(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep.

When it comes to Canada’s role on the world stage, the Trudeau government has been quietly siding with the world’s worst tyrants and human rights abusers.

A new report from the independent watchdog group UN Watch issued a scathing report this week on Canada’s voting record at the United Nations.

“Canada broke with the free world and joined Syria, Iran and North Korea by voting ‘no’ on eight separate measures that sought to hold Cuba accountable for widespread human rights violations,” read the report.

On issues of basic rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, workers rights, and political freedoms, Canada failed to join other Western liberal democracies in condemning Cuba.

Instead, our diplomats sided with the oppressive communist regime.

Trudeau’s representatives even failed to join a motion calling for gender equity in Cuba.

When the world’s top male feminist shies away from an opportunity to lecture others on gender, you know something’s not right.

And it isn’t just at the UN that the Trudeau government has shamelessly ignored abuse and sided with Cuba.

Over the past year-and-a-half, mysterious “sonic attacks” have been waged against Canadian and American diplomats and their families in Havana, leaving many with brain injuries and symptoms like gushing nose-bleeds, intense nausea and incapacitating headaches.

Both countries recalled injured diplomatic staff, but while the U.S. has loudly and openly been investigating these attacks and condemning Cuba, Canada has remained silent.

The victims recently spoke out about their treatment in a Globe and Mail report, revealing that the Trudeau government failed to acknowledge their concerns or protect their safety.

“We did not expect to be abandoned, or more precisely, sacrificed – that’s how we’re feeling now,” one said.

According to the Globe report, several diplomats agree that the Trudeau government “considers it strategically important to maintain a comparatively close relationship with Cuba’s Communist regime, for trade and political reasons.”

Trade? Cuba is a poor country with a planned economy; most Cuban businesses are owned and operated by the communist government and its rogue military.

Canadians who visit Cuba may not realize it, but Cuba’s hotel industry is run almost entirely to benefit its military. Your tourism dollars are going towards guns and bullets used to persecute political prisoners and kill innocent people.

And when it comes to Canada’s trade partners, Cuba ranks 47th on the list of countries importing Canadian products.

So why is Canada going out of its way to befriend a military dictatorship?

According to the anonymous diplomat interviewed by the Globe, the Trudeau government doesn’t want to upset Cuba “because of Canada’s bid for a UN Security Council seat.”

In other words, the Trudeau government is so desperate to be part of the UN in-crowd — a group of corrupt, elitist, power-hungry bureaucrats — that it’s willing to sacrifice on core Canadian principles.

When ruthless dictator Fidel Castro finally died in 2016, most Cubans celebrated. I was reporting from Little Havana in Miami where thousands of Cubans gathered to dance, sing and show their support for freedom and reform in Cuba.

Justin Trudeau, by contrast, issued a tone-deaf statement praising Castro, calling him a “larger than life leader” and spreading propaganda about his record as Cuba’s long-standing dictator.

Trudeau’s strange affinity for Cuba, and his willingness to turn a blind eye to Cuba’s repeated belligerence, is a disgrace to all Canadians.

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North Initiative 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was booed as he took the podium at an event in Calgary this week.

Outside, thousands of demonstrators blocked the streets to protest Trudeau’s appearance in a province and a city that feels completely abandoned.

These weren’t your typical protesters. There were no black masks, no property damage and no arrests.

In fact, citizen journalists shot footage of friendly, polite, respectful and jovial, albeit frustrated, Canadians showing their disapproval towards Trudeau’s policies.

Specifically, these folks were protesting his energy policies and, to use Trudeau’s own words, his plan to “phase out” the Canadian oil sands.

Trudeau, always rich in platitudes and poor in understanding his job description, admitted it is “very much a crisis” in Alberta. No kidding. Trudeau is imposing his national carbon tax while having a hand in blocking four major pipelines — Energy East, Trans Mountain, Northern Gateway and Keystone XL.

Alberta’s abundant oil supply is landlocked. Increasing amounts are therefore shipped by rail, which is not only more expensive but also more environmentally risky.

