The federal government spent almost $600,000 to host European delegates in luxury Vancouver hotel rooms for a conference many did not end up attending.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly is an annual meeting that typically takes place in Europe, but was hosted in Vancouver from June 30 to July 4 last year.
Of the 700 European parliamentarians who were invited, almost half of them didn’t attend the conference or chose less expensive hotels to stay in if they did.
Canadian taxpayers were left to foot the bill for 1,400 overnight stays, which cost a minimum of $425 per night, for a total of $596,000.
“It is very concerning, especially in the current economic times, when people are lined up at food banks while we’re looking at a $1.8 million event that went 35% over budget,” Conservative senator Elizabeth Marshall told parliamentary officials during the Senate’s internal economy, budgets and administration committee. “That does not look good on either the Senate or the House of Commons.”
Additionally, the audio-visual costs for the conference far surpassed the initial budget of $1.8 million, coming in $649,000 over budget.
“I’m not sure how we can just … sugarcoat this and pass this off,” Sen. Don Plett told the committee. “A deficit of over a half a million dollars.”
The decision to host the conference was defended by Liberal MP Hedy Fry, who said the initial costs were projected to be much lower than what they ultimately ended up being.
“We had a pretty normal delegate showing, and then, for whatever reason, people just didn’t turn up,” Fry told CBC News. “I think one of the reasons, we found out later on, was that also our hotel rooms had increased since pre-pandemic. The cost of hotels in Vancouver just shot up post-pandemic.”
Fry said that the government was unable to get out of their hotel contracts and that in the future, it will be more cautious not to book hotel rooms until the delegates confirm that they will be in attendance.
She also said that delegates who cancel with little notice should be financially responsible for paying for those accommodations.
Canada last hosted the conference in Ottawa in 1995. When Parliament, rather than the government, hosts an international conference, the House of Commons is responsible for 70% of its costs and the Senate pays the remaining 30%.
The conference had initially been scheduled for 2020 but was postponed because of the pandemic.
Hotel rooms were booked at the Hyatt Regency, the Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, the Fairmont Pacific Rim, the Fairmont Waterfront, and the Marriott Vancouver Pinnacle Downtown, all in close proximity to the Vancouver Convention Centre where the conference was held.
The rate of the rooms was not made public, however, four- or five- star hotels cost anywhere from $425 to $1,024 per night for that time of the year.
The CUPE union, with its long history of anti-Israel vitriol before and after the Oct. 7 atrocities, has produced a toolkit that tells its York University members they have an “intellectual imperative” to stand up for Palestine.
The 15-page toolkit, produced by the education committee of the union local’s Palestinian Solidarity Working Group (a laugh in itself), even calls out York University for its “complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
It is rife with lies and both anti-Israel and antisemitic tropes, one-sided allegations, and oppression talk by the radical pronoun set who are really supposed to be representing the bargaining rights of contract faculty, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, part-time librarians and archivists at York.
The toolkit contends Palestine is a “human issue,” an “arts issue,” a “society issue,” a “cultural issue,” and – get this – a “feminist issue.”
The only thing they don’t mention is an LGBT issue.
I’m not surprised considering these progressives are absolutely blind and ignorant to the cruelty, homophobia and misogyny Hamas leaders are responsible for towards Gazans and Israelis.
The toolkit urges members to “refuse the current status quo” that encourages a “culture of fear and academic silence” around Palestinian solidarity.
It suggests members join the campus-wide teach-ins on Palestine and develop teaching materials, based on the resources provided, to share with students.
”Following a long and brutal 75-year settler-colonial occupation of Palestine, we are witnessing something more horrific than the 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe),” the toolkit says, inviting educators to challenge the “violences of the dominant world order.”
In addition to the lies and hyperbole, the union conveniently ignores that Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2005 and that this all started with the brutal atrocities on innocent Israelis of Oct. 7, equivalent in relative numbers to another Holocaust.
The toolkit states unequivocally that the union will support and represent any members who speak out or write about “all forms of violence and oppression” by Israel (of course).
It also says York University is “complicit” in Israel’s occupation of Palestine (even though there is no such thing as a Palestinian and Hamas, not Israel, governs Gaza).
