Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week thought-of-the-day ...



Prime Minister Carney's arranged election victories signal (at least in his mind) the time to get to work ... removing Canada from the American sphere of influence and jet-setting around the globe.

He'll take a moment out of that schedule to placate the morons who voted for him.

To wit:

A day after sweeping three byelections in Ontario and Quebec that gave him a majority in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he is temporarily removing the federal excise tax on gas and diesel.

The move means that the cost of gas will drop by 10 cents on a litre of gasoline and four cents per litre of diesel starting on Monday and lasting until Labour Day.

The fuel tax holiday, which Carney said would also see the four cent per litre excise tax removed on aviation fuel, is expected to cost an estimated $2.4 billion.



Now, about that:


The Trudeau/Carney government as it stands (in case one had forgotten):


**

The gap between Canada's richest and poorest grew last year as financial markets gained, interest payouts declined and the job market softened, said Statistics Canada on Monday.

The agency says the income gap — measuring the difference in the share of disposable income between households in the top 40 per cent and those in the bottom 40 per cent — reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025.

The result compared with a gap of 46.4 percentage points a year earlier.

The wider gap came as the lowest-income households saw wages rise slower than the overall average and saw their investment income fall because of lower interest payments on savings, the agency said.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada says the top 20 per cent of the wealth distribution accounted for 65.7 per cent of Canada's total net worth at the end of 2025, averaging $3.5 million per household.

In contrast, the bottom 40 per cent of the wealth distribution held three per cent of Canada's net worth, averaging $81,650 per household.

The gap in wealth between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 40 per cent was 62.7 percentage points at the end of 2025, up 0.6 percentage points from a year earlier.

**
Ontario is overhauling its body that reviews complex medically assisted deaths, narrowing its membership, scaling back its scope and shifting its role away from independent oversight toward supporting the system it is meant to scrutinize, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Two former members say the proposed new version of the committee is designed to be less rigorous and to provide less oversight.
**

Four provinces and the federal government are dialling back their freedom-of-information (FOI) laws, moves that ominously mirror one another.

British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Ottawa are tightening transparency legislation, or proposing to do so, to make internal government documents harder for citizens, journalists and others to obtain. 

**

Canada’s dominant Liberal Party has introduced legislation that may soon make Christian speech illegal.

In March, the Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-9, also known as the “Combatting Hate Act.” The bill was introduced under the guise of mitigating antisemitic attacks in the wake of Hamas’ violent attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Liberals claimed it was developed to protect religious communities, but C-9 eagerly expanded to prohibit public displays of “hate,” including “Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” The Canadian Liberals have used so-called hate speech as a Trojan horse to enact censorship laws — the same thing American Democrats are trying to do here. 

C-9 intentionally uses vague language, allowing “hatred” to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Canada’s DOJ has admitted as much, stating, “The penalty for the new hate crime offence would reflect the harm caused by the illegal act.” Under C-9’s broad definitions, public prayers and Bible recitation could conceivably be prosecuted as criminal offenses if they’re determined to be “hateful.” Violators could face up to a decade behind bars.

The “Combatting Hate Act” reportedly removes a portion of the religious defense previously found in section 319(3)(b) of the Canadian Criminal Code, which states, “No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.” The “good faith” was protection for religious principles. 

C-9 creates a gaping loophole for anti-religious lawfare. The bill explicitly aims to “streamline” judicial “hate crime” proceedings by removing the requirement that all “hate propaganda charges” first be approved by Canada’s attorney general. This strips any semblance of law enforcement oversight, empowering individuals to inflict their anti-religious dogmas on anyone they deem “hateful.”

Canada has a history of legislating away its citizens’ freedoms. In 2017, Bill C-16 made “hate speech” against transgender-identifying Canadians a crime. Criminal complaints can be filed against someone who repeatedly uses biologically correct pronouns for a person who claims to be the opposite sex. 

Canada’s weak protections for speech and religious exercise have diverged from the United States’ historically much stronger safeguards, but today’s Democrats threaten to take America down the same dangerous path. In the 1970s, Canada introduced laws barring people from using telephones and later the internet to promote so-called hate speech. Though some of these laws have since been repealed, the country’s mission to counter “hate” is still in motion. In 2019, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Cabinet ministers to crack down on online “hate speech” in reaction to the political right.

In just a few decades, Canadians’ freedom of speech and religious liberties have declined dramatically. While both C-9 and C-16 might sound extreme and far from home, American politicians have pursued similar legislation under the guise of safety, social stability, and inclusion.