As a result, Canadian crude oil is now selling at historic low prices and the economy is losing $80 million each and every day. Unemployment levels in Alberta are the highest in decades, one of four Calgary offices sit empty, investors and Canadian energy firms are fleeing the country, and, all the while, Albertans are still being forced to pay equalization transfer payments to the rest of the country.

To add insult to injury, the Trudeau government introduced Bill C-69, which will make it all but impossible to approve future energy projects.

Trudeau is inserting his divisive identity politics into the pipeline approval process and will require companies to undergo a review based on intersectional politics — a fringe far-left ideology championed by Marxist university professors and their social justice warrior students.

With this gloomy state of affairs in Alberta as a backdrop, the federal government unveiled its Fall Economic Update this week. The Liberals have turned this update into a mini budget — another opportunity to bribe special interest groups with taxpayer money.

Trudeau’s budget seemed to have targeted handouts and tax credits for everyone — manufacturers, the tech sector, fishermen, exporters, charities, and even journalists.

Despite earlier promises to only run “modest deficits” and to balance the budget by 2018 — a pledge Trudeau said was “cast in stone” — the Liberals instead unveiled an $18.1 billion deficit, with $17.6 billion in new federal spending.

Under Trudeau’s watch, the federal debt will grow to $765 billion by 2023, and continue to skyrocket from there. Our children and grandchildren will be left with that bill, to be paid off through higher taxes and reduced services.

But out of all that money, all that borrowing and all those handouts, the Trudeau Liberals couldn’t find a way to support the energy industry in Alberta — the backbone of the Canadian economy and a source of hope and opportunity for Canadians of all walks of life.

In fact, there wasn’t a penny pledged to help Canadians who work in the oil sands. Nothing to speed up pipeline construction, nothing to increase the capacity for oil to be shipped by rail, nothing to remove barriers and help get our oil to market.

Trudeau may acknowledge the existence of a crisis in Alberta, but he fails to grasp how he’s played a significant role in creating and prolonging it.

No wonder he was booed and protested.

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North Initiative. 

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

Canada is on track to receive more asylum applications in 2018 than any previous year since the Immigration and Refugee Board started tracking this information in 1989.

This, after 6,465 asylum seekers submitted applications in October alone.

So much for immigration minister Ahmed Hussen’s assertion that the numbers were going down and that the Trudeau government had everything under control.

This year, Canada is on track to receive more than 55,000 refugee applications, compared to 50,385 in 2017 and 23,870 in 2016.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent out his infamous tweet in January 2017 inviting the world’s refugees to come to Canada, and since then, 100,000 self-selected and unscreened migrants have taken him up on the offer.

Over 37,000 of these migrants crossed into Canada illegally along the US border. These asylum seekers fall outside Canada’s official targets for immigration and refugee numbers. This means Canada could accept more than double the number of refugees it laid out in its annual immigration plan submitted to Parliament.

The Trudeau government told Canadians we’d welcome 43,000 refugees in 2018; instead we could welcome more than 98,000 — most of whom have not yet been determined to be legitimate refugees, but will be given all the same benefits nonetheless.

There are now more than 64,000 migrants waiting in a backlog to have their cases heard by an immigration judge. It will take years, possibly a decade, to work through all these applications.

By the time some cases are ruled upon, the claimants will have already started a life and a family in Canada, making it nearly impossible to deport them. Others will have disappeared completely or fallen into criminal gangs and networks.

There is mounting evidence that Canada has lost control of its immigration program.

An increasingly large portion of migrants coming to Canada were not screened or vetted. They were not rescued from a war zone, nor were they selected based on merit or skills or to help contribute to our country.

Instead of helping the most needy, our refugee system today seems to be aimed at helping the most sophisticated opportunists — those who deliberately break our laws, jump the immigration queue and bypass our legal immigration system.

And we are deliberately rewarding this bad behaviour.

The Trudeau government has rolled out the red carpet, and from the moment these migrants illegally cross into Canada, the government holds their hand and treats them like they’re staying at an all-inclusive resort.

The RCMP at times look like hotel bellhops helping migrants with their luggage. Migrants register and are given ground transportation to the city of their choosing. They stay at expensive hotels — courtesy of the taxpayer — and receive immediate and free access to healthcare, education, language classes and generous welfare payments.

