A group of former Conservatives has established a new federal party called Canadian Future, aimed at providing Canadians with a centrist alternative in the next election. Interim leader Dominic Cardy joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the driving forces behind the party’s formation and its vision for the future of Canadian politics.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE ANDREW LAWTON SHOW
Notable women’s rights advocate Meghan Murphy was only five minutes into her speech at the Victoria, B.C. 1 Million March 4 Children parental rights rally when police told organizers to shut down the event and leave.
The march planned for later that afternoon never happened, as Victoria police (VicPD) ordered an end to the protest within 15 minutes of it starting on Wednesday, Murphy told True North.
Murphy, as well as other rally speakers and organizers, were demonstrating on the B.C. legislature grounds in support of parental rights and removing gender identity ideology from school curricula.
According to VicPD, “At approximately 12:30 p.m., counter-protesters pushed past police and rushed the stage, creating an unsafe environment, and a decision was made to cease further planned activities.”
Two arrests were made.
A contingent of rainbow-wearing counter-protesters, some of whom support sex change surgeries for minors and giving information about fringe sex acts to preteens, was of a distance from the main protest. However, busloads of young counter-protesters wearing black hoodies began arriving at the grounds, and streams of the masked agitators headed straight for the stage.
Murphy said VicPD was to blame.
“The Victoria Police had committed to keeping the protesters away, there wasn’t supposed to be any physical contact between the counter-protesters and the people there to attend the rally, many of whom are parents, moms with kids, elderly women,” Murphy recounted.
“The police didn’t even attempt to separate protesters from us.”
Murphy said that a counter-protester rushing the stage punched a police officer in the head and was promptly tackled to the ground by other officers. At that point, police shut down the entire affair.
“It’s really weird that the cops just let everything happen… they didn’t even attempt to control the crowd,” she said.
Police and security escorted Murphy to her car when she left.
“Following escalating tensions at a large demonstration in front of the BC Legislature today, with approximately 2,500 people in attendance, VicPD Officers are asking citizens to leave, and for others to avoid the area,” the department stated in a September 20 community notice.
Murphy said the protest was important to stand up to the “lie” being pushed on parents.
“I know how many parents are upset at what their kids are exposed to and learning at school… what kids are being taught in school is confusing and dangerous,” she said.
“To teach a child that a boy can become a girl or he can actually be a girl on the inside is a lie. I can’t believe they’re teaching this in school – it’s like teaching religion in school. That’s not allowed in public schools, so I don’t know why this is.”
Dozens of 1 Million March 4 Children protests with hundreds or even thousands of attendees took place across the country, but the Victoria event was the only one shut down by police.
Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives maintain their silence on the nationwide One Million March for Children.
Meanwhile, a large number of left-wing politicians, including Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh, have condemned the parental rights protest as “hateful.”
Plus, a Sikh separatist on India’s most-wanted list was murdered in Winnipeg on Wednesday, according to Indian media.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and William McBeath!
The Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) is planning to take the federal government to court as the amnesty for firearms prohibited by the Liberal government’s May 2020 order-in-council is set to expire at the end of October.
Without an extension, scores of legally-purchased firearms will become illegal overnight.
The CCFR is expected to file an injunction on Friday.
CCFR CEO Rod Giltaca the government is creating unnecessary fear and uncertainty for gun owners.
“They’re waiting,” Giltaca told True North’s Andrew Lawton. “Every time this amnesty deadline rolls around the government waits until the last couple of days and it stresses a lot of gun owners…. For the everyday gun owner, especially elderly people, they start to get very nervous and some people may even turn in their guns because they’re worried they’re going to become criminals.”
These concerns were echoed by CCFR spokesperson Tracey Wilson.
The firearm advocacy group fears that many Canadian gun owners could have their gun collections seized after October 30, when the amnesty expires.
“The criminality of hundreds of thousands of Canadians, through no fault of their own, is at risk here,” Wilson told the National Post.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the government to play politics and leave everyone hanging in the breeze, trying to figure out if they’re exposed to a 10-year prison sentence.”
On May 1, 2020, former Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino introduced an order-in-council that reclassified a large cohort of commonly owned firearms as prohibited. Some of these guns include variants of the AR-15 long rifle, the Ruger Mini-14, M14, and SIG’s MCX and MPX group of firearms.
The reclassification also prohibited any firearm capable of muzzle energies that exceeded 10,000 joules.
The order-in-council barred owners of these guns from using, selling or transferring them, meaning they’ve been in limbo for over three years awaiting establishment of the government’s promised “buyback.”
