Your mid-week moment of clarity ...
The story so far:
A statement posted to the foundation’s website early Tuesday morning broke the news, saying President and CEO Pascale Fournier and the board made the decision to jointly resign.“In recent weeks, the political climate surrounding a donation received by the foundation in 2016 has put a great deal of pressure on the foundation’s management and volunteer board of directors, as well as on our staff and our community,” read the statement.“The circumstances created by the politicization of the foundation have made it impossible to continue with the status quo, and the volunteer board of directors has resigned, as has the president and CEO.”
This "politicization":
But the foundation has found that Mr. Trudeau’s politics keep intersecting with it. Over and over.
The organization’s directors and its CEO, Pascale Fournier, found their activities kept getting caught up in what they called “politicization.” So on Tuesday, they announced they had all quit en masse from the board of the Trudeau foundation.
The Prime Minister of the same name lamented that the “toxicity” of today’s politics was getting in the way of the nobler pursuits of academia.
But it sure seems that a Chinese businessman named Zhang Bin was going out of his way to create an intersection between Mr. Trudeau and the Trudeau foundation seven years ago, in 2016, when he gave $200,000 to the foundation. In retrospect, the fortuitous nature of this donation probably should have raised a few questions about intersections. Now people are looking for them.
It didn’t help that the former senior civil servant who wrote the report on the panel that watched for interference in the 2021 election, Morris Rosenberg, had been the CEO of the Trudeau foundation from 2014 to 2018. Or that the special rapporteur appointed by Mr. Trudeau to review the whole business, former governor-general David Johnston, had links to the foundation, too. The Trudeau foundation funds educational programs, but there sure were a lot of intersections between politics and the foundation that bears the PM’s family name. ...
Soon after, it was announced that Mr. Zhang, also political adviser to the Chinese government, and another Chinese businessman, Niu Gensheng, would donate $1-million in gifts that memorialize Pierre Trudeau’s legacy – $200,000 went to the Trudeau foundation, another $50,000 went to erecting a Pierre Trudeau statue and $750,000 went to the University of Montreal, where Pierre Trudeau studied law.
But The Globe reported in March that a source had revealed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had captured a 2014 conversation in which a Chinese consulate official instructed Mr. Zhang to donate to the Trudeau foundation and promised Beijing would reimburse him.
After that report, Ms. Fournier announced that the foundation would return the money, saying it would never have knowingly taken funds from a foreign government.
But it’s not like nobody was asking questions about the donation back in 2016. The question was whether Mr. Zhang was trying to curry favour with the newish Prime Minister by donating to causes that glorify the Trudeau name. ...
In 2016, when questions about Mr. Zhang’s donation started to mount, Mr. Trudeau insisted that the foundation was non-partisan, pointing to the fact that its board included former Conservative cabinet minister Chuck Strahl.
So Mr. Strahl resigned from the board – not because there was anything wrong with the foundation or what it did with its money, but because he felt the Liberals were using him as a political shield.
After all, Mr. Strahl told the CBC interviewer at the time, it was a little strange to see a wealthy Chinese businessman show up at a Liberal fundraiser, and people might reasonably want to ask whether he is making large donations to Trudeau family causes in an effort to curry favour with the Prime Minister.
It turns out that was a reasonable question.
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Last week the Minister of Human Resources Development and I published our innovation strategy. In the strategy we spoke of the need to create a Canadian program similar to the Rhodes scholarships to promote excellence, encourage those who seek it and reward those who achieve it.
I am honoured to announce today that the Government of Canada will endow the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation with $125 million allocated in the budget to enable the creation of a truly world class program for advanced studies in the humanities.
The usual suspects are certainly fried over this:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday blamed unnamed critics he identified only as “those people” for discrediting the taxpayer-subsidized Trudeau Foundation. The group’s CEO and board of directors abruptly resigned weeks after admitting to accepting a $200,000 donation from China: “It is a shame to see the level of toxicity and political polarization that is going on in our country these days.”
Why does this sound familiar?
