Your middle-of-the-week interjection ...
This country does lip service to veterans, the sacrifices of whom no one truly understands.
What better way to discredit them by injecting one's own sad politics into the mix:
Only in Toronto would we be as stupid and as insensitive as that.
The City of Toronto at the Old City Hall Cenotaph Tuesday made sure that before we got to our war dead it was all about everything but them.
Before the bells rang at 11 a.m. on the 11th day on the 11th month — before the moment of silence or a rendition of the Last Post on this Remembrance Day — Aretha Phillip, the chief of protocol and external relations, passed the podium microphone over to two air cadets “to share the lands and ancestral acknowledgments with us.”
She didn’t dare do it herself this year.
One of the cadets gave the traditional land acknowledgment. The other talked of people being brought here against their will as part of the “transatlantic slave trade.”
So much for remembrance, dignity and respect for the fallen Canadian troops of the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, Afghanistan, peacekeeping missions, and the Cold War.
Their tributes could wait.
The following is what was read out first. By the way, these are not the words of the young cadets. They were used to read this out. Those behind this travesty were hiding behind them. This should not have happened.
(Sidebar: I won't bother re-posting that tripe. Go to the link and read it but it truly is a waste of time.)
To wit:
“Lest we forget our veterans who served and died in foreign wars and, instead, focus on exaggerated slavery and past colonialism.”
— Kevin Vuong 🇨🇦 (@KevinVuongxMP) November 12, 2025
For #Toronto’s historically illiterate: slavery was abolished by the British Empire in 1834, which is 33 years before 🇨🇦 became a nation (in 1867). https://t.co/JRYbU05QQZ
**
New Brunswick Conservative MP Mike Dawson said it was an affront to the memory of the fallen that the Chaplain General’s 2023 Direction on Chaplain’s Spiritual Reflection in Public Settings is still in place.
“I am ashamed that our government intends to restrict public expressions of faith in our military, or in plain terms, to ban prayer. It is cowardice to ask our sons and daughters to put themselves in harm’s way but refuse them the right to express their faith in God. To deny those who provide our freedom the right to openly pray is an insult to those who never came home,” Dawson told the House of Commons.
I'll just leave this right here:
I then, with error yet encompass'd, cried:
"O master! What is this I hear? What race
Are these, who seem so overcome with woe?"
He thus to me: "This miserable fate
Suffer the wretched souls of those, who liv'd
Without or praise or blame, with that ill band
Of angels mix'd, who nor rebellious prov'd
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only. From his bounds Heaven drove them forth,
Not to impair his lustre, nor the depth
Of Hell receives them, lest th' accursed tribe
Should glory thence with exultation vain."
I then: "Master! what doth aggrieve them thus,
That they lament so loud?" He straight replied:
"That will I tell thee briefly. These of death
No hope may entertain: and their blind life
So meanly passes, that all other lots
They envy. Fame of them the world hath none,
Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."
And I, who straightway look'd, beheld a flag,
Which whirling ran around so rapidly,
That it no pause obtain'd: and following came
Such a long train of spirits, I should ne'er
Have thought, that death so many had despoil'd.
When some of these I recogniz'd, I saw
And knew the shade of him, who to base fear
Yielding, abjur'd his high estate. Forthwith
I understood for certain this the tribe
Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing
And to his foes. These wretches, who ne'er lived,
Went on in nakedness, and sorely stung
By wasps and hornets, which bedew'd their cheeks
With blood, that mix'd with tears dropp'd to their feet,
And by disgustful worms was gather'd there.
We owe these veterans an apology for screwing up this country.
Also:
“There’s a way to express yourself politically, but I don’t think it’s when you’re singing the national anthem. It’s not a time to shove your political views, whatever they are, into the conversation.
“Don’t make it a me moment instead of an us moment.”
Soon, we won't even have an anthem.
Nor a country:
Protectionists, start your engines. On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a “Buy Canadian” procurement policy that prioritizes Canadian suppliers for all manner of federal spending, including a second set of national “major projects” he’s announcing on Thursday. “We will build Canadian, by becoming our own best customer,” Carney intoned. Ottawa will allocate nearly $186 million in new funding to the policy, including “streamlined support for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses trying to break into the federal market.”
(Sidebar: what products are made in Canada and not China? This China. I'll wait.)
At first blush, this sounds incredibly patriotic: make things at home, spend our tax dollars on our own businesses, support Canadian jobs. But it also represents a retreat from the free trade policies that have served Canada so well, while doing nothing to counter the big bugbear of our economy: low productivity. It makes a virtue of corporate welfare, whereby the government picks economic winners and losers, in this case based solely on nationality.
(Sidebar: read - kickbacks. The Liberal way of doing things.)
The “Buy Canadian” doctrine effectively gives Canadian companies a guaranteed market, regardless of how good their products are, or how efficient their business is. But guaranteed markets breed complacency. The drive to cut costs, innovate, and reach new markets vanishes — and consumer prices go up.
Case in point: for decades, Canadian regulations have sheltered our Big Six banks and our telecom monopolies from competition. As a result, Canadians pay billions in “excess” bank fees and some of the highest telecom costs in the world. Supply management policies do the same thing for agricultural products, keeping foreign competition out and raising the cost of staples like eggs and milk for consumers.