The Trudeau government is trying so hard to accommodate these migrants, they’ve created what economists call a moral hazard. The nicer we are and the more we give to migrants, the more migrants we’ll have arriving at our doorstep.

Through its actions and its programs, the Trudeau government is encouraging migrants to break our laws and jump the immigration queue.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper did an in-depth interview on Sunday with American conservative journalist Ben Shapiro. On the topic of immigration, Harper made the case for broad legal immigration that helps the economy and benefits all Canadians.

He had one caveat. “I have no time for illegal immigration.”

Many Canadians feel the same way.

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

What is a refugee? The term gets thrown around a lot and, if you get your information from the mainstream media in Canada, you could be forgiven for believing a refugee is any migrant who arrives in a Western country hoping to stay.

The media in Canada, following cues from the Trudeau Liberals, erroneously conflate asylum seekers with bona-fide refugees. It happens every day on the CBC and on the pages of newspapers, such as the Toronto Star.

But not all asylum seekers are refugees. Many migrants explicitly break the rules laid out for becoming a refugee, for instance, by crossing through other safe countries before submitting their refugee applications.

Sadly, all this does is undermine the plight of real refugees around the world.

One such example of a true refugee in need of Canada’s help is Asia Bibi.

Bibi is a poor Pakistani farm worker, who also happens to be Catholic. She was born and raised in a small rural village near Lahore, Pakistan, where Christians are targeted, persecuted and relegated to low status and low-wage jobs.

Bibi and her family were often pressured by their community to convert to Islam.

One day, Bibi was sent to fetch water from a nearby well, and on her way she stopped to take a drink of water for a cup she found on the ground. Another villager saw her and insisted it was forbidden for a Christian to drink from the same cup as Muslims.

Bibi was confronted by an angry crowd, who again demanded that she convert. She refused, and defended her belief in Jesus Christ as the saviour of mankind.

A mob later showed up at Bibi’s house and began to physically attack her and her family. They accused her of making derogatory statements about Islam.

Police arrested her and charged her under Pakistan’s perverse blasphemy laws that punish those who criticize Islam.

Bibi was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 and sentenced to death by hanging.

The ruling was upheld by the Lahore High Court and she remained on death row.

Following international pressure from human rights organizations and the Pope himself, the case was sent to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, which last month ruled Bibi was innocent, citing insufficient evidence and inconsistent witness accounts.

The acquittal prompted mass protests from hardline Islamists demanding that she be killed. Thousands of angry men took to the streets in mass demonstrations.

Bibi is now in hiding in Pakistan and the court ruled she cannot leave the country because her case remains in an appeals process.

The British government, meanwhile, confirmed it would not offer Bibi asylum — out of fear for the safety of British diplomats in Pakistan.

Canada has stepped up and our officials are reportedly in discussions with Pakistani officials about bringing her to Canada.

Bibi is an example of a real refugee, a person with a well-founded fear of persecution based solely on her religious beliefs. If she is forced to remain in Pakistan, there is no doubt she’ll be killed.

Her case highlights the very reason countries, such as Canada, have an asylum program — to protect individuals from cruel and unjust treatment while upholding our own values of freedom of speech, religious freedom and the rule of law.

Asia Bibi deserves asylum. And if the U.K. insists on cowering to a mob of Pakistani Islamists, then Canada needs to be there to offer Bibi and her family immediate aid and asylum.

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North Initiative.

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

Sunday marks the 100 year anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First World War.

The ceasefire was signed in November 1918 and news of the war’s end was quickly and widely celebrated throughout the British Empire.

World War One was known at the time as “the war to end all wars” and when the Germans finally surrendered, British Prime Minister Lloyd George optimistically stated, “I hope we can say that thus, this fateful morning, came an end to all wars.”

We celebrate Armistice Day, now known as Remembrance Day, to honour the brave men who fought and died to preserve our freedom and our way of life. This despite the sad truth that WWI — a devastating war that left some 40 million dead, including approximately 61,000 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force — was far from the end of all war.