In 2025, the California Legislature introduced SB 771, which would have targeted social media companies for “acting as algorithmic accomplices” to content leading to a “hate crime.” Tech companies thought to be amplifying “hate speech” could have faced millions of dollars in civil penalties for each infraction. The governor vetoed the pro-censorship bill, but it passed through the state Senate and Assembly, meaning a majority of lawmakers endorsed the legislation. 

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law forcing social media companies to allow users to report online “hate speech.” Further, the tech companies were required to respond to each report or pay fines. The New York Legislature also introduced bills that would require the tech giants to enable users to report so-called misinformation about vaccines and elections — aka, information that threatens Democrat narratives.

U.S. leaders have also attempted to prevent Christian worship services. During the 2020 Covid shutdowns, many churches were forcibly closed. In March 2020, Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested for violating a stay-at-home order and was shamed for holding regular church services. Several Christians in Idaho, including a church deacon, were arrested after singing psalms in public without wearing masks. It wasn’t until years later that the victims sued the city. The era of Covid lockdowns has passed for now, but the muscle the government flexed against Christians hasn’t atrophied.





Frances Widdowson, who launched a legal challenge against University of Lethbridge (UL) in July 2023, had her arguments heard by a Court of King’s Bench judge on Friday. Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor, is arguing that the University of Lethbridge restricted her right to free speech when it cancelled her talk in February 2023.

Blackfoot First Nation protesters and other demonstrators pressured the university to cancel the event, and then-president Michael Mahon consented to their calls amid what the school describes as security concerns. Widdowson — who has prompted similar protests at two other Canadian universities — said the cancellation mirrors a worrying trend of campuses restricting precisely the sorts of open debates they are meant to encourage. 

“People need to take this seriously, because universities are incredibly important institutions in a democratic society,” Widdowson said. “They let knowledge be disseminated, they’re important in the training of professionals, and are also a bulwark against authoritarianism. All of those functions now are under threat, because you have institutions like the University of Lethbridge, which is not academic at all anymore and has been completely captured by Indigenization activists.” 

Court hearings have focused on whether the university had an obligation to protect free speech in the face of the alleged “very real harms” of hosting the event, according to a legal brief filed to the court by Widdowson’s lawyer, Glenn Blackett. Following Friday’s hearings, a ruling is expected in the coming months.

Widdowson has attracted opposition primarily for work in which she has doubted the claims put forward about Indigenous unmarked graves in Canada, with a focus on Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc, previously known as the Kamloops Indian Band, which has claimed that 215 “missing children” are buried in unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school. 

Nearly five years after the initial claim, however, the First Nation has not exhumed the remains of any children. In a February update, the First Nation said its investigation using ground-penetrating radar is ongoing. Widdowson has made a point of emphasizing this current lack of evidence, including in a 2025 YouTube documentary called “What Remains: Aftermath of the Kamloops Mass Grave Deception.” (A 2021 Assembly of First Nations resolution referred to the Kamloops claims as an example of “burial sites or mass graves.”)

Widdowson said it was an “open question” whether any children were secretly buried on the Kamloops residential site, but said that those allegations need to be properly scrutinized and supported. The graves are regularly cited as evidence of Canada’s alleged genocide against First Nations. 

“Claims should be asserted on the basis of reason, evidence and logic, not the basis of a prescribed doctrine,” she said. 

The planned February 2023 event was about how “wokeism” was undermining academic freedom. Widdowson agreed to the talk on the invitation of Paul Viminitz, a professor who the university later fired in 2024. (Viminitz was previously a party to Widdowson’s Court of King’s challenge, and Jonah Pickle, a former student, is currently an applicant). 

Widdowson has since called on the Alberta government to intervene in her case against University of Lethbridge due to her claims about the threats to academic freedoms at stake, but the government has thus far declined. 

Elizabeth Harper, spokesperson for Advanced Education Minister Myles McDougall, said the province’s universities are obligated to report on their free speech policies, adding that “the University of Lethbridge has been asked to review their policies to ensure that they support free speech.”

Matthew Woodley, a lawyer at Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP who is representing the University of Lethbridge, was occupied with separate court proceedings on Monday and was unable to schedule an interview, according to his assistant.

In a statement, University of Lethbridge spokesperson Trevor Kenney said that the same week of the cancelled talk in February 2023, Widdowson led two other lectures at the university that passed without incident. 

“The University cancelled a room booking for an event involving Frances Widdowson as the result of concerns relating to possible harms raised by members of the University community, including safety risks,” Kenney said. 