Asked for a comment, York spokesman Yanni Dagonas said while the university is committed to support and uphold freedom of expression, it have advised the community that it does not find the CUPE toolkit to be in accordance “with the rightful expectations of the university as an employer.”
Dagonas says the university has reached out to the union to discuss the matter.
The union countered with a Feb. 1 e-mail criticizing York administrators for “overreach and intimidation” in their attempt to police any discourse on Palestine “that is not in alignment with the University’s position.”
CUPE 3903 chairperson Stephanie Latella says coverage of the toolkit has incited “abusive behaviour towards CUPE” and her in particular. She says her email account has been “inundated” with hundreds of unwelcome and inappropriate messages.
She indicated she was not willing to meet with school administrators at this time.
No surprise there but as most activists like Latella have proven, they can write, produce and say the most egregious things about the Jewish state but are downright petulant when they get pushback for it.
That said, Latella and her union claim that York University invests in arms-manufacturing corporations supplying weapons to Israel and has economic relationships with various “Zionist cultural institutions” such as Hillel, as well as Israeli universities. They encourage a boycott of all of them.
Antisemites tend to use “Zionist” instead of “Jew” to preempt accusations of antisemitism. But Hillel is a Jewish organization.
The toolkit says the union rejects the “dangerous conflation” of anti-Zionism and antisemitism and includes some bafflegab to support its claims.
I think they’re rather confused. If one denies Jews the right to their homeland and suggests a boycott of Israeli corporations and institutions—as they have in this toolkit — that’s antisemitism in its most basic form.
In one paragraph, this ridiculous toolkit claims Israel is carrying out “genocidal violence” made possible by material support of Western “imperialist nations” such as the Canadian “settler state.”
I guess it didn’t dawn on the radicals who wrote this that they are gladly taking money in our “imperialist nation” and occupying a residence in our “settler state.”
The best comes when they suggest educators check into the resource list of “teacher-activist” Javier DaVila, the Toronto District School Board equity employee who has been twice forced on leave for his obsessive anti-Israel rhetoric. He has also been the subject of a series of complaints to the Ontario College of Teachers.
I first exposed this hateful man in 2021, Subsequent to my reports, a series of equally hateful unions launched a petition trying to have me removed from my job at the Toronto Sun.
He has a GoFundMe site that has raised $64,000 for his legal woes so far.
Another recommended resource — which truly shows the great disconnect of these progressive unions — is the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s Palestine Digital Action Toolkit.
I wasn’t aware that feminism was celebrated in Gaza under Hamas.
In short, the union’s toolkit would be laughable if not for their obsessive Jew hatred, which is not the least bit funny.
It is clear from the union’s repeated focus on the “myths of Zionism” and the need to read resources that challenge “Israel’s independence story” that anything short of eradicating the Jewish state would not be satisfactory for these union haters.
A recent report from the Fraser Institute is blasting the Liberal government for not having any realistic plans to reduce the debt ratio in the next few decades.
Plus, the Edmonton Police Service has issued a warning to the public last week after a convicted child sex offender, who goes by Laverne Waskahat, was released from custody.
And Conservative nomination candidate Sabrina Maddeaux tells True North what drew her to conservatism and why she should be the party’s candidate for Aurora–Oak Hills–Richmond Hill.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Lindsay Shepherd!
Conservative MP Michael Barrett said he would like to see the rules surrounding acceptable gifts and trips for Members of Parliament to be reexamined in the wake of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s controversial Jamaican vacation.
Trudeau accepted an $80,000 trip to Jamaica over the Christmas holidays, paid for by Peter Green, a man Trudeau claimed to be an old family friend.
Canada’s interim ethics commissioner said that the vacation did not violate any rules and confirmed that Trudeau checked with him before accepting the gifted accommodation from his friend.
“He consulted us, and we advised him,” Konrad von Finckenstein told MPs on Tuesday, testifying before the House of Commons ethics committee regarding what the rules are in relation to gifts and trips.
Finkenstein told the committee that as far as his office was concerned, the matter has been dealt with and the case is closed.
