As the cost of living becomes more expensive, half of Canadians indicate that they are only $200 away from being unable to pay their bills.
According to an Ipsos survey conducted for the professional service firm MNP, 49% of Canadians surveyed are within $200 of insolvency. Further, 31% of respondents said they are unable to cover their bills because they don’t earn enough income.
Two thousand Canadian adults were surveyed by Ipsos from March 9-15 – a week prior to the Bank of Canada’s (BOC) decision to raise its central rate for the first time since 2018.
The BOC raised interest rates by half a percentage point last week and promised several more hikes in an attempt to fight historically-high inflation.
According to the survey, 52% of Canadians said they were already feeling the effects of high rates prior to the BOC’s decision.
A majority of Canadians have been looking for ways to reduce spending as their worries about the Canadian economy continue.
According to a recent Leger survey in March, 81% of Canadians believe inflation is a very or somewhat serious problem for their household. It also showed that 86% of respondents say they believe inflation will increase, while 84% expect gas prices to rise.
In February of this year, Canada’s inflation level hit 5.7% – the highest it’s been in 30 years. Economists predict that the inflation level will steadily increase, due to sanctions on Russia and other world events.
Gas prices rose more than 32.3% compared to the previous year’s figures. Food prices across Canada are up more than 7.4%.
Rather than reduce spending or attempt to address the cost of living crisis, the Trudeau government is continuing its massive spending spree, revealing $56 billion in new spending and programs in its latest budget.
The new spending includes $8 billion on defence, $10 billion towards an affordable housing plan and further taxes on financial institutions. The Liberals have also raised a surtax on those earning over $1 billion by 1.5%, bringing it to 16.5%.
“Freeland is giving taxpayers another credit card budget with no plan to pay the bills on time and chip away at the $1 trillion debt,” said Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation Federal Director Franco Terrazzano.
“Freeland is taking the wait-and-see approach to the government’s credit card bills and hoping the economy can grow faster than its borrowing, but that’s not a good bet with its track record of runaway spending.”
If one were to listen to the legacy media and mainstream politicians, populism is now an extremist political ideology that threatens to upend democracy and bring an end to Canada as we know it.
In very recent political discourse, the term has become a dirty word of sorts and a taboo that politicians are encouraged by polite society to avoid.
While at the EU, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau derided the presence of “cynical populists” in reference to the recent Freedom Convoy protests.
“Unfortunately, we’re seeing a rise in cynical populists who are trying to exploit these anxieties. They pretend to have easy solutions that play on people’s fears,” Trudeau told European parliamentarians.
Trudeau is terrified by the fact that populism is taking root in Canada and giving ordinary people a voice.
He ignores the fact that he and the Liberals have driven Canada into the gutter. Populism is only a reaction to our elites who have lost the plot. pic.twitter.com/VtYDMAhOlk
Most recently, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leadership candidate and MP Pierre Poilievre has been branded as a firebrand populist, even by his opponent Jean Charest who accused him of “stoking the flames of populism” on Apr. 9.
Meanwhile, on the right flank of the Conservatives, People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier has been attempting to revive populism in Canada since he founded the party in 2018.
Many Canadians are left wondering, what does populism mean, and is it really as bad as it sounds?
In reality, the truth couldn’t be further from this narrative. Populism has a long and storied past in Canadian political history both on the left and the right.
The CPC itself was a merger of the Canadian Alliance (a successor of the populist Reform Party) and the Progressive Conservative Party. Even before that, the regional political parties of the United Farmers of Alberta and the United Farmers of Saskatchewan set a precedent in their explicitly populist intentions and programs during the 1920s.
Even NDP founder Tommy Douglas has been called the “prairie populist,” and was lauded for his fierce populist style and rhetoric while advocating for socialist ideas.
Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning told True North in a recent interview that it was a shame that the populist movement was now being denigrated and misunderstood, especially with such a long and respected history in Canadian politics.
“It’s so unfortunate that populism is misunderstood by Canadians and I think I can prove that Western Canada’s had more experience with populist movements of populist parties and populist governments than virtually any other part of North America,” Manning said.