The mandated grace period will expire on Oct. 30, 2023 and has already been extended once.
In April, Mendicino introduced what would be the initial phase of a government program to confiscate the affected firearms. It was to be implemented some time this year, however no specific details have been presented thus far.
Details from the order-in-council are coming, said Jean-Sébastien Comeau, a spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Dominic Leblanc’s office.
“They’ve got a lot of questions, and lot of fears,” said Wilson, referring to Canada’s gun owning community.
“Regardless how you feel about these types of guns, there’s real people attached to the other end of this who are terrified. They’re terrified of getting in trouble,” she said.
If nothing is done to remedy the situation before the deadline, many gun owners in Canada will find themselves in direct violation of federal firearms laws and could face serious fines and even jail time.
“We answer to tens of thousands of members, we have old guys who’ve owned these guns for decades without issue wondering what’s going to happen,” said Wilson.
“What do I do? Do I turn my guns in? Where do I go? I don’t want to be criminalized. There’s a panic within the community, because people don’t understand the politics of it.”
In 2020, several challenges were filed in federal court claiming that the Firearms Act has been violated by the government after the Liberals outlawed over 1,500 firearms through regulatory decree instead of through a legislative process. The challenges hope to have the order-in-council deemed unconstitutional.
Several provinces have said they will take measures to prevent the order-in-council and protect the firearms rights for gun owners in their provinces.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has tabled a new housing bill on Wednesday that would give bonuses to “high-cost cities” if they meet their new housing targets.
The Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act is a bill that attempts to speed up the construction of housing to alleviate the current housing crisis.
Poilievre’s bill also intends to reward Canadian municipalities that vastly exceed their housing targets by granting them money reallocated from the Trudeau government’s Housing Accelerator Fund.
The new legislation hopes to enact a clear target of new homes to be completed through the country’s largest cities – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa. The housing target is to be increased annually by 15% and be funded by money set aside for federal infrastructure with specific amounts allocated based on each city’s targets.
It would also allow the federal government to reserve the right to adjust infrastructure funding in the event of unforeseen circumstances, like a war, natural disaster or economic recession that would prevent a city from reaching their target for any particular year.
Municipalities could also become eligible to receive money from a $100 million dollar pot if they “greatly exceed housing targets,” states the bill.
The bill is unlikely to pass unless another party in the House of Commons throws its support to the legislation. However, the bill does signal what housing legislation from a potential Conservative government might look like.
Houses built would be required to be in close proximity to public transit and federal funding for transit would be “held in trust” until “high-density residential housing is substantially occupied on available land around federally funded transit projects’ stations.”
Another stipulation for cities to receive funding under the bill would be that they “not unduly restrict or delay the approval of building permits for housing.” If an “eligible person who has reasonable grounds” to suggest that building permits have been prolonged or prohibited, they would be able to submit a complaint to the federal government.
Executives who don’t meet their housing targets or have applications for new housing construction treated within an average 60 day period, will be liable to be punished by having their bonuses withdrawn.
Poilievre also seeks to amend the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Act so that members of its executive committee would be denied bonuses if the national target of a 15% increase isn’t met for each year.
If applications for new construction take longer than 60 days to be approved or rejected for more than a six month period, executives of the committee will have their salaries cut by 50%.
There will also be a GST rebate included in the bill for new residential rental properties that offer rent which is “below market rate.”
The bill would also force the federal government to provide a report of inventory, regarding what federal buildings and land could potentially be used for housing construction and to sell off at least 15% to developers, with some exceptions.
The minister of environment would have to certify that this potential land was not “ecologically sensitive” or located within one of the country’s national parks before it could be sold off.
Once eligible, the federal properties would have to be available in the housing market within 12 months of being identified in the report.
Housing Minister Sean Fraser criticized aspects of the bill saying that while he agreed with the 60 day timeline regarding application response from the CMHC, he disapproved of slashing the GST on select rental properties.
“They say it’s about building homes and not bureaucracy, but they would have to insert a level of administrative capacity to identify which units get approved in order to identify who is going to benefit from the limited exemption of GST that they’re providing,” said Fraser, according to the National Post.
Fraser also said that the government does not plan to support the new legislation.
Let me be clear.
I am not queer.
I am a lesbian.
I find the former term hateful and perjorative – like faggot or dyke – and I’m not sure when the radical leftists felt it appropriate to start calling themselves queer, as if it is some sort of badge of honour.
Most assuredly, the queer activists – the TQ in the cacophony of letters used to describe those who don’t identify as heterosexual – do not speak for me.
