Back when Paul Bernardo was known in the media as the “Scarborough Rapist” and had not yet morphed into a notorious schoolgirl rapist and killer, Anne Kelly was just starting her career as a case management worker with Correctional Services Canada.
From there, she began climbing the ladder.
Now, at the apex of her career as Commissioner of Correctional Services (CSC), the top gig in the federal incarceration department, she found herself publicly explaining why Bernardo was recently moved from the hardcore, maximum-security Millhaven prison in Kingston to the medium-security institution in the Quebec town of La Macaza.
This is not normally done, but there is nothing normal about Paul Bernardo by any stretch of the imagination. Not to Kelly. Not to anyone.
Bernardo is serving a life sentence for kidnapping, torturing and killing Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15, in the early 1990s near the Ontario town of St. Catharines.
He lured the girls into his car and then, with the help of his fiancée-then-wife Karla Homolka, held them hostage in the couple’s Port Dalhousie home, where they were raped and murdered.
He was also found guilty of manslaughter in the rape and drugging death of Homolka’s sister Tammy, 15.
Before that, he was the “Scarborough Rapist,” admitting after his trial to sexually assaulting at least 14 young women in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Anne Kelly was just starting out on her career.
He attacked most from behind, dragging them into bushes with a knife to their throats. Rather than going through another trial, the Crown applied to have him declared a “dangerous offender” — a designation reserved for Canada’s most violent criminals and sexual predators. So he’s the worst of the worst.
Tim Danson, long-time lawyer for the victims’ families, said he was stunned when a CSC official called him last week to tell him about Bernardo’s transfer.
He said they told him they weren’t able to disclose the reasons, based on Bernardo’s privacy rights.
Well, that’s when it all hit the fan. The country went into an uproar and had not changed its mind that the psychopath Bernardo should rot in the isolation of a maximum-security prison cell until he is called to Hell.
It had not expected Bernardo to be transferred to the medium-security Laurentian mountain prison of La Macaza where, coincidentally, sexual offenders are the force of its existence.
In fact, sex offenders make up two-thirds of the prison’s inmate population.
So, Anne Kelly was called up to explain it all.
Kelly said the committee assigned to review Bernardo’s transfer concluded that while the decision to transfer the serial killer was “sound” and the corrections agency “went above policy in this case to notify victims, additional steps could have been taken to provide more information.”
“We contacted all of the registered victims prior to this announcement, and I spoke directly to those wishing to be walked through the findings,” said Kelly.
“What they have gone through is unimaginable. Public safety, and their safety, continues to be top of mind for us in any decisions we make,” she added.
“Hearing about this case so intensely over the past days has brought up strong emotions, and rightly so. I regret any pain and concern this transfer has caused.”
But, in the end, Bernardo was going nowhere.
La Macaza would be his home, hopefully until he is finally leaves in a box.
As Canadians experience financial pressure from interest rate hikes, soaring housing prices and increases in the cost-of-living, nearly three out of five Canadian parents say they frequently worry about their child’s financial future.
A recent Maru Public Opinion poll commissioned by TD Bank found that many parents feel that their children are ill-prepared and lack the financial literacy to build a healthy financial future amid economic uncertainty.
Fifty-eight percent of parents said that they frequently worry about their child’s financial future with only 35% of Canadians feeling confident that their child or children are prepared to avoid the same financial challenges that they had encountered when they were younger.
Generally, parents are not confident in their child’s financial literacy or their ability to provide their child the necessary financial literacy to succeed in Canada.
The survey found that 66% of Canadian parents are not confident in their child’s financial knowledge for their current age and nearly 90% of them agreed that they would feel more confident if their child had received an improved financial education before their teenage years.
By far, parents believe that budgeting and saving are the two most important financial fundamentals for their children to learn today, but only 29% of parents discuss finances with their child weekly and 70% of parents don’t feel very prepared to support their child’s financial literacy at home.