“They are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people? .."
One could pick any quote or instance, really.
The amount of projection Justin does can be seen from space.
He enjoys the division and name-calling he does.
It also shows that he is getting desperate.
To wit:
La Presse cites internal Trudeau Foundation review. As this story evolves, the perception issues surrounding the Special Rapporteur’s prior links to this Trudeau family foundation won’t help the argument that he is totally distant from entities subject of PRC interference efforts pic.twitter.com/rAnLpCifjQ
— Sam Cooper (@scoopercooper) April 12, 2023
**
The taxpayer-backed Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation was plunged into crisis in March, several weeks after the Globe and Mail reported that a major 2016 donation ultimately came from the Chinese state rather than a Beijing billionaire, according to an internal document obtained by La Presse.
Shortly after the Globe story broke, the foundation publicly announced it would return $140,000 to the Chinese benefactor.
But the document says problems cropped up when the foundation began preparations to send back the money.
The foundation’s board was alerted that the name on the reimbursement cheque to return the Chinese donation would not be the name of the real donor.
This stalled plans to return the cheque because the name of the true donor, according to the document, did not appear anywhere on the accounting books of the foundation, La Presse reported. It said such a reimbursement would therefore have been unlawful, according to the internal foundation document.
The Montreal newspaper reported that eight members of the foundation board, who were not directors at the time the donation was received in 2016, then demanded that an independent investigation be carried out. They asked those longer-serving members of the board to recuse themselves from any discussion of the matter because they were in a conflict of interest.
One source told La Presse the Chinese donation ultimately turned out to be a “stink bomb” that led to an internal crisis of governance at the foundation.
The newspaper also reported that members of the board of directors even considered asking the office of the federal auditor general to investigate the matter.
These revelations come after the head of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and its board of directors resigned Tuesday, blaming the political backlash that followed a revelation that the true benefactor behind a large financial gift from a Beijing billionaire was the Chinese government.
The foundation announced in early March that it planned to return $140,000 to the wealthy Chinese donor after The Globe and Mail reported that the contribution was part of a Beijing-directed influence operation to curry favour with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On Tuesday, the foundation said in a statement that president and chief executive Pascale Fournier and the entire board would leave, adding that the political scrutiny surrounding the donation had put pressure on staff members and the board’s volunteer directors. “The circumstances created by the politicization of the foundation have made it impossible to continue with the status quo,” the statement said.
The foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the memory of Justin Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, said three directors have agreed to remain on an interim basis until a new board is chosen. The foundation is backed by a $125-million government endowment set up in 2002 under former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien.
People don't quit from Justin's dad's foundation on a whim.
An internal review might reveal some - shall we say? - interesting things?
More:
What so shook the organization that its entire leadership — forgive the clumsy phrase — defenestrated themselves? What turbulence from within or without, or combination of both, led to the mass exodus? What will be its consequence?We know that the foundation claimed it returned a donation of $200,000 that was thought to have been arranged by the Chinese government in an attempt to influence Mr. Trudeau. But it was reported by La Presse Wednesday, that, in fact the funds were not returned because the actual donor could not be determined.To pick just one thread out of this troubled tapestry, all resistance, all stonewalling and procrastination of setting up a full, independent multi-person public inquiry into Chinese interference just simply has to stop. The refusal to set up such an inquiry cannot now be sustained.Article content
If Mr. Trudeau will not now call back his “special rapporteur,” shut down this barely begun one man peek into this massive story, then David Johnson, ex-GG, more pertinently ex-member of the (now) exploded Trudeau Foundation, must himself take the step, that he is no longer either willing or properly situated for that task.There is no way, especially after the events of this week, that the family friend and past member of the Foundation can continue to be the single source investigating Chinese interference; most especially since it is a donation to the Trudeau Foundation from Chinese sources, that is the epicentre of this entire messy saga.
The above report is not the only reason why the Liberals wants Bills C-11, 18 and 36 passed:
Newly released documents show that a federal government department asked Facebook and Twitter to delete a newspaper article that it felt contained errors — but both social-media giants denied the request.
