A newly released docuseries aims to uncover the truth about doctor-assisted suicide in Canada. Produced by UnveilTV, “MAiD in Canada” features interviews with medical experts, disability advocates, legal experts, veterans, and other leading voices to explore the reality of Canada’s assisted dying regime. Series producer Andrew Kooman and director Daniel Kooman joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the inspiration behind the project, and what they hope it may accomplish.
It was probably one of the best examples of the frustration of parents with woke school board edicts reaching the boiling point.
A group of parents attended a meeting of the York District Catholic School Board (YDCSB) Tuesday night to express their concern with a call to fly the Pride Progress flag in front of all schools and the education centre during Pride month in June.
Their concerns – likely more with the efforts of school boards to ram 2SLGBTQI ideology down the throats of young children than any actual homophobia – erupted into a huge drama with videos of them in the atrium of the YDCSB education centre rotunda surfacing in the legacy media and on social media channels.
This was after they were removed from the board meeting.
Police were also called to keep the peace.
In true fashion, the legacy media slanted their reports just enough to elicit predictable responses from the woke crowd.
They endeavoured to paint the parents and the board – which has not made a decision on whether to fly the Pride flag – as a bunch of neanderthals and all the sheep on social media (most of them not gay) jumped into the fray.
What the media did not do is clarify that the flag proposed is the Progress Flag – not the traditional rainbow flag.
The Progress flag is a radical queer variation on the more commonly known rainbow flag, the colours of which symbolize the fight gays my age undertook to gain rights.
The Progress version, created in 2018, includes black and brown stripes that represent marginalized black communities and pink, light blue and white stripes from the transgender flag.
The ridiculously divisive flag, intended to pander to the queer activists and indicative of the times, suggests that gay and lesbians of colour or trans folk are far more oppressed than those of us who are gay or lesbian and are white.
Front and centre in the middle of all this was Toronto Catholic board teacher Paolo DeBuono about whom I’d just written a story.
He turned up to the meeting to deliver a deputation, using the premise that his child was once a YDCSB student.
According to accounts of what occurred, when his deputation was pulled, he turned up in the atrium to confront the protesting parents, claiming he was used to “negative attention” for trying to make Catholic schools “more inclusive.”
Sorry. I didn’t say, “I am not afraid,” as you can hear at the end of this clip.
— Paolo De Buono, 🌈 #BLM, MSc, JD, OCT (@misterdebuono) April 27, 2023
Today some of those same angry York Catholic parents came to my school (in another municipality).
I will not be bullied into not teaching inclusively for 2SLGBTQI+ students. I will continue to encourage other Catholic educators to teach inclusively for 2SLGBTQI+ students. pic.twitter.com/Jje72cbkSh
— Paolo De Buono, 🌈 #BLM, MSc, JD, OCT (@misterdebuono) April 27, 2023
Pflag York Region chimed in contending the parents were using their religion to mask their hate.
YCDSB to receive designation as "Unsafe for the LGBTQ2IA+ Community of York Region" in the absence of meaningful action. – https://t.co/WRTw4XEO65
Having covered this issue extensively over the past year and being gay myself, I would note a few things.
For one thing, De Buono – who blocked me on Twitter Friday – has no business inserting himself into the issue if he wants to remain a teacher with the Toronto District Catholic School Board.
If he doesn’t like the religion they teach, he can take his inclusive message elsewhere.
There are many faith-based schools that do not embrace the idea of flying the rainbow flag on their property – in particular the radical Progress flag.
I don’t see such flags at any Jewish day schools and would venture to guess the same at Muslim schools.
Just because the board won’t fly the flag – which to me is now being used as a test of whether one is virtuous or not – doesn’t mean they are homophobic, or hateful, or whatever ugly names were tossed at the parents and the school board bureaucrats.
I respect the board bureaucrats for standing up to this bullying by the activists and DeBuono.
As for the parents, I suspect they are tired of having the activists ramming these issues down their throats and are simply concerned that their kids get a proper academic and religious education.
After all, isn’t that what Catholic schools are all about?
Trans activist Julia Malott perhaps put it best:
We need to talk… about Pride flags.
If you accuse organizations of the phobias for NOT flying a pride flag, you are not adopting a position where we are free to fly flags. You’ve created a position of coercion, where those who do not bow to your demand are deemed guilty of… pic.twitter.com/RtSWycrUJw
This week on the Alberta Roundup with Rachel Emmanuel, Rachel catches up with the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights spokesperson Tracey Wilson for an update on their legal challenge of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s order in council which banned over 1,500 models of firearms.