Nor do they speak for many of the LGB contingent who fought for their rights in the 1970s and successive decades.
Or like me, who lived in the closet for 20 years.
But now we have those rights and we live very well in Canada.
That is a huge part of the takeaway from Wednesday’s 1 Million March 4 Children.
There is a greater divide than ever in Canada’s LGBTQ community.
The so-called queer activists – the TQ – are desperately in search of a cause now that the hard-fought rights for gays have been granted and same-sex marriages and adoptions have been widely accepted.
To stay relevant, they’ve turned themselves to the TQ in the alphabet soup of gay rights – and they’ve done so highly aggressively.
Most gays like me – conservative or liberal – just want to live their lives and not shout their identity from the rooftops as many queer activists feel the need to do.
We also agree with letting children be children and disagree with the concept of ramming pronouns and gender identity down the throats of kids as young as five!
It’s absurd and bordering on abusive.
A 2021 global Ipsos poll found that only 3% of those living in 27 countries surveyed identify as LGB; another 1% of adults as transgender or gender fluid.
I know when I was growing up and suspected I was different, I waited for years to determine whether those feelings were legitimate.
But the kids in Ontario and Canadian schools have no chance in 2023.
The loud minority of queer activists and school board administrators are hellbent and determined to convince kids, who likely have never even thought of such sophisticated concepts, that there are dozens of genders and they may not have been born in the right body.
Perhaps kids have an issue with gender dysmorphia; perhaps they are tomboys or effeminate – but many will grow out of it or decide they’re LGB, instead of mutilating their bodies for life with puberty blockers.
But the way the queer activists talk, you’d think half the kids in Ontario classrooms were gender fluid, gender dysphoric or trans.
Perhaps school board administrators think they’re doing the right thing to protect kids but I suspect it’s more about power and control over young impressionable minds.
We know that the labour and teachers unions have forever used kids in the school system as pawns in their ridiculous demands for more money.
But the efforts of the past few days – during which they marched proclaiming the parents participating in the 1 Million March 4 Children were ultra right-wing, transphobic and hateful – take their manipulation to a whole new level.
This borders on evil. They are playing with kids’ lives.
As someone who has covered the dangerous indoctrination of young kids by the radical left and woke progressives in school board classrooms, I was thrilled to see the unparalleled success right across Canada of Wednesday’s rally.
The school boards tried, the radical left unionists tried and the TQ activists tried but they did not succeed with their efforts to intimidate parents who have had enough of the scourge of gender ideology in schools.
While they labelled the 1 Million marchers as “bigots,” the radicals no doubt had trouble reconciling the fact that many of the marchers were Muslim moms – a very group they allegedly protect when they’re not protecting the TQs.
It was amusing to watch their hypocrisy.
But more than anything, Wednesday’s march showed that parents have awakened to the detrimental and destructive impact of woke indoctrination.
Whether school boards and teachers unions choose to pay attention, or not, I believe this is only the start.
A mass nationwide protest against gender ideology took place throughout Canada on Wednesday. The organizers – a group of Muslim parents who have had enough of the radical gender ideology craze – named the coordinated protest the ‘1 Million March For Children.’
Harrison Faulkner was on the ground at the Toronto protest to interview attendees and make sure both sides of the story were told. As thousands gathered to oppose gender ideology and indoctrination in schools, an equally large number of counter protesters showed up to reject what they called a gathering of “ultra-conservatives” and “transphobes.”
Watch the latest episode of Ratio’d with Harrison Faulkner!
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has so far not said a word about Wednesday’s nationwide parental rights protest, despite previously expressing support for parental rights.
According to the Canadian Press, Poilievre’s office sent out a memo to MPs telling them not to speak to the media or post online about the demonstrations, instructing them to only reference Poilievre’s past statements on the matter if responding to constituents.
So far Poilievre has chosen to tread carefully when it comes to wading into the debate surrounding gender ideology in schools.
True North reached out to the Conservatives for comment and clarification on where Poilievre stands on the matter and was referred to Poilievre’s past comments also.
“Protestors (sic) have legitimate points to make, and they enjoy the freedom of assembly and expression to make them,” reads the memo.
“On Wednesday mornings, party caucuses meet, requiring the attendance of all MPs. If needed, feel free to use (Poilievre’s) previous two statements to communicate with constituents on the issue of parental rights.”
Several provinces including Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Manitoba have moved to require schools to inform parents if a child under the age of 16 is undergoing a gender transition or using different pronouns while at school.
New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs attended a pro-parents protest in Fredericton on Wednesday.
