A drag queen story hour for children at Pride Winnipeg celebrations on Sunday featured a performance group whose members have posted extreme and satanic-themed content on their social media profiles.
“The House of Hex” is a Brandon, Manitoba based drag queen group. According to the Pride Winnipeg website, the group held a 2:00 p.m. drag queen story hour on Sunday on the kids stage for its 2023 program.
The group is composed of four performers: Flora Hex, Luna Hex, Mercy Hex and Lilith Hex.
Instagram profiles by the group’s so-called “mother” Flora Hex and the official House of Hex account post a variety of horror and satanic themed content not suitable for children.
I’d add an evil clown image but they’ve already been provided in this case. https://t.co/lgxxmehy3z
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 5, 2023
Some of the photographs feature bondage gear, horns and frightening makeup.
Last year, CBC News profiled the group claiming that it spread a “message of expressing kindness, creativity and inclusivity.”
“It was always like a goal of mine through doing drag … not necessarily making more drag performers or drag artists, but to give people the opportunity to seek to express themselves in ways that they might not have thought of or felt comfortable with before,” Flora told the outlet.
Protests have erupted across Canada surrounding drag queen events for kids. Opponents of the practice claim that drag queen performances are too sexualized for children and risks confusing them about their natural development.
Last year, dueling protests occurred outside of a Winnipeg coffee shop where a drag queen story hour took place near Halloween.
As Toronto’s mayoral campaign enters its final weeks, latest polling shows former NDP MP Olivia Chow has been able to maintain her large lead while Anthony Furey continues to resonate with Toronto voters.
Forum Research released their latest poll showing Chow polling at 38%, leading the second place Mark Saunders by a 25% margin.
Anthony Furey has quickly risen up the polls in recent weeks, as the journalist-turned-politician has risen his support from 2% in early polls to being pegged at 10% in Forum Research’s latest poll.
Furey is polling ahead of establishment politicians like Ana Bailão, Mitzie Hunter and Brad Bradford.
Meanwhile, Furey, who is currently on leave as True North’s VP of content and editorial, is polling just under Toronto–St.Paul’s councillor Josh Matlow who is pegged at 12% support and Saunders who is polling at 13%.
The pool of voters who remain undecided is shrinking, as 19% of Torontonians polled say they have not made up their mind about who they’ll be voting for.
Chow, who last served as a Toronto city councillor in 2005, built her campaign on a progressive message and leveraged the reputation she had built as a city councillor, an NDP MP, and as the third place Toronto mayoral candidate in 2014.
On the campaign trail, Chow had made promises to make the city more affordable for renters, improving the TTC’s city-wide service, building 25,000 affordable rental units and forcing the city’s libraries to open seven days a week.
“After a decade of conservative mayors, the city has become more expensive and less liveable for people,” said Chow as she announced her campaign.
On the other hand, Furey has been gaining support in the polls after a series of campaign announcements calling for the removal of bike lanes, hiring 500 more police officers and ending Toronto’s drug injection program.
Support for centre-right candidates who have taken strong positions on drug and crime policy is divided among Furey, Saunders and Bradford, as together, the candidates are polling at 28%.
Forum Research’s poll results based on the total sample are considered accurate 19 times out of 20, +/- 3%.
One of the sickest men to ever despoil a Canadian courtroom, a serial killer and rapist named Paul Bernardo, was secretly transferred from the notorious maximum-security Millhaven Institute near Kingston, Ont., to the medium-security La Macaza prison in the Quebec Laurentians last week.
None of the families of his victims was notified. It was all done, basically, under the cloak of darkness.
A source, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told Global News that La Macaza is a prison for sexual offenders and those at risk of being harmed by other inmates, and who also said they believed the move of Bernardo was done “secretly.”
Bernardo’s sex crimes transpired over several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of which he videotaped and which formed part of the evidence against him in court, and sparked widespread terror and revulsion.
Among his acts, he and his then-wife Karla Homolka kidnapped, tortured and killed Leslie Mahaffy, 14, of Burlington, Ont., in June 1991 at their home in Port Dalhousie, Ont., before dumping her cement-encased remains in a nearby lake.
They similarly kidnapped and, after ignoring her agonized pleas over three days, killed Kristen French, 15, in April 1992.
Bernardo ultimately admitted to raping 14 other women. He was also convicted of manslaughter in the December 1990 death of Homolka’s younger sister, Tammy. The 15-year-old girl died after the pair drugged and sexually assaulted her.
