After the Liberal party’s devastating loss in the Toronto—St.Paul’s byelection, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is calling for another round of byelections to be held on Sept. 16.
Plus, a national pro-life group is asking Health Canada to pull an abortion pill off of the market after reviewing the government’s adverse reactions reporting system.
And an inmate serving a near 8-year sentence escapes from a healing centre in Edmonton.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Lindsay Shepherd and Noah Jarvis!
Canada’s minister of heritage announced the government would be spending almost $300,000 in taxpayer money to fund a university project to create a website and browser tool to combat online misinformation.
“Discerning fact from fiction in our online world has become an increasingly difficult problem,” reads a statement from Canadian Heritage. “However, with the growing sophistication of online misinformation, it can be challenging to trust what you read online.”
Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascal St-Onge announced that funding would be given to the Université de Montréal to develop a user-friendly website and a web-browser extension “dedicated to detecting misinformation.”
“The challenge of navigating for reliable information online and on social media only keeps getting more difficult. Canadians deserve better. Thriving democracies require informed citizenry, and Canadians deserve the right to trust the information they need to inform their choices,” said St-Onge in a statement on Monday.
“That’s why projects like this one play such a vital role in helping build and maintain that trust in Canadians.”
The university will apply AI tools to “detect and counteract” misinformation that is spreading online in Canada “across languages, modalities (text, audio, video, images), and sources.”
According to Canadian Heritage, the technology will involve “behavioral nudges” to quell the proliferation of fake news stories which will alert users to potential misinformation and reduce their “likelihood of sharing this content.”
The government believes this will enhance public knowledge and media integrity as Canadians will be able to “quickly verify online content.”
The Trudeau government will allocate $292,675 for the project through the Digital Citizen Contribution Program, which was created to provide financial assistance for research projects that fight online misinformation.
“The prevalence of social media platforms in our daily lives has profoundly affected how Canadians interact with their government, the media, civil society organizations and each other,” said Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc in a statement on Monday.
LeBlanc said that social media has allowed for citizens to spread false information while participating in the public discourse.
“While these new platforms have empowered citizens to participate in public debate, they have also facilitated the spread of false information,” said LeBlanc. “Through this funding, we are supporting democratic resilience by providing Canadians with tools to verify online content, thereby strengthening their ability to assess the quality of information they come across online.”
The Trudeau government tabled the Online Harms Act in February, which it purports will safeguard Canadians from “online hate and other forms of harmful content.”
However, a survey conducted in March revealed that many Canadians don’t support the government being the arbiter of what constitutes online harm, nor do they think it is even possible from a logistical standpoint.
Of the 1,527 survey respondents, 70% said they support the government’s plan to regulate the internet, while 25% said they didn’t.
Within the cohort of supporters however, only 41% believe that the Online Harms Act will actually make the internet a safer place with another 32% saying it won’t.
Even fewer believed that the government could regulate online hate without clamping down on free speech, with a minority of 10% of respondents saying that they “completely trust” the government.
Proving that school trustees often use the school board as a stepping stone to bigger and better things, the chair of the Toronto District School Board has decided to throw her hat into the ring in the upcoming byelection for a Toronto city council seat.
Six-year trustee Rachel Chernos Lin, also the chair of the TDSB for the past two years, bailed a few days ago after writing a formal letter to outgoing education director Colleen Russell-Rawlins requesting a leave without pay until the November byelection.
She is vying for the Don Valley West seat vacated by Jaye Robinson, who sadly passed away from cancer a few months ago.
She says in the letter, obtained by True North, that four superintendents and two trustees – including her leftist pal on the board Shelley Laskin – will oversee “any issues that may require guidance and advocacy.”
That sounds like a recipe for chaos.
She adds that Marxist trustee Neethan Shan, the only would-be politician I know of to go downmarket from city councillor to trustee, will take over as chair.
With that, she appears to have made a hasty retreat, signing up to run while surrounded by past-her-due-date councillor and former head of the Manitoba Communist party Paula Fletcher and grossly past-his-due-date councillor Mike Colle.
