Cabinet used a costly “Digital Citizen Initiative” to fund partisan research at taxpayers’ expense, Access To Information records show. The Initiative launched by then-Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould polled Black people on whether they voted Liberal and hired Liberal publicists to monitor “anti-Liberal” media: “We decided to focus.”
Taxpayers in Canada Revenue Agency focus groups complained they were “gouged” and “overtaxed” by greedy auditors, says a pollsters’ report. The research followed cabinet’s threat to enact a $17.4 billion increase in capital gains taxes: “Impressions of Canada’s tax system focused on its complexity, lack of fairness and rates of taxation which were characterized as high.”
Governor General Mary Simon and entourage billed nearly $37,000 in hotel charges to visit the Paris Paralympics last August, records show. The junket followed demands from MPs for greater scrutiny of Simon’s expenses that included silk jackets, limousine rides and gourmet meals: “The Governor General has shown a lack of respect for taxpayers.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals’ amendment of the Broadcasting Act attempts to classify podcasters and musicians as “broadcasters” and subject them to national broadcast rules.
Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, which has passed through both the House and the Senate and gained Royal Assent on February 2, 2023, will control what content search engines like Google and YouTube recommends to Canadian users.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation in an in-depth analysis on the legislation earlier compared Bill C-11's censorship to "authoritarian nations like China and North Korea."
The bill also compels podcasters to register under the national broadcast regulator Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and requires media giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify to promote Canadian content and pay 5% of their revenue to support Canada’s legacy broadcasting system, according to Music Canada’s Patrick Rogers.
Of that 5%, 30% is to be allocated to “a new fund to support commercial radio news in smaller markets.”
“It’s frankly bewildering that the CRTC would divert funding from music streaming platforms away from the music industry to subsidize commercial radio news. Put simply, digital platforms are being asked to subsidize a totally different, struggling industry,” said Rogers. ...
Canadian psychologist and renowned podcaster Dr. Jordan Peterson, who recently announced he has moved to the United States — in part due to legislation like Bill C-11, commented on some of the consequences of Trudeau’s streaming Act in 2022.
“Let's say that the new media, which is the internet itself, was capable of producing some of the opposition to the globalists and Trudeau that the legacy media have abandoned,” said Peterson at the time.
“What Bill C-11 has done is basically, it defined all internet content of any sort as subject to the same CRTC — they’ve defined them as broadcasters that are equivalent to, let's say, to CBC, or CTV.”
Peterson explained broadcasters are different because airtime is limited, and “the government had to parse up the airwaves.”
The internet, on the other hand, “is not a scarce resource,” said Peterson.
“And now, if a small business person like me, let's say, doesn't broadcast in French and English and in indigenous languages and to any diverse range of people with disabilities, and highlight Canadian content, then the government can do what it needs to do, to deprioritize their distribution."
“And they'll do that by putting pressure on the search engine providers like YouTube and Google, or just stopping them all together.”
Trudeau’s Online Harms Act, introduced in February, marked a low point in 2024 as the most aggressive assault against free expression in Canadian history. But the Liberals’ Bill C-63 was not the only symptom of a sick culture: too many Canadians want to empower government to decide on behalf of everyone what is true or false.
NDP Member of Parliament Leah Gazan introduced Bill C-413 to criminalize “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada,” and make this new offence punishable by up to two years in prison.
Earlier in the year, NDP Member of Parliament Charlie Angus introduced Bill C-372, to make it a crime to state (or even suggest) that fossil fuels “lead to positive outcomes in relation to the environment, the health of Canadians, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples or the Canadian or global economy.”
Trudeau, Gazan and Angus are so convinced of the truth of their own beliefs that — if given the chance — they would actually jail their political opponents! Jailing your opponents — as opposed to debating them — is one of the hallmarks of fascism.
It would be a huge mistake to view assaults on our Charter rights through a partisan lens and see threats to freedom as a uniquely Liberal-and-NDP phenomenon.
Conservative MPs voted unanimously to make it a criminal offence for parents to encourage their sexually confused child or teenager to embrace and accept the sex that she or he was born with. Embracing the highly misleading slogan of prohibiting “conversion therapy,” Conservative MPs joined the Liberals, Greens, NDP, and Bloc to make it illegal for psychologists, counsellors, therapists, doctors and religious leaders to encourage a man who identifies as a woman to embrace his masculinity and his male body.
Likewise, it is now a crime to encourage a woman who identifies as a man to embrace her femininity and female body. Under Bill C-4, passed in December 2021, the only legal option for parents — and everyone else — is to put transgender ideology into practice.
Even helping an adult to de-transition back to her or his birth gender could lead to a criminal prosecution, thanks to the support of all MPs of all parties.
Canada saw a rush of foreign students claiming to be refugees after cabinet announced cuts to study permits, new figures show. A total 11,630 foreign students applied to remain in Canada as refugees from last January to August, the equivalent of more than 340 a week: “That isn’t the sign of a healthy system.”
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