The victims families’ lawyer Tim Danson says he stressed to Correctional Service Canada that if Bernardo ever were to escape, there would be a serious risk to public safety, but he was assured that “medium security is still significant security.”
Homolka was convicted of manslaughter in what became known as the Deal of the Century, and served a 12-year prison sentence before release in 2005. She went on to remarry and become a mother, infuriating the masses.
Bernardo’s move to La Macaza, said Danson, “just tears them apart. There’s just a high level of pain and sadness and despair and anguish.”
“A situation like this, just as it is when we’re preparing for parole hearings … it kind of transports the families back to the beginning and it kind of ignites all the horrible feelings, you know, that they’ve been trying to address and deal with and get on with life,” he said.
A spokesperson for Correctional Service Canada would not comment “on the specifics of an offender’s case,” but stressed that “this offender” is serving an indeterminate sentence, meaning there is no end date to the sentence.
In other words, Bernardo is most likely going to die in prison.
It could not come sooner to the journalists who covered the trial, some of whom had to be treated for PTSD and other emotionally related ailments because the details of the case were too cruel to be comprehended, but were nonetheless resurrected each time Bernardo annually sought parole.
His next parole hearing is set for November 23.
Bernardo was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering the two teenage girls near St. Catharines, Ont.
The Correctional Service of Canada couldn’t say why the convicted killer was moved, but it said “public safety” is the “paramount consideration” in every decision.
“While we cannot comment on the specifics of an offender’s case, we assure the public that this offender continues to be incarcerated in a secure institution, with appropriate security perimeters and controls in place,” a spokesperson said on Friday.
“It is important to note that this offender is serving an indeterminate sentence, which means that there is no end date to their sentence.”
Canadian soldiers deployed in Latvia as part of a NATO mission have been spending their own money on helmets and other equipment due to outdated supplies provided by the Canadian Armed Forces.
The soldiers have been forced to buy upgraded helmets with built-in hearing protection and headsets from online retailers white training abroad. They have also had to acquire their own rain gear, tactical vests and ammunition in the same way.
The private purchases reflect the frustration of the soldiers with the outdated and inadequate equipment they have been given by the army. Some of the gear, such as the CG634 helmet, dates back to the 1990s and does not meet the current standards of ballistic protection or ergonomics.
Lt.-Col. Jesse van Eijk, the Canadian battle group commander in Latvia, expressed his concern about the disparity in equipment between his troops and their allies in an email obtained by CBC News.
He wrote that it was “concerning verging on embarrassing” to see the differences in issued soldier equipment between the Canadians and the Danes. He added that most of the systems his soldiers lacked were “easily available on the open market” and not some kind of secret technology.
“In general, it was concerning verging on embarrassing to see the differences in issued soldier equipment between us and the Danes,” wrote Lt.-Col van Eijk in a May 12 email obtained by CBC News.
“This was only exacerbated by the fact they were carrying more advanced Canadian-made Colt Canada rifles, mounting more advanced Canadian Elcan DR sights, and the fact that most of the systems our soldiers lacked were easily available on the open market and not some sort of closely guarded technology.”
The Canadian defence mission in Latvia consists of more than 700 Canadian soldiers out of a total of 1,500 from various NATO countries. The effort is part of a deterrence strategy against Russia’s aggression in the region.
Besides the helmets and gear, the Canadian soldiers also face shortages of modern anti-tank weapons, systems to counter drones and a dedicated short-range air defence system.
The department has since said that it was working on procuring new helmets, body armour, weapons and other equipment for the army, but did not provide any timelines or details.
“Ensuring the safety and well-being of our members remains a top priority,” said Department of National Defence spokesperson Jessica Lamirande.
“Acquiring hearing protection for soldiers is a complex undertaking as it must balance noise reduction, weight, and the ability for users to effectively communicate.”
With Alberta’s United Conservative Party being reelected to a majority government, many Albertans are now wondering what the next four years will hold for the province. Municipal affairs minister Rebecca Schulz joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the government’s plans and priorities for the upcoming term. Plus, why was Rachel Notley’s NDP so successful in Calgary?
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used a Toronto Raptors event last week to launch partisan attacks against the Conservatives, blaming the rise in gun violence on the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper.
Plus, as the Trudeau government’s controversial Online News Act, C-18, inches closer to becoming law, tech giant Meta is testing a new feature on its platforms that will block news content for many Canadians in a trial run that will last a month.
And a grown man exposed his penis to children while denouncing “white privilege” in a performance on the opening night of the taxpayer-funded Quebec City Museum of Civilization’s “Love me gender” exhibit.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Rachel Emmanuel and Andrew Lawton!
