In the bleak mid-pre-winter ....
While the world wasn't looking ... :
Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media baron Jimmy Lai on Monday was found guilty of sedition and collusion with foreign countries by a Hong Kong court.
The 78-year-old was charged under Hong Kong’s controversial national security law, enacted by Beijing in 2020 after pro-democracy protests swept the region in 2019.
The court said Lai was guilty of a “conspiracy to commit collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.”
It also said that Lai and his tabloid Apple Daily, requested a foreign country or entity outside of China “to impose sanctions or blockade, or engage in other hostile activities” against Hong Kong or China.The court, in its 850-page judgement, said that the businessman “harbored his resentment and hatred of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] for many of his adult years.”
Lai, one of the CCP’s most vocal critics, had pleaded not guilty to two charges of colluding with foreign forces under the national security law, as well as a charge of conspiracy to publish seditious materials.
He has been under arrest since 2020, with his trial starting in December 2023. Lai’s sentencing is expected to be on Jan. 12.
While Canada wasn't looking:
A small group of demonstrators marched back and forth outside of Ma’s office in Markham, north of Toronto, on Sunday carrying signs that accused him of being a traitor to the voters who elected him and a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Questions raised about his approach to China include an endorsement of his candidacy in April’s federal election by a pro-Beijing community leader. Critics also raise his previous, senior position with the Hong Kong hospital authority, and his appearance in August at a dinner celebrating the Chinese Freemasons Society, a group accused of being a proxy of sorts for the Chinese government.
Two of the speakers at that event, including China’s vice-consul in Toronto, used the forum to promote the idea of what Beijing calls “reunification” of mainland China and Taiwan. Annexing Taiwan is a major goal of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has not ruled out using military force to achieve it. The overwhelming majority of people reject the notion in Taiwan, a democratic, self-governed enclave that has never been part of communist China.
At the event, Ma simply brought greetings from Parliament and praised the Freemasons group, known as Hongmen in Chinese, but said nothing to indicate he supports unifying Taiwan and the mainland.
Still, Gloria Fung, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, said there was enough worrisome about Ma’s record regarding Beijing that she warned a Conservative organizer to carefully vet him as a candidate early this year.
So why didn't they?
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Chinese-language outlets including EasyCA show Ma listed as a director of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association in 2019, with additional Chinese-language coverage later describing him as a leader. Two years later, the group held a widely covered October 2021 press conference accusing O’Toole’s “anti-China” stance of costing the Conservatives the election and demanding his resignation.
The National Post reported that the CCCA’s spokesman at the event asserted that China’s arrest of the “Two Michaels” occurred only after “Canada started the war,” that China had a right to fly military aircraft into Taiwan’s air-defence zone, and that Canada should not publicly criticize Beijing’s human-rights abuses.
Dear Canada, no one cares what you think and your political class hates you:
Support for new pipeline construction across Canada is rising, with 75% of Canadians saying they favour building new routes to Eastern Canada and British Columbia, according to an MEI-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.
The survey also found that 71% of Canadians believe the approval process for major energy projects, including environmental assessments, is too long and in need of reform.
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In a year-end CBC interview, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre confirmed that his strategy to build an oil pipeline differs from the prime minister’s in that he would eventually steamroll opponents who stood in its way.
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An Abacus Data poll found that 67 percent of the 1,500 people surveyed earlier this month said the cost of living in their area is the worst they can ever remember it being. Another 21 percent say the cost of living is bad where they live, although they can recall periods when it was even more challenging.
Only 11 percent say the cost of living is not bad, the survey said.
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I would say that we are in the bottom ten percent:
A conservative Canadian think tank ranked Canada as the twelfth “freest” country in the world based on a global index that measures human freedoms, while claiming that freedom has declined for the vast majority of the world’s population in recent years.
The Fraser Institute, jointly with the U.S.-based Cato Institute, released its annual Human Freedom Index on Tuesday, which found that nearly 90 per cent of people across the world had less freedom in 2023 – the latest year for which data was available – than they did in 2019.
“Governments around the world have recently been restricting freedom of expression, freedom of association and assembly, freedom of movement, and the freedom to use sound money,” Matthew D. Mitchell, a Fraser Institute senior fellow and the report’s co-author, said in a press release.
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A&W Restaurant franchisees in Québec say they face closure without migrant labour. Owners in a petition to the Commons human resources committee said they could find no Québecers willing to work in fast food: ‘They are currently the only labour force truly available to fill positions that Québec workers refuse.’
Quebec Liberal Party Leader Pablo Rodriguez will resign amid a crisis involving allegations of vote-buying and reimbursed donations during the leadership race he won in June.
