This week on The Alberta Roundup, Rachel Emmanuel discusses Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to push Ottawa back. Namely, the premier announced her government will pull out of new federal programs or avoid federal consultations that aren’t in Alberta’s best interests.
Smith also said her United Conservative Party government will not enforce federal laws or policies that attack Alberta’s economy and people and she denounced the World Economic Forum.
Also on the show, Rachel discusses former UCP leadership candidate Leela Aheer, who placed last in the leadership contest. Aheer announced she won’t run for the party in the spring 2023 general election.
To wrap up the show, Rachel discusses the latest update in the Trudeau Liberals’ gun grab scheme.
Tune in to The Alberta Roundup with Rachel Emmanuel.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is leaving the door open to giving back pay to unvaccinated provincial employees who were laid off during the pandemic due to vaccine mandates.
The New York Supreme Court on Tuesday handed a massive victory to unvaccinated city workers by ordering the city to rehire those who were fired and give them back pay.
In an interview on The Andrew Lawton Show set to be released Sunday, Lawton asked Smith whether retroactive pay will be part of the Alberta government’s response.
“Is that aspect of it something you would like to see in an Alberta response, retroactive pay for the time that these people would have been working, had they not been put out of work because of the mandate?” Lawton asked.
In response, Smith said she saw the New York decision and expects to see more court decisions “along those lines.”
“I want us to be at the lead and making amends for some of the harms that were caused over the last two and a half years,” she told Lawton.
“So I want to make sure that I’m doing things sort of in a legally appropriate way. And so I’m just going to wait until I get that legal advice, but I suspect we’re going to see more judgments like the one we just saw.”
Smith already apologized to unvaccinated provincial workers who lost their jobs. At the United Conservative Party annual general meeting on Oct. 22, the new premier apologized and invited unvaccinated workers to return if they wished.
During the pandemic, Alberta Health Services implemented a vaccine mandate and temporarily laid off unvaccinated employees. Some private businesses also required proof of vaccination from their employees.
In the three weeks since Smith won the Alberta premiership, she’s taken a strong stance on making amends to unvaccinated Albertans. In her first press conference after being sworn in as premier on Oct. 11, Smith said the unvaccinated are the most discriminated group in Canada that she’s witnessed in her lifetime.
She also said her government will move ahead with amendments to the Alberta Human Rights Act to make it illegal to discriminate based on vaccination status. She warned businesses in an Oct. 20 address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce to get onside with the upcoming policy.
Speaking to Lawton on Sunday’s show, Smith said she needs to consult with all government departments to find out how many staff were laid off over their vaccination status and how many returned to work. The premier said she’s heard that some businesses are still requiring Covid vaccines.
“I think that that is the first of what may be several court decisions that end up causing a rethink on what has happened over the last two and a half years,” she said.
Tune into the full episode of the The Andrew Lawton Show on Sunday at 10:00am MT.
With those words, former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly tried in vain to paint himself in the best light possible during his testimony Friday at the Emergencies Act probe into the multi-headed Freedom Convoy that hamstrung the nation’s capital for weeks last winter.
But he failed by breaking down emotionally, not over a tragic death in the policing community but over the sad death of his own reputation.
He had failed miserably in his duties, which turned out to be the worst-kept secret coming out of the inquiry.
Sloly was such a failure, in fact, that he fired himself, resigning in the midst of the convoy’s height of unlawfulness.
Growing emotional as he answered commission counsel’s questions, Sloly described the demonstration as “too much” for the service.
The Ottawa police “were doing their very best under inhuman (sic) circumstances, like the city was, like the community was.”
“It was too cold and it was too much. But they did their very best and I’m grateful to them,” he said.
At one point, he exaggerated the size of the occupation, stating that 3,000 trucks had commandeered the city when 500 would have been closer to the truth.