A Canadian scholar is raising the alarm about a woke charter that has been signed by over 50 Canadian colleges and universities.
St. Mary’s Philosophy professor and former Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship president Mark Mercer says the “Scarborough National Charter on anti-Black racism and Black Inclusion” will have “terrible consequences” on academia.
The charter was released in 2021 by an advisory committee that emerged from a 2020 virtual anti-black racism event hosted by the University of Toronto following the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
The 22-page document calls for post-secondary institutions to adopt principles of Black Flourishing, Inclusive Excellence, Mutuality, and Accountability when developing initiatives to “foster black inclusion.” The document also supports “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” (EDI) ideology.
But in an Interview with True North, Mercer shared concerns about the Scarborough Charter, saying it is anti-academic. “It not only doesn’t promote the academic mission… but it subverts it.”
“(The charter) says that there are correct things to think about and correct ways to think about them, incorrect ways to think about them. That our ideas aren’t to be judged by their quality, that is whether they’re true or false, whether they solve problems or not, but rather their origin,” said Mercer.
“It seeks to impose burdens and controls on people who are attempting simply to think hard about the matters at hand.”
The BLM-inspired charter seeks to achieve its social justice agenda with “principle-based commitments to action” in governance, research, teaching, and learning.
At the governance level, it calls for equity across all leadership structures, revisions of dispute resolution and disciplinary processes, race based hiring in order to increase the number of black scholars, and the recruitment of more black students. It also calls for reassessments of campus security and safety procedures to ensure black dignity, understanding the existence of “technological inequities” and the creation of “anti-racism” offices.
At the research level, it calls for equitable research grants and “recognition practices for members of historically underrepresented communities bearing disproportionate burdens of the labour.” As well as race research clusters, and new reward systems that recognize contributions to “intersectional Black flourishing.” It also calls on research about or implicating black communities to respect “principles of co-construction.”
When it comes to teaching and learning, the charter calls for “affirming, accessible spaces” and naming practices “that foster Black belonging, knowledge development and sharing.” It also calls for the decentering of “epistemic Eurocentrism” in current curricula, and for more black studies programs. Furthermore, it calls for special scholarships, bursaries, fellowships for black students as well as “anti-racism” training for university staff and faculty.
As for Community Engagement, the charter calls for “inclusive task forces to conduct independent studies of the histories of slavery, colonialism and racial injustice, with a mandate to include recommendations that promote inclusive higher education and community flourishing into the future.” It also calls procurement processes to have “Black community prior-impact assessments.”
There are multiple elements of the Scarborough Charter that Mercer is concerned about, including the request that research on or implicating black communities respect “principles of co-construction.”
Mercer told True North the latter amounts to requiring black communities have a say on one’s research, which “undercuts the trustworthiness of university research.”
“If we’re not to draw certain conclusions, then we can’t trust that the conclusions that the research has drawn are accurate, are not biased, influenced by other things.”
Mercer is also concerned with how the charter wants to respond to anti-black racism on campuses. “The charter asks for more oversight and control, for expanding notions of harassment and disrespect,” he said, adding “that’s going to have terrible consequences for discussion and for intergroup, interpersonal relations.”
The institution Mercer teaches at, St. Mary’s University in Halifax, is a signatory of the Scarborough Charter.
He says he isn’t seeing the charter have impact yet due to the bureaucratic process that comes with implementing policy – but says that will likely change in the coming years.
“I think it’s coming. Many of the departments welcome it, and I think there have already been race-based hirings at St. Mary’s.”
Mercer also said he cannot find anything in the charter that he feels is beneficial to academia, and believes the EDI document does not benefit black students or scholars as academics.
“The main identity of anyone at a university, professor or student is an academic,” he added. “Those are the values and the concerns that one has at a university. The charter asks us to set aside our identity as academics in favour of other things, in favour of other goals, in favour of other purposes.”
“If you take the purpose of a university to be a place where there are synicures, special set asides for particular people to represent accurately some demographic or whatever, then perhaps (the charter is) serving its purpose,” he added.
In addition to promoting EDI ideology, the charter claims that there was slavery in Canada – despite the fact that slavery was abolished on the land that now is the Dominion of Canada in 1834 – 33 years before confederation.
Below is a list of the Canadian colleges and universities that have signed the Scarborough Charter.
As Toronto’s mayoral campaign enters its final month, candidates have had the opportunity to announce their policy platforms to address the city’s drug and addiction crisis.