Her election website was also a go by that day.
Chernos-Lin did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s hard to say whether the TDSB is better off with her or without her.
I can certainly say that the leftist’s incompetence and her inability to hold anyone accountable while chairman will fit right in at the City Hall circus under Mayor Olivia Chow.
She will also be right on brand with council’s refusal to acknowledge and deal with the tide of antisemitism in the city – seeing as she, even though Jewish, has refused to take a strong stand against the same Jew hatred in TDSB schools.
An umbrella group of concerned parents operating as SOSTDSB said under her stewardship, the TDSB has become “awash in DEI ideology and has thrown excellence and merit out the window.”
That’s for darn sure.
Instead of acting like a check and balance for the administration, she has presided over a board that believes itself to be cheerleaders for Russell-Rawlins and her reign of terror.
Chernos-Lin has not uttered a peep about a so-called review into the tragic suicide of Richard Bilkzsto, who killed himself after being harassed and bullied by a DEI consultant who was the pick of Russell-Rawlins.
Since she’ll be gone until November: one has no clue whether the review will be completed before the education director leaves the board this fall.
She and most all of her trustees have permitted Russell-Rawlins to dumb down the curriculum, to put teachers and administrators on leave who don’t swallow the anti-black racism Kool-Aid, and to remove any and all consequences for those who bring knives and guns to school. She has done nothing to tackle the serious rise in absenteeism and the dereliction of duties by teachers who have experienced a serious decline in morale.
I’ve lost count of how often Chernos-Lin and her cabal of Mean Girls – most notably Shelley Laskin – rule out of order the one trustee who has tried to push accountability.
I’m referring to heroic Willowdale trustee Weidong Pei.
The twosome have gone out of their way, in fact, to protect Russell-Rawlins and her DEI sycophants by repeatedly trying to silence Pei.
It is appalling to me and to many others who demand accountability that such an incompetent politician would think she has what it takes to be a councillor.
But I guess if Chow can be mayor, any incompetent will do.
The only thing she has going for her is name recognition in Don Valley West.
Otherwise she will add nothing to the current council except to be a sure vote for whacky leftist ideas that have already led to the decline of the city.
Steven Guilbeault says the implication that the federal government could have done more to fight the wildfire that ravaged Jasper, Alta. is “simply not true.”
Guilbeault, Parks Canada president Ron Hallman, and Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland addressed reporters Monday, defending their response to the fire as having “saved lives.”
“The simple fact is that sometimes there are no tools or resources capable of overcoming a wildfire of the magnitude that we faced this week, and as the mayor so eloquently said the other day, ‘We stand humbled in the presence of nature,’” said Hallman.
Parks Canada has managed Jasper National Park since it became an official national park in 1930. Guilbeault said Jasper is one of the best-equipped towns in Canada to deal with wildfires.
“To think that over all those decades, we would not have deployed all of the resources necessary to try and do everything that is humanly possible to protect a town from a forest fire is simply not true,” said Guilbeault.
Thirty percent of the town was claimed by the fire, officials said. All fires in the town have been extinguished. A staged re-entry is currently being planned, but no firm timeline exists.
Jasper has sprinkler systems installed in key areas and Parks Canada has been conducting interagency emergency simulations with the municipality for at least the past seven years, according to Hallman.
“The fact is that Parks Canada and our partners have done everything we reasonably could have done to reduce fire risk over many years and to be prepared for what may come,” he said.
He said Jasper was evacuated of its more than 20,000 visitors and residents within five hours, with no casualties.
Hallman said that the pine beetle infestation was a factor in the fire, but insisted Jasper has been doing prescribed burns since 1996, with 15 in the last decade over thousands of hectares.
However, short of bulldozing all of the forests, Hallman said Parks Canada does its best to implement preventative measures, such as removing vegetation.
True North previously reported that a former senior planner of Jasper National Park said the federal agency’s fire prevention staff were overconfident in their ability to battle wildfires, and their neglect turned the park into a powder keg.