At the most basic level, a populist views society as being divided between two broad classes: the people and the elites. That division also often takes on a moral dimension, with the people being seen as inherently good, while the elites are depicted as being unvirtuous or self-interested.
The ultimate goal of populism is that the people will persevere and have their concerns finally represented more fairly by the power structure. In this way, populism is not incompatible with democracy. In fact, it encourages democratic participation en masse and often promotes a form of direct democracy where the electorate has more say in decision making through referendums and other democratic tools.
In many ways, this simple categorization is what makes populism so appealing to many. In 2011, it played a contributing role in the Occupy Wall Street movement’s famous distinction between the 1% who own the majority of the world’s wealth and the 99% representing everyone else.
Former US President Donald Trump adopted a populist message in 2016, promising to “drain the swamp” of self-serving bureaucrats in Washington, DC, and to represent the marginalized views of rural America. That message landed Trump in the White House – to the shock of many mainstream observers.
The focus on dividing society between the people and the elites can also be seen as an internal flaw or contradiction inherent with populism. After all, when a populist politician is elected to power, is he not now a member of the elite?
Whether one agrees with this division or not, populism continues to be an attractive and convenient framework for politicians of every camp to adopt whenever the wealth gap becomes a major political issue.
Populism is often successful because it addresses real grievances and inequalities present in modern society. After all, it is difficult for anyone to deny that countries afford exclusive privileges to an elite while denying those same privileges to the vast majority of its citizens.
These qualities also make populism highly amenable to the needs and messages of individual politicians. As recently as the 2020 US presidential election, Senator and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was branded by many as a populist for his attack on banks “too big to exist” and for his calls to further tax the billionaire class.
Even Trudeau himself has been described at times as a populist by the media. Not long ago, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte referred to both Trudeau and himself as the “right sort” of populists. In that sense, populism can be both right-wing and left-wing. Even centrists can be populists depending on how they frame their message.
Despite this, the recent wave of anti-populist attacks and accusations is exclusively levelled towards the right end of the spectrum. There are several reasons for it, but foremost among them is the rising success of right-wing populism throughout the world, including grassroots movements like February’s Freedom Convoy.
The Chair of the National News Media Council is refusing to investigate claims that a left-wing journalist misrepresented her arrest by RCMP officers during an anti-pipeline protest in subsequent reporting.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Chair John Fraser claimed that the matter was outside of the organization’s mandate – despite that mandate involving investigating breaches of journalistic standards among members.
“The Council deals with unresolved complaints about specific breaches of journalistic standards and does not offer general comment on issues outside its mandate,” said Fraser. Fraser did not expand on his comments.
The Council, which has lobbied the federal government for legislation to protect legacy media outlets and public subsidies, dismissed allegations against The Narwhal’s Amber Bracken.
Bracken was recently accused of spreading misinformation after claiming that RCMP officers violated her rights during a raid on anti-pipeline blockaders in northern British Columbia.
New evidence shows that Bracken did not identify herself as a journalist and that officers read a court injunction to her and others holed up in a cabin together before apprehending the group.
“My arrest makes me a big part of a national reckoning with press freedoms,” said Bracken. “They would take my cameras from me. After that, my rights.”
A statement by the Department of Public Safety has disputed Bracken’s claims, saying that officers acted in accordance with the law.
On Nov. 25, a journalist released a video showing the arrests. However the video does not show what occurred preceding RCMP members’ breach of the structures,” the department stated in a memo.
“RCMP officers read the injunction at each structure and made several calls over the course of more than an hour for occupants to exit the structure. The only response from inside the structures were derogatory in nature and refusals. It was not until RCMP officers entered the structures and arrested the individuals that they identified themselves as journalists.”
Bracken’s misleading reporting was submitted to be considered for the Canadian Journalism Foundation Jackman Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Gregory Tobin is the National Content Manager for the Canada Strong & Proud network of pages.
This past week, federal Liberal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, after multiple delays and much political posturing, finally announced the Trudeau Government’s approval for the Bay du Nord oil project located off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
This was no doubt the right decision.