Major cities across the country, including Toronto, have seen an exponential increase in the number of deaths from opioid overdoses. In 2022, Toronto saw 506 deaths from opioid overdoses, a 269% increase compared to 2015’s 137 opioid overdose deaths.
This issue has drawn a varying level of interest among the mayoral candidates. Mark Saunders and Anthony Furey have spoken in-depth about the drug and addiction crisis on the campaign trail while Ana Bailão and Mitzie Hunter have steered away from this issue.
Former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders has released a comprehensive plan to deal with the crisis with a series of announcements concerning the future of Toronto’s drug injection sites, drug legalization and supports for addicts.
On Toronto’s drug injection sites, Saunders believes they pose a danger to the surrounding community as it is common to see used needles litter the surrounding area.
Saunders concedes that drug injection sites save lives and would like to maintain the city’s support for the program, but promises to take a zero-tolerance approach to needle disposal and street cleanliness.
“While supervised injection sites save lives, nearby residents and communities have received the short end of the stick and it is now time to rebalance this debate and protect the dignity and quality of life for all residents,” said Saunders.
Saunders committed to cancelling Toronto’s request to the federal government to legalize hard drugs like crack cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, fentanyl, and more for personal use for both adults and youth.
Furey has also taken a strong stance against illicit drug use in Toronto, being vocally critical of the city’s programs to distribute drug paraphernalia to Toronto’s family shelters and slamming the city’s drug injection program.
Recently, Furey held a press conference where he exposed a city program that was forcing Toronto’s non-profit shelters to accept and distribute Toronto Public Health branded crack pipes and crystal meth pipes.
Furey promised to end the program, lamenting the fact that taxpayers are funding the program.
“Most Toronto residents will be shocked to learn that their tax dollars are going to crack pipes and crystal meth kits,” said Furey.
“This is not just going on at drug injection sites, though: Shelters across the City are now being told they must distribute these drug kits, and basically become injection sites.”
Furey also announced that as mayor he would scrap the city’s drug injection sites in favour of a treatment model similar to Alberta’s model of treatment and recovery.
“As the number of injection sites has increased in Canada, so has the number of overdose deaths and so has the violence,” said Furey.
“This is not a sustainable situation. We need to prioritize treatment. Isn’t that what you’d want for yourself or a loved one?
Furey is currently on leave as True North’s VP for editorial and content.
While Saunders and Furey have taken a tougher stance on Toronto’s drug crisis, the same can’t be said about other candidates.
Progressive councillor for Toronto – St. Paul’s Josh Matlow says that he would push for a de-politicization of the the drug and addiction issue and instead focus on saving lives.
Matlow told True North that he would support the legalization of hard drugs for personal use and also supports Toronto’s drug injection sites.
Matlow’s platform includes a $115 million fund for community health and safety that would address poverty, racism, and trauma – components that Matlow says are risk factors for criminal behaviour and drug use.
The fund would expand mental health crisis teams, provide additional shelter beds, expand mental health and addiction counselling, and provide safe spaces for at-risk youth among other initiatives.
Matlow says that he would divest money from the Toronto Police Service’s budget to fund his multi-million dollar health and safety fund.
“For too long, we’ve expected police to do too much,” says Matlow.
“They aren’t social workers, youth counsellors or public health nurses. Let’s allow them to focus on solving crimes while properly resourcing community experts who can prevent violent incidents before they happen.”
The race’s frontrunner Olivia Chow’s plan consists of creating new 24/7 respite centres for the city’s homeless population and expanding Toronto’s community crisis service who respond to and help people suffering from a “mental health crisis.”
The former NDP MP would expand the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS), a team of crisis workers meant to respond to menal health crises’ at the number 211 with an additional $10 million in funding annually.
Chow says her plan would provide citizens dealing with mental health issues with the immediate city-wide support that they need while freeing up 911 operators and emergency workers to respond to other emergencies in the city.
“The Toronto Community Crisis Service is an approach that puts care and understanding first without involving the criminal justice system. I’ll make sure this service is available in every corner of our city,” said Chow.
Other major candidates like Mitzie Hunter and Ana Bailão have not released extensive campaign platforms addressing Toronto’s drug and addiction problem.
Bailão would expand the TCCS to service the entire city and she would pressure Ontario’s provincial govermment to be accountable for their healthcare responsibilities.
Hunter on the other hand announced that she would eventually create a comprehensive mental health and addiction strategy that will receive millions of dollars in funding, but she has not released the details of said plan.