However Barrett responded to Finkenstein’s position by saying that that the time has come to discuss a change in the rules, calling it “not sustainable.”
“The status quo obviously isn’t working,” Barrett told CP24, en route to a Conservative caucus meeting on Thursday.
“Regardless of whether Trudeau stayed with friends or not, the prime minister should not be taking lavish holidays at a time when Canadians are lining up at food banks in record numbers.”
The Prime Minister’s Office had initially said Trudeau would personally pay for his Jamaica trip, however, when it was later divulged that it was paid for by a family friend, opposition MPs took notice.
The PMO later released a statement clarifying this distinction, assuring Canadians that the family trip was of no cost to the taxpayer.
“If it had not been an acceptable gift, it would have had to be reported on our website… nothing has been reported,” said Finkenstein.
The Parliamentary Budget Office projects that the Liberals carbon capture tax credit could cost as much as $1 billion more than what the Trudeau government had initially estimated.
The independent watchdog said that the carbon capture, utilization and storage CCUS investment tax will likely cost $5.7 billion, despite Finance Canada claiming it would only cost $4.6 billion over the 2022-28 timeframe in several of its federal budget announcements.
The concept behind carbon capture is to curtail the effects of climate change by the oil and gas sector.
This is because the technology hasn’t proven to be effective when scaled up to that size and it comes with a heavy price tag.
Critics of the CCUS tax like Environmental Defence, an organization that works with the government on policy, say that the uncapped credit may cost even more than the recent estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Office.
“Carbon capture and storage is a dangerous distraction being promoted by the oil and gas industry to prolong business as usual,” Julia Levin, Environmental Defence’s national climate associate director told CBC News.
“These tax credits are being designed without a ceiling. That means the final cost for Canadian taxpayers could end up being much, much more significant.”
However, the Trudeau government is calling it a “historic investment” into a “clean economy” for the country.
“Carbon capture, utilization and storage is essential to reducing Canada’s emissions,” said Chrystia Freeland’s senior communications adviser and press secretary, Katherine Cuplinskas.
“We know that Canada cannot afford to miss out on this economic opportunity, and we want to incentivize businesses to reduce their emissions as soon as possible.”
The program offers investors a 37.5% to 60% tax credit on their investments in equipment designed for carbon transportation, storage, and direct air capture.
Investors in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia are all eligible for the credit, however, it is not yet active.
The credit will only take effect if and when the necessary legislation to enable it is passed in Parliament, at which point it will be made retroactive to 2022.
According to Natural Resources Canada, the country currently has eight commercial carbon capture facilities, which combined only capture about 0.5% of the country’s total emissions.
“Reducing emissions from Canada’s oil and gas production is a priority, yet it presents unique challenges,” reads a report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
“Industry representatives consider carbon capture and storage (CCS) to be the sector’s primary emission reduction solution, but there is a lack of evidence on the efficacy of this approach and its consistency with Canada’s net-zero commitment.”
A 30-year-old Sudanese man has managed to evade deportation for the fourth time within just over a year.
Illay Mohamed, a refugee from the African nation, was released from jail by a Sudbury judge despite his history of violence.
The recent legal episode centred on a charge of bodily harm resulting from an altercation at the Sudbury jail in September.
Mohamed pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of assault.
The recommendation from defence attorney Michael Michel and the Crown found favour with Justice Julie Lefebvre, leading to one year of probation and a suspended sentence.
However, Lefebvre cautioned Mohamed about his violent history, urging him to address his anger issues to avert deportation.
Mohamed, confined since Mar. 30, 2023, was imprisoned for 64 days, which, coupled with previous sentences, granted him enough credit to avoid further jail time. Consequently, he secured release following the sentencing.
Michel, emphasizing the gravity of the situation, had previously warned Mohamed that this represented his final opportunity to avoid deportation.
Mohamed has a history of violent offences, including weapon-related and assault convictions in 2021, and additional criminal activities in the last two years.
The September altercation arose from a disagreement between Mohamed and an inmate of Nigerian origin regarding the observance of Prisoners’ Justice Day.
Things escalated into a physical confrontation, with Mohamed inflicting injuries that necessitated medical attention on the other man.