On May 27, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band, or Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc, claimed that it had located the remains of 215 children — “some as young as three years old” — in an apple orchard at a former residential school site. The claims were based on the results of ground-penetrating radar, which is capable of detecting ground disturbances but does not confirm the presence of bodily remains. 

The next month, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan said it had found potentially 751 potential unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Merieval Indian Residential School. (The Cowessess chief emphasized at the time that they were not mass graves, but unmarked ones.) 

Some cities including Victoria cancelled their Canada Day celebrations that year, and The Canadian Press named the Kamloops “unmarked graves discovery” as its newsmaker of the year. 

Widdowson said that until the evidence of graves are verified, it is intellectually unhealthy to assert that they do. That is also true for Canada’s First Nations, she said, who deserve to have their many struggles addressed on a foundation of truth. 

“If we don’t have the truth, we will not be able to figure out the best way to organize society,” she said. “That’s what’s happened to Aboriginal people now, is that they’re being fed a whole bunch of falsehoods which are making it impossible for Aboriginal people to thrive and live full lives in modern society. 

In December 2021, Mount Royal University, Widdowson’s former employer, terminated her over allegations that a series of tweets she had posted were a form of harassment. In 2024, an arbitrator found that Widdowson’s dismissal was unwarranted and that, despite her controversial views, there had “never been a complaint about the quality or ethics of her scholarship.”

 





Something feels off about Canadian public policy. Governments at every level seem perpetually busy announcing new agencies, launching new programs and carving out new tax measures. They are drawn to the new and visible, while the core of their responsibilities — the services people currently depend on — quietly deteriorates. There’s a name for this: “policy adventurism.” It’s a distraction we can no longer afford.

Toronto City Council recently voted 21-3 to launch a pilot project establishing four city-operated grocery stores. The goal is to make food more affordable for residents struggling to make ends meet. Food insecurity in Toronto is real and Canada is the food inflation capital of the G7.

But consider the proposal. This is a municipal government that cannot reliably fill potholes, has presided over a transit system in chronic dysfunction, and has seen housing affordability collapse on its watch. Now it intends to enter the grocery business. As food economist Sylvain Charlebois notes, modern food distribution is “incredibly complicated.”

Because grocery retail operates on notoriously thin margins, the Daily Bread Food Bank finds that even if the city eliminated those margins entirely, the maximum theoretical saving to households would be around $40 to $73 a month. The underlying drivers of food pricing would remain completely untouched, while taxpayers would be left subsidizing a permanent municipal loss leader.

The grocery pilot reflects a broader governing reflex: when confronted with complex, systemic failures, governments are often tempted to launch new initiatives rather than fix the machinery they already have. At the federal level, this dynamic has driven a steady expansion of new agencies.

Ottawa created the Canada Infrastructure Bank in 2017 to catalyze private investment in public infrastructure. It spent years failing to move money out the door. Rather than reckon with that reality, the Carney government doubled down. It added the Major Projects Office, Build Canada Homes and a Defence Investment Agency.

As Shannon Proudfoot recently wrote, this is a workaround rather than a public service overhaul. And it mistakes the rhetoric of urgency for the reality of delivery. Starting up a new agency generates a press release. It does not generate the structural regulatory reform or procurement capacity that determines whether things get built.

The recent Ontario budget shows similar adventurism. It includes a new $4 billion Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund — on top of the recently established Building Ontario Fund, with funding now at $8 billion — to leverage private capital to grow certain sectors. Missing from this conversation is why pension funds and private capital are choosing to invest abroad rather than at home in the first place.

As governments expand into dubious new areas, existing responsibilities get shortchanged. A March 2026 Auditor General report found that Ottawa identified over 153,000 potentially non-compliant international students but had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases a year. The ArriveCan application — a simple digital tool for border management — ballooned to an estimated $59.5 million with costs the Auditor General described as impossible to determine due to poor record-keeping.

Millions of Canadians do not have a family doctor, and they now wait a median of 28.6 weeks for medically necessary treatment — triple the wait in 1993. Student math scores have been falling for over two decades. Violent crime has surged. And serious concerns remain about the quality of Canada’s infrastructure.

These outcomes are striking because they occurred precisely at a time that governments dramatically expanded payrolls. Real institutional capacity is built through focus and clear mandates. Policy adventurism destroys the discipline of doing defined things well over time.

Some of it is well-intended. But the political reality is hard to ignore. New agencies and pilots generate headlines today with ribbon-cutting opportunities. Fixing a complex regulatory apparatus or reducing surgical wait times takes years, with diffuse credit and no guarantee of political reward.