The request to remove social-media posts that linked to an unspecified Toronto Sun article came from a director of communications on Sept. 27, 2021, according to information prepared by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Documents say that staff at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, which reports to Parliament through the immigration minister but is otherwise an independent body, believed the article contained "serious errors of fact risking (and) undermining public confidence in the independence of the board as well as the integrity of the refugee determination system." The board did not respond to questions from The Canadian Press.
The social-media companies ultimately said that they were denying the request because the article wasn't their original content.
The Toronto Sun did not respond to a request for comment.
Paul Knox, a professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University's school of journalism, said governments don't have any business telling anybody what can be published where.
The government was "totally out of their lane on this one" and needs to apologize, he said.
"You can't only have freedom of the press for people you approve of and people you consider to be right," said Knox, who also sits on the Canadian issues committee for the Canadian Journalists For Free Expression, an organization that defends the rights of journalists.
He said that while publications can be held accountable for being wrong, it doesn't entitle people to demand that something be removed from a platform.
"And the last people on Earth that would be justified in doing that would be entities of a government," he said.
The Opposition Conservatives said Tuesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government "cannot be trusted" to protect Canadians' right to free expression.
"No government should be able to demand that news be erased from history simply because they do not like the facts," Conservative MP Rachael Thomas said in a statement. "It is extremely concerning that the Trudeau government has sought to censor the free press through secret requests to big tech companies."
Documents tabled in Parliament detail 214 examples of Ottawa asking for social-media content to be removed between January 2020 and February 2023. Companies took down posts about half the time for reasons such as impersonation or copyright violations.
The government documents came in response to a written question from Conservative MP Dean Allison.
In another case, the Canada Revenue Agency requested that private messages be removed from Facebook Messenger after employees shared taxpayer information on the platform.
The agency said an administrator deleted the chat on June 7, 2022, but it was unclear whether Facebook deleted the messages from its servers.
"The CRA disciplined the employees involved, up to, and including, termination of employment," the documents say, and the affected taxpayers were notified and offered credit protection services. Employees were also retrained on unauthorized access and social media.
In a third case, Meta, which owns Facebook, granted a request by the government to delete an account that was impersonating former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki and sending people fake messages.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and LinkedIn all complied with various requests about posts that infringed on copyright or company policies.
However, social media companies often kept up posts that the government and its departments believed were offensive.
Both Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, publish public reports on how often different levels of government request changes to remove posts.
Google's reporting shows that since since 2011, it has received 1,347 requests from Canadian government entities — whether municipal, provincial or federal — to remove posts.
Also - he has a point:
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has asked Twitter owner Elon Musk to label CBC’s Twitter accounts as “government-funded media.”
Poilievre said in a tweet late Tuesday afternoon he wrote Musk to ask that his social media platform “accurately” label CBC. He pointed out in the letter that the public broadcaster receives the “vast majority of its funding” from the federal government. CBC/Radio Canada received $1.24 billion in government funding in 2021-2022, and reported $651 million in revenue, the biggest proportion of which came from advertising.
The letter follows Twitter’s move to similarly label outlets such as British public broadcaster BBC News and National Public Radio in the U.S. Both have objected to the labels.
Twitter’s defines a “government-funded” media outlet as an outlet “where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”
It's just taxpayer money:
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department spent more than $79,000 polling Canadians on whether they preferred the phrase “climate change,” “extreme weather” or “climate crisis.” Results were inconclusive: “Duh, of course the climate changes.”
**
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday pledged ongoing subsidies to Ukraine until it “wins the war.” Cabinet re-announced additional loans and grants detailed in Freeland’s March 28 budget that bring total taxpayer aid to $8 billion and counting: “We will be there until Ukraine wins the war.”
**
Cabinet budgeted dental care grants for children at more than quadruple the typical cost, according to Canadian Dental Association figures. Grants were a maximum $650: “Overall 96 percent of all claims submitted for children under age 12 were for less than $650.”
Dictatorial governments in the past seized countries' resources for their own.
History repeats itself:
The dustup over provincial control of natural resources continued into April 11, with the federal Justice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti putting out a statement denying he said what he clearly said, and the three Prairie premiers issuing a statement in response.
The evening of April 10, Lametti issued the following statement via Twitter, with emphasis added by Pipeline Online:
“I am the Minister responsible for the implementation of the United Nations Declaration Act (UNDA) into federal laws and policies. Last week I met with First Nations leaders to discuss its implementation as part of a session of the AFN-SCA that was focused exclusively on the UNDA. Amongst the many questions I was asked, the Natural Resources Transfer Act was raised by First Nations Chiefs on a couple of occasions. It is part of my job to listen to those concerns. To be clear, at no point did I commit our government to reviewing areas of provincial jurisdiction, including that over natural resources. The focus of our Government’s work is to co-develop an action plan with Indigenous partners that will show the path we must take towards aligning federal laws and policies with UNDRIP.”
CPAC recorded the interchange. It can be found here, starting around the 42 minute mark: https://www.cpac.ca/episode?id=3a22d1b8-f939-4792-ab6e-e0fc4fc89f62
During a panel at the Assembly of First Nations Special Chiefs Assembly, in Ottawa on April 5, Justice Minister David Lametti was asked by two people about provincial jurisdiction over natural resources. Grand Chief Brian Hardlotte from Prince Albert Grand Council asked Lametti to “rescind the act, The Natural Resource Transfer Act, that affect the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. That’s what we’re asking you, minister as an action item with a statement. It affects our treaty rights, of course, under the Sask First Act, that we hear about. And it’s to do with natural resources. Indian natural resources.”
Chief Don Maracle of Mohawks of Bay of Quinte said, “Canada exporters natural resources to other countries. They earn trillions of dollars in revenues from those resources. Those resources were given to the provinces, without ever asking one Indian if it was okay to do that, or what benefits the First Nations expect to receive by Canada consenting to that arrangement.”
(Sidebar: and who says that you own it?)
Also - no one cares about your t-shirts:
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, commonly called Orange Shirt Day, will not be a statutory holiday in Manitoba again this year, Premier Heather Stefanson said Tuesday.
It's called stacking the electoral deck:
Boosting the economic well-being of a population is indeed a worthwhile objective of immigration, but that requires more than simply making the economy bigger.India’s economy is 60 per cent bigger than Canada’s and Switzerland’s is 60 per cent smaller. Is India’s economy what we are aiming for? Making the economic pie as big as possible is clearly not the objective. What matters is the size of the average slice when the pie is divided by the population.The immigration policies that the current Liberal government adopted in 2015 reflected two decades of reforms focused on leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita, the size of the average slice – a sound economic objective. But this government has shifted the objective to something new.The government hinted at its objective in March when it rationalized Canada’s surging population – a one million increase last year – as an alleged economic necessity to fill vacant jobs, which if focused on lower skilled jobs is more likely to lower than raise GDP per capita.Other times, however, the government has been less than transparent. The government’s opacity in what it is trying to achieve leaves us to guess.Perhaps it is trying to maximize our population to raise our geopolitical influence on the world stage or to keep small towns in the Maritimes from disappearing.But why then limit our annual immigration target to only 500,000? Why not announce to the world that if you get here, you will be granted permanent residency status on arrival?That’s because economies have absorptive capacities. When our housing, social infrastructure and business-capital investments do not grow commensurately with our population, there are economic tradeoffs. Usually, the Canadians most adversely affected by these tradeoffs are existing immigrants competing for housing, jobs and social services in the same communities as the newcomers.Perhaps the objective is humanitarian, that is it’s more about boosting the economic well-being of the newcomers themselves. If that is true, however, then we should target the world’s poorest.The world’s 20 poorest countries accounted for 8.2 per cent of the world’s population in the 2015-21 period but only 4.8 per cent of Canada’s new immigrants. The share of immigration dedicated to humanitarian objectives in the government’s latest targets is 19.8 per cent in 2023, 18.5 per cent in 2024, and 16.2 per cent in 2025. Humanitarian ideals is clearly not what this government is focused on.The reality is that the objective of this government’s immigration policies is not the size of the economy, population growth, humanitarianism or GDP per capita.Leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita requires attracting the world’s best and brightest to drive innovation, productivity growth and job creation in advanced sectors that are intensive in new technologies, research and development, and STEM skills. That does not seem to be this government’s priority.The priority of this government appears to be filling existing job slots with workers regardless of the value added of those jobs. The goal is overwhelmingly to support businesses by alleviating the competitive labour market pressures they are facing to increase the wages and productivity of their work forces.This is evident in the government’s recent decision to reverse regulations introduced by its predecessors in 2014 to curtail business reliance on low-skill temporary foreign workers.It is also evident in the government’s recent decision to waive all limits on the off-campus work activity of foreign students, whose numbers are exploding and who are heavily engaged in low-wage work.Most significant, the government is now proposing a reform of its system for selecting candidates for economic-class immigration, known as the “express entry system,” which will target immigrants to fill existing job slots rather than being focused on attracting the world’s top talent.
Also:
Article content
“I conclude that the incompetence of (the claimant’s) former counsel resulted in a miscarriage of justice and amounted to a violation of their right to procedural fairness.”The lawyer named in the ruling is Louis Nadeau of Montreal.
North Koreans and Uighyurs are used as slave labour by the Chinese.
Black men in Canada typically earn less today because “Black people were seen as a source of cheap labour” in the 18th century, says a Department of Justice report. The claim contradicts Statistics Canada data showing most Black families in Canada immigrated here after 1971: “However their slavery and exploitation were part of Canadian society for over 200 years.”
Money-grubbing scumbags.
Latin Mass - the fear of the ages:
Who the heck was this informant for this illegal act, how'd they find this character, how did the FBI make the recruitment pitch, and how much taxpayer money was the informant paid?
Meanwhile, the leftists dominating the Catholic Church itself have been attempting to stamp out the Latin Mass, too — so why was the FBI trying to uselessly duplicate its efforts? Or was it a government-private "partnership" here?
Those seem like valid questions for Jordan to ask as his subpoena brings Wray back to testify under oath.
We could leave it to the Catholics to sort out whether he went to confession afterward for his misdeed, informing on his fellow parishioners for an intrusive government agency in a blatantly illegal act.
The fact that they had an informant (and who knows if it was really one, let alone confined to the Richmond field office?) puts the FBI squarely in the league of Russia's KGB, which, after the Soviet empire collapsed, was found to have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church like termites, spying on people going to church, listening in on confessions, driving clergymen to issue state policy pronouncements. It was an ugly period, and obviously, many Russians abandoned religion altogether as the ugly spectacle became obvious, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Might that be the real aim of the Bidenites — to separate people from their churches, making them distrustful, and no longer wanting to be associated with them? That certainly would be convenient for the state, whether the Soviet one or the American one.
Some would prefer that we forget:
It was a bad period to be in school. That is an understatement in the extreme. Says Youqin Wang,
My high-school life was horrible and bloody. On August 5, 1966, the Red Guard students beat to death our principal, a 50-year-old woman named “Bian.” They beat her to death on campus. . . .
In 1968, four teachers committed suicide after they were insulted and tortured.
Youqin Wang further says,
On August 18, 1966, Mao met 1 million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. Song Binbin, the head of the Red Guards at my high school, presented to Mao the Red Guard armband. Her father was Song Renqiong, a leading official in the Party.
The violence escalated and spread to the whole country. In the summer of 1966, thousands of people in Beijing alone were killed by the Red Guards.
Youqin Wang herself was labeled a “white expert student.” She was “expert” because she had skipped grades and was younger than others in her class. As for “white,” it did not refer to skin color. It meant “counterrevolutionary.” “Red” referred to that which was properly Communist and good.
Justin's vision for us.
His favourite country.
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