The decision was confirmed to The Canadian Press by two sources within the party who did not want to speak publicly. Rodriguez will address his caucus during a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
Rodriguez, who had hoped to restore the Liberals to power in next year's election, cast his party as the only viable alternative to the sovereigntist Parti Québécois and the only sure way for Quebec to avoid a third referendum on independence in the next four years. But the former federal cabinet minister proved unable to overcome the crisis that has consumed his party for the last month.
After Quebec’s anti-corruption police announced a criminal investigation of the party last week, prominent Liberals began openly calling for him to step aside.
No country for anyone:
Cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby secretly paid $80,000 for pro-Palestine research to counter alleged “disinformation” by MPs, senators and media, Access To Information records disclose. Elghawaby’s Office of the Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia had flatly denied the confidential funding at taxpayers’ expense: “Thank you again for this impeccable work.”
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Well, Canadians, what are you going to do about it?:
Montreal for Palestine stopped by the city’s downtown Christmas market on Sunday to harass and intimidate its patrons — on the same day that an antisemitic terrorist attack took place in Australia.
On Sunday, Montrealers woke to news of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah event on Australia’s Bondi Beach. Two men — a father and son — opened fire on the crowd, killing 15 and injuring about 40. Those killed ranged in age from 10 to 87 and included two rabbis, a 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor.
This didn’t stop Montreal for Palestine, a group known for its weekly protests and street prayers outside Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, from taking to the city’s streets that same day.
Worse, these protesters appear to be escalating their behaviour, testing our laws, the limits of our police forces and the patience of Montrealers.
On this day of all days, they parked themselves outside a Christmas market located at Place des Arts, where citizens were gathered with their children to shop, eat and enjoy the atmosphere.
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Fat MPs fail to waddle into Israel to score votes back home:
Pro-Palestinian advocates are claiming that Israel is suppressing independent reporting in the West Bank after a delegation of Canadians, including six MPs, was denied entry into the conflict-prone region. This is nonsense, as the Palestinian territory is easily accessible. I know because I travelled there last Friday.
The sponsored 30-person delegation was organized by the Canadian-Muslim Vote (TCMV), a registered charity that says it’s dedicated to empowering Canadian Muslims through civic engagement. After visiting Jordan, the group had planned on crossing the border into the West Bank for meetings with civil society groups, refugees and officials from the Canadian government and Palestinian Authority (PA). ...
Upon arriving at the Allenby Crossing, the only legal pathway between Jordan and the West Bank, the delegation was denied entry by Israeli border officials primarily due to “public security or public safety or public order considerations.” The delegates — excluding the Canadian MPs — were then issued denial letters, which clearly requested, in English, signatures from the recipients confirming that the letters had been delivered.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan, a member of the delegation, shared a photo of one of the letters, confirming Israel’s justification for blocking access. Yet Liberal MP Fares Al Soud, another delegation member, told the Toronto Star that he and his co-travellers did not sign the letters, which he said were mostly written in Hebrew, because they were not given enough time to understand them.
Later that day, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which manages the West Bank’s border crossings, confirmed in a statement that the delegation had arrived “without prior co-ordination,” and had been blocked “for security reasons.”
Behold! The Canadian immigration system:
When permanent resident Navinder Singh was caught with child pornography on his phone in 2018, he didn’t understand what was so wrong about it. He thought that his 19 videos of sexual abuse were “funny” and told a forensic psychologist afterward that things “were different in India.”
Without any details — it gets worse — this alone would tell any regular Canadian that Singh was incompatible with our society. But at every step of the way, the system has fought hard to keep him in Canada. By 2024, he was still here, fighting deportation, and it’s very possible that he remains. His case highlights the many failure points at which the immigration system fails to keep criminal perverts out of the country.
Singh first came to Canada back in 2013 on a temporary foreign worker permit, which was upgraded to permanent residency in 2018. This was an admission and integration failure: he didn’t share the western taboo against child sexual abuse, nor did he absorb that part of our moral code in the years prior to his arrest. We don’t appear to screen for that when admitting foreign workers.
Singh got his permanent residency papers at the end of February 2018 (along with his family). But the papers needed to be confirmed by immigration officials, so the next day they crossed from Alberta into Montana and back again to jump the immigration queue, a loophole known as “flagpoling.” It was here that Canada Border Service Agency officers became suspicious: Singh had a Class 1 licence that officers suspected was fraudulent.
Singh gave his phone to border officers, who found shocking videos within.
Read the rest if you can stomach it.
Ottawa has sealed all progress reports connected to the federally funded search for the alleged graves of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, citing confidentiality to block public access to documents detailing how the money was used and what was actually found.
Blacklock's Reporter says the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations refused an Access to Information request for the records, saying the reports submitted by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation were protected under the Access to Information Act as confidential third-party information.
The decision effectively shuts down scrutiny of a project that received $12.1 million in federal funding for what Ottawa described as the “exhumation of remains” and forensic DNA testing.
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