And once government signals it is open for business in a new domain, stakeholders mobilize, lobbyists identify opportunities and pressure mounts to add more — each addition drawing staff, budget and ministerial attention away from the functions that were already failing. Every hour a deputy minister spends starting up the latest adventure is an hour not spent on restoring the integrity of the immigration system or managing the hospital capacity crisis.

A similar dynamic plays out in the tax system. Every budget seems to produce questionable new carve-outs, each justified in isolation, collectively producing what might be called the Swiss-cheese effect: a base riddled with holes, increasingly difficult to administer, eroding the fiscal foundation that existing public services depend on.

Governments do face genuinely new demands, from regulating artificial intelligence to navigating shifting trade relationships and managing demographic pressures. These challenges require immediate attention and institutional bandwidth.

But a state spread thin on redundant agencies and municipal grocery stores cannot manage these modern imperatives. Fiscal room, bureaucratic capacity and public trust are scarce. We cannot afford to spend them promiscuously on elective adventures while the foundations of public policy continue to crack.

The moment demands a rigorous return to prioritization. Governments must perform well in the core duties they have already promised before borrowing resources from the future to invent something new.



But make-work projects give the impression of solid action, so ...





Given how prevalent diversity, equity and inclusion ( DEI ) has become in recent years — notably in the federal government — it’s important to state some facts.

For example, according to the federal government’s anti-racism strategy , “Systemic anti-Indigenous racism accounts for the fact that compared to non-Indigenous People, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis experience poorer social, economic, and political outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.” But according to the data, factors such as education and geography largely explain the differences in average incomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

In fact, as noted in a new study by the Aristotle Foundation, when Indigenous Canadians have a trade or university degree, live near a major urban centre and work full time, they have similar — or sometimes higher — incomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

Consider the latest census data, which measured incomes in 2020. Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year and have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the median employment income was $5,000 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Calgary, $4,000 higher in Toronto, $4,000 higher in Vancouver, $500 lower in Montreal and $2,000 lower in Ottawa-Gatineau. (All geographies refer to Census Metropolitan Areas).

Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year but have no certificate, diploma or degree, the median employment income was $5,600 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto, $800 higher in Vancouver, $400 lower in Montreal and Ottawa-Gatineau, and $1,600 lower in Calgary.

As the data show, at higher levels of educational attainment (university certificate or diploma, a bachelor’s degree or higher), Indigenous workers actually slightly outperform their non-Indigenous counterparts on average. At lower levels of educational attainment, their median incomes are slightly less. It is difficult to conclude from these statistics that Indigenous workers’ incomes are negatively impacted by systemic racism.

Overall, the median employment income in 2020 was actually 15.7 per cent lower for Indigenous workers compared to non-Indigenous workers, but much of that is because a lower proportion of Indigenous workers obtain university degrees than the general population. Another major reason is that only 50 per cent of Indigenous workers worked full time for the full year compared to 54 per cent of non-Indigenous Canadians.

Incomes also tend to be higher in large cities where there’s more economic opportunity, and living and working in a federal or provincial capital provides more access to government jobs where pensions and job security tend to be much stronger. The data show that Indigenous workers are less likely to live in or near major urban centres — another reason for the income disparity.

So, what’s the main takeaway?

The data suggest that despite historic wrongs, Indigenous Canadians today are not hostages to a systemically racist economic system — they can and do prosper. When Indigenous Canadians obtain the same level of education and work the same number of hours in the same city as non-Indigenous Canadians, their incomes are broadly similar.

 Notably, any remaining income differences cannot simply be attributed to “systemic racism.” It would be silly to conclude that systemic racism causes full-time Indigenous workers with bachelor’s degrees to earn less than non-Indigenous workers in Ottawa-Gatineau while also causing full-time Indigenous workers without any certificate, diploma or degree to earn more than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto.

The bottom line is that hours worked, geography, and education largely explain the employment income disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Canada. The evidence does not support the claim that “systemic anti-Indigenous racism,” as the federal government might suggest, is to blame. Therefore, any policies meant to address systemic racism should be reviewed with a skeptical eye.





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Monday, April 13, 2026

Canada the Cruel

I had to read this twice to make sure of what I was reading:

A leading MAID advocate argued to parliamentarians last month that Canada must legalize assisted suicide for the mentally ill, lest those same patients commit suicide.

The statement was made at a March 24 parliamentary committee debating the legalization of MAID for Canadians whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.”