Worse yet, attempts to prefer “home-grown” businesses can lead to graft and waste. The $59-millionArriveCan procurement scandal resulted in part from guidelines requiring the awarding of contracts to Indigenous-owned firms, which saw companies pretending to be First-Nations based to get deals. In fact, Ottawa’s entire IT procurement policy was slammed for a lack of variety in suppliers.
When you erect trade walls — even patriotic ones disguised as procurement policy — you also stunt productivity. According to the Bank of Canada, a more competitive business environment would drive greater innovation and efficiency, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, the very ones Carney’s strategy now wants to prefer. Canada’s productivity problem will not be solved by stifling competition, but by opening it up.
Carney is appealing to the base anti-Americanism that has pervaded Canada since the Sixties without actually tapping into our vast resources, lowering corporate taxes, building factories that make essential goods for the country, and trading when and where we need to.
Rather like the Canadian Juche but less.
**
Two prominent examples illustrate the issue. Manitoba NDP MP Leah Gazan would criminalize those who publicly disagree with her widely shared views on residential schools; in her second attempt to pass a private member’s bill she seeks to make it illegal to condone, deny, downplay or justify these schools (Tomson Highway, who reported a positive experience in residential school, should beware). In the second example, Gazan’s former colleague and NDP MP until 2025, Charlie Angus, sought to sanction those whose views on the oil and gas industry differed from his.
We should be thankful that they are not in a position to impose their opinions on the rest of us but we should be concerned that they can advance their views from public offices. Freedom of expression is fundamental in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and in our western liberal values generally, and we should expect it to be vigorously defended by members of Parliament. By what presumption do Gazan and Angus seek to deprive us of this freedom?
Both can claim that their views are shared by many or most Canadians, but that is not the test of permissible speech. Freedom of expression exists to protect all lawful speech including minority and unpopular opinions as well as those more commonly held. Indeed it is the former that are most in need of protection.
The wider question is one for all of us. We must be vigilant in protecting our rights and freedoms. We live in censorious times, and Gazan and Angus are not alone in wanting to shut down voices not aligned with theirs; activists on several fronts want to do the same. In the more polarized environment that we experience today, differences are cleavages with sides intolerant of one another and unwilling to engage on the merits of what divides them. Protesters are too often bent on sidelining and silencing opponents, and third parties prefer to stay back in the shadows not wanting to become involved.
A convenient get-out-of-jail free card:
More than 500 days in harsh pre-trial custody was enough punishment for a Mohawk man caught driving around Peterborough with a crack pipe in his lap and a “killing machine” of a rifle in the back seat, along with a flame thrower in the trunk, according to a recent sentence of time served from Ontario’s Court of Justice.
Jesse Garlow, a convicted drug trafficker who was under a firearms prohibition, had been in custody since June 7, 2024 when he was sentenced. Police initially pulled him over because the car he was driving was weaving.
“I have determined that systemic and background factors have affected the degree of responsibility of this offender. Mr. Garlow is the personification of intergenerational trauma. I cannot imagine more sympathetic circumstances or mitigating factors that cry out for some compassion. Punishing him with a further period of incarceration for the sake of the common good would be unjust,” wrote Justice Brenda Green, who recently handed Garlow a suspended sentence and three years of probation.
The Liberals will NEVER put a moratorium on unvetted mass migration.
A Liberal MP has sponsored a Commons petition to grant federal aid and permanent residency to foreign students and migrant workers facing departure or deportation. More than three million foreigners are in Canada on valid or expired temporary permits, by official estimate: “Canada’s non-permanent resident population was estimated at approximately 3,049,277.”
When you've lost the alphabet crowd ... :
Subsidized LGBTQ activists are protesting a federal bill to ban disruptive rallies outside synagogues. New measures to outlaw intimidation at places of worship were “concerning given the rise in LGBTQ activism,” the group Egale Canada wrote the Commons justice committee: “LGBTQ protestors will be forced to question whether they could be seen as provoking a state of fear.”
Money-wasting or money-laundering?:
It is “difficult” to determine what good came from a multi-million dollar subsidy program launched to promote United Nations policies, say federal auditors. Then-International Development Minister Karina Gould launched the program in 2021 on the promise of a “brighter future for everyone.”
French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Tuesday that any Israeli plans for annexation in the West Bank would be a “red line” and would provoke a European reaction.
He spoke as Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Paris one month into a fragile truce between Hamas and Israel, following two years of war triggered by the terror group’s October 7, 2023 attack against Israel.
Abbas, 89, is the longtime head of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control over parts of the West Bank, and is being considered to possibly assume governance in Gaza under the deal.
Macron, whose country in September recognized a Palestinian state, warned against any Israeli plans for annexation in the West Bank following an uptick in violence in the Palestinian territory.
“Plans for partial or total annexation, whether legal or de facto, constitute a red line to which we will respond strongly with our European partners,” Macron said at a joint press conference with Abbas.
Also:
Israel's parliament has passed the first reading of a bill proposing the death penalty for those it deems to be terrorists acting against the state - a requirement which means it is likely to be used only against Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis.
The bill - which has been condemned by the Palestinian Authority and human rights groups - was backed in the 120-seat Knesset by 39 votes to 16.
Far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir - whose Jewish Power party brought the vote - celebrated late on Monday by handing out sweets.
"After the law is finally passed - terrorists will only be released to hell," he said.
The bill must pass two more readings before becoming law.
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