This project will produce about 300 million barrels of oil, which can be used to help wean the world off of using foreign oil produced by authoritarian regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is expected to create thousands of jobs for Canadians and generate $3.5 billion in government revenue.
Further, thanks to using the latest in Carbon Tech, it will be one of the lowest carbon intensive oil developments in the entire country.
However, despite these clear and obvious benefits, the Bay du Nord project faced multiple delays in receiving approval from Guilbeault and the Trudeau Government, which has done nothing but destroy investor confidence in Canada’s best-in-the-world resource industries and caused stress and headaches for unemployed and underemployed Newfoundlanders and other Canadians who would benefit from this project.
Minister Guilbeault has been described as a radical, and worked for many years for the questionably-motivated environmentalist group Greenpeace. Back then, Minister Guilbeault was involved in illegal stunts like scaling Toronto’s CN Tower to unfurl a giant sign accusing Canada of being a “climate killer” – which later led to his arrest – and another which saw him trespass onto the property of then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein’s home to install solar panels.
Since then, Guibeault has said, “in many ways… I’m still this guy who climbed the CN Tower.”
We should believe him when he says that.
So there is no doubt that approving the project has caused some issues for Guilbeault, including active criticism from his eco-radical NGO friends and strained relationships with his new-found partners in Jagmeet Singh and the NDP.
After all, this decision comes just shortly after it was revealed the Liberals and the NDP had entered into a secret agreement in which the NDP have agreed to prop up the Trudeau Liberal government until 2025. Sounds like trouble in paradise.
This is the same NDP that for many years now were steadfastly opposed to any Canadian resource projects, including the Bay du Nord project, along with any and all new oil and gas developments.
While Newfoundlanders and Canadians should breathe a sigh of relief that the Bay du Nord project has been finally approved, we may want to hesitate before giving too much credit to Guilbeault and his Liberal counterparts, as – thanks to this new deal with the NDP – it may be the last development of its kind being approved anytime soon.
New analysis shows that a majority of Canadians are seeing diminishing incomes due to inflation levels that are higher than their wage gains.
According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), wages rose by only 2.7% over the past two years, while inflation grew by 3.4% annually.
Throughout the labour market, inflation-adjusted pay growth was in the red, including in the education and healthcare sectors.
In February of this year, Canada’s inflation level hit 5.7% – the highest it’s been in 30 years. Economists predict that the inflation level will steadily increase, due to sanctions on Russia and other world events.
“We’re just not seeing wage gains anywhere near the rate of inflation,” said CCPA senior economist David Macdonald. “It may be that workers have yet to catch up to the fact that inflation is high, and that they should start asking for higher wage gains on a year-to-year basis.”
A few industries did see wage growth higher than inflation including real estate and the information sector.
“At this point, employers are probably interested in retaining their employees because it’d be hard to find new ones,” Macdonald said. “And that puts more power into the hands of workers, particularly workers with more tenure.”
As recently reported by True North, a record number of public sector executives were hired during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic who are now demanding that taxpayers pay them more.
The Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX) recently lobbied the federal government for higher salaries and better working conditions. In the last few years the number of executives working for the government has grown by 21%.
“Levels of frustration, beyond what has ever been seen before in the executive community, are being measured,” APEX CEO Carl Trottier wrote to Fortier.
“A record number of executives are asking APEX how to be demoted out of the executive cadre stating pay inversion and disrespect by the employer as the main causes.”
Despite their six-figure salaries, federal executives complained that some of their specialist employees were making more than they were.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) is recognizing the fortieth anniversary of the Charter of Rights of Freedoms by ranking the provinces that violated it worst during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“April 17, 2022, marks 40 years since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms became a part of Canada’s Constitution,” said JCCF president John Carpay. “But this date has been marred by the long list of serious Charter infringements perpetrated against Canadians by the federal and provincial governments over the last two years.”
The JCCF has been on the front lines of the fight against government and institutional pandemic restrictions, including on the ground in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy.
Its new report, titled “Who had the worst bunk in Canada’s locked down barracks?,” gives Quebec bottom honours as the worst trespasser on Charter rights, with Prairie province Saskatchewan – the first to drop restrictions – coming in as the “least worst.”