Jocelyn Downie, a leading MAID activist since 2004, warned that if the federal government keeps excluding mentally ill Canadians from accessing assisted suicide, the result will be more mentally ill Canadians dying by suicide.

“What will happen, if there is an extension or an exclusion, is that people will die by suicide,” she said.


Yep.

**

A new poll has revealed a “deep divide” among Canadians’attitudes to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID).

The online survey, conducted by ResearchCo., found that 41 per cent of Canadians think health-care professionals should be able to decline providing MAID services if they have a moral or faith-based objection.

Forty-two per cent of respondents disagree, while the remaining 17 per cent said they weren’t sure.

That figure is up five points from a similar survey conducted by ResearchCo. in November 2022.

“On a regional basis, opposition to moral or faith-based objections in physician-assisted death cases is highest in Alberta (47 per cent), followed by Atlantic Canada (45 per cent), Quebec (44 per cent), Ontario (41 per cent), British Columbia (also 41 per cent) and Saskatchewan and Manitoba (36 per cent),” ResearchCo. said in a news release.

“Opposition is higher among Canadians aged 55 and over (45 per cent) than among their counterparts aged 35 to 54 (42 per cent) and aged 18 to 34 (39 per cent).”

Several provincial regulatory authorities have issued guidelines requiring medical practitioners who are unwilling or unable to provide MAID to refer patients to other institutions or providers.

In Ontario, for example, physicians and nurse practitioners who object to providing MAID must refer patients “in a timely manner” to another provider.

Gabrielle Peters, a disabled writer and policy analyst, said in an interview with National Post: “The idea of intentionally killing somebody is something that many people object to, and so I think this is a pretty fundamental right that we should be preserving in our society.


Evil loves complicity.




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We Don't Have to Trade With China

As much as Carney et al want us to:

The federal government has not raised national security concerns about a Chinese company’s planned acquisition of a Canadian goldminer, clearing the way for the transaction.

Shareholders of Allied Gold Corp. voted in favour of China’s Zijin Gold International Co. Ltd.’s proposed $5.5 billion acquisition of the company last week.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly reviews all proposed foreign takeovers of Canadian companies in case of national security vulnerabilities. The reviews include assessing how the deals will affect Canada’s defence capabilities, critical supply chains, and the potential for enabling foreign espionage.

(Sidebar: this moron? God ...)

The Canadian government had a 45-day window to raise concerns about the deal, but it did not do so, meaning it was approved by default. The government would still be able to block Zijin’s acquisition of Allied if it fails to pass the ongoing net economic benefit review, which examines the deal’s impact on the Canadian economy, jobs, and supply chains.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the government is aware of the transaction, but said it can’t comment on specific transactions due to confidentiality provisions in the Investment Canada Act.

Zijin, which has indirect ties to the Chinese regime through its ownership structure, struck a deal in January to acquire Allied for $44 per share in cash—an all-time high for the stock. Allied operates mines in the African countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Mali, and produces around 375,000 ounces of gold a year.

Neither of the companies responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, Ottawa tightened rules on Chinese ownership in the Canadian mining sector, citing national security concerns over China’s growing control of the global critical minerals supply chain. The Canadian government was particularly concerned about Chinese control of lithium, cobalt, and rare earths.

Canada has typically allowed Chinese investment in Canada’s gold sector in recent years, as the metal is not classified as a critical mineral. But in 2020, Ottawa blocked Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd.’s attempted acquisition of TMAC Resources Ltd. TMAC’s mine is located near tidewater in the Northwest Passage, which is a strategic shipping route in the Canadian Arctic.

Since Mark Carney became prime minister in early 2025, he has moved to strengthen ties between Ottawa and Beijing in a bit to diversify trade away from the United States. During a visit to China in January, Carney announced he was reducing tariffs on imports of Chinese electric cars, and said Canada was open to more investment from China.


China doesn't want its vassal sate to be in the sphere of American influence.

**
**

In policing — particularly in national security and organized crime — we are trained to recognize a simple truth: the most serious threats rarely arrive with warning. They emerge gradually, through relationships, dependencies, and decisions that appear rational in isolation but carry strategic consequences in aggregate.

What concerns me today is not a single incident or headline. It is a pattern.

Consider the sequence.

In September 2024, Mark Carney assumed a central role shaping Canada’s economic future as Chair of the government’s Task Force on Economic Growth. Weeks later, he met with a senior official from the People’s Bank of China. Shortly thereafter, Brookfield — an entity with which he has longstanding ties — secured a loan of roughly $250 million from the state-owned Bank of China.

