Ashamed of nothing:
Cabinet yesterday acknowledged stiff opposition to its proposal to regulate legal internet content. Attorney General Arif Virani said a censor bill will be split to focus on issues that “should be a priority for everybody.”
Like calling Justin a useless weasel, right?
It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t think much of Trudeau as a world leader. He called the Canadian PM “very dishonest and weak” and “meek and mild” during the G7 summit in La Malbaie, Quebec in 2018. At the time, they were butting heads about US tariffs on aluminum and steel.
When Trump doesn’t like a political figure, he rarely hides his feelings. Indeed, if Trudeau’s only line of defence against the 25 per cent tariffs was that it would kill the Canadian economy (and his political career), Trump presumably thought it was blubbering that deserved to be mocked. That’s exactly what he’s done.
Alas, Trudeau left himself wide open to this attack from Trump. It would have happened if he was a Canadian prime minister, US governor – or his previous role as a drama teacher.
Trump - he's the guy who gets things done, and everyone (especially the pants-wetters) knows it:
Many Canadians — 40 per cent — are prepared to cut Mexico loose in any trade talks Canada has with the United States, and most — 56 per cent — are not prepared to welcome any influx of migrants fleeing northward to escape Trump’s threatened mass deportation orders, according to an Abacus Data poll over the last week shared with the Star.
An Angus Reid Institute poll similarly shows almost half of Canadians — 49 per cent — want the federal government to take a tough approach to Trump’s tariff threat to slap a 25 per cent surcharge on Canadian imports. They agree with the suggestion Ottawa should “play hardball — even if the tariffs come, Canada shouldn’t let itself be bullied.” Another 33 per cent said the federal government should “try to negotiate for a lower tariff,” while only 10 per cent said Canada should “concede and do whatever the U.S. demands to avoid the tariffs.”
**
Leger found that less than a third of Canadians polled (31 per cent) said they are very or somewhat confident in the federal government’s ability to successfully handle the new U.S. president and his tariff proposals. The lack of confidence was prevalent across the country, in rural and urban areas, in every age group, and among both men and women.
Only Liberal voters (67 per cent) said they have confidence in the federal government’s ability to succeed. That number drops sharply among Conservative voters (19 per cent).
“Canadians are deeply dissatisfied with the government. The popularity of the prime minister and his party is suffering, and I think that… they’re just not feeling confident about how the prime minister is going to measure up against the incoming president,” said Enns.
**
The Canadian government is talking about adding helicopters and drones at the border to stop fentanyl shipments so Donald Trump drops his threat of devastating economic tariffs.
But David Asher, a Trump ally, says it should be doing more. Much more. And as someone who's worked on fentanyl policy for Trump, he says Canada should be making substantive, systemic changes.
He calls it frustrating to hear Canadians downplay their country's role in the fentanyl epidemic, just because a minuscule percentage of seized contraband comes from Canada. There's more to it than that, he says.
**
It's not simply inability; it's unwillingness:
According to Canada’s Border Services Agency, the number of illegal immigrants crossing southward into the United States has surged since 2022.
The agency sent its intelligence document to senior Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada officials.
“The vast majority were very likely in Canada for less than 6 months of which a large portion were in Canada for less than 3 weeks,” the agency’s intelligence analysis document states.
The document adds that “the majority of individuals who attempt to cross southbound illegally arrive by air, mainly at Montreal Trudeau International Airport and Toronto Pearson International Airport and move quickly.”
President-elect Donald Trump warned the Canadian government that he would impose a 25% tariff on its products until the country acted to curb illegal crossings into the United States. “This spurred Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc to promise more funding for helicopters, drones, censors and ‘boots on the ground to police the border in the past fortnight,'” The Globe and Mail reported.
**
Canada’s border services agency has no infrastructure in place to search trains for drugs, people and other goods crossing illegally into the country by rail, the head of the border agents’ union says — a security gap that adds to concerns about an overall lack of enforcement at the border.
Mark Weber, national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, says a shortage of personnel and equipment at official points of entry means less than one per cent of containers moving through Canadian seaports are being searched for illicit goods.
That rate is even smaller for cross-border rail traffic, he said.
“We don’t do it at all,” he told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block. “We don’t know what comes in via train.
“Could be products, people (coming in, but) we don’t have the infrastructure to do those searches. … That’s really something Canada should be investing in.”
**
Canada’s privacy laws are one of the “real barriers” to addressing the significant issue of cross-border sex trafficking, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Canada says.
Sex trafficking is one of several border security concerns that have been routinely discussed between the two countries under the Biden administration, Ambassador David Cohen says, long before U.S. president-elect Donald Trump began pushing Canada and Mexico to address irregular migration and drug trafficking or risk punishing tariffs.
**
Canada will establish two new Arctic consulates in Alaska and Greenland and appoint a dedicated Arctic ambassador as part of a long-awaited strategy for a region where Russia and China are increasingly seeking to assert their influence.
The creation of a diplomatic presence in Anchorage, Alaska, in particular, is seen as important to managing Canada’s relations with US President-elect Donald Trump, which have been severely strained in recent weeks over his threat to impose hefty tariffs and pressure to tighten border security.
“The Arctic will be key in our engagement with the US. The US is our closest partner — and will continue to be — as we invest in Arctic security with the new policy, the Arctic foreign policy, as its foundation,” Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said at an event to release the strategy on Friday.
Even Vice-President Elect JD Vance gets things done:
Canada has seen a number of church burnings in recent years thanks to anti-Christian bigotry.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 6, 2024
All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group.
Jamil is speaking the truth. Shame on journalists who refuse to see what's obvious. https://t.co/LKq146gTGc
It's called professionalism, Canada.
No comments:
Post a Comment