Wilson gives an update on the case and reveals whether she thinks the federal court will rule in favour of the CCFR.
Justin Trudeau’s astonishing ability to mislead Canadians without blinking or hesitating is on full display this week, and if this does not give voters serious pause, possibly nothing, ever will.
On April 24th, speaking to students at the University of Ottawa, Trudeau claimed, “While not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all of the incentives and protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated.”
Thankfully, social media exploded almost instantly with clips of him announcing vaccines would be mandatory for federal employees and federally regulated transportation sectors. Quickly, someone posted the October 6th, 2021 press release headlined “Prime Minister announces mandatory vaccination.”
Clips of Trudeau threatening the unjabbed with “consequences” including not being able to travel by plane or train surfaced. The French interview in which he referred to the unjabbed as “racists” and “misogynists” was thrown in for good measure.
Road Warrior News received comments from Purolator employees who were fired from their jobs when they refused to get Covid shots.
“What a pathetic, delusional liar!!!” one wrote. “Sod off!” said another.
Over seven years, we’ve learned that our Prime Minister is a smooth talker, one who can speak eloquently at length while saying nothing that actually matters. That is a special skill; you have to give him credit for that. He can spin noncommittally with the best ever seen in politics. No doubt his background as a drama teacher is a blessing in Ottawa.
Irritating as it is, spin is one thing; but ignoring a demonstrably provable fact is something else altogether.
Outright misleading Canadians about something that hurt so many people, that shattered families and plunged honest workers into poverty is not just condescending and arrogant, but taunting and cruel.
Justin Trudeau is gaslighting the nation, and the nation knows it. Will Canadians actually continue to support this man as Prime Minister? Now that we know that he can, and he did, lie about the most painfully important thing that has happened on the globe since World War II?
Whatever happens next, it’s on us. Now we know.
The precise timing of Trudeau’s latest gaffe should concern taxpayers additionally, as it comes within hours of his announcement of the most gargantuan corporate subsidy ever contemplated by a Canadian government. On April 21, Trudeau announced that beleaguered Canadian taxpayer would gift $13 BILLION to Volkswagen, so that it can build a battery plant in St. Thomas, Ontario.
The glib, shallow answers Trudeau and his associates designed to provide at the VW announcement were so half-baked that I wrote a humour piece comparing Trudeau and Ford to an Abbott and Costello routine. In the vintage comedy bit, Bud Costello multiplies 13 times 7 and gets the answer “28,” no matter how many times his landlord tries to check the math. It is hilarious.
What is not hilarious is Trudeau and Ford pulling an almost identical routine on media and taxpayers (“The important number is not the $13 billion, but the 5 years in which it will be paid back,” Trudeau reiterated, magically waving a hand with 5 outstretched fingers, like a hypnotist.)
Well, actually, the $13 billion does matter to the taxpayers who still need to pay their taxes this week even though CRA staff are on strike. Simultaneously, the Main Estimates committee is trying to get answers on how the $13 billion will be spent, and how job creation will be measured.
As reported by Blacklock’s in an article headlined, “Spend it first, disclose later.”
“Taxpayers will only learn of terms of a $13 billion Volkswagen Canada subsidy once the money is spent, the Senate national finance committee was told yesterday. Managers with the Department of Industry refused to discuss the subsidy for a battery factory in St. Thomas, Ontario.”
If the job creation numbers or the payback period turn out to be lies, well, we know who we’re dealing with before we start.
Torontonians who think they’re taxed to the hilt probably have no idea just how right they actually are.
Nearly 30% of a Toronto condominium’s purchase price comprises levies imposed upon developers who, in turn, pass them onto consumers.
According to a report from Altus Group on the Residential Construction Council of Ontario’s (RESCON) behalf, development charges (DCs)—which increased by 46% year-over-year in 2023—parkland levies, ‘community benefit charges’—formerly known as Section 37—and HST, among other taxes, add 22 to 27% onto the cost of a condo’s sale price.
“A new buyer comes along for a $1 million home and they saved up their $200,000 down payment and it goes towards paying off most of the taxes, fees and levies, and then they ask why people live with their parents until they’re 35,” RESCON President Richard Lyall said. “It’s not a failure to launch, it’s a failure to grow properly.”
Developers, for their part, pay the city up to 40% tax on a single unit, typically cashing out of projects with profits ranging from eight to 15% that are often reinvested in subsequent projects in the supply-constrained city.
Asked by True North why levies are so high in a city devoid of affordable homeownership options, Lyall said, “The short answer is the city does it because it can,” noting that DCs “have increased exponentially in the last decade.