Peter Scholz, who was hired by Parks Canada in 2008, estimated that by last summer, close to 40% of the national park’s trees were standing deadwood killed by pine beetle infestation.
Hallman said the fire travelled 15 feet a minute and was 300 metres high, 100 metres above the trees. He added that the fire was projecting burning pinecones up to a kilometre ahead of it.
“There is nothing any human on Earth or any piece of equipment could have done standing in front of that wall of fire that would have allowed them to stop it. It’s just not possible,” said Hallman.
Ireland defended the government’s response to the fire.
“I just want to join and reinforce his message for anyone who might see this as a failure. I reject that premise, as does Mr. Hallman. We anticipated with Parks Canada that something like this could happen. And so we fortified our community,” said Ireland, who thanked the firefighters from across the province for “allowing 70% of the town to be saved.”.
“I reject entirely any suggestion that there is a failure here. Everyone got out of town. Every resident, every visitor got out safely, and most of our town was spared.”
Ontario’s publicly funded broadcaster published an article guiding the province’s centre-left parties on how they can work together to defeat Premier Doug Ford in a general election.
In an article titled “Here’s how to beat Doug Ford in the next election,” TVO’s Steve Paikin describes a plot that the Ontario Liberals, NDP, and Green party could develop to oust the Progressive Conservatives in power.
Referencing the recent legislative election in France that saw the centrist and left-wing coalitions work together to keep the right-wing National Rally from forming government, Paikin suggests a coalition of Ontario’s centre-left could keep the PCs out of power.
“If the current premier is really so awful, why don’t you replicate the French experience here in Ontario?” writes Paikin. “Officials from the three opposition parties could meet and come to an agreement on how the parties would contest Ontario’s 124 ridings, whenever the next election takes place.”
Paikin suggests that the Liberals, NDP, and Greens collaborate with one another to defeat Ford’s PCs by strategically running candidates in ridings so that centre-left candidates do not split the vote.
It suggests that in the 83 ridings the PCs won in the 2022 election, the Liberals withdraw candidates from northern Ontario and southwestern Ontario while the NDP ceases to run candidates in historically Liberal ridings such as Toronto—St. Paul’s and Toronto Centre.
The article raises questions about Ontario’s public broadcaster and its political neutrality, political observers say.
Takdeer Brar, a consultant at Crestview Strategy tells True North that TVO needs to reorient its focus away from anti-Conservative attacks and towards providing Ontarians content that is consistent with their mandate.
“TVO is an exclusively taxpayer funded media organization. But despite soaring crime, inflation, and a struggling middle-class, this organization instead prioritizes anti-conservative hit pieces,” says Brar.
“Remarkably, TVO fails to understand that this very conservative government was repeatedly elected by a majority of Ontario voters. When will this organization begin to provide impartial news reporting rather than fantasy opinion pieces targeting the will of the Ontario people?”
TVO receives over $39 million dollars annually from the Ontario government to provide educational content, produce documentaries, and content on current affairs for the benefit of all Ontarians.
True North reached out to TVO for comment but received no response.
What just happened at the Olympics? The opening ceremony for this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris was full of anti-Christian symbolism and demonic imagery. The Last Supper scene was mocked by replacing Jesus with a fat acceptance and gay activist. The world erupted in anger and fury over the scenes while French president Emmanuel Macron couldn’t hold back his excitement, posting to social media “This is France!”
Can you imagine what would happen if the Olympics decided to mock and ridicule Islam the same way they mocked Christians? Well, actually, we do know what would happen. Because in France if you make a joke about Muhammad, your life will be in danger.
None of this has anything to do with sport or the history of the Olympics. It is simply an attack on Christians and Christians should not stand for it.
Watch the latest episode of Ratio’d with Harrison Faulkner.
The City of Ottawa may soon erect tent-like “sprung structures” to deal with its “unprecedented levels of irregular migration,” according to a new memo from city staff to Ottawa’s mayor and city councillors.
