cited a few outlier individuals at the protest with more extremist views and/or affiliations with extremist groups, even though they were only a few in the public space out of the hundreds of people that showed up.
These individuals with more extreme views were mostly down by the road arguing with Indigenous and Antifa counter protesters.
Regardless, some journalists not at the event jumped to the conclusion that Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer showing up to speak to the crowd near the stage by Parliament somehow meant he was endorsing white nationalism.
Journalists had also cited the vitriolic and racist comments some in the Yellow Vest movement have expressed online. However, the United We Roll convoy distanced itself from the Yellow Vest movement for that reason, rebranding itself.
Nevertheless, the Facebook page Yellow Vests Canada has 110,000 members, many of whom are everyday Canadians upset with the current government’s policies, so many of the people that showed up in Ottawa at the United We Ride protest wore yellow vests to represent their opposition to the same issues it first represented in France: the carbon tax and an increasingly centralized, globalized government.
The people True North spoke to also expressed concerns about illegal border crossings and Canada potentially losing sovereignty over its own immigration levels if it follows what’s outlined in the non-compulsory UN compact on migration, but didn’t express anti-immigrant sentiments.
“I’m against the UN migration compact. I don’t think that the UN should be dictating to us how many people we should be taking,” said Lockwood. He knows it’s non-binding but still believes it shows the government’s intent to eventually make it binding, which would in effect allow the UN to give Canada quotas of people to take in.
“Of course, I don’t believe [the government is prioritizing Canadians],” says Bacovsky. “I think there are a lot of Canadians out there that do need the help for a lot of things.”
The Trudeau government is ramming through its plan to boost immigration levels, despite survey after survey showing that Canadians oppose this idea.
Canadians want a responsible, rules-based immigration program that benefits the entire country. That’s simply not what the Trudeau government has offered.
True North’s Candice Malcolm explains.