Sloly pointed to gaps in intelligence as the main issue ahead of the convoy’s arrival in Ottawa since he claimed there was no intel to suggest the convoy was going to dig in and hold Lowertown hostage and the streets in gridlock.
“To this day, even with the benefit of hindsight, I do not have any clear impression or saw any clear conclusions that we were going to have anything more than what I was being briefed on by my team,” he said.
Despite receiving regular briefings on the anticipated demonstration from the Ontario Provincial Police, the former chief said there was a “structural deficit” in Canada’s national intelligence threat assessments.
“I’m grateful for the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) for filling that gap and doing so to the very best of their ability,” he said. “But it was not optimal for us.”
However, the commission has already seen reports and heard testimony indicating police had advance warning that some protesters were bent on staying in the capital until all vaccine mandates were repealed or until a new government was somehow installed.
But Ottawa police was planning for a one-weekend demonstration, not a three-week protest in a cold February.
A Jan. 28 OPP intelligence report shared with Sloly says that “available information” indicated that the protesters planned to remain in Ottawa “at least” until Feb. 4.
Sloly told the commission lawyers, however, that he understood that to mean the protest would take place primarily over one weekend, with a small group remaining afterwards.
Other testimony suggested otherwise.
On Thursday, testimony from a senior OPP officer had Sloly pleading with the OPP to send him as many resources as possible in order to kill off “the head of the hydra” and prevent other convoys from spreading elsewhere.
Clearly, Sloly found himself Friday caught between a rock and a hard place, with previous testimonies contradicting his recollections on many fronts.
And it was getting him nowhere. In fact, it put him back in the corner he was trying so hard to paint himself out of.
In 2021, the Canadian Armed Forces implemented a mandatory vaccination policy for all of its members. Those unwilling to comply could be deemed “unsuitable for further service”, and subsequently released. Valour Law founder Catherine Christensen joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the problem with this policy, how it’s affected the lives of Canadian veterans, and what she’s doing to fight back.
Some Canadian media members are having a meltdown over business magnate Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on Thursday.
Musk’s purchase engendered cartoonish comparisons to fictional villains, pledges to leave Twitter and anger towards the prospect of the return of former US president Donald Trump to the platform.
True North has compiled some of the most Canadian hysterical responses to Musk taking over Twitter.
CBC’s 22Minutes says Twitter to become hate speech forum
Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter and fired its top executives. Woah, that means any minute now Twitter could devolve into a chaotic forum for hate speech and misinformation.
Radio host Kevin Frankish tells Musk “we don’t want Trump”
Free speech does not mean hate-speech. It does not mean lying and threatening is ok. Let @elonmusk know that we don't want Trump, or bullies and trolls like him, allowed back on Twitter. #NoTrumpOnTwitterhttps://t.co/HbMg3GznbB
“Disinformation researcher” Caroline Orr Bueno concocts Twitter conspiracy theory
Everyone is just going to start tweeting horrible things and claim they were hacked, and then Twitter can say they’re not taking action because the accounts might have been under someone else’s control.
Ottawa Citizen columnist Andrew MacDougall argues with Musk about citizen journalism
It worries me that Musk appears to conflate information dissemination on this platform with journalism. They’re not the same.
Yes, what some citizens produce is news, but most don’t interrogate the source or qualify the information. They amplify what matches their views. https://t.co/6AlqOtxu9N
Reporter Don Bradshaw angry that “crime family” head Donald Trump could return
If @elonmusk decides to let the head of the #Trump crime family, Donald Trump, back on #Twitter, have we all decided to what social media platform we’ll migrate? I’m open to suggestions. #TrumpIsALaughingStock#ELONMUSK
Something long overdue is quietly happening in Canadian foreign affairs. The pivot away from China has begun.
After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rightly endured years of criticism for being soft on the authoritarian regime in Beijing, members of his cabinet are now making signals that things are going to change.
“What we want is certainly a decoupling: certainly from China, and I would say other regimes in the world which don’t share the same values,” Minister for Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne said in remarks last week in Washington, DC, in front of a gathering of business executives.