Less than two decades later, the world found itself engulfed in another catastrophic world war that required millions more to make the ultimate sacrifice to stop the spread of fascism and to protect freedom and democracy worldwide.

In 1921, the Royal British Legion created a campaign called the Poppy Appeal, based on John McCrae’s 1915 poem ‘In Flanders Fields,’ to raise money in support of injured veterans and their families.

The bright red poppy was seen as a symbol of inspiration; the blood-red wildflower grew in the French and Belgian fields that were ripped apart by tanks and artillery and devastated by human carnage during the war.

The poppy represented new life and hope.

My great-grandfather was killed in these fields in 1915, leaving behind his wife and young children in Vancouver, B.C.

The poppy lives on, as a small token of our appreciation to those who did not hesitate to risk everything to protect the things they loved the most.

Remarkably, many Canadians today are ignorant of our past and unaware of just how lucky we are to live in a free and democratic society.

A new survey from Ancestry.com found 56% of Canadians polled could not point out the significance of this year’s Remembrance Day anniversary.

Only 46% of Canadians expect to observe a moment of silence on November 11 and only 59% will buy and wear a poppy, down from 70% in 2017.

While 91% of respondents in Alberta and the Atlantic provinces plan on commemorating Remembrance Day, only 80% will nationwide, down from 86% last year.

Among younger Canadians, only 72% of people under the age of 35 said they will attend a Remembrance Day event.

That’s not good enough.

Canadians across civil society, including in our schools, churches, community centers and amongst new Canadians, need to take the lead in ensuring this tradition is passed onto future generations.

Freedom is not free, it requires constant vigilance and an understanding of how we came to be the freest and most prosperous civilization in human history.

One hundred years ago, it required a generation of young men to sacrifice everything in order to protect their families back home and ensure freedom and security for future generations.

We’d be remiss if we failed to understand our history and traditions as Canadians, part of which is to spend a few hours each year honouring the military heroes who fought and died so that we would never have to be exposed to the horrors of war.

It’s the very least we can do. Lest we forget.

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North Initiative 

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

Despite what the TV pundits and cheerleaders in the media predicted, there was no ‘Blue Wave’ this November.

Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S. saw a modest showing for the Democrats, who were able to pick up enough seats to gain control of the House of Representatives.

It’s a minor shift in the balance of power in Washington, and will allow the Democrats a new lever to try to temper Donald Trump’s agenda and hold his feet to the fire. It was by no means, however, a landslide victory for them.

In fact, it fell far below historic trends. In Barack Obama’s first midterm election, his party lost 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Bill Clinton’s first midterm saw the Democrats lose 54 seats in the House and nine in the Senate.

By contrast, the Republicans lost about 23 seats in the House and gained four in the Senate on Tuesday.

The real story from the midterm elections is that there was no mass backlash against Trump, despite the best efforts of Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the media. It also showed that the 2016 election was no anomaly, but represented a real shift in the political landscape. 

Trump’s nationalist and populist focus has attracted traditionally Democratic voters, particularly in blue-collar and working-class regions of the country.

With all his flaws, Trump remains one of the Western world’s most authentic politicians. What you see is what you get. He’s loud, brash, rude, and far from a traditional and polished politician. That drives the elites crazy, but it resonates with some 40% of the country.

They want a President who is fearless, who doesn’t stand down, doesn’t apologize and puts Americans first.

Republicans are never going to get a fair shake from the media; a Media Research Center study on the evening news found that while midterm coverage of the Democrats was more or less balanced, 88% of the coverage on Republicans was negative.

Much like the way the media treats Conservatives in Canada, the U.S. media demonize Republicans and ignore any good news story about the Trump administration. Like news about how the economy is booming and that there are now more job openings than there are Americans looking for work.

Unlike Conservatives in Canada and traditional establishment Republicans, Trump fights back.

He blasts the media for their dishonesty and takes his own message directly to the people. He doesn’t apologize or beg for forgiveness from the Left, and that drives them even crazier.

Meanwhile, the Democrats can’t seem to get their message straight. Rather than learning from the mistakes they made in 2016, the party continues to slide towards the hard Left.