“Parents want the role they play in their child’s life respected within the school system. I agree. And we can do that while still providing a safe and welcoming environment for all students,” Higgs wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
In an emailed statement to True North, Poilievre’s Director of Media Relations Sebastian Skamski referred to past comments Poilievre has made on the issue of parental rights.
One of the quoted comments by the Conservative leader was at Pakistani Independence Day in August.
“It’s about parents that are frustrated with government imposing contrary values on their children. My view is that parents should be the final authority on the values and lessons that should be taught to children. I believe in parental rights, and parental rights come before the government’s rights,” said Poilievre at the time.
Additionally, Poilievre spoke about New Brunswick’s changes to education policy and told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to stay out of provincial jurisdiction.
“Look, this is a provincial policy. I know that Justin Trudeau has butted into that. The Prime Minister has no business in decisions that should rest with provinces and parents. So my message to Justin Trudeau is butt out, and let provinces run schools and let parents raise kids,” said Poilievre.
Poilievre also addressed the issue at MuslimFest London last month.
Justin Trudeau’s estranged wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau has signed with a talent agency to pursue “meaningful partnerships.”
The Spotlight Agency, a firm established to “match celebrity talent with clients who wished to work closely with them,” said in an announcement Wednesday it was the exclusive representative of Gregoire Trudeau.
The announcement presents Gregoire Trudeau as a “trained television, radio host, and interviewer.”
While her biography with the agency doesn’t explicitly reference the informal political role she held as the prime minister’s spouse, it does tout several appearances she made alongside or on behalf of Trudeau.
“Throughout her professional and personal endeavours, Sophie has been fortunate to meet and converse with several renowned world leaders in hopes of bringing further change and justice to the world, including the late Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis, King Abdullah II of Jordan, French President Emmanuel Macron, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and many more,” it says.
Next year, Gregoire Trudeau is releasing a memoir, Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other, which purports to “ignite an emotional evolution and encourage all people to become more aware of their emotions and the inner workings of their own personality in order to inspire everyone to see that there are more things that bring us together than separate us.”
Gregoire Trudeau is no stranger to the public eye, working as a television presenter in Quebec before Trudeau was elected.
She also once sang, unprompted, a song she wrote for her daughter at a Martin Luther King Jr. tribute in Ottawa.
Trudeau and Gregoire Trudeau announced their separation in joint social media posts in August.
“After many meaningful and difficult conversations, we have made the decision to separate,” they wrote. “As always, we remain a close family with deep love and respect for each other and for everything we have built and will continue to build.”
Afterwards, the former couple and their children went on a family holiday to Tofino.
Indian media is reporting that Sukhdool Singh Gill, who also goes by the alias Sukha Duneke, was shot and killed in Winnipeg on Wednesday, in what media is describing as a gang-related murder.
Winnipeg Police confirmed in a statement that a 39-year-old Sukhdool Singh Gill has been idenitifed as the victim in an ongoing homicide investigation but did not elaborate on his alleged gang connections.
On Wednesday, India’s National Investigation Agency released a list of 43 individuals accused of being involved in terror or gang related activities, some with links in Canada.
Duneke was ranked no. 33 on the list.
Ranked no. 1 is Lawrence Bishnoi, whose gang has apparently already claimed responsibility for the killing of Duneke.
As reported by NDTV, a Facebook post from Bishnoi’s gang said that the killing of Duneke was in retaliation to the killing of two other gangsters and that Duneke was a “drug addict” who got “punished for his sins”.
NDTV reports that Bishnoi’s gang has warned that “their enemies will not be able to survive in India or any other country for that matter.”
Bishnoi is currently serving time in an Ahmedabad prison on drug smuggling charges. He is also accused of involvement in the killing of famous Indian rapper Sidhu Moose Wala who started his professional music career in Brampton, Ontario.
According to the Times of India, Duneke was a “close associate” of Arsh Dalla, a man designated as a terrorist by Indian authorities who is believed to be hiding in Canada and is accused of being a member of the Khalistan Tiger Force.
That same report says that both Dalla and Duneke were trying to “resurrect” the Khalistan Tiger Force after the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar last June.
Canadian politicians have yet to comment on the reported killing of Duneke last night.
As diplomatic tensions between India and Canada continued to escalate, India announced in a statement that they have suspended all visa services in Canada in response to growing security concerns.
This came after both India and Canada expelled senior diplomats from their respective countries.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that Canadian intelligence officials were “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.”
Trudeau has yet to provide evidence to the public over these allegations despite calls from opposition leader Pierre Poilievre to “come clean” with the evidence.
This is a developing story.