“People want to trade with people who, really, share the same values,” Champagne added.
That’s quite something, because if you rewind a few years that sort of talk might have been labelled Trumpian.
These aren’t one-off remarks either. They’re part of a calculated pattern.
Champagne was in fact echoing themes made in a previous speech by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, which was also given in Washington, on Oct. 11.
The Deputy PM began her remarks by acknowledging that the once high hopes that the rest of the world would transform itself into liberal democracies like Canada have floundered.
“Liberal democracy world-wide has today declined back to 1989 levels, and autocracies have been making a comeback,” Freeland said. “Many, including China, the second most powerful country in the world, have grown both wealthier and more coercive.”
Freeland went on to lay out what she calls a “new economic path” where we lessen our reliance on countries like China and instead see that the good guys stick together: “Going forward, we should design our government procurement and incentive programs with friend-shoring in mind.”
In one of her more pointed comments, Freeland states that “as fall turns to winter, Europe is bracing for a cold and bitter lesson in the strategic folly of economic reliance on countries whose political and moral values are inimical to our own. China’s increasingly aggressive wolf diplomacy has already given many smaller democracies a foretaste of that experience.”
The stuff about the need to bring those smaller democracies into our orbit — like select African and Latin nations — is modern Cold War rhetoric.
This is all a welcome reversal for a government led by a man who notoriously claimed he admired China’s “basic dictatorship” and that had to be dragged kicking and screaming by its Five Eyes intelligence partners to do the right thing and deny Huawei’s bid to join our 5G grid.
But what’s really behind it? Did Trudeau concoct this pivot by himself? That’s hard to believe. As Jason Kenney pointed out several years ago —and got in trouble for his truth-telling — Trudeau never once as a parliamentarian did anything that even aspired to heavy-lifting on policy matters.
How does a government go from thinking serious foreign policy means you fly around the world singing about feminism and climate change, to offering up meaty stuff like this?
Perhaps this isn’t Trudeau or Freeland’s doing at all. Maybe the Biden administration has simply told them to get with the program. The reason the aforementioned remarks were spoken in Washington, DC — as opposed to at a G8 gathering or the United Nations — could be that they were exercises in telling the Americans what they wanted to hear.
All of the above has been quietly rolled out the past year and a half as Biden’s foreign policy, which is just a revised version of Trump’s policies. In February 2021, not long after taking the oath of office, Biden announced an executive order to bring as much manufacturing back to America as possible.
Earlier this month, an article in the Financial Times complained that “Biden’s broader security-related trade strategy has too strong an element of onshoring for comfort.” Again, these are the sorts of criticisms previously leveled at Trump.
And when Freeland spoke of “friend-shoring”, she was just reiterating a phrase that’s been popularized by Biden administration officials.
Who knows, maybe Trudeau still does harbour some admiration for China. But Canada has no choice as Biden advances, in his own way, Trump’s decoupling from China.
It’ll be interesting to see how the federal Liberals make good on their words. The Conservatives have been calling for a decoupling for a couple of elections now, including pledges to cancel Canada’s membership in China’s global investment bank, which former finance minister Bill Morneau had us join.
There are a lot of creative ideas on the table for how Canada can decouple from China. It looks like the Liberals are now surprisingly open to them.
On Day 12 of the Emergencies Act hearings, former Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said that “misinformation and disinformation” from mainstream media sources during the Freedom Convoy was “unrelenting” and seriously damaged the morale of Ottawa police officers.
“It was crushing to the members’ morale” – “It was unrelenting, it was 24 hours a day,” said Sloly. “By the end of the weekend it had become a global story that the mainstream media was following and none of it was portraying, in any way accurate, the hard work of the men and women of the OPS. None of it. To this day it hasn’t.”