Correctional officers intervened using pepper spray, capturing the incident on surveillance footage.
As Ottawa continues its crusade against climate change, little regard has been given to the complexities and adverse impacts of a “just transition” in the context of Northern Canada. In this latest edition of Unjust Transition, Chance Oil and Gas president Richard Wyman joins True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the overlooked consequences associated with the ongoing shift in energy policies.
Exactly why Hamas attacked Israel when it did may never be known for sure, but a couple of reasons for the massacre’s timing seem plausible.
First, Israel’s accelerating success at improving relations across the Arab world has become a strategic threat to Hamas. Second, deep divisions in Israeli society could have led Hamas to believe the country was already precarious.
The Abraham Accords, a diplomatic coup largely engineered by former U.S. president Donald Trump in 2020, normalized relations between Israel and four Muslim countries after 26 years of inaction, bringing the total to six: the U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, Egypt and Jordan. The Abraham Accords also brought onto the horizon normalization with Saudi Arabia, a key Middle East state – all-but assuring that even more would follow.
If that happened, it would no longer be Israel that was isolated from the Arab world but, increasingly, the Palestinians themselves – and most especially the “rejectionist” groups that practice terror because they are committed not to peace or a state of their own but to wipe Israel off the map, and Jews along with it.
Hamas may have calculated that a full-fledged assault from Gaza would strike a fatal blow to the process by forcing Arab countries to side clearly with them. But, while Arab states are dutifully criticizing the “excessive violence” of Israel’s response, they are not severing ties, much less going to war on Hamas’ behalf.
The more likely scenario is that Hamas struck when it did mainly because it hoped to exploit the deep rift in Israeli society between left and right. Israel certainly looked vulnerable. Reflecting enmity every bit as intense as anti-Trumpism in the U.S., Israeli “progressives” have been behaving as if they wanted to wreck their precariously balanced country.
Although the left has more than one aim, its most urgent goal is to preserve the ultra-liberal Supreme Court of Israel’s unusually extensive powers, particularly that of nullifying any piece of legislation its justices disapprove of. As Israel’s demographics – and electoral results – gradually shifted more populist and rightward, Israel’s left has increasingly relied on the bureaucracy, arts/media and the legal system, including the judiciary, to maintain political influence.
Unlike anywhere in the free world, Israel’s highest court can overturn any national law that fails to meet a “reasonableness” standard – a standard it invented and defined for itself. The court’s ever-broader use of its powers has impeded the work of recent right-of-centre governing coalitions. It has overturned government policies on a wide range of matters fundamental to a government’s responsibilities – like social welfare spending, natural gas contracts and who a prime minister gets to put in his cabinet.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his Likud Party winning several elections, was prevented from implementing much of his policy agenda.
In July, after months of fractious debate and bitter nationwide protests, Israel’s divided parliament, the Knesset, introduced a law restricting the Supreme Court’s power to employ the “reasonableness” standard.
Israel’s opposition walked out and the law passed 64-0. This and other proposed reforms, despite being ceaselessly attacked, would merely have brought Israel’s internal balance of power in line with that of every other Western democracy.
Knesset games are, however, tame compared to what happened on the streets of Tel Aviv. Within hours of the July vote, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, blocking traffic, pitching tents, lighting bonfires and even blockading Israel’s international airport. Police had to drag protesters off roadways and use water cannons.
For weeks, the demonstrators upset the economy and alarmed investors. Ominously, reserve air force pilots opposed to Netanyahu’s government began refusing to attend training sessions, prompting publicly expressed concerns that military readiness could be threatened. There were even rumours that active duty soldiers were deliberately underperforming or threatening to desert.
Since this was all publicly known, Hamas may have concluded Israel was on the brink of mass political suicide. If so, then here too the terror group miscalculated. Its orgy of atrocities begun on October 7 – rapes, decapitations of infants, burnings, mutilations and kidnappings – not only shocked every Israeli, but unified the country like nothing else could.
Hamas misjudged the depth and nature of Israel’s left-right split. While Israel’s internal politics are vocal, personally vicious and at times unhinged, when a genuine threat to the nation’s safety or existence arises, internal disagreements are immediately deferred.