The report notes that whereas the provinces all began with more or less the same restrictions in March 2020, time and differing understandings of “the science” created a wider disparity of responses to the pandemic. As a result, Carpay noted, “some Canadians suffered much more than others.”
1.Quebec
According to the report, Quebec during COVID was “easily the worst offender of freedoms guaranteed by the Charter and the worst place to live in Canada.”
“With its totalitarian-style nightly curfews, inter-provincial travel restrictions, restrictions on travel within the province, threats of a tax on the unvaccinated, disregard for religious freedom, an imposition of vaccine passports for places of worship, and the continuation of mandatory mask-wearing, Quebec earns the top spot as the worst offender of the Charter,” Carpay said.
Quebec also banned Canadians without COVID shots from accessing groceries when it brought in an order requiring proof of vaccination to enter big box stores. The ban caused ads to appear online by those offering to go shopping in stores the unvaccinated could no longer enter.
As the JCCF notes, the mandates are not yet over in Quebec either. The province is also launching a campaign promoting fourth boosters against the “sixth wave.”
2.British Columbia
Despite its formerly libertarian reputation, B.C. came in as second-worst violator, not only for its continuing vaccine mandates against healthcare workers in both the public and private sectors but also for its seemingly arbitrary closure of houses of worship.
“For example, British Columbia ordered houses of worship to be closed, and they were closed for 14 months,” the study reports. “All provinces placed some kind of limitation upon religious observance of course, but B.C.’s blanket, lengthy, all-purpose closure was a unique interpretation of the supposed science behind Canada’s Covid response.”
B.C. was the last province to announce its timeframe for lifting COVID restrictions and also the last to lift its vaccine passport. Last Christmas, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry came in at number one in True North’s “top 10 worst and weirdest winter COVID restrictions” when she ordered that unvaccinated people would not be allowed to gather over the holidays.
3.Manitoba
People outside of Canada’s easternmost Prairie province might have missed it, but Manitoba was an early and zealous advocate of harsh lockdown measures.
“Manitoba comes close to B.C. in the rank-ordering for second-worst abuser of Charter rights,” the report reads. “Like B.C., Manitoba seriously infringed both religious freedom and mobility rights, closing all houses of worship from November 2020 to February 2021, and again in May of 2021… it joined Ontario and Quebec in mutually closing its provincial borders to supposedly “non-essential” travel.”
“It was also in Manitoba that People’s Party Leader Max Bernier was arrested and charged under Manitoba’s Public Health Act for assembling in a gathering at an outdoor public place and for failing to self -isolate upon entering Manitoba.”
4.Ontario
According to the JCCF, Canada’s largest and most populous province came in somewhere near the middle of the mob. Ontario shut schools the longest and also closed its borders. As the province of the Freedom Convoy and Ambassador Bridge border demonstrations, it also highlighted emergency measures and legislation enacted to shut down pandemic protests.
“Lengthy provincial stay-at-home orders, intended by Premier Doug Ford to be enforced with random police stops, showed an alarming government comfort with Soviet-style enforcement,” the report stated.
“Ontario’s mutual border closures with Manitoba and Quebec also violated Canadians’ Charter right to move. The province prosecuted and fined some pastors and congregations which defied public health orders, but unlike Alberta, at least did not jail anyone.”
5. Atlantic “Bubble” Maritime Provinces
While each Atlantic province offered its own potential examples of Charter and even human rights violations during COVID – including New Brunswick allowing grocery stores to ban unvaccinated Canadians – the JCCF grouped them into a single unit due to their collectively closed border.
“The four Atlantic provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and
Newfoundland and Labrador) established the so-called Atlantic Bubble,” the report read. “Within this bubble, residents were permitted to move freely.”
“However, other Canadians were barred from entering these four provinces unless government determined the reason to be ‘essential.’ The RCMP set up roadblocks on the Trans-Canada Highway to enforce the exclusion. One could hardly imagine a more unambiguous violation of the Charter section 6 mobility rights to move freely within Canada.”
6.Alberta
The second province to lift COVID restrictions, Alberta came out ahead of others in most respects. Alberta was also the first province to (partially) rescind a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, although the order still applies to new hires.