For years, Canada has been experiencing a significant rise in the price of homes as big cities like Toronto’s average home price rests above $1 million, making it hard for young Canadians to buy their first home.
The Ontario government has taken steps towards adding mandatory financial literacy for the province’s students starting in Grade 1.
The Ontario education ministry has moved forward with revamping the province’s Grade 9 math class that eliminates competence-based streaming and introduces some financial literacy education, among other reforms.
Long-time Toronto District School Board principal Richard Bilkszto took on the aggressive anti-black racism bullies at the board and paid the ultimate price for doing so.
Humiliated by a race “expert” hired by the board to preach anti-black racism dogma, left hung to dry by his peers and cancelled by his TDSB superiors, the celebrated principal took his own life last week.
“There is no question that these events and the lack of support from the TDSB caused him intense stress and mental suffering,” said his lawyer Lisa Bildy, who called him a “highly accomplished leader in the field of adult education” over a 24-year career.
Bilkszto just filed a $750k lawsuit against the board alleging beach of contract, defamation of character and reprisal by the board’s senior administrators after he was repeatedly labelled a “white supremacist,” shamed and humiliated at two anti-racism indoctrination sessions run by Kike Ojo Thompson and her KOJO Institute.
The lawsuit has yet to be served on the board, says Bildy, adding that it’s up to his family to decide whether to continue.
His crime: He challenged, politely, Ojo-Thompson when she contended at one of her indoctrination sessions that Canada is far more racist than our neighbours south of the border.
The sessions during which Bilkszto became her target occurred on April 26 and May 3, 2021.
As I reported in a 2021 story, Ojo-Thompson has repeatedly been the contractor of choice for TDSB education director Colleen Russell-Rawlins both when she was the Peel District School board and when she transferred to the TDSB.
According to Bilkszto’s claim, after retiring from full-time teaching in early 2019, he became a sought-after casual principal.
He received accolades for his work from both the board brass and the trustee for the area.
That was until Ojo-Thompson got into the act.
At the April 26, 2021 session, the contractor issued a torrent of nonsensical oppression-speak about Canada and residents with white privilege: “We are stepping on necks we are kneeling on necks, we are Derek Chauvin-ing a whole group of people,” she said. (Derek was the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.)
“Patriarchy is killing you, capitalism is killing you and white supremacy is taking your soul,” she continued.
(She, of course, ignored the irony of being a capitalist herself who has collected tens of thousands of dollars of public money from her ridiculous sessions.)
According to the statement of claim, when Bilkszto politely challenged the contractor about her contentions – based on his experience teaching at an inner-city school in Buffalo, Ojo-Thompson tried to slice and dice him in front of some 200 administrators with the board.
“We are here to talk about anti-black racism but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for black people?” she lectured him.
I listened to the tape of this and other interchanges and her tone was aggressive, bordering on cruel and patronizing, implying how dare she be questioned.
The lawsuit claims says she ended that session by contending she got out the “weed whacker” to cut down a weed (Bilkszto).
“I was hot today,” she is quoted as saying, rather malevolently. “It was good. It was really good.”
No one stood up for Bilkszto at that session or the subsequent one a week later, at which Ojo-Thompson allegedly continued to harass him, repeatedly calling his response a week before “resistance in support of white supremacy.”
Ojo-Thompson, seemingly out for blood, subsequently suggested that the TDSB take action against Bilkszto for allegedly choosing not to “unlearn” his white supremacism.
His reputation in tatters and suffering from emotional distress, a WSIB claim ruled in his favour and he was granted loss of earnings until July 1 of 2021.
The adjudicator said in the WSIB ruling that the speaker’s conduct was “abusive, egregious and vexatious” and can be considered “workplace harassment and bullying.”
But instead of acknowledging that fact, the TDSB doubled down and reneged on the contract to hire Bilkszto at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate when he returned from sick leave. He had other contracts revoked and failed to get other internal positions as well, the claim alleges.