“That is very unfortunate because public trust and confidence is the number one public safety factor,” Sloly continued. “When any police service loses public trust and confidence that in itself is a massive public safety threat and risk. It materializes in so many ways.”
“Public opinion against the OPS and its members turned just as quickly and to the same unprecedented levels that were unrelenting.”
Sloly, who resigned from his position on Feb. 15, went on to talk about how during the pandemic, he lost communication with his staff and other officers. He noted that meetings with staff on Zoom were inadequate for proper communication and that he was eager to meet with people in person.
Sloly testified that he was under the impression that the convoy would be a weekend event and that he had “some doubts” as to whether or not it was actually going to materialize. Sloly said that his force was “tired” after the 2020 ‘Defund the Police’ movements.
Yet a risk assessment later produced by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) said the demonstrations were expected to be “bigger in crowd size than any demonstration in history” with large pools of protesters.
A few days before the convoy had arrived, Sloly explained, he got his first request for additional police resources from Ottawa Acting Deputy Chief Patricia Ferguson
Sloly mentioned there was a disconnect from federal partners and that he was only communicating with provincial police: “Why wasn’t I getting risk assessments from federal partners?”
“There’s a structural deficit in the national risk assessment process,” said Sloly. “This was “not optimal.”
Commission lawyer Frank Au asked about Sloly’s view of the Charter, which prevented them from blocking trucks from coming downtown. Sloly said that he’s a cop, not a lawyer, but still believed they couldn’t close roads without a real threat to public safety.
Au brought up a Jan. 28 internal memo, which offers a legal opinion on the convoy. It said cops should balance competing Charter rights, impacts to mobility and health safety in Ottawa. Sloly said he had access to the legal opinion at the time.
Sloly recalls there being roughly 5,000 vehicles surrounding Ottawa’s parliament building between Jan. 28 and 29.
“There wasn’t one convoy ever. There were multiple convoys with groups that arrived and left on a daily basis,” said Sloly.
“What we were dealing with in reality was a massive group of fluid interacting individuals and groups where there was no one leader, no one spokesperson and no one thing to deal with,” he said.
Sloly described frustrations within the department, noting instances of changes to incident commanders without his knowledge and examples of individuals going outside of the chain of command.
Sloly became concerned that OPS would not be able to remove protesters and trucks without “hundreds of officers.”
When asked if he was comfortable letting the OPP take a lead role, Sloly said he did not make a request and would not unless he needed to.
“We were three days into the situation… I think it would have been irresponsible and unnecessary to burden another police service with that level of a request,” he says. Sloly rejected the idea of having OPP take command of local officers.
Although Sloly said that “nothing was off the table” in the response, including OPP integration.
Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly says unspecified “misinformation and disinformation was off the charts" during the Freedom Convoy protests and damaged the morale of Ottawa police officers. #poecpic.twitter.com/nnl0VwY3dU
By Feb. 14, Sloly began to hear comments about his potential resignation. At first Sloly did not consider it but said he changed his mind the next day due to exhaustion and, among other reasons, how then-board chair Diane Deans said she lost confidence in him.
Sloly was asked to give his account on the competing narrative of the convoy bring a risk to public safety or if it was “family friendly.”
“It was a tinder box waiting to explode, it was not a family festival,” said Sloly.
“It was a tinder box waiting to explode, it was not a family festival.”
Former Ottawa Chief of Police Peter Sloly gives his view of the Freedom Convoy protests after being asked whether it was a family friendly event or not. pic.twitter.com/R808UgkISn
It’s been two weeks since the Public Order Emergencies Commission began, and despite hours of witness testimony: not a single piece of evidence justifying the Emergencies Act has been provided. Convoy lawyer Keith Wilson joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss why nobody has been able to justify the Act, his thoughts on the hearings so far, and his expectations for the weeks to follow. Also, why was the Peckford case dismissed and what does it mean for Canadians?
