Four more sleeps until Easter 🐰🐣
The new boss is the same as the old boss:
But Mark Carney was installed as leader because he is the ultimate avatar of that sense. The blue suit, the calming tone—maybe he actually was a non-ideological “above politics” leader for whom many centrist Canadians pine.
So it’s a real mistake that his Liberal Party was caught engaging in the dirtiest, most cynical, least “good government” style campaigning. The details include Liberal staffers planting campaign buttons with Trump-style messaging at a conservative conference, meant to draw an association between the Canadian Right and the MAGA movement down south. And it’s to the credit of CBC journalist Kate McKenna that she broke the story on Sunday and followed up with a question on it yesterday.
But this shouldn’t be a one-day story. It goes to the core of the case that the Carney Liberals are making in this election. So journalists should keep asking questions. Sure, Carney says he didn’t know about it, but did he give approval, tacit or otherwise, for dirty tricks? If it wasn’t Carney, who in Liberal HQ approved? Why doesn’t he make the campaign directors take responsibility and resign? Why are they importing American culture issues into Canadian politics, all the while claiming to deplore “American-style” political and social influence? Most importantly: why is the Liberal Party stirring up division, not just going after opposing candidates, but trying to misleadingly smear ordinary volunteers and supporters?
That’s not good government, it’s the worst kind of partisanship, the sort that justifies mistreatment and lying for partisan advantage.
But, really, if one is stupid to be swayed by what is clearly fear-mongering based on emotional retardation and partisanship, then perhaps voting isn't for you.
The real issue is having a clearly compromised party continue its economy-ruining ways because of the fomented hatred for a more successful world leader.
Why don't we look to ourselves before we sit down to our Two Minutes Hate?
Canada's fortunes are tied to the United States.
Instead of threatening to rattle the sabres we don't have or back-tracking from empty threats, why don't we make a deal that would make both parties happy?
But that would make sense.
More:
By contrast, six in 10 Liberal voters said they were motivated primarily by “a fear of what the future holds for Canada,” with the unpredictable U.S. President Donald Trump threatening trade relations.
I'm afraid that Carney and his China-cosying friends will wipe out my savings.
If the Liberals didn't run on the imaginary phantoms from the American South, they would have to run on their records.
They would be screwed.
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Liberal MP Ya’ara Saks (York Centre, Ont.) last night blamed media conspiracies in dismissing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s contacts with friends of China. Saks made the comment in a heated B’nai Brith election debate as her Conservative opponent expressed astonishment: “Is that your idea of what you’re going to censor, when people talk about what is happening in our election right now?”
Now, about that:
On September 9, 2024, former prime minister Justin Trudeau named Carney the chair of a task force on economic growth.
The following month, Carney met with the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China, according to Poilievre and a Chinese-language news article he cited in his post. Then, a few weeks later, Brookfield allegedly secured a $250 million loan from a Chinese state-owned bank.
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The Bureau report reveals Brookfield had already invested over $3 billion in China before Carney took the helm in 2020. Research suggests that Carney played a role in expanding the firm’s presence there.
In March 2024, The Telegraph reported that Mark Carney met with Xi Jinping as China sought to strengthen ties with the West. Corporate documents revealed that Brookfield held over $3 billion in politically sensitive investments with Chinese state-linked real estate and energy companies, along with a significant offshore banking presence. One major venture involved a $750-million investment in high-end Shanghai commercial property in 2013, partnering with a Hong Kong tycoon affiliated with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which the CIA identifies as a key “United Front” entity of Beijing.
This investment occurred at the peak of China’s real estate bubble. Last year, as China’s market crashed and vacancies in Shanghai soared, Brookfield under Carney secured hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from the Bank of China to refinance its Shanghai commercial land holdings. This emergency loan came a decade after Carney, while Governor of the Bank of England, helped facilitate the Bank of China’s global expansion. In a 2013 speech, Carney announced that the Bank of England had signed an agreement with the People’s Bank of China to support the internationalization of the Renminbi, describing it as a global good.
How interesting.
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Liberal leader Mark Carney says pipelines are “not necessarily” the large projects his government would prioritize to deal with the “crisis” of the trade war with the United States.
And how do you propose that Canadian oil gets sold? Through bottles?
**
It's an election year. A scapegoat must be used in order to save the other traitors:
Records show TD Bank had concerns about suspicious activities of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations and the information was passed on to Ottawa’s financial watchdog. The CTCCO has ties to the Chinese consulate and Beijing’s United Front Work Department, which is responsible for overseas propaganda, disinformation and foreign-interference operations.