The JCCF also noted, however, that it was the only jurisdiction to jail pastors who defied public health orders.
“Pastors (Jim) Coates and (Tim) Stephens were both charged with exceeding capacity limits,” the report recounts. “Pastor Coates spent a month in jail, while Pastor Stephens served three days before the Alberta Crown took the position that his arrest was ‘unlawful.’ Pastor (Artur) Pawlowski had been arrested before for holding religious services without following public health rules, and in October 2021 was fined $23,000 and handed 18 months probation.”
“Operating under (Alberta Health Services) instructions, police padlocked their churches and arrested the pastors. All were jailed. Pastor Coates was held for more than a month, much of this time in solitary confinement with only one other cell mate, and very limited times outside of his cell. He was also fined $1,500.”
7.Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe was the first to announce he would be lifting COVID restrictions back in early February. As the JCCF notes, Saskatchewan was also less committed to lockdowns even though its policies echoed other regions. As such, Carpay deemed the Land of Open Skies the “least-bad ‘bunk’ in the locked down ‘barracks.’”
“All-in-all, it appears that Saskatchewan’s violations of Charter rights and freedoms were the least severe in Canada,” the report concludes.
“If true, this is no cause for Saskatchewan or its people to celebrate, because in every Canadian province the ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ became two years to flatten our freedoms.”
Quebec Public Health had to apologize on Thursday after a staff member posted a link to a Pornhub foot fetish video in a tweet on COVID-19 case counts.
The original tweet stated in French: Here is the situation in Quebec as of April 13.”
Included in the tweet was a hyperlink that led to a “Femdom feet worship” page on the adult video website Pornhub.
The embarrassing mistake led to a public retraction by Sante Quebec, although by the time the department apologized, the tweet had already been live for half an hour.
“Due to a situation beyond our control, a link with inappropriate content was posted on our Twitter account. We are looking into the causes. We are sorry for any inconvenience,” wrote Sante Quebec.
En raison d’une situation hors de notre contrôle, un lien avec du contenu inapproprié a été publié sur notre compte Twitter. Nous en cherchons les causes. Nous sommes désolés des inconvénients.
Pornhub is a Canadian-owned pornography company. The video-streaming website’s owner Mindgeek has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years after it was accused of hosting illegal content such as child pornography and sexual abuse videos.
Company officials have even had to appear before parliamentary committees to testify over the content on their platform.
In February, MPs with the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics heard from witnesses including Serena Fleites who said she had sexually explicit videos of her posted to the website when she was only thirteen years old.
“There was instances of the video having 2.7 million views, despite hundreds of comments of people saying this is obviously child pornography. And yet Pornhub still wouldn’t take it down,” said Fleites.
“Even when I messaged them multiple times, it would take forever. When I did get a response, they would hassle me for all these other details.”
Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leadership candidate Patrick Brown appears to have been avoiding legacy and independent media outlets since launching his campaign.
Brown, who is also the mayor of Brampton and the former leader of the Ontario PC Party, launched his campaign for the CPC leadership in Brampton on Mar. 13, selling himself as a “Fighter. Leader. Winner.”
He has since travelled to various Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal and Ottawa to meet with different cultural groups.
Thank you to the Manitoba Islamic Centre for hosting me last night! It was a pleasure to address the mosque and talk about my commitment to religious freedom in Canada and abroad.
However, Brown doesn’t appear to have done legacy or independent media interviews since launching his campaign. It should be noted that before his campaign launch, Brown would often appear in legacy, radio, and even independent outlets in his capacity as mayor of Brampton.
For example, Brown spoke with True North’s Andrew Lawton back in January to discuss hospital data and the need to end pandemic lockdowns.
True North searched through Brown’s Twitter and Facebook posts and did not find a single interview since he launched his CPC leadership campaign. The same goes for Brown’s campaign YouTube channel.
True North reached out to Brown’s team to ask if they could point to any interview or media appearances he has done since launching his campaign but did not hear back by the deadline given.
It does appear, however, that Brown is willing to engage with cultural media, as True North did come across an interview Brown did on Mar. 15 with a South Asian community news outlet.