Recent polls show that Chow maintains a sizeable lead compared to the other candidates, polling at 32% support while Bailão polls at a distant second place at 16% support. Saunders is polling at 12%, while Furey polls at 9%, Matlow at 10%, and Hunter at 7%.
The arrest of Fr. Arul Savari, a 48-year-old priest accused of sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl at a Roman Catholic church on the Little Grand Rapids Indian Reserve 265 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg on May 27 has provoked a local demand that the church leave the community.
The child was alone with the priest, who was charged with sexual assault, sexual interference, sexual exploitation of a young person, luring a child and forcible confinement on May 30.
“We don’t want the church here,” Oliver Owen, the reserve’s chief announced to media.
“I brought that up to the band meeting about our priest and the community right away said, ‘you know what, we don’t want that person here in the community, we don’t want him to come back and we don’t want the church here,'” Owen said in a phone interview with the CBC.
“It’s hard to imagine. I’m kind of lost for words,” Owen said.
Fr. Arul Savari, accused of sexual assault on the Little Grand Rapids Indian Reserve. (Facebook/Arul Savari)
In a statement Tuesday, Southern Chiefs’ Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels said they stand with the girl who was harmed.
“First Nations have sadly experienced predatory behaviour for generations when it comes to the churches,” Daniels said in a news release. “The leaders of the Catholic church have much work to do in repairing relationships with our nations.”
The same sentiments were expressed on June 1 by Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe Winnipeg Free Press columnist and a professor of indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba.
“It’s well known that the Catholic Church has a history of sending abusive employees to First Nations communities.
“There are, literally, thousands of arguments [read: abusive priests] to support banning the Catholic Church from First Nations communities. Most begin with the history of violence.
“Last fall, APTN [Aboriginal Peoples Television Network] Investigates released a report showing that 82 priests, nuns and other church employees had been named in 146 lawsuits throughout the 1990s and 2000s, alleging physical and sexual harm at eight Catholic-run residential schools in Manitoba.
“The problem, as in most abuse cases, is survivors aren’t believed or, by the time they are, evidence is so old survivor accounts are difficult to corroborate.
“The point here is that there is clearly an ongoing systemic problem with the Catholic Church sending sexual predators and abusers to Indigenous communities.”
None of these assertions has much credibility.
The Archdiocese of St. Boniface, the body responsible for Fr. Savari’s appointment, immediately suspended Fr. Arul Savari from all ministerial activity:
“Fr. Savari has been forbidden to have anything to do with former parishioners and children,” the church said.
This is not to doubt that the sexual abuse of children under the age of consent has long been a problem for the Catholic Church with up to four percent of priests having been accused of this serious crime. Still, this rate seems not out of line with such assaults in the larger society or among other clergy or members of other professions.
And there is no evidence that the Archdiocese suspected that Savari had a history of paedophilic sexual exploitation.
Nor is there any evidence that Catholic priests in Canada believed to be molesting the children under their supervision or care are still routinely transferred elsewhere, a practice said to have been common in the past.
But as horrific as these acts have been, they need to be contextualized.
For example, the APTN Investigates story Sinclair mentions revealed that most of the lawsuits were abandoned once the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was finalized, presumably because that 2007 agreement allowed those claiming abuse to be exempted from rigorous verification and vigorous cross examination.
Contrary to Sinclair’s assertion, the non-adversarial nature of the Independent Assessment Process meant that survivors were believed even when their accounts were difficult to corroborate.
It has been crudely estimated that 5,000 people committed a sex crime at an Indian Residential School during the system’s 113-year government-controlled existence. But fewer than 50 have been convicted, only a few of them priests. The rest, 4,950 people, few of them clergy, must be considered innocent based on that presumption unless proven guilty.
Most important of all is the comparative context: weighing the difference between sexual abuse by priests and by other indigenous people.
In this regard, Chief Owen must have a very short memory if he actually believes “It’s hard to imagine” the reputed abuse of this little girl.
On October 21, 2021, his predecessor, Chief Raymond Keeper, 65, was arrested and charged with luring a person under 18, two counts of sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon, and touching for a sexual purpose while in a position of authority.
Former Little Grand Rapids chief Raymond Keeper. ALEX LUPUL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES.
At the time of his arrest, RCMP said they believe there may be more victims than this young girl.
As of March 7, 2022, RCMP confirmed no further charges have been laid, but indicated the investigation has progressed and new interviews have taken place.
Band residents said they believe Keeper is still residing in the community and there is no indication that the reserve is trying to have him exiled as is their legal right under Band Council Resolution provisions.