There is no allegation of illegality here. But in national security work, legality is not the threshold. Exposure is. Influence is. Perception is. And when public authority and private financial interests intersect — particularly involving foreign state institutions — it raises questions that deserve clear answers.

Now turn to Newfoundland.

The Beaver Brook mine is not just another industrial site. As The Bureau has reported, it is North America’s most significant source of antimony — a mineral essential to ammunition, advanced weapons systems, and modern defense technologies. China owns it. And in 2023, it was shut down.

Since then, Beijing has tightened global supply through export controls, driving prices sharply higher while Western governments scramble to secure independent sources. The United States has responded with billions in strategic investment. Canada has not.

In policing, when a critical asset is controlled by a foreign state actor and rendered inactive in a way that benefits that actor strategically, we do not assume coincidence. We assess leverage.

The same dynamic is emerging in Canada’s Arctic.

Chinese state-linked enterprises hold significant mineral positions in Nunavut. At the same time, Ottawa is accelerating infrastructure projects — roads, ports, and corridors — that will define access to those resources for decades to come. Infrastructure is not neutral. It determines who operates, who profits, and ultimately, who holds influence on the ground.

If Canadian-funded infrastructure enhances the operational reach of foreign state enterprises — particularly those aligned with strategic competitors — we must ask whether we are strengthening sovereignty or quietly diluting it.

Layer onto this the growing body of evidence around foreign influence operations.

A recent international study identified hundreds of organizations in Canada connected to China’s United Front system — an apparatus designed to shape political and social environments abroad. Canada’s own Foreign Interference Commission has heard credible concerns about relationships between political actors and networks aligned with Beijing’s interests.

This is not about ethnicity or diaspora communities. It is about state-directed influence — deliberate, persistent, and strategic.

What is most troubling is not any single element, but the inconsistency across them.

Canada identifies China as a strategic challenge. Yet strategic minerals remain under foreign state control. Public funds support foreign state-linked enterprises. Domestic industries are bypassed in key procurements. National security considerations appear disconnected from economic policy.

In my experience, organized systems — whether criminal or state-based — do not need to overpower institutions. They exploit gaps. Inconsistencies. Misalignments between stated priorities and actual decisions.

Right now, Canada is presenting those gaps.



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Your Duplicitous, Tyrannical, Thieving, Inept Government and You

The natural governing party, so they say:

Floor-crosser MP Marilyn Gladu defended her move to the Liberals on Thursday evening, arguing the decision is what’s best for her riding, while also promising to vote with the party on social issues.

“This is actually the best thing for my riding, for the country and for myself,” she told reporters on the sidelines of the Liberal National Convention in Montreal.


Oh, yes - entirely for you, Marilyn.


It's called cheating and it's done by a European failed banker with no native riding and with vested interests in the United States, but none in Canada:




Deputy Defence Minister Christiane Fox in a staff email neither resigned nor apologized after being censured for cronyism. Fox said she breached an Act of Parliament to hire a friend who’d previously worked at a Good Life gym in the name of diversity. The gym employee is Black: “My efforts were focused on advancing diversity and inclusion.”

Something tells me that she would apologise if she knew that she would lose her pension for this kind of sh--.




The sobering but never mentioned fact is that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are near historic lows, only one-fifth or one-tenth the levels 500 and 600 million years ago, respectively. Preindustrial year levels were 300 ppm; a hundred years ago, they approached the extinction level of 180 ppm. No one knows, and we don’t want to, the exact level at which plants die, animals and fish cannot exist, and human life ends.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if, as it appears, the small impact by humans on CO2 levels (this includes burning fossil fuels, humans breathing, and cows flatulating) may have prevented further fatal decline (this is conjecture). We should celebrate the average annual increase of 2 ppm in the last hundred years to the current level of 430 ppm, avoiding the ultimate damage to the planet. 

The low levels reveal the false narrative of the 1992 Earth Summit zealots’ scaremongering, also revealing the real risk of low levels. The persistent and tiring tactics of Secretary General Guterres warn that humans are “burning up the planet,” which is “on fire.” He knows that in the past temperatures saw tropical verdancy and alligators in the Arctic. How did the planet ever survive?

But this dishonest and highly misleading narrative gained legs; our Prime Minister is one of the leaders of this damaging deception.

All this begs the question of why emission reductions are needed, and further, why Canada needs to be at the forefront? Canada runs at only about 1.5% of total global emissions, hardly relevant to the purported problem. 

There was no mandate asked or given to governments — federal, provincial, or municipal — to make Canada the global leader in emission reductions.