Barack Obama was once considered a radical in the party, but compared to the new wave of Bernie Sanders-inspired Democratic-Socialists, race-baiting Social Justice Warriors, and the Antifa-led Resistance mob, Obama looks like a moderate.

The Democrats failed to offer an alternative vision for America. They didn’t present a coherent policy agenda or any substantial reasons why they deserve more political control.

Instead, they doubled down on the crazy. Their campaign amounted to accusations that Trump, and by extension many Americans and particularly white men, are racist, sexist, xenophobic, transphobic bigots.

The Trump Republicans fight back against the unhinged mob, and the American people continue to reward them in the polls. Conservatives in Canada could learn a lot from this strategy.

Candice Malcolm is the Founder of the True North Initiative. 

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

The Trudeau government is ramming through its plan to boost immigration levels, despite survey after survey showing that Canadians oppose this idea.

An Angus Reid poll from August 2018 found that half of Canadians want lower immigration compared to only 6% who want increased numbers. Likewise, another Angus Reid poll from earlier that month, which focused on illegal immigration, found that two-thirds of Canadians believe we accept too many asylum seekers.

These numbers represent the lowest public approval of Canada’s immigration program since pollsters started tracking this data in the 1970s.

While public opinion on immigration has hit an all-time low, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is boosting immigration to an all-time high.

The Liberal government announced its annual immigration targets this week — unveiling an aggressive plan to boost immigration numbers to the highest levels in modern Canadian history.

By 2021, the Liberals plan to welcome 350,000 new permanent residents per year.

Under Trudeau’s plan, Canada will add a city the size of Victoria, B.C., London, Ont., or two Prince Edward Islands each and every year.

The Liberals will have welcomed 1.3 million new permanent residents in by 2021, the equivalent of the city of Calgary or the province of Manitoba within the next three years.

Trudeau’s plan will bring in more people than the current populations of Yukon, Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick, combined.

New permanent residents are just half the equation. The Trudeau government also plans to boost the number of temporary foreign workers to 250,000 per year.

When we add together permanent residents, temporary workers, foreign students and other long-term visitors, Canada will welcome roughly three-quarters of a million people into our country each year.

That’s more than 2% of our total population.

Where will these newcomers live? Will they disperse across our vast country, or, like most newcomers over the past few decades, will they join the already congested major cities?

Will these newcomers learn English or French and adopt a Canadian identity? Will they learn about Canadian history, will they celebrate our culture and adopt our values?

Or, will they follow Justin Trudeau’s cue that Canada is a “post-national state” with “no core identity”? Will they live in isolated communities and fail to learn English or become economically self-sufficient?

Trudeau has created a toxic brew when it comes to immigration. He’s flung the door wide open, repeatedly inviting the world to come to Canada on social media.

His government has welcomed and even helped to facilitate the stream of illegal border crossers coming in from the United States; a problem that those same Angus Reid polls show two-thirds of Canadians describe as a “crisis” and 70% do not trust Trudeau to fix.

Alongside the Trudeau government’s unwillingness to protect our borders, Trudeau has embraced a postmodern attitude that neglects the Canadian identity and downplays the importance of integration.

Canada has long been a country made up of different people from different parts the world who came to Canada for new hope and opportunity. Immigrants from all backgrounds worked hard and come together over our shared values and way of life.

Canadians are intrinsically open to immigration and welcoming to newcomers, so long as they are willing to work hard, play by the rules and embrace our Canadian values.

Trudeau’s immigration and integration policies are testing the limits of Canadian openness and generosity. Canadians want a responsible, rules-based immigration program…(READ MORE)

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

There was a rare consensus in the House of Commons last week. All parties voted in favour of a Conservative motion that called on the Trudeau government to bring criminal charges against Canadian citizens who travelled abroad to fight alongside the Islamic State.

“Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are calling on the Prime Minister to immediately table a plan to serve justice to anyone who left our country to fight with this terrorist organization,” said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel, who introduced the motion.

Without providing specifics, Rempel added that the government should examine legal reforms to help ensure courts can access evidence against terror suspects.

The Conservatives are supposed to be the party of law and order, the party that prioritizes our safety and security over endless compassion, political correctness and virtue-signalling.