After a tight race, Winnipeg elected a new mayor this week – Glen Murray! No wait – Scott Gillingham! CTV News Winnipeg incorrectly declared Murray as the winner. After realizing its mistake, CTV had to retract its tweet after pushing literally fake news.
Plus, Ontario Premier Doug Ford gets caught with his pants on fire after it was revealed the Public Order Emergency Commission repeatedly requested that he testify before the Public Order Emergency Commission.
And to cap the show off – the legacy media loses their minds about RCMP officers wearing a Thin Blue Line patch. Yep, you guessed it — it’s racist or something.
These stories and more on Fake News Friday with Andrew Lawton and Harrison Faulkner!
An Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) liaison apologized to Freedom Convoy organizers and accused the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) of “betrayal” after an attempt by Ottawa police to raid the convoy’s fuel depot, according to new audio exclusively obtained by True North.
Tensions over the incident apparently boiled over so much that it jeopardized the working relationship between the two police services.
Ottawa police spearheaded the Feb. 6 raid on Coventry, the nickname for the Coventry Rd. parking lot the City of Ottawa initially offered to the convoy as a staging and overflow area.
The raid not only sparked a breakdown between convoy leaders and the police liaison teams, with whom they had been coordinating since the beginning of the protest, but also between the OPP and OPS.
An OPP liaison apologized to Freedom Convoy organizers after Ottawa police raided the Coventry fuel site, telling them he and his colleagues felt "betrayed" by the Ottawa Police Service. This comes from a recording of the call I obtained. pic.twitter.com/gTtzQlNhHm
In a phone call after the raid, an OPP liaison apologized to convoy members and blamed Ottawa police for keeping the OPP in the dark.
“I personally want to apologize…for what occurred earlier today or later tonight there in the evening,” the officer said in a recording of the call obtained by True North. “We were being told the police’s position on the event, and…we discovered that we were not being told the truth, or actually we were not being updated and being consulted with what was going on.”
The officer was speaking to convoy spokesperson Joanie Pelchat and a group of the protest’s road captains. Pelchat was not involved in the convoy’s Coventry operations but had been in regular communication with the OPP’s liaison team.
The officer said he was speaking for himself and on behalf of other OPP officers “that felt they had been betrayed or kept out of the loop.” OPP liaisons thought they were making “good progress” with convoy organizers, which was why the officer said he felt so blindsided by the raid.
Police liaisons were at Coventry when Ottawa police tweeted that “anyone attempting to bring material supports (gas, etc.) to the demonstrators could be subject to arrest. Enforcement is underway.”
The officer said in the call that the OPP liaison team would be reassessing its cooperation with Ottawa police over the incident, which he acknowledged jeopardized the “trust” built between police and convoy organizers.
“For the arrests that were made, for the other turmoil, everything that we had built and said or promised which was not followed or which was overturned by Ottawa police management, we’re just saying that we hope we can build again a relationship of trust,” he said. “For now, we’ve removed ourselves from the Ottawa police operations.”
The officer hinted the decision by the OPS to raid Coventry may have been related to “pressures from their boards, from the mayor.”
“But they could have at least informed us so we can communicate that with you as well,” he said. “That wasn’t done, so we’re sorry for that.”
Tensions between the municipal and provincial police services about the Coventry raid have been discussed before the Public Order Emergency Commission.
OPP negotiator Sgt. John Ferguson told the Commission that he was informed of the impending raid by Ottawa Supt. Mark Patterson shortly before the operation was set to commence. Ferguson told Patterson that OPP liaisons were already at Coventry and had been engaging with convoy organizers for two hours. Ferguson advised the Ottawa Police Service to abort the operation, but Ottawa police disregarded the recommendation.
Another Ottawa police inspector told Ferguson that “they did not want the fuel from Coventry Road to be displaced and that they were proceeding without warrant,” according to the Commission’s summary of its interview with Ferguson.
The OPP and OPS both told True North they would not comment while the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings are underway.