Despite his lack of media appearances, Brown has made his stances known on select issues, including selling himself as an opponent of cancel culture and a promoter of religious freedoms. He has, for example, promised to continue opposing Quebec’s Bill 21 – a controversial secularism bill.
Brown has also criticized Harper-era policies on the Niqab – an Islamic garment that completely covers a woman’s face, except for the eyes.
Your campaign co-chair and key endorser did a brave, good, thing and called out the niqab ban. With your statement below are you calling them liars too? https://t.co/SPXWgBlVjgpic.twitter.com/zGnvf2o49y
The Toronto Star has also reported that Brown pledged to Tamil communities that he would lift the terrorist designation on the Tamil Tigers — a militant organization responsible for several terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings.
He has also joined former Quebec Liberal premier and CPC leadership candidate Jean Charest in promising to honour Trudeau’s childcare deals with provincial governments.
That Brown has spoken out about certain issues while apparently avoiding legacy and independent media has led some to wonder whether his controversial past as a politician is a factor.
A number of controversies had arisen while Brown was leader of the Ontario PC Party from 2015 to 2018, including flip flops on the carbon tax and on a promise to repeal Kathleen Wynne’s controversial liberal sex-ed curriculum.
There were also allegations of rigged nominations, voter fraud and ballot stuffing in the Ontario PC Party under Brown’s leadership, as well as an investigation that found Brown had breached ethics laws.
Since becoming mayor of Brampton, Brown has continued to face controversies, including a failed university scheme and problems involving Brampton’s integrity commissioner.
It also should be noted that some people on Brown’s campaign team were previously on the campaign of ousted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole – who also flip-flopped on certain issues, including the carbon tax.
Brown’s executive campaign chair Fred DeLorey served as campaign manager for both O’Toole’s 2020 leadership race and his 2021 federal election campaign. Brown also appointed Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner – who supported keeping O’Toole as CPC leader – as his national campaign co-chair.
Polling is not shedding positive light on Brown’s campaign, with a recent Leger survey giving him 5% support among Conservative voters. For comparison, front-runner Pierre Poilievre received 43%.
There are currently 12 people vying to lead the Conservative party into the next election. Candidates have until Apr. 29 to submit the required signatures, and to pay the registration fee and compliance deposit to appear on the ballot.
Michael Binnion is the Executive Director of the Modern Miracle Network.
Canadians have historically had good reason to be proud of our contribution internationally, and recent global events have most of us thinking about our role.
Although we are a mid-sized economy with a small population, the world has consistently been able to count on us to be the junior partner who punches above our weight.
Recently, international concerns have changed focus to the environment as the top policy issue – and Canada once again has aggressively sought to do more than our share.
However, we have been missing a fundamental change and opportunity. Canada has the capability to step up as a senior partner in a world concerned about resources and the environment. There have been many voices warning about the importance of including energy security and our strategic interests as part of our policy on environment. Unfortunately, the Canadian response has been mired in 20th-century environmental ideas. We missed several opportunities for mega projects to bring resources with world leading environmental performance to international markets. Sadly, where the world and Canada finds itself in the present moment, ’I told you so’ is cold comfort.
The growing fracture lines on a global response on climate was shown in Glasgow, as China and India both said they would not commit to 2050. Russia has been rogue on climate all along, and it is obvious they prioritize their strategic interests ahead of global environmental challenges. Russia’s pursuit of strategic interests in Europe has not only created a humanitarian crisis, but it has also set up China as a reliable Russian ally. It seems inevitable that China will ‘belt and road’ Russia in its time of need and effectively take control of Siberia and its vast resources. Only a country like Canada can claim resources as rich as Siberia without a population that can use them all.
The Russian invasion has exposed the importance of security for people – safety, food, shelter, and energy are all sharply in focus. Even those trapped in old ideas of bans and blockades to stop petroleum use have agreed we need to end being dependent on countries who don’t share our values, especially for critical commodities like energy. The clear advantage to Russia, including finances from control of much of the world’s energy supplies, has reignited the discussion over what and where our energy should come from. We again see reports recirculating of Russian financing of anti-natural gas and anti-fracking groups to eliminate competition. One commentator even noted that Putin had successfully mobilized ‘useful idiots’ in the West to support his agenda.