This occurred almost instantaneously. Suddenly, everyone was waving the blue-and-white flag of Israel. Atheists began preparing kosher meals for religious first responders. Jews across the political and religious spectrums and from around the world left their regular jobs and civilian lives, streaming to military bases or airports to answer the Israeli government’s call-up of some 360,000 reservists. Within a few days, Netanyahu had formed a unity wartime government that included Opposition Blue-and-White Party leader Benni Gantz.
Why is this so? Unlike Western progressives – who despise patriotism – both sides of the ideological divide in this growing country of 9.8 million remain deeply patriotic. Both the left and right are imbued with a sense of mission to save Israeli democracy. Rather than having identified a mortal weakness, then, Hamas’ Medieval barbarity unified the quarreling factions. Netanyahu today has unprecedented support (despite what the polls say) and can expect that to hold for the war’s duration.
Once the fighting stops but before politics-as-usual resumes, Netanyahu will surely face tough questions over the security lapses that helped Hamas achieve its catastrophic surprise. They happened on his watch, and Israelis are unforgiving of such failures. During the surprise 1973 Yom Kippur War, the country was solidly behind Labour Prime Minister Golda Meir and defence minister Moshe Dayan. But afterwards, Israelis demanded to know how their vaunted security and intelligence apparatus failed. Several senior IDF officers and Meir were ruined.
Netanyahu’s position seems eerily similar. Many are predicting that his fate is sealed. But were he to engineer a knockout blow against Hamas this time, rather than allowing the terror group to be saved by international pressure for the sixth time since Gaza was turned over to the Palestinians in 2005, he might just remain in office. If it emerges that the left’s undermining of Netanyahu and his reforms contributed to the country’s inattention and unpreparedness, Netanyahu’s standing might even grow. At this point, anything can happen.
Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practising lawyer from Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.
The University of Waterloo is looking for “gender-fluid” people, as well as women, sexual minorities and non-white people to meet the “diversity, equity and inclusion” quotas of its Canada Research Chairs positions.
True North found several job openings from the university with these requirements.
“To address legal requirements for supporting underrepresented groups in the CRC program, this opportunity is open only to women and gender minorities, which is defined to include individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, and Two-spirit people,” reads the job posting for a chair position in optometry & vision science field.
The same requirements apply to Waterloo research chair positions in personality psychology, mathematics, computer science and health.
For the computer science division, the university is looking to hire someone who is a sexual or gender minority and someone who is not white.
“The call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of a racialized minority,” reads the posting.
The Canada Research Chairs program is a federally funded initiative that invests millions annually into research related to engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Since 2017, Ottawa has been mandating DEI requirements for the program.
“Achieving a more equitable, diverse and inclusive Canadian research enterprise is essential to creating the excellent, innovative and impactful research necessary to seize opportunities and for responding to global challenges,” reads the Government of Canada website.
The University of Waterloo was criticized online over its Canada Research Chairs DEI job postings.
Concordia professor and author Gad Saad, who is a research chair at his university, mocked the university in a sarcastic X (formerly Twitter) post. “Thank you, UWaterloo for your laudable efforts in opening up the two listed positions. Together we can decolonize STEM!”
The term “gender-fluid” was coined by proponents of gender ideology in the 1990s. It is used to define people whose “gender identity changes rather than remaining fixed.”
“Gender-fluid people may move between different genders throughout their life. Their gender may shift over a day, a week, months, or years,” reads an article about the term.
The University of Waterloo told True North it is “using the language outlined in the federal requirement.”
The university previously made headlines for a DEI initiative bringing back segregation in swimming – with dedicated swim times for “Black folx.” Waterloo alsooffers swim, workout, and rock climbing times exclusively for transgender, “non-binary,” and “2SLGBTQ+” people.
Earlier this week, the Liberals introduced legislation to postpone the implementation of assisted dying for those suffering with mental illnesses until 2027, citing unreadiness for the change, but reaffirming their commitment to the policy. Conservative MP Michael Cooper joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to explain why he thinks it is essential to reevaluate the entire assisted dying policy for mental illnesses.