He was bullied, cancelled and treated with disdain bordering on malevolence for speaking up about the anti-racism bafflegab spoon-fed by empowered black activists at the behest of an education director who has divided the board into oppressors (white students/teachers) and the oppressed (black students/teachers and her cabal of like-minded superintendents).
It is sickening to think how much they’ve abused their power.
Efforts to reach Ojo-Thompson were unsuccessful. In fact she blocked me on Twitter after I sent her a request for a comment.
She also blocked others for commenting on her abusive behaviour.
The TDSB issued a statement through spokesperson Ryan Bird saying: “Our hearts go out to Richard’s family and loved ones. He was a strong advocate – particularly to those in adult and alternative education – and worked tirelessly to create an environment that fostered students success for students of all ages.”
Social media has been abuzz for the past two days about this tragic end to the life of a wonderful educator.
The consensus is that there needs to be a more concerted effort to expose these DEI-for-hire bullies.
I knew Richard. He was one of the good guys.
He didn’t deserve what he was handed. He was the furthest thing from being racist.
Conservative energy critic Shannon Stubbs took to social media on Thursday to blast the Liberal government’s plan to end subsidies for fossil fuel production as incoherent and a political ploy to target a non-existent problem.
According to Stubbs, the federal government has not shown a common definition for “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,” which it targeted in an announcement earlier this month.
“The truth is the former Conservative government ended the vast majority of direct fossil fuel subsidies in Canada. What’s wild is that the government can’t even define ‘inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,’” Stubbs said in a LinkedIn post.
“The natural resources committee did a whole study on this subject, and neither government of Canada officials nor witnesses used a common definition. So, I guess the NDP-Liberals are about to make something up — and then get rid of it.”
According to Stubbs, currently Canada only has a benchmark corporate tax treatment for all businesses which oil and gas companies can claim.
“The NDP-Liberals can’t define inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, AND they can’t tell you where all the money for R&D and innovation, or for government programs and services, is going to come from instead,” wrote Stubbs.
“What’s clear is the Liberals remain hellbent on shutting down Canada’s oil and gas sector, even though it invests more private sector dollars in clean tech than all other sectors – COMBINED, and leads the way in developing alternative energies and the fuels of the future,” Stubbs cited the fact that the industry contributes $26 billion a year in taxes and royalties on average.
“The reality is their reckless anti-energy and anti-private sector policies will kill hundreds of thousands of high-skilled, well-paying jobs, risk billions of dollars in government revenue, and won’t actually do anything for the environment.”
True North reached out to Natural Resources Canada for comment and was told to tune into a technical briefing on Monday for additional details.
According to analysis by the Canadian Energy Centre, the oil and gas industry has also contributed to the wealth of provinces like British Columbia.
Oil and gas developments and related economic activity between Alberta and British Columbia contributed a net positive $9 billion to British Columbia’s GDP.
The business activity also created over 55,000 jobs for British Columbians.
A new essay in C2C Journal by researcher Gleb Lisikh dives into the world of pandemic data manipulation, unravelling the shocking truth of how flawed interpretation of Covid-19 tests and exaggerated death counts led to a staggering overestimation of the pandemic’s severity. Lisikh joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to break down the numbers and shed light on the crucial lessons to be learned before any future crisis unfolds.
“Making a Pandemic: A Simple Meat & Potato Recipe” by Gleb Lisikh can be read here.
Schools across Canada have incorporated gender ideology in their curriculums, teaching young students about pronouns, transitioning and LGBTQ lifestyles. Many believe this is inappropriate for children and that gender ideology has no place in schools, including many parents of the Muslim faith.
In the last few months, Muslim parents have organized and participated in protests against gender ideology being taught in schools. In addition, many Muslim students have refused to participate in pride events being held in their schools.
The left and the legacy media have been highly critical of Muslims who are taking a stand against gender ideology. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even lectured Muslims, accusing them of being manipulated by “the American right wing.” But what’s really behind their opposition? What pushed them to finally speak out?