Initiated by the Trudeau federal government in 2015 when it withdrew Northern Gateway after a ten-year regulatory process, the onslaught of the energy sector began. With the guidance of his university buddy Gerald Butts, Energy East, and the Trans Mountain fiasco, capital investment is avoiding our country, with the knowledge that pipelines are only the visible head of the climate crisis dragon.

We are now saddled with one of the world’s “climate crisis” leaders, Mark Carney, who, through much of this period, was a personal advisor to the Liberal Party. BTW, his wife, Diana Fox Carney, works with Gerald Butts at the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory agency.


Also:


 

The Liberals' greatest gift to the country is brain-drain.

(Sidebar: among other things.)

There is no capital, no innovation, no research, and no willingness to keep and pay the professionals educated here.

Now here we are:

Are you a Canadian considering improving your situation after graduating by moving abroad for better, higher paying opportunities? A guest speaker at the federal Liberal party convention on Friday just suggested that, in order to defeat Canada’s brain-drain problem, our best and brightest either stay put or cough up half a million dollars, what he suggests is the cost of their taxpayer-subsidized education, before they can pursue opportunities outside of Canada.

Ironically, the special guest who made this suggestion during the Building a Stronger, More Competitive Canadian Economy panel which also featured federal ministers Mélanie Joly, Rechie Valdez, and Lena Metlege Diab, is a Canadian who left Canada for better opportunities, now lives in Europe, and paid no such tax himself.

Patrick Pichette was born and educated in Montreal and left Canada for work in the U.S. accepting a role at Microsoft and then senior vice president and CFO of Google in California. He now lives in London, U.K., and is a partner at Inovia Capital. He paid no exit tax when he left Canada.

Yet, Pichette thinks today’s young Canadians should stay put, or cough up $500,000 if they want to leave.

Pointing to himself and then the crowd, Pichette says , “We as Canadians, have subsidized my education to the tune of… half a million,” he told the captive audience, warming up to the idea Ottawa should restrict basic freedoms.

You see, the Americans’ TN visa program for Canadians and Mexicans created under NAFTA is simply too affordable and accessible. Pichette recounted his own experience using the program:

“In Canada, the minute you have your degree, if it’s a professional degree, there’s something in the Canada… it’s called the TN program. So, Microsoft, I finished from University of Waterloo with my computer degree, Microsoft phones me, offers me a job, 300 grand a year, right, all I have to do is show up at the border, apply for a TN visa, right, and I get this three-year, like no questions asked, it costs 30 bucks,” he told the crowd without an ounce of shame.

Pichette laid out the cost of the brain drain of Canada’s talent and gave his recommendation for a cure:

“30,000 TN go to the U.S. every year. You want to save yourself five, ten billion dollars. Shut the TN program. Keep them in Canada, or make them pay their half a million so that if they leave, I’m OK with that,” said the European.

Pichette then suggested that these students, our best and brightest, were a drain on our economy: “You want to go to the U.S.? Give me back my money. Like my dad, my mom — you all work every day to offer them their education. You can’t let five billion or ten billion a year of your hard-earned cash (go) so that Microsoft can get smarter,” he said, seemingly without a lick of self-awareness.

In reality, it is the economy that is a drain on our best and brightest. Seventy percent of our emigrants are highly educated. Emigration hit near-record levels in 2025, up three per cent from the year before, when 120,000, more than half of these emigrants were prime aged workers and highly skilled.

Why do our best and brightest leave? They leave for better paid jobs, more opportunities and lower taxes for themselves and for their companies if they are entrepreneurs. And now, due to inflation and expensive housing, they have even more reason to want to leave.

Yet here’s Pichette, who is now a European, also suggesting to a Canadian audience that we bring in outside to talent to this economy. And attract them with what, exactly? It’s absurd.

This isn’t just a Pichette problem. The Liberals appear to refuse to understand what makes a great economy for workers a businesses to thrive. All they know is that they want to govern as many aspects of it as possible, pick winners, and unload the tax burden of the massive bureaucracy onto Canadians, the smartest of which understand this clearly, and choose to leave.

Threatening young people with a massive exit tax or shutting down mobility pathways won’t fix Canada’s problems. It will only confirm why so many feel they have no choice but to leave.


Would barbed wire be cheaper and easier?

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Speaking of tyranny:

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It’s easy to see why the Carney government wants to overturn the unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the Federal Court of Appeal condemning the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act (EA) during the trucker convoy demonstrations in February 2022.