In Canada, the widely under-reported Allan Report was not able to trace the original source of foreign funds flowing to anti-Alberta oil and gas campaigns. However, it did expressly find hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funding flowing to groups operating in Canada, giving at least some plausibility to the reports on Russian disinformation and finance. Some of those groups were very active in the campaign to ban LNG and natural gas production in Quebec which, for the moment at least, has made it impossible for Canada to help with the gas crisis in Europe.
In our myopic Canadian debate on energy and environment, we compare two 20th-century ideas. One being ’business as usual’ – which in a world growing to 10 billion energy-hungry people in the 21st century seems unsustainable to most. At the other side of the spectrum is the idea of a transition off of and ban of fossil fuels – an approach many believe threatens 21st-century human progress. The debate between the two ideas presumed fossil fuel technologies were static, which supported the non-progressive idea of a ban. It also presumed technologies for renewables would advance faster than they have.
What we have not considered seriously is a third option. An all-of-the-above approach to energy security and our strategic interests – using incentives for technological advances for all our energy sources. In a third option, we would have a race to net-zero emissions and hope all our energy choices win. The recent embrace by Ministers Wilkenson and Guilbeault of carbon capture, utilization and storage technology as a major tool to reduce emissions gives some hope that perhaps the federal government is moving towards a 21st century approach to a ‘wicked’ policy problem.
The war in Ukraine gives Canada yet another chance to step up as a senior international partner guaranteeing energy and resource security for our allies. Holding on to old-fashioned and non-progressive ideas of moratoriums will cause Canada to let down the entire Western world in its time of need. It is not just a chance for Canada; it is an imperative.
The path Canada is on now is to remain a junior partner, increasingly punching well below even that smaller standard. The other choice is to make the 21st century the Canadian century. Canada can and must step up as the senior partner guaranteeing security of resource supply that is environmentally responsible. We need to not just continue to be a leader in renewables but also a leader in an emerging trillion-dollar market in new carbon-tech. Through new efficiencies, sequestration, and recycling of CO2 into valuable products, Canada can lead the way on an energy transformation that will see fossil fuels like natural gas competing with renewables to be low emissions energy.
If Canada does step up, it will empower our senior partners to stand up along with us to confront authoritarian states like Russia. It will also finance Canada’s ongoing leading environmental and social programs – and it might even allow us to consider investing in becoming northern military specialists and guard the Arctic not just for Canada but for our NATO allies.
The world is watching us in their time of need. It’s time to drop old and failed ideas of bans and blockades. Embracing a third option of transformation for energy and the environment can allow us to lead not only our allies on resource security but also the planet on environment. We’ve historically been proud of our international contributions, and now is the time for us once again to show the world what Canadians can do.
The Canadian legacy media is up in arms after Elon Musk announced his plan to buy the popular social media platform Twitter for $43 billion.
On Thursday it was revealed that Musk made an offer of $54.20 per share in cash, saying he hoped to unlock the “extraordinary potential” of Twitter should he own it. The offer is 38% over the price as of April 1.
The news came shortly after Musk became the largest shareholder of the company earlier this month.
Musk has been an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Twitter. He has repeatedly tweeted in support of the Freedom Convoy movement and was even forced to take a controversial tweet down which likened the prime minister to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Reporters and commentators from media outlets including Global News, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and others complained about the deal and pondered taking their content to another platform altogether.
“This isn’t good” says Globe and Mail journalist John Lorinc
National Observer reporter calls Musk “rich and so fragile” over bid to buy platform
Imagine being so rich and so fragile that you literally try to buy and seize control of the public square because you don’t like that people use it to criticize you.
Musk purchasing Twitter is an “ego thing” says Canadian Geographic reporter
Musk says he's got a plan b if his Twitter bid goes south. I bet it is using that money he was going to waste on his ego for solving some bigger, more noble problem, like homelessness and poverty, right?
Yeah, that's it…or probably just more of the ego thing.