Former mayoral candidate for Toronto Bahira Abdulsalam and concerned parent Kamal El-Cheikh joined The Rupa Subramanya Show to discuss their concerns. Tune in now!
The Greater Essex County District School Board (GECDSB) has issued a statement in response to one of its teachers being caught on tape berating Muslim students for skipping an LGBTQ pride day – saying the incident “is being addressed internally.”
In the audio recording from June exclusively obtained by True North, a Northwood Public School teacher tells her class that the Muslim students abstaining from pride was “an incredible show of hatred [that] was incredibly disgusting to have witnessed.”
EXCLUSIVE: An elementary teacher in Windsor, Ontario berated Muslim students for skipping LGBTQ pride day, telling them their abstention was “disgusting” and “an incredible show of hatred” that makes her not want to be their educator. Recording obtained by @TrueNorthCentre. pic.twitter.com/T7jhFfLHvN
“I do not want to be a part of this school,” adds the teacher.
The tirade came amid reports of a very high absence rate at the school on its pride day. According to Life Site News,approximately 600 out of the school’s 800 students stayed home – a 75% absentee rate.
The teacher is also heard condemning the Muslim students for telling her they can’t change their religion to have it support LGBTQ lifestyles – and that they ought to challenge their parents’ beliefs.
In a statement to local outletWindsorNewsToday, GECDSB spokesperson Madeline McEachern said the board “was made aware of this incident as soon as it occurred in early June 2023,” but that it “cannot comment on personnel matters relating to any staff member.”
“Board and Northwood administration immediately addressed all staff, students, and community members who were affected to ensure their well-being at that time. The principal has spoken directly with the students involved and distributed the letter to the entire Northwood community.”
A source provided True North with the Jun. 20 apology letter sent to Northwood families by principal Dustin O’Neil. He said the teacher’s comments were inappropriate.
A source provided @TrueNorthCentre with a Jun. 20 apology letter sent to Northwood families by principal Dustin O’Neal. He said the teacher’s comments were inappropriate. pic.twitter.com/Bpz2ny2Ulh
“As stated in the letter, diversity and a sense of belonging enrich students’ learning experiences, and we are committed to ensuring that all students and families are represented positively in our schools,” said the spokesperson.
The board added that the incident “is being addressed internally.”
In the past two months, the GECDSB has been the subject of community criticism and protest over its LGBTQ policies.
As previously reported by True North, the school board allows children to change their gender or pronouns at school without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
One GECDSB trustee supportive of the policy claimed in a CBC interview that only a “vocal minority” of parents oppose the gender identity policy. A Leger poll commissioned by SecondStreet.org however found that 56% of Ontarians believe parents should be notified if their child wants to change their gender or pronouns at school.
The school board also opted to temporarily ban parents and other members of the public from board of trustees meetings in June amid outrage over the policy.
Election fever is in the air in Manitoba among those most determined to incite a change in government.
Things don’t look good for the Progressive Conservative government led by seasoned politician Heather Stefanson who is serving her first stint as Premier. The next election will be held on October 3, and nearly all opinion polls show the NDP in the lead.
The smell of blood has seen an informal alliance of the federal Liberal Party government, indigenous activists, left-wing academics, and local media to dethrone Stefanson, ghoulishly employing the heartbreaking murder of four indigenous women as their latest talking point.
Niigaan Sinclair wears three of these hats – Anishinaabe activist, associate professor of native studies, and Winnipeg Free Press columnist – which he feels gives him leave to say Stefanson “wears the stink of cruelty” for refusing to support the search of a landfill site for the remains of two allegedly murdered women.
The political gaslighting of Stefanson began not long after it was revealed on December 1, 2022, by the Winnipeg Police Service that Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man, had been charged with the tragic first-degree murder of four indigenous women, including 39-year-old Morgan Harris and 26-year Marcedes Myran.
Winnipeg police say Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois and a fourth unidentified woman the community has named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, were all the victims of an alleged serial killer. Jeremy Skibicki, 35, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder. (Submitted by Cambria Harris, Donna Bartlett and Darryl Contois)
This was followed by a December 6 statement by Police Service Chief Danny Smyth, who said that though it was believed the remains of Harris and Myran were at the Prairie Green Landfill just north of the city, his forensic experts had made the “very difficult decision” not to search that garbage dump after determining it wasn’t feasible to do so. This was because of the passage of time and the large volume of material deposited there, exacerbated by serious physical dangers associated with excavating that site.
An additional RCMP study, only recently made available, supported these assertions.
But the danger of searching for and near impossibility of finding the remains of these homeless women, seemingly more cherished in death than they were in life, did nothing to prevent this tragedy from descending into near farcical political grandstanding.
On February 8, 2023, Marc Miller, the minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, allocated $500,000 to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) “to examine the feasibility of a search” for the two women’s bodies.
The AMC quickly appointed a Landfill Search Feasibility Study Committee (LSFSC) to conduct the study. Its nine-member Landfill Search Feasibility Study Oversight Committee was composed solely of indigenous people, including representatives of the two affected families.
The composition of this body is troubling. In the interests of scientific objectivity, accountability, and transparency, the still officially secret feasibility study should have been led by disinterested parties. Instead, the decision to search, an effort that would take between one and three years at a cost of between $84 million and $184 million, was predetermined.
These crude estimates are a window into the other shortcomings of the study.
The composition of the Oversight Committee is also questionable because it could very well subvert the murder charges against Skibicki: the universal principles of natural justice and their application in Canada say that victims, their families, and their supporters must never be allowed to control any criminal investigation, regardless of how much sympathy they may engender.
Yes, the Technical Subcommittee of the LSFSC contained two forensic experts. Still, the landmark 2019 Paulsen and Moran study saw its warning “A search should not be initiated if more than 60 days had passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated” arbitrarily rewritten as “Paulsen and Moran (2019) caution initiating a search when more than 60 days has [sic] passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated.”
Converting “don’t do it” to “be careful” points to a lack of professional objectivity, if not questionable ethics, in a search that would exceed the 60-day limit by 10-fold, were the Prairie Green excavation project begin even as early as mid-August of this year.
On July 12, Miller called the Manitoba government’s decision to fund or otherwise assist in the landfill search “heartless” and callous and that it had damaged, if not destroyed, the federal government’s ability to help with the search.
“The federal government’s willing to help. We’re willing to play a role, a very important role in this. But … the government can’t nationalize a garbage dump or the waste-disposal system for the City of Winnipeg,” he said.
The next day, Miller added the federal government cannot step in unless the province gave its jurisdictional permission.
None of these statements has any credibility, especially given that the federal government would only serve as paymaster for a search that would be micromanaged by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, just as the search for thousands of reputedly missing Indian Residential School students believed to be buried in unmarked graves across the country has been controlled by local Indigenous bands.
Stefanson immediately fired back, defending her decision not to search the landfill.
“What should not happen — must not happen — is the continuing politicization of this awful tragedy. This irresponsible approach can only compound the suffering of the families, inflame wider community issues and threaten matters already before the courts [the murder charge against Skibicki].”
For the first time, she also added the critical issue of feasibility.
“As the Premier of Manitoba, however, I also have other responsibilities. These have required that government address difficult considerations on the viability of a search of the Prairie Green Landfill. Based on an objective review of these issues, we have made the difficult decision that such a search is not viable. There can plainly be no guarantees on the outcome of an exceedingly challenging and complex search, and the immediate and longer-term human safety and workplace risks involved cannot be ignored,” she wrote in a statement.
Marion Buller, a retired judge who led the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, just jumped into this political swamp when she opined that Ottawa should take a larger role in the controversy over the province’s refusal to lead and fund the search.
Buller said the federal government could sidestep the provincial government and try to reach an agreement with the landfill owner to conduct a search: “There’s so much more that can be done and should be done by all levels of government, rather than sitting back and playing some sort of blame game…. Let’s just put politics aside and get the work done,” Buller said.