The appeal court’s Jan. 16 ruling – upholding the 2024 judgment of Justice Richard Mosley that the government’s actions were unconstitutional and unlawful– is a devastating indictment of what the Liberal government did, reflecting many of the arguments made by the protesters.

The feds, having lost twice in court on this issue, are now appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada, saying they must have “the tools needed to protect the safety and security of Canadians in the face of threats to public order and national security.”

(In 2023, Justice Paul Rouleau, head of the public inquiry into the government’s use of the EA, concluded it was justified, but added he did so with reluctance, because the factual basis for its use was not “overwhelming,” and, “reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion.”)

The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether to hear the government’s appeal.

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Bottom line, police can now enter your property without a warrant if their purpose is to investigate a crime, even one in which you may be the suspect, as long as they say after the fact that they weren’t entering the property for the purpose of a warrantless search. One can expect at least some police to abuse this power by snooping around private properties in cases where they ought to have a warrant. Perhaps your car happens to be the same make and model as a reported drunk driver, even though you’ve been home all night. They can now bang on your door and start asking you questions, invading your privacy by seeing who you happen to have over that night. Even worse, perhaps you say the wrong thing, and get arrested. You can’t get your privacy back once it’s been breached, and it’s hard to undo the impact of criminal charges even if they’re later dropped. This is why we have warrants in the first place.



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No Country For Anyone

Just in time for Yom HaShoah:

Last year saw the highest level of deadly violence against Jews around the world in over three decades, with 20 people killed in antisemitic attacks, according to an annual study released by Tel Aviv University on Monday.

The violence, including a deadly attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, continued a spike that began following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, the report’s authors said.

“The data raise concern that a high level of antisemitic incidents is becoming a normalized reality,” said Uriya Shavit, the report's chief editor.

Deadly antisemitic attacks were recorded on three continents. Fifteen people were killed at the holiday event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. There were additional deaths in two antisemitic attacks in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., and Colorado; and in Britain, two people were killed at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

Each year, Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice releases the report about antisemitism ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day marks a national memorial for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, which begins Monday evening.

The new report also tracked an increase in antisemitic attacks that resulted in physical harm, including beatings and stone throwing.

It found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994, when the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. An Argentine court has blamed Iran and its Hezbollah proxy for the attack.

According to the report, there was a moderate increase in the overall number of antisemitic incidents last year compared with 2024, but that total represents a huge jump from 2022, before the war in Gaza. The report tracks incidents that range from physical attacks and vandalism to verbal threats and harassment on social media.

“The peak in the number of incidents was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, after which we began to see a downward trend — but unfortunately, that trend did not continue in 2025,” Shavit said.

In the United Kingdom, there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up from 3,556 in 2024. In Canada, the number of incidents grew from 6,219 in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025, a number more than three times higher than in 2022.

The report found that even after the Gaza ceasefire took effect last October, antisemitic incidents continued to rise from the same period during the previous year. In Australia, there were 588 antisemitic incidents between October and December 2025, up from 492 during the same period in 2024. There were a total of 472 antisemitic incidents across Australia during all of 2022.


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If you can't deny it, distort it!: 

Holocaust distortion is on the rise. It does not always appear as outright denial of the murder of six million Jews. Increasingly, it takes subtler forms — reshaping the historical record in ways that erode understanding of what happened and why. Beyond the dangerous manifestations of rewriting the Holocaust itself, there are also increasing efforts to distort its aftermath. The story of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who survived the war only to remain stateless is too often overlooked, minimized, or reframed in ways that obscure their plight. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the history of the refugee ships that carried Holocaust survivors toward British-mandated Palestine in the years immediately after the Second World War.

(Sidebar: it is fruit of a poisonous tree trying to find its way to acceptability.) 

The Nuremberg trials of 1945–46 exposed the full horror of Nazi crimes against the Jews of Europe. As the world learned the scale of the genocide, one might have expected that the survivors who emerged from the devastation would quickly find refuge.

But that was not the case.

By 1947, at least 200,000 Jews remained homeless and stateless across Europe, many confined to displaced persons camps. They were survivors of ghettos, camps, and hiding. Many had lost entire families. Returning home was often impossible; communities had been destroyed and antisemitism remained widespread. Liberation had come, but security and belonging had not.

For many of these survivors, the possibility of rebuilding their lives in the historic homeland of the Jewish people offered a rare glimmer of hope. Their aim was simple: to live normal lives in peace after the immense tragedy they had endured.

That hope became world famous through the story of the ship Exodus 1947 . On July 11 of that year, more than 4,500 Jewish refugees boarded the overcrowded vessel in Sