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Sunday, July 20, 2025

Romanian parliamentarian boycotted Trudeau EU speech

By
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa
-

Romanian Member of European Parliament (MEP) Cristian Terheș was one of many EU politicians who savaged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau following his speech in Brussels on Wednesday, refusing to attend and citing Trudeau’s violation of citizens’ rights. 

Terheș has been a vocal critic of Trudeau’s crackdown on peaceful Freedom Convoy protesters. In a written statement translated by True North, Terheș accused the prime minister of being hypocritical for lecturing on democracy while quashing freedom and rights at home. 

“I refused to validate by my presence the facade of the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau,” Terheș wrote. “You can’t come and teach democracy lessons to Putin from the European Parliament when you trample with horse hooves your own citizens who are demanding that their fundamental rights be respected.”

Trudeau, who is on his second trip abroad to discuss the war in Ukraine this month, is facing a flurry of condemnation from European parliamentarians for his treatment of freedom demonstrators in Canada.

After Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in February, a militarized police force shut down Ottawa and brutalized protesters in an operation to end the convoy demonstrations against Canada’s harsh COVID-19 measures. One elderly woman was trampled by a riot horse during the crackdown. 

“When you, a politician from the “west,” implement in your home methods of repression and the trampling of the rights of your own citizens, who demand their rights be respected, as Putin does at home, you are no better than him,” wrote Terheș. “On the contrary, through the tyranny that you’re implementing you add deceit and hypocrisy, destroying liberty and “western” values.”

Through the Emergencies Act, the Trudeau government also enabled banks to freeze the assets of protesters and donors to the convoy’s fundraisers. 

Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakusic also condemned the prime minister to his face. 

“Canada, once a symbol of the modern world, has become a symbol of civil rights violations under your quasi-liberal boot in recent months,” said Kolakusic. “We watched how you trample women with horses, how you block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes. To you, these may be liberal methods, for many citizens of the world, it is a dictatorship of the worst kind.”

German MEP Christine Anderson, who is a member of the controversial right-wing party Alternative for Germany, also joined in to voice her displeasure at the prime minister’s presence in the European parliament, calling it a “disgrace to any democracy.” 

Ottawa Police chief admits no firearms discovered at Freedom Convoy

By
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa
-

Despite earlier allegations by unnamed sources, Ottawa Police interim chief Steve Bell admitted before a parliamentary committee on Thursday that no loaded firearms had been seized during the crackdown on the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa last month. 

Bell, who had been tasked with ending the convoy protests after former chief Peter Sloly resigned, made the admission under questioning by Conservative MP Dane Lloyd during a Commons public safety committee.

“In Ottawa during the protest clearing operation were any loaded shotguns found in the trucks of protestors?” asked Lloyd. 

“What I can indicate is throughout the protest, we did receive information and intelligence around weapons and possession of weapons by people that either had attended or intended on attending the occupation,” said Bell.  “As a result of clearing, at no point did we make any firearm-related charges, yet there are investigations that continue in relations to weapons possession at the occupation.”

Lloyd continued to press Bell on the matter, asking for a clear yes or no response to the question. 

“I guess, yes or no, Interim Chief – were loaded firearms found in the trucks during the protest clearing operation? Yes or no?” said Lloyd.

“There have been no charges laid to date in relation to weapons at the occupation site,” responded Bell. 

“It’s just a clear question, Interim Chief. Were weapons found? Were loaded firearms found? Yes or no?” asked Lloyd once more. 

“No, not relating to any charges at this point,” said Bell. 

In February, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to quash peaceful convoy protests, which were heading into their third week in Ottawa. Among several allegations politicians and legacy media were spreading about the protesters to justify the heavy-handed measure was that police had discovered loaded firearms on the site.

As recently as Mar. 19 freelance journalist Justin Ling repeated the claim that “loaded shotguns were found” by police. 

Bell is the latest official to poke holes in the Liberal government’s narrative around the Freedom Convoy. A number of other key testimonies have disputed claims of terrorism and foreign funding.

According to Freedom Convoy co-organizer and ex-RCMP officer Daniel Bulford, “nefarious elements” had allegedly planned to plant stolen weapons among the convoy truckers in an effort to discredit the movement. 

Two men launch lawsuit against vaccination travel requirement

By
Noah Jarvis
-

With no end in sight for the federal COVID-19 vaccination requirement to board a commercial flight or train trip in Canada, two men have filed a lawsuit against the Trudeau government demanding the restriction be lifted. 

Shaun Rickard, a British citizen who has been living in Canada for 30 years as a permanent resident, is the owner of a contracting business. He is also unvaccinated against COVID-19. Rickard and another man, Karl Harrison, have filed a court challenge against the government’s travel restrictions targeting unvaccinated Canadians.

In an exclusive interview with True North, Rickard explained that “not being able to travel is problematic,” especially since the restrictions bar him from being able to visit his family in England, including his father, who is sick with Alzheimer’s. 

After creating a Twitter account and GoFundMe campaign to overturn mandated COVID vaccines, Rickard was able to gain thousands of followers and raise over $22,000 from supporters. He said he was banned from Twitter, however, and that he took down the GoFundMe as a result of Twitter cutting him off from his supporters.

The Freedom Convoy, which concluded in Ottawa late last month, had also advocated for restrictions to be dropped. While the convoy was not related to the lawsuit, Rickard remains supportive of the Ottawa protests. 

“I supported the truckers 100%, and I still do,” he told True North.

“Let’s be clear. It’s not like they went and sat in the houses of parliament. They were on a public street, a public sidewalk, outside. The mainstream media has become… despicable in their portrayal of them.” 

Lawyer Sam Presvelos is helping with Rickard’s case. According to him, the lawsuit against the Trudeau government emphasizes a lack of scientific justification for the mandates. 

“The real focus of the case is just looking at the science,” Presvelos said. “Travel-related Covid-cases are at, like, 1% of all cases. And that’s all travel. If at a grocery store the chance of you getting Covid is 1%, are we going to tell unvaccinated people you cannot buy groceries?”

While similar lawsuits like the one brought by former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford argue the unconstitutional nature of the mandates, Presvelos emphasized a different approach. 

“What people need to understand about Charter rights is that your Charter rights are not absolute, which means that any Charter right you have can be breached by the government,” he said.

Presvelos explained that the Oakes test – which established the limits for the government being able to violate Charter rights – requires legislation to be rationally connected, proportionate and minimally invasive. 

Presvelos argued that the mandates are not proportionate or minimally invasive, and that “this policy is more about encouraging people to get vaccinated than it is about protecting the health and safety of travellers.”

While critics of the government’s actions have been labeled as anti-science and uncaring of others, Presvelos wanted to reassure observers of the case that “no matter what the mainstream media and politicians say, we’re all on the same team.” 

“We want people to be healthy, we want people to be safe.”

Presvelos said that several lawsuits fighting back against the Trudeau government’s vaccine mandate for travel have been combined, and they will proceed on the same timeline.

The suit is scheduled for its first day in federal court in September.

Masks don’t do anything. Stop wearing them.

By
Candice Malcolm
-

Whether it was the obsessive rules about masking, punitive vaccine mandates or the bullying tactics used against the unvaccinated, Canada’s Covid policies were characterized by repeated failures. 

The public health advice was confusing, hypocritical, hectoring and oftentimes, completely counter to what we knew about the virus. It was opposed to scientific knowledge. 

Today on the Candice Malcolm Show, Candice is joined by Dr. Matt Strauss, the Medical Officer of Health for Haldimand Norfolk and an ICU doctor at Guelph General Hospital. Dr. Strauss wrote a recent opinion piece he wrote on a comprehensive scientific study on the limitations of masks – especially cloth masks. 

They talk about the repeated failed approaches to Covid, the limitations of vaccines, the bullying tactics used in the media against people with dissenting opinions (including Dr. Strauss!) and the many unintended consequences of our failed policies. 

SUBSCRIBE TO THE CANDICE MALCOLM SHOW

Former Liberal leader calls alienation of truckers a “failure of liberal democracy”

By
Jonathan Bradley
-

Former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff has said that the trucker protests against COVID-19 restrictions reveal just how fractured political discourse has become in Canada. 

“Why the hell did we get to a situation in which hard working men and women in Canada felt so alienated that they had to shut down the capital of our country for three weeks?” said Ignatieff on an upcoming episode of The Hub’s Hub Dialogues. “It doesn’t excuse what they did – I felt that police action had to be taken to clear the thing – but, boy, it’s an indictment of the failure of liberal democracy.” 

Ignatieff was the Liberal leader from 2008 to 2011, and it was his resignation that led to Justin Trudeau eventually winning the party’s leadership. An academic and author, Ignatieff served most recently as president and rector of the Central European University. 

Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14, and for the first time in Canadian history, to end the trucker protests. According to Trudeau, using the act was important to give the federal government and police forces more powers to break up protests and border blockades, despite most of them having ended by that time. 

“There’s a high level of frustration that this situation has gone on as long as it has,” Trudeau had said. “Those people have gone from protesting and disagreeing with those (COVID-19) measures, to limiting and blocking the freedoms of their fellow citizens.”

Ignatieff went on to say that governments have to listen to massive protests and that democracies need disagreements. He also said that Canadians love to avoid conflicts and that such an avoidance leads to a build-up. The problem with Canadians, he said, is that “we’ve decided the solution to this problem is to be very, very nice and avoid saying anything that stirs anybody up.”

Ignatieff said that a liberal society should prioritize individualism rather than separating people into identity groups. He said liberals put freedom before equality and solidarity. 

He also said that this belief distinguishes liberals from socialists and social democrats. and that it separates liberals from conservatives since “freedom means change.” 

Ignatieff is not the only Liberal to have broken ranks with Trudeau about his response to both the pandemic and the trucker protests. 

Quebec Liberal MPs Joel Lightbound and Yves Robillard both spoke out against their government’s actions in February, with Lightbound taking aim at Trudeau’s characterization of the protesters as violent extremists.

“I have enough respect for my fellow Canadians not to engage in these easy, absurd labels,” Lightbound said.

Quebec tells its healthcare network to prepare for a sixth wave and fourth doses

By
Elie Cantin-Nantel
-

The government of Quebec has told the province’s healthcare network to prepare for yet another wave of COVID-19 cases, as well as a campaign to encourage fourth injections of the vaccine. 

Radio Canada reported that the directive came from the province’s public health director Dr. Luc Boileau, who made the proclamation due to a rise in cases caused by the BA.2 Omicron subvariant.

Quebec reported 2111 confirmed cases of COVID-19 via PCR tests on Wednesday, making it the first time since mid-February that the province reported over 2000 daily cases. 

It should be noted that the province also reported a drop in hospitalizations. 

The government of Quebec has confirmed its intention to launch a fourth-dose vaccination campaign next week. 

Vulnerable people will be eligible to receive their fourth vaccine dose three months after they had their third. These include the immunocompromised, those living in long-term care and retirement homes and individuals over the age of 80. 

Quebec is one of only a few jurisdictions in North America that still requires people to wear masks in indoor public spaces. The province says it is opting to maintain the measure for the time being. 

“Quebec has always been very cautious in its decision making, I think,” said Boileau. “And with what’s happening in Europe, and with the data we have here, we now want that caution.”

However, the urgency with which the Quebec government is rushing to offer fourth doses of the COVID-19 vaccines does not resonate with everyone in the province’s medical community. 

Dr. Karl Weiss, a professor of medicine at McGill University as well as a physician, microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at the Montreal Jewish Hospital, has expressed doubts about the immediacy of the campaign.

Weiss told Radio Canada that he “would try to wait until the fall.” He also said that there is a lack of data showing the effectiveness of fourth vaccine doses. 

While Weiss believes a fourth dose may help, he thinks that at some point people will have to ask themselves, “are we going to give a fourth, fifth, sixth dose…?”

The Quebec government’s plans also received criticism from provincial Conservative leader Eric Duhaime, who called it a fear campaign. 

Duhaime also warned that the re-election of Quebec premier Francois Legault’s party would lead to mandatory third and fourth doses, as well as the return of the province’s vaccine passport system. 

As of now, the province does not plan to reinstate the restrictions that it previously lifted. These include capacity and gathering limits, as well as the vaccine passport.

During the last two years of the pandemic, Quebec imposed some of the harshest measures in the Western world. This included a strict, police-enforced curfew, lockdowns, the closure of places of worship and bans on private gatherings. Recent lockdowns came despite the province having a high vaccination rate.

Quebec also banned the unvaccinated from big box stores including Walmart and Costco, and considered making vaccination mandatory under the threat of “significant” fees. 

The Legault government has also been accused on multiple occasions of introducing restrictions that were not backed by science. 

Toronto man sues City Hall over $100k donation to Quebec Bill 21 challenge

By
Andrew Lawton
-

A Toronto man has filed a lawsuit against the City of Toronto to scrap its $100,000 payment to a legal fund fighting Quebec’s controversial secularism bill.

In a notice of application filed with the Ontario Superior Court, Louis Labrecque accuses the City of Toronto of overstepping its mandate by fighting Bill 21, a law that has nothing to do with Toronto or Ontario.

“As a Quebec statute, Bill 21 does not engage, affect or limit the rights and freedoms of Torontonians,” the application says. “The Ontario Legislative Assembly has not enacted equivalent or similar legislation.”

Bill 21 is the Quebec law enacted in 2019 that prohibits public servants from wearing religious symbols such as hijabs, yarmulkes and crucifixes at work.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims, the World Sikh Organization, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association are mounting a legal challenge against the bill.

In December, Toronto mayor John Tory put a motion before council to contribute $100,000 of city funds to the legal challenge. Council adopted the motion, but according to Labrecque’s lawsuit has not yet sent the funds.

Labrecque’s lawsuit asks the court to declare the motion “void for illegality on the basis that it is beyond the jurisdiction of the City of Toronto.”

Labrecque’s lawyer, Asher Honickman of Jordan Honickman Barristers, says the lawsuit is ultimately about stewardship of municipal funds.

“This is not a case about the merits of Bill 21,” Honickman said.”It is about the jurisdiction of the City of Toronto to pass bylaws and resolutions and to spend taxpayer money. The Supreme Court has said that municipalities must confine themselves to matters that have a municipal purpose, and the applicant takes the position that funding an out-of-province legal challenge does not further a municipal purpose in the City of Toronto.”

Last year, the Superior Court of Quebec upheld Bill 21 as generally constitutional, but found it did not respect the constitutional rights of Quebec legislators and English school boards. The Quebec government is appealing the decision.

City councils in Kingston, Ont. and Victoria, B.C. voted to donate $10,000 and $9,500, respectively, to the legal challenge. Brampton and London are each giving $100,000.

Ottawa council entertained a motion to donate $100,000, but Mayor Jim Watson said it wasn’t an appropriate use of municipal funds, even though he personally supported the lawsuit.

Louis Labrecque v City of T… by Andrew Lawton

Record number of people left Ontario for other provinces last year

By
Jonathan Bradley
-

More people moved away from Ontario to other parts of Canada in 2021 than have left the province in any year since 1981, according to an analysis by Scotiabank. 

The study, called “A Sudden Move: Understanding Interprovincial Migration out of Ontario,” revealed that while Ontario’s population rose by 175,000 due to immigration, more than 108,000 Ontarians left for different provinces.

“Pandemic restriction severity, housing affordability, and telework adoption all appear to have influenced the trend—in contrast to past periods of strong out-migration that mirrored starker differences in regional economic conditions,” said Scotiabank senior economist Marc Desormeaux in the paper published on Mar. 17. 

Desormeaux wrote that Maritime provinces were seeing record numbers of people move from Ontario and that British Columbia welcomed more Ontarians than at any point since the 1990s. According to the report, more people also moved from Ontario to Quebec than vice versa for the first time in recorded history. 

British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces, reported Desormeaux, might have seen upticks in Ontario residents because of less strict COVID-19 restrictions. If Ontario continues to reopen with limited COVID-19 cases, he said, the migration out of the province might be reduced. 

Ontario has also experienced the longest lockdowns anywhere in North America throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Ontario implemented a fourth lockdown in January, citing large case counts stemming from the Omicron variant. 

According to the paper, the variety of provinces that Ontarians are moving to might also stems from housing affordability challenges in the last few years, as well as more remote work. Toronto surpassed Vancouver as Canada’s priciest local housing market in February. 

A number of Canadian cities, some of them in Ontario, saw home price increases averaging at or near six figures, according to Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) data obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

“It is not yet clear if the shift in Ontario interprovincial migration will prove to be a permanent one,” said Desormeaux. “Even if the macroeconomic drag proves transitory, or can be offset by immigration, interprovincial headcount losses should still reinforce the need to step up efforts to improve housing affordability.” 

Figures revealed that average price gains were at or near $100,000 or more in Toronto, Ottawa, Victoria, Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax. Housing prices increased the most in the Greater Toronto Area, where they went up by $286,000 (31%) to about $1.2 million. 

Liberals gave $600,000 to influencers to praise government

By
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa
-

Taxpayers forked over $600,000 to social media influencers last year for them to sing the praises of the Liberal government. 

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, an Inquiry Of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons revealed that various ministries had hired media personalities to compliment the government on social media.

The payments were billed as “partnerships with social creators” and totalled $610,900 in 2021. The figures were originally requested by Conservative MP Warren Steinley.

Among those who were paid to sing the praises of the Liberals was Dragon’s Den personality and investor Michele Romanow, as well as partner Nicholas Duvernois, who received $120,000 to promote Export Development Canada. 

Federal staff wrote that Romanow was hired to “bring our success stories to life.” 

“The biggest risk you should take in your life is the risk on yourself. You should always bet on yourself,” wrote Romanow in a motivational Facebook post. 

Motivational speaker Kalen Dahlgren was also hired by the government to promote sales of Royal Canadian Mint coins. The survivor of the 2018 Humboldt Broncos crash was paid $46,000 for his services. 

The Department of Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada also used taxpayer funds to promote their COVID-19 strategy and vaccination. A total of $154,499 was paid out by the agencies for favourable tweets and Facebook posts. 

“The influencer campaign complemented the Government of Canada’s overall strategy to help everyone in Canada make an informed decision about Covid-19 vaccines,” the federal government wrote. 

Meanwhile, the Department of Canadian Heritage paid $142,000 for tweets on Canada Day and for ice-carving competitions in Charlottetown, Corner Brook, Fort St. John, Halifax, Saskatoon and Winnipeg.

In the past, the federal government has justified paying for positive media coverage. According to a 2021 Audit Of Natural Resources Canada Communication Function the government hoped to “leverage the power” of social media to their benefit. 

“With the increasingly important role of digital platforms, the speed at which information travels and citizens’ expectations for timely, relevant information, communications increasingly impacts policy agendas in real time, further underscoring the need to effectively leverage the power of digital in order to achieve departmental goals,” department officials wrote.

Canadian Taxpayers Federation spokesperson Kris Sims told True North that the Trudeau government’s self-promotional campaign was “a frivolous waste of taxpayers’ money.”

“More than 150 families could’ve bought a brand new furnace for what we paid online celebrities to sing the praises of the Trudeau government,” she said. “We are more than $1 trillion in debt, and it’s well past time for the feds to sober up and stop their spending bender.”

LEVY: Convoy organizer calls success in Ottawa just the start

By
Sue-Ann Levy
-

Despite totalling his car, shattering his ankle on an icy Ottawa sidewalk and having his bank accounts frozen for seven days, one of the organizers of the Freedom Convoy has said it was all a smashing success.

In a sit-down interview with True North this week, Benjamin Dichter said the three-week-long protest had pressured our political leaders to end the COVID mandates.

“We 100% moved the needle,” Dichter said. “People are now starting to see how far our politicians have gone off the cliff… some people are starting to wake up.”

Dichter – who is hobbling around on crutches until the end of April – said he sees himself as just an “ordinary dude with a truck” and that the whole experience was a “blast.”

He said it was a credit to the cause that despite the obstacles thrown in front of them by the banks and the Liberal government, the Freedom Convoy managed to raise $10.1 million through the GoFundMe fundraising platform – until the funds were frozen by the TD bank.

He said that GiveSendGo – the Christian alternative to GoFundMe – subsequently reached out to the convoy, and through them they managed to raise $9-million in one drive and another $500,000 in smaller drives.

Dichter is from Toronto and formerly ran for the federal Conservatives in the Toronto-Danforth riding, but what isn’t well known is that he bought a truck during the pandemic and drove it for a living. His work consisted of going back and forth across the border delivering paper products, without having to show his vaccination papers or a QR code.

He said that what really got him upset was the enforcement of the QR codes and the COVID digital passport – things, he said, he was concerned would become the basis for “an entire surveillance state.”

“That was going to lead to massive tracking beyond what is normally done,” he said.

Dichter said he thinks the Freedom Convoy made people realize just how fake the media is. According to him, their dishonesty was why only select independent outlets were invited to their press conferences in Ottawa.

“If we invited them (the legacy media), they’d just call us names,” he said. “Why (would we) waste our time subjecting ourselves to their BS?”

Dichter laughed when I told him about the conferences and lectures now being held by journalists to complain about “mean tweets” and the hatred some say they experienced at the hands of the truckers.

He also said he thought that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had behaved predictably at the outset – first hiding out and then coming out to describe the truckers as neo-Nazis.

As for Trudeau’s implementation of the Emergencies Act – Dichter says even he was surprised with that one. He said he realizes now that even extremists “always double down,” and he feels that Trudeau’s long-time friend and advisor Gerald Butts was behind it.

Dichter said it was when the convoy’s GiveSendGo fundraiser was hacked and donors started seeing their names on social media and having their bank accounts frozen that people really got scared.

He said his own personal and corporate accounts were frozen for seven days – a situation he discovered when he tried to pay for an Uber Eats order one night. His entire banking history had been erased, he said, only to be reinstated when the Emergencies Act was revoked on Feb. 23.

Dichter said he survived with the help of a friend for seven days.

“There is nothing like being targeted by your own government for alleged money laundering,” he said. “Canada has become worse than a third-world banana republic.”

Even now Dichter says he is concerned that he’s been flagged by the big banks – adding that this is a good reason to pursue Bitcoin.

He insisted that the convoy was only the start of his efforts to wake Canadians up to what is happening in our country. For now, though, he has to wait out the recuperation of his ankle surgery in February, having broken both the fibula and tibia slipping on an Ottawa sidewalk.

He admitted he’s not a good patient.

He is so tenacious, in fact, he said he crutched up to Parliament Hill in the snow 24 hours after having the ankle repaired.

“I was trying to make sure these people didn’t get into the mindset of being anxious,” he said, referring to the efforts of the government and the legacy media to demonize and disperse the movement.

“I told them not to let them divide them.”

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