TD examined CTCCO’s transactions and identified possible money laundering. The “transactions involve individuals or entity (ies) identified by media, law enforcement and/or intelligence agencies as being linked to criminal activities,” according to the documents seen by The Globe and Mail.
TD also suspected the CTCCO accounts were used for “pass through activities.” This is a term used when money is quickly transferred in and out of accounts, often without the account holder having a direct connection to the ultimate beneficiary.
The TD information on CTCCO was sent to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), which investigates money laundering and terrorist financing.
The records reviewed by The Globe include banking information on Mr. Dong and his wife, Sophia Qiao. Ms. Qiao had received a $200,000 cheque in 2019 from Cheng Yi Wei, permanent honorary chair and executive director of CTCCO. Ms. Qiao repaid the money in 2022. There is no explanation in the records of why the couple’s account was closed.
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Organizers of national election debates dropped immigration from tomorrow’s English language telecast but not the French debate scheduled this evening at 6 pm Eastern. No reason was given. Provinces outside Québec have seen the highest rates of immigration and most opposition to record quotas: “Do you feel there are too many, too few or about the right number of immigrants coming to Canada?”
People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier yesterday proposed a first-ever national moratorium on immigration until Parliament solves the housing crisis. “The Canadian government should work for us Canadians, not foreigners,” he told reporters: “We were called racists.”
Let's look at it this way: millions of unvetted people (none of whom are doctors and engineers - and why aren't we training and keeping Canadian professionals, by the way?) are coming into the country and have no prospects of finding jobs, supporting themselves, living in a house, and the answer is to bring more people to sleep on sidewalks?
Not a great plan.
Is this the same province that needs to build up its francophone numbers by letting ANYONE in?:
The new Parliament must amend the Criminal Code to prohibit hate speech under the guise of religious instruction, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said yesterday. It follows a 2023 incident in which a Muslim speaker wished death on Montréal Jews while reciting a Quran prayer: “O Allah, destroy the enemies of the people of Gaza.”
Also - fire her now:
Cabinet’s $191,000-a year Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia should be fired, the Canadian Future Party said yesterday. Amira Elghawaby, a former Toronto Star contributor, must be removed and her budget revoked, said the Party’s platform: “Remove the position and budget.”
No one letting thugs threaten actual students should be rewarded with public funding:
The federal government announced on April 14 that it is freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard after the university said it would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle diversity programs and limit student protests.
Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a campus-wide message earlier on April 14 that “the University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
Hours later, the Education Department’s task force on anti-Semitism released a statement, announcing the funding freeze.
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges—that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” the task force stated.
In case we had forgotten how evil communism is:
Sheltering in the shade of a bus repurposed into a mobile museum, Mean Loeuy tells a group of children about the hell he went through in a Khmer Rouge labour camp.
"At the beginning we shared a bowl of rice between 10 people," recounts the 71-year-old man who lost more than a dozen family members during Cambodia's bloodiest era.
"By the end, it was one grain of rice with a splash of water in the palm of our hands," he says, describing the camp as "like a prison without walls."
The children look on with expressions ranging from nonplussed to horror.
Mean Loeuy is one of a handful of survivors supporting the latest project of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the U.N.-sponsored tribunal that delivered its last verdict on Pol Pot's brutal regime in September 2022 before wrapping up its trials.
Since January last year, a team led by a lawyer has traveled around Cambodia teaching schoolchildren about the government it ruled as genocidal, sharing 20 years' worth of evidence and testimony from victims such as Mean Loeuy.
The capital Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge 50 years ago on Thursday, but now two-thirds of Cambodia's population are under 30.
Most grew up without living through the horrors of Pol Pot's rule between 1975 and 1979, nor the 20 years of conflict that followed.
Many young people have no more than an inkling of the grimmest period of their country's history — one still haunted by the deaths of around 2 million people through starvation, disease, forced labour or murder.
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'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death,' says Kwon Hyuk, as he remembers his time running a concentration camp in North Korea.
'Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'
As chief of management at Camp 22, buried in the remote mountains of North Hamgyong, it was once his job to watch the cruel experiments on political prisoners.
'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said in frank comments to the BBC in 2004.
'The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying,' he said, but desperately tried to resuscitate their children until their last breath.
Camp 22 was reportedly closed eight years later, in 2012. And North Korea rebuked the claims as part of a US-inspired 'smear campaign'.
But Kwon Hyuk, who spoke out in the hope that the regime's evils would at last be exposed, is joined by hundreds of voices corroborating his stark assessment of the 'banality of evil' in our times.
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