City employees have identified three parcels of land where the sprung structures could be potentially located. Each structure could house 150 beds and would come with a number of customization options.
The sprungs would feature aluminum arches connected to an “all-weather outer architectural membrane.”
“These semi-permanent structures are not like emergency tents used in disaster response. Interiors and exteriors are customizable,” wrote Clara Freire, general manager of community and social services in the memo to council.
“Interiors can be constructed with washrooms, offices, kitchens and sleeping space. The structures are designed to be fully compliant with local building and fire codes.”
According to Freire, sprung structures have been used to house homeless people in over 80 communities in the United States. They have minimal foundation requirements and can be easily relocated.
The city has not confirmed where these structures will be located yet but did say that they would not be ready until next year at the earliest.
The memo indicated that the city has been engaged in “active discussions” with the federal government to receive approximately $105 million in funding for the project
Some councillors have expressed concern over the proposed plan, with one moving a motion to rescind the staff’s authority to review and implement such options.
Coun. Wilson Lo introduced a motion to quash the plan, which he said would cost millions of dollars without any council oversight or public consultation.
“Using sprung structures sets us five steps back,” Lo told council. “We’re basically shuffling newcomers within the shelter system into something that looks quite different. It’s still a shelter in a temporary structure.”
Lo said he didn’t believe that the sprung structures offered a legitimate long term solution to the problem in an interview with a local radio station.
“They are quality structures…It’s a shelter in the end, we’re not actually putting them into permanent housing to let them succeed,” said Lo on Newstalk 580 CFRA last week.
Lo also took issue with the 12 to 18 month timeline for building the sprung structures, pointing out that other communities have managed to build and open facilities offering more permanent housing in under a year.
“I can’t wrap my head around why we can’t pursue the permanent, proper solution and add to our housing stock at the same time, rather than something that is temporary,” Lo said.
His motion was ultimately voted down by council, who believed that the problem demanded an urgent response.
“The idea is to get everybody a permanent home, but the numbers are so huge. We need to put people in place. We need a place for people to arrive. We need a reception centre,” said Coun. Marty Carr in an interview on Newstalk 580 CFRA.
The City of Ottawa referred True North back to the memo when asked to comment.
Premier David Eby says immigration into British Columbia is “completely overwhelming” the province as he calls for changes to Canada’s equalization formula.
Eby made the comments earlier this month while sharing his support for Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey’s legal challenge against the federal government over what some believe to be mismanagement of federal funding in relation to immigration.
The two premiers are seeking financial support from the Trudeau government to alleviate the influx of migrants each province has received, similar to how Quebec Premier Francois Legault was able to secure $750 million in federal funding for its accommodation of migrants.
“We’re talking about well in excess of 10,000 people a month,” Eby told reporters in Halifax. “Our most recent total for last year was 180,000 new British Columbians.”
Eby said that while the province’s immigration is “exciting,” logistically it isn’t sustainable because public resources such as schools have become strained.
“And that’s great, and that’s exciting, and it’s necessary. And it’s completely overwhelming. To add a new city of 180,000 people every year to our province is not sustainable. Our schools are full. We are unable to keep up with housing starts.”
Eby said Canada’s premiers discussed the issue during the Council of the Federation conference to understand how they would “link up our immigration targets and the federal government’s immigration work with the reality on the ground of what we have capacity for.”
“We don’t want to lose the overall picture of how dramatically the population is growing, certainly in British Columbia, and the impacts that that’s having on the ground in terms of our ability just to keep up,” he added.
The Liberal government has admitted its current immigration levels are too high, with Immigration Minister Marc Miller saying that the current system is “out of control” in January.
Miller’s office did not respond to True North for comment.
Canada’s population grew by 1.27 million people last year alone, with immigration accounting for 97.7% of that growth.
B.C.’s population increased to 5.6 million people last year, up from 5.43 million in 2022.
This isn’t the first time that Eby has been critical of equalization funding, saying in June that he took issue with how federal immigration money was being “showered down” on Quebec and Ontario “at the expense of Western Canada.”