This is not only an indication of a double sexual-abuse standard between different Canadian ethnic groups but a window into the commonplace occurrence of indigenous sexual abuse.
As for an associated mainstream media double standard, a Google search of indigenous sexual abuse yields dozens about Fr. Savari and a meagre handful about ex-Chief Keeper, none for the past 14 months.
Could this be because intra-indigenous sexual exploitation is so prevalent that it is hardly newsworthy?
This seems plausible given other anecdotal evidence and overall statistics.
Nahanni Fontaine, a member of the Sagkeeng Anishnaabe Indian Band and an NDP member of the Manitoba provincial legislature, says she was just five when she was sexually abused for the first time.
At the age of eight, Fontaine remembers waking up with her knees up and her panties down after family members built a place for her to sleep on the floor while guests were over.
She recalls a drunken guest pushing her body onto a bed on the floor, pulling down her underwear and performing oral sex.
Fontaine — a long-time advocate for missing and murdered indigenous women —says her story is far from an isolated case: she knows very few indigenous women who haven’t gone through a similar experience.
Even if she is exaggerating and only 60% of indigenous women have been physically or sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, as Statistics Canada data show, this would represent some 740,000 indigenous females 15 years of age and older compared to a little over four in 10 non-indigenous women.
If he is found guilty, Fr. Savari should be severely punished for his wicked crime. But he and his church should not by scapegoated for intra-group adversities and pathologies that are so out of control among indigenous people themselves.
The signing of apartheid-like treaties and the creation of the separatist Indian Act during the late 19th century surely retarded the absorption of Western European beliefs, values, and practices have made the first settlers of Canada whose cultures were permanently transformed by colonialism worse off than they might otherwise be judging from the social, and economic, health differentials between Indigenous people and other Canadians.
Placed in a comparative national context, these show that indigenous people on and off reserve exhibit: the highest rates of criminal behaviour and incarceration; the lowest incomes; and the highest rates of unemployment, non-working population numbers, poverty, welfare dependency, and homelessness; the poorest housing; the highest rates of infant mortality; the lowest life expectancy; the highest disease and illness rates; the highest school dropout rates; the highest rates of child apprehension, fostering, and adoption; the highest levels of suicide; the highest rates of sexual abuse; the highest rates of single motherhood; and the highest rates of murdered and missing women.
Both on and off-reserve, female-headed, single-parent households whose children, usually the offspring of multiple fathers, are an open invitation for sexual abuse by revolving door stepfathers.
And given these tragic adversities and pathologies, now exacerbated by the hopelessness created by generations of welfare dependency, if “There are, literally, thousands of arguments [sexually abusive priests] to support banning the Catholic Church from First Nations communities,” as Sinclair claims, there are far better grounds for banishing tens of thousands of abusive and sexually predatory indigenous men as well.
ConocoPhillips Co., a Texas-based oil and gas company announced a $4.4 billion deal to buy the rest of the Surmont oil sands project in Alberta.
The vote of confidence shows a strong commitment to the province’s oil sands sector, according to the deal’s supporters.
“We look forward to leveraging our position as 100% owner and operator of Surmont to further optimize the asset while progressing toward our overall interim and long-term emissions intensity objectives,” said ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance in a press release.
“We will remain on track to achieve our previously announced accelerated GHG intensity reduction target of 50 to 60% by 2030.”
On Twitter, newly elected Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pointed to her government’s pro-business policy as leading to more investment into the province.
“As I mentioned on election night – Alberta is open for business! It’s great to see this recent $4.4 billion dollar ‘vote of confidence’ in our economy,” tweeted Smith.
As I mentioned on election night- Alberta is open for business!
The project uses advanced technology to extract bitumen from deep underground. Surmont currently produces about 69,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOED), and has the potential to reach 300,000 BOED in the future.
ConocoPhillips already owns 50% of Surmont, and is expected to buy out TotalEnergies’ share for $4.4 billion. The deal would be the largest investment in the oil sands since 2017.
It would also signal ConocoPhillips’ confidence in the long-term viability and profitability of the oil sands sector in Alberta.
According to ConocoPhillips, the oil sands can provide a reliable and stable source of energy for decades to come, as global demand for oil continues to grow. The company has also taken steps to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and improve its environmental performance
The deal between ConocoPhillips and TotalEnergies is expected to be announced soon, pending regulatory approvals and other conditions.
The deal would mark a major milestone for the oil sands industry and for ConocoPhillips’ Canadian operations.