“A development charge is one of the ways municipalities could raise funds because they don’t have a share of sales taxes and other things,” Lyall added. “They came up with these development charges to pay for new development, but they also came up with this bullshit that ‘growth pays for growth,’ when in fact development charges and the whole lot of levies don’t pay for anything growth-related.”
According to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s latest statistics, the average sale price of a Toronto proper home in March was $1,054,563, which means a buyer paid as much as $284,732 in taxes on a condo in the city last month.
The building industry has long pilloried the idea that growth pays for growth as sophistry, pointing out that revenue derived from the suite of development taxes ultimately borne by homebuyers is not spent on servicing roads or anything else remotely growth-related.
According to Luke Johnston, VP of development and general counsel of Dunpar Homes, all three levels of government make more combined than developers do on a project.
“The common misconception is it’s taken out of developers’ profits, but the best way to really characterize it is it’s a tax on the home purchaser,” he said. “HST is added onto the purchase price, so the government takes in much more revenue than the developer, which makes eight to 10 per cent profit, and they pay taxes on that as well, so on a $1 million unit in Toronto, the three levels of government takes in about $250,000.
Johnston added that the homebuyer, who pays HST, get taxed twice.
“It goes towards ongoing capital obligations the City of Toronto has. They’re just increasing tax on new home purchasers and using those funds to fulfill the city’s cost needs in other areas,” Johnston said.
The ramifications of taxing young people, whose earnings are paltry relative to the cost of living in Toronto, so exorbitantly is they will leave for greener pastures, Johnston surmises.
“I do expect to see younger people leave the city. Not just people currently renting who want to buy something, but also people in small condos downtown who maybe have young families and want to get something with a small backyard, which they simply can’t afford in Toronto,” he said.
“So they have to move to the hinterlands and find something more affordable, so we’re unfortunately likely to see more sprawl and less ownership, and for previous generations, their principal retirement investment was their own home.”
The Liberal government’s controversial internet regulation bill, C-11, has become law with “independent” senators ultimately voting in favour of it yesterday. When it comes into effect, the CRTC will have control over what content social media companies and online streaming platforms show to users, though the regulations are still yet to be worked out. True North’s Andrew Lawton says the importance of this can’t be understated as C-11 signals the death of the open internet.
Also, True North founder and editor-in-chief Candice Malcom takes a break from her much-deserved maternity leave for a wide-ranging conversation about the changing tides of media and the future of True North.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is poking fun at the Opposition Alberta NDP leader after Rachel Notley claimed the government was hiding details of its new Calgary arena that were already revealed in public documents.
On Tuesday, Smith announced a deal with the City of Calgary and Calgary Flames ownership to strike an agreement in principle on a $1.22-billion deal to replace the Saddledome.
Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley alleged there were hidden costs in the agreement that won’t be released until after the provincial election, saying “officials” have told her party as much.
“While broad numbers on the Calgary arena deal were released yesterday, we learned today that there is a confidential financial agreement between the parties that identifies additional financial contributions by taxpayers, contributions beyond the $870 million outlined yesterday,” Notley told reporters on Wednesday.
For example, the NDP leader said there’s a hidden agreement giving Flames owners development opportunities in adjacent lands. However, that detail is already disclosed in public city releases made public, and was included in an earlier deal that didn’t go through.
“Details are important,” Smith tweeted above a United Conservative Party campaign video attacking Notley’s comments on the matter.
Notley has not committed to moving the project forward if she’s elected premier on May 29. She did say, if elected, she would ask “accountants” and “experts” to check the deal’s fairness to taxpayers.
An earlier deal for a new arena collapsed when the Flames owners were tasked with an extra $30 million in costs.
The city and province are paying for 70% of the $1.22 billion project. The city’s share is $537.5 million or 44% of the new deal. The province will pay $330 million with funds flowing to infrastructure, land costs, and the demolition of the Saddledome.
The Flames will contribute $356 million, with much of that coming yearly over the next 35 years.
Smith said the government investments were made with an eye to being “respectful to provincial taxpayers.”
“We made it clear from the start that although the province would not invest in the actual construction or operation of the arena itself — that was the responsibility of the city and the Flames — the province would be willing to invest in supportive infrastructure for the arena, the Stampede and the expanded BMO Centre,” Smith said.
The new area will be built on 14th Avenue and 5th Street S.E. in Calgary’s Victoria Park. The location is north of the existing Saddledome arena where the city and Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corp. have previously decided to build an events centre.
In August 2022, the Canadian Taxpayer Federation (CTF) called on the federal government to implement an annual “sunshine list,” which would disclose the number of employees earning six-figure salaries, including their names.
The Ontario government does this, much to the distress of the public-sector unions who’d rather cry poverty during labour negotiations than confess to reasonable salaries.
In fact, every provincial government, except Prince Edward Island and Quebec, provides their taxpayers with compensation disclosure lists.
It makes no sense, therefore, not to have a sunshine list at the federal level.
It is sorely needed.
While in the midst of the 155,000-member Public Service Alliance (PSAC) strike, the CTF did a deep dive into national public service salaries via access to information requests and came up with no good news for the unions to use in negotiations — not when 102,762 bureaucrats received $100,000 or more in salaries during 2022.
All told, those bureaucrats cost taxpayers $13.4 billion.
“Taxpayers can’t afford more bureaucrats taking six-figure salaries,” said Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the CTF. “The feds must take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”
There are now 33,754 more federal bureaucrats making six-figures annually than there were before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
And since 2015, the number of federal bureaucrats making $100,000 or more has spiked by 136%.
The most-recent Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) report notes that “Compensation per full-time equivalent increased from an average of $117,497 per FTE in 2019-20 to $125,300 in 2021-22.”
According to Statistics Canada, though, the average full-time private-sector salary in Canada as of September 2022, was $1,175.37 per week or $61,119.24 per year for a 40-hour week.
Given some of the current demands from government union negotiators, the PBO estimates “the additional cost to the government would be $16.2 billion over 2023-2024 to 2027-28.”
While Canadians complain about their struggle to pay the rent and utilities, plus put food on the table, a total of 312,825 federal employees received at least one pay raise during the pandemic.
More worrisome, the federal government handed almost $600 million in bonuses since the beginning of the pandemic despite incentive targets never being reached.
“The federal government must be transparent with taxpayers about bureaucrat pay and that means publishing a sunshine list,” Terrazzano said. “We pay the bills and we deserve to know how many six-figure bureaucrats we’re paying for.”
The average compensation for each full-time federal employee is $125,300 when pay, pension, paid time off, shift premiums and other benefits are considered, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
It’s hardly a bad pay cheque.
“Taxpayers can’t afford to pay billions more to fund a bloated bureaucracy,” said Terrazzano. “Members of Parliament must speak out and reject the unreasonable demands coming from government union negotiators.
“Families are trying to figure out whether they can afford milk or ground beef at the grocery store and government union negotiators are asking for an extra $9.3 billion,” said Terrazzano “The government’s bargaining position needs to be absolute no to these demands.”
On April 18, the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan think tank, released a report showing that government employees receive “an 8.5% wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts.”
The report also notes “the available data on non-wage benefits suggest that the government sector enjoys an advantage over the private sector” in the form of pension coverage and paid time off, among other perks.
“Enough is enough, taxpayers are tapped out,” said Terrazzano. “The bureaucracy doesn’t deserve a penny more from taxpayers.”
CBC President Catherine Tait criticized Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to defund the CBC due to allegations of biased journalism, according to a letter obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.
After Poilievre ran his Conservative leadership campaign on the promise to defund the state broadcaster, Tait wrote a letter to the leader in November 2022 to request a formal meeting to discuss its implications.
“I have received a response from your office informing me that you are not able to accommodate my request to meet with you,” Tait wrote. “I must admit I find this disappointing.”
“Your party continues to run email blasts and Twitter and Facebook ads falsely accusing CBC journalists of bias and using the ‘defund’ promise to try and generate money for your party.”
“As head of the public broadcaster and as leader of the Opposition, I think Canadians can rightly expect that the two of us have a responsibility to discuss the implications of your promise.” wrote Tait before requesting another meeting.
Despite Tait’s claims that the CBC is unbiased, the state broadcaster has been criticized on numerous occasions for its anti-Conservative coverage and accused of being friendly towards the Trudeau government.
During the 2019 federal election. the CBC sued the Conservative Party after alleging that the party infringed on the ‘moral rights’ of two of its employees after using program excerpts of Rosemary Barton and John Paul Tasker.
Further, the Trudeau government used misleading reports from the CBC to invoke the Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy in February 2022.
According to filings with the United States’ Federal Election Commission, Tait donated to the presidential campaign of then-Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Trudeau government’s online censorship bill passed the final stage of voting in the Senate and received royal assent and became law.
Also, CBC President Catherine Tait requested to meet with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to discuss his campaign promise to defund the public broadcaster.
Next, as public servants continue to strike leaving serious disruptions to the Canadian economy, there is no word from the government about using the Emergencies Act or back-to-work legislation to end the protests.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Rachel Emmanuel and Andrew Lawton!