But Buller seems ill-informed about the key issues.
Waste Connections of Canada, owner of the Prairie Trail facility, has fully cooperated with provincial authorities by, among other things, immediately closing off the section of the landfill where the women’s remains are believed to be buried. As for the province of Manitoba, Stefanson has declared that search costs were not an issue and the province would not prevent the federal government from ordering a search as long as worker safety was assured.
On the other side, federal officials have undoubtedly dissected the landfill feasibility study and are now desperately looking for an exit strategy out of a hopeless search based on a feasibility study that doesn’t pass the smell test. Scoring some cheap anti-Conservative Party political points by an uncouth and nearly unprecedented gaslighting of Stefanson in the weeks leading up to the October provincial election must have seemed like a nice added bonus.
Similar attacks may backfire on sundry Aboriginal parties shouting “Heartless Heather” as the silent majority of Manitobans becomes aware of the weak evidentiary underpinnings of a painful tragedy that should have been grounded in lots of objectively factual evidence.
A Manitoba provincial flag with the phrase Heartless Heather flies above the Brady Road landfill site blockade on Monday, July 17. (Radio-Canada).
Instead, an increasingly skeptical populace has been shown only proof that raw emotion, intense anger, and insatiable financial demands continue to trump the search for truth in our increasingly “woke” purge of Enlightenment science and logic, especially when this involves the fate of underclass indigenous women.
The modern left leaves no room for debate or dissent – especially on gender issues. This is how Stuart Parker, a literal communist activist who’s been in the trenches on a variety of left-wing causes for decades, wound up getting denounced by his (former) friends. Parker, the president of the socialist Los Altos Institute in British Columbia, was cancelled for criticizing radical gender ideology. He’s still very much a leftist, but has written an essay for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Inside Policy decrying the “intolerant authoritarians of the new left.” He joined True North’s Andrew Lawton for an in-depth discussion about cancel culture and the left’s authoritarian inclinations.
The RCMP has charged former RCMP officer William Majcher with using his position of knowledge to supply the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with sensitive Canadian intelligence.
On Friday, Majcher appeared at a Quebec courthouse via videoconference, where he was charged with two counts under the Security of Information Act; preparatory acts for the benefit of a foreign entity and conspiracy.
“According to the investigation, Mr. Majcher allegedly used his knowledge and his extensive network of contacts in Canada to obtain intelligence or services to benefit the People’s Republic of China,” reads an RCMP press release.
“It is alleged that he contributed to the Chinese government’s efforts to identify and intimidate an individual outside the scope of Canadian law.”
In a comment to Radio-Canada, corporal Tasha Adams said that Majcher had been working for a Hong Kong-based firm collecting information about an individual on behalf of the PRC, which wanted to target the individual.
Inspector David Beaudoin told the CBC that the investigation began in the fall of 2021, investigating alleged incidents between 2014 and 2019.
In 2011, Majcher became the CEO of Sun Wah International Asset Management, a Hong Kong-based financial services provider, remaining in the position until December 2014.
Before his arrest, Majcher had been working as the president of EMIDR Limited, a corporate risk firm hired by governments and corporations specializing in asset recovery. In this role, Majcher told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he was “a hired gun to help either large corporates or governments to get back what is rightfully theirs.”
Majcher has served as an advisor and on the boards of numerous Hong Kong-based corporations and is a contributing writer to the Harbour Times.
Before moving to Hong Kong, Majcher was a former RCMP officer who worked undercover to discover corruption and money laundering in the lawyering and financial sector professions.
In 2002, Majcher went undercover in an RCMP investigation and helped to bring Toronto lawyer Simon Rosenfeld to justice for drug cartel-related money laundering.
In 2005, Majcher was removed from command of the Vancouver-based Integrated Market Enforcement Teams, allegedly because Majcher had sought the nomination as a future Conservative Party candidate.