But when it comes to combating jihadist terrorism, the Conservatives seem to have lost their spine.

Not too long ago, the Conservatives knew that terrorists pose a greater threat than the individual crimes they commit. Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper believed in throwing the book at violent jihadists, and introduced a law to strip citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism.

They used it to revoke citizenship from the Jordanian mastermind of the Toronto 18 terrorist plot.

According to Harper-era minister Jason Kenney, the law applied to “people who are convicted of violent disloyalty to Canada — who hate our country so much that they take up arms against it as members of a terrorist group or take up arms against it in a foreign army through the commission of treason or of war against Canada.”

Those were the good old days.

Today’s Conservatives, by contrast, are suggesting that we repatriate these terrorist thugs and try our luck to convict them through Canada’s bleeding-heart justice system.

The reality is that once these ISIS fighters are back on Canadian soil, they will no doubt be welcomed by a fan club of human rights lawyers who are all too happy to argue that the terrorists did nothing wrong.

A news conference on Tuesday helped prove this point.

The father of a British man who holds dual citizenship with Canada made an appeal to the Trudeau government to help his son, who is being held alongside captured ISIS jihadists in Syria.

The father stated that his son was only guilty of being a devout Muslim who naively travelled to Syria to try to help people. He insisted that there is no evidence his son carried out violence on behalf of ISIS and that this is all just one big misunderstanding.

This is a preview of what other returnees and their fancy lawyers will argue if they are permitted back into Canada and face charges.

The Western world is struggling with the menace of jihadist terrorism and the dilemma of what to do with enemy citizens who travel abroad to fight alongside terrorist armies.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stands out among world leaders in his naive and often absurd declarations of support for the rights and privileges of terrorist citizens. He’s on the fringe far-left when it comes to dealing with terrorism.

Canada needs a strong opposition party to hold Trudeau accountable and demand that the safety and security of Canadians come first.

Instead of trying to find common ground with the Trudeau Liberals, the Conservatives should stand up for…(READ MORE)

(This column originally appeared in the Toronto Sun)

Canadians are taxed to death.

We pay taxes when we earn money, taxes when we spend, taxes when we save and taxes when we invest.

We pay taxes on basic necessities, such as food, housing, clothing and heating our homes during the long Canadian winters.

We even pay taxes on our taxes. When Canadians fill up at the pump, we pay a sales tax that gets applied on top of the hidden gasoline taxes.

According to the Fraser Institute, Canadians pay 42% of all the money we earn in taxes.

This is all important context when discussing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax grab.

Trudeau, being Trudeau, doesn’t call it a tax. Much like how he calls terrorists “foreign travellers” and those who illegally cross into Canada “irregular immigrants,” Trudeau calls his carbon tax a “price on pollution.”

The Liberal government, joined by its friends in the mainstream media, loves to tout that carbon taxes are recommended by economists as an efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For people who claim to have economists on their side, they sure seem to lack a basic understanding of how markets work.

Trudeau’s tax is imposed on carbon, which means it’s imposed onto everything.

To help make this more palatable, Trudeau has pledged to bribe Canadians with our own money, using another sly euphemism, a “climate action tax credit.”

But Trudeau’s rebate will only help offset a portion of tax portion paid by Canadians, not the endless unseen increases to our cost of living coming as we pay higher prices on everyday goods and services. But that’s the entire point.

The carbon tax is specifically designed to make our lives more expensive. By imposing a regressive tax, the Trudeau government is purposefully lowering our standard of living.

We will drive less, buy less, do less and have less.

Getting a modest rebate during tax season, if you trust this cash-strapped, spendthrift government to follow through, is little consolation.

Trudeau is making Canadians feel artificially poorer, in pursuit of a pie-in-the-sky United Nations scheme that disproportionately punishes North American consumers.

In recent years, however, Canada and the U.S. have reduced carbon emissions. As technologies improve and consumers become more savvy, rich countries have an impressive record of curbing emissions — without heavy-handed, top-down, government-knows-best schemes like Trudeau’s.