According to the premier, B.C. is receiving 10,000 people every 37 days and many refugees are being forced to stay in homeless shelters and international students are being left without support.
“And so to see a single-province agreement with Quebec, is an underlining of a sense of frustration that I heard around the table,” Eby said last month.
Legault initially asked the Trudeau government to be reimbursed $1 billion for costs incurred by its influx of immigration, for which the province ultimately received $750 million.
Eby called the news of Quebec’s funding to be the “straw that broke this camel’s back.”
“I cannot understand how that could happen. I cannot understand why we cannot get a per capita share at a minimum,” he said.
A national pro-life group is asking Health Canada to pull an abortion pill off of the market after reviewing the government’s adverse reactions reporting system and finding over one hundred reports of “serious” adverse reactions in connection with the drug protocol.
According to the Health Canada website, there were over 45 “serious” adverse reactions to Mifegymiso, a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, used to induce an abortion. The drug has been on the market since 2017. One of the reports in Health Canada’s database indicates a 19-year-old woman died after receiving the protocol.
Pete Baklinski, the communications director for Campaign Life Coalition, a pro-life group, told True North in an interview that he hopes the reports lead to Health Canada pulling the drug off of shelves.
“Abortion experts have called (Mifegymiso) the gold standard of medical abortion, saying how safe it was,” Baklinski told True North. “To see the numbers of reports of women who have been harmed by it was quite shocking.”
When looking at the adverse reporting for the two drugs which make up Mifegymiso, Baklinski noticed the side effects reported between all three were identical in some cases.
According to the adverse reporting data, there is a suspected link between mifepristone and the death of a 27-year-old woman, as well as 65 other “serious” adverse reactions.
Health Canada defines a serious adverse reaction as “a noxious and unintended response to a drug, which occurs at any dose and requires in-patient hospitalization or prolongation of existing hospitalization, causes congenital malformation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, is life-threatening or results in death.”
The adverse reactions database, which serves as an early reporting system, was established to warn the public about potentially negative side effects and is sometimes used to remove products from the market if deemed unsafe.
“The data presented reflects, as much as possible, the reporter’s observations and opinions, and does not reflect any Health Canada assessment of association between the health product and the reaction(s),” the interpretation guidelines on Health Canada’s website say. “Inclusion of a particular reaction does not necessarily mean that it was caused by the suspected health product(s). Certain reported reactions may occur spontaneously.”
Even so, Baklinski said the data speak for themselves.
“One woman died after using Mifegymiso. A 19-year-old girl, and so many women who suffered major complications, including infection and sepsis, some of them had near brushes with death,” he said. “The list of harms that women who took misoprostol and mifepristone were exactly the same.”
Joyce Arthur, the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, disagrees.
“Mifegymiso has a proven safe track record, with a similar safety profile to early aspiration abortion, and both are far safer than full-term pregnancy and childbirth,” she said in a written response to True North. “It is a tragedy if someone dies or is seriously injured due to a drug complication, but there are usually other variables involved that make it hard to pinpoint the cause. Infection is a risk with any gynecological intervention, including childbirth, and can rarely, if ever, be directly attributed to abortion pills.
She noted several other commonly prescribed drugs with a more significant number of side effects and complications, including Viagra, penicillin, and Aspirin.
“Approved drugs are approved for a reason – they are either overwhelmingly safe as is the case for abortion pills, or if they have serious side effects/complications, their life-saving properties are considered far greater, chemotherapy, for example,” said Arthur, who touted abortion drugs as contributing to a “dramatic drop” in maternal mortality rates in countries with restrictive abortion laws, such as in Latin America.
Arthur said there are over one hundred scientific studies that demonstrate the safety of abortion pills.
Nicole Scheidl, the executive director of the pro-life medical association Physicians for Life, said Campaign Life Coalition’s report was “well-researched and highlights many of the problems with the reduction of medical oversight in the provision of chemical abortions.”
Baklinski noted that thalidomide, a drug previously used to combat morning sickness in pregnant women, was pulled off the shelves after over a hundred adverse reactions were reported.
“We have over a hundred women who have suffered near brushes with death. That’s met the threshold for something being unsafe,” he said. “I think that is enough for Health Canada to look seriously at this drug. And to recall it because it’s clearly harming women, and it’s not safe.”
After the Liberal party’s devastating loss in the Toronto—St.Paul’s byelection, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is calling for another round of byelection to be held on Sept. 16.
The Prime Minister’s Office announced Sunday byelections for two of the three seat vacancies in the House of Commons for the ridings of Elmwood—Transcona in Manitoba and LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in Quebec.
Trudeau did not yet announce a byelection in the British Columbia riding of Cloverdale–Langley City, which polling suggests the Conservatives would likely reclaim from the Liberals were an election held today.
The Elmwood—Transcona riding, in east Winnipeg, has been won by the NDP in every election since its creation with the exception of in 2011 election, when the Conservatives won it to help form their majority government.
The NDP has nominated Leila Dance, a member of the Transcona community who has worked at several non-profit organizations, most recently the executive director of Transcona Biz.
She hopes to keep the seat orange, replacing former NDP MP Daniel Blaikie, who won it by over 21 points in 2021, claiming 50% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 28% and the Liberals’ 15%. Blaikie, who resigned from the seat earlier this year to take a job in Manitoba’s NDP government, was the son of the riding’s longtime MP, Bill Blaikie.
The Conservatives’ are running Colin Reynolds, a construction electrician and a member of the IBEW Local 2085 union representing electrical workers in Manitoba and Nunavut.
With the NDP’s reputation as the party of choice for unionized workers, the Conservatives’ nomination of a unionized blue collar worker signals a shift in the traditional voting coalitions.
“Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau’s costly coalition does not represent union workers like me,” said Reynolds upon claiming the Conservative nomination.
The Liberal party acclaimed Ian MacIntyre as its nominee for Elmwood—Transcona, just days before Trudeau called the riding’s byelection.
MacIntyre is a long-time teacher and union activist who led the Manitoba Teachers’ Society from 1998-1999.
A member of the LGBTQ community, MacIntyre ran for the unpopular Manitoba Liberal party in 2023, placing a distant third in the Kildonan – River East riding.
The LaSalle—Émard—Verdun riding will see the Liberals attempt to reclaim their hold over the Montreal riding held by their party since its creation in 2015 by former Trudeau cabinet minister David Lametti.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau handpicked Laura Palestini to become his party’s candidate in the riding after a nomination contest was already underway.
Many of the contestants who had organized campaigns to become the riding’s Liberal candidate said they were shocked the party had taken an undemocratic approach to choosing LaSalle—Émard—Verdun’s candidate.
As LaSalle’s city councillor on the Montreal city council, Palestini seeks to boost the Liberals’ chances in the riding, especially among the riding’s Italian-Canadian community, of which she’s a member.
The Bloc Québécois nominated social worker Isabel Dion.
While the Bloc Québécois lost to Liberal MP Lametti in the 2021 federal election, Dion stands a better chance to win the coming byelection to her predecessor, as the Liberals’ popularity has plummeted in the past year.
The NDP have nominated Craig Sauvé, an independent Montreal city councillor since 2013 and a longtime supporter of the federal NDP.
Sauvé is a former member of Montreal mayor Valérie Plante’s municipal party Project Montréal, but he left the party in 2021 following allegations of sexually assaulting a Montreal citizen in 2021. He denies the allegations.
The Conservative party is running Louis Ialenti, a law graduate from the University of Queensland and a co-owner of the Montreal bar The Cloakroom.
The Liberals are favoured to win in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, as the Grits won 43% of the vote compared to the Bloc Québécois’ 22%, the NDP’s 19%, and the Conservatives’ 8% in 2021.
However, 338Canada projects a much closer byelection than in 2021, as the Liberals are projected to win 30% of the vote while the NDP and Bloc Québécois are both projected to win 24%.