Canada’s carbon emissions dropped by 1.4% in 2016 without a carbon tax; carbon emissions fell by 2.7% last year in the U.S., after they withdrew from the UN Paris accord.

Meanwhile, global emissions continue to rise. Developing countries, such as China and India, don’t really care what UN bureaucrats and global boy scouts like Trudeau have to say and continue to expand their resources sectors. They’re doing what’s best for their citizens.

In Canada, the opposite is true.

Trudeau is punishing us through higher taxes, killing our resource industry through endless red-tape and, all the while, pretending he’s helping us. But even he knows his tax grab is futile when it comes to saving the planet; he admitted so much this week on a Quebec talk show.

“Even if Canada stopped everything tomorrow… it wouldn’t make a big difference.”

What Trudeau’s carbon tax does, instead, is give governments a new and lucrative way to pry more money away from overtaxed citizens and ensure we get to keep less of our own hard-earned cash.

Canadians should do everything possible to stop Trudeau’s destructive…(READ MORE)

LONDON – Tommy Robinson is free, for now.

On Tuesday, Robinson appeared before the highest circuit judge in London’s Central Criminal Court, defending himself against contempt charges that landed him in prison.

Judge Nicholas Hilliard, Q.C. ruled that the facts of the case were not yet settled, and referred the case to the Attorney General — punting the decision to the political class, who will have to weigh public interest in its ruling.

This was good news for Robinson, who had requested the referral and submitted a witness statement that led the judge to determine the case was too complex for him to rule on.

Tuesday was just the latest hurdle for Robinson in his ongoing court battles against the draconian UK government.

Robinson was found in contempt of court in May 2017 for filming during the trial of four Muslim men later found guilty of gang-raping a 16-year-old girl.

Robinson, an activist and citizen journalist from a working class background, claims he wasn’t familiar with the strict rules around court reporting in the UK; he received a suspended sentence and was put on probation.

A year later, he went to Leeds to report on the trial of 20 Pakistani men accused and later found guilty of rape and forced prostitution.

There’s a disturbing trend in the UK of Muslim gangs luring, grooming and forcing vulnerable girls into prostitution rings. For years, authorities across the UK failed to intervene to stop the horrendous abuses against these girls, predominantly from from white working class families, out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia.”

Robinson was better informed on the court rules this time, having received legal training and more reporting experience through his time working for Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. He carefully followed the rules, and the judge in that case later ruled that his reporting had no impact on that trial.

He was nevertheless arrested and charged with breach of peace for filming outside the Leeds court. Within hours of his arrest, he was found guilty of contempt and whisked away to jail.

For the crime of reporting on the horrendous grooming and rape of girls as young as 11, Robinson spent more than two months in prison. He was inexplicably transferred to a predominantly Muslim prison, where he claims he was severely mistreated and spent much of him time in solitary confinement.

On August 1, Robinson’s appeal was finally heard and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales threw away his conviction, citing a lack of due process.

Robinson was released, having lost 40 pounds and looking like a political prisoner.

I went to London this week to cover Robinson’s trial and to learn more about the growing political movement behind him. My airfare was covered through a grant from Rebel Media, who crowd-sourced funding to bring more journalists to cover the trial.

Robinson returned to court this week for the retrial of his original conviction. This time around, he was not alone — thousands of supporters from England’s forgotten working class showed up in central London to protest the treatment of Robinson as well as the horrendous phenomenon of grooming rape gangs.

The British press, known for their snobby derision towards working class people, wrote off the crowd as soccer hooligans and far-right racists. They loathe Robinson and demonize him at every opportunity.

Tommy Robinson is far from perfect. He refuses to abide by political correctness and has made plenty of mistakes, both in his early days of street activism against radical Islam and more recently in how he covered the rape-gang trials.

None of this justifies why a journalist was arrested, jailed, thrown in solitary confinement and denied basic rights; while rapist and pedophiles are treated with kid gloves and often protected by UK elites.

Something is rotten in the state of England. Tommy Robinson is working furiously to expose the harmful effects of political correctness and turning a blind eye to cultural violence originating in immigrant communities.

Elites in the UK may not like it, but a growing audience of everyday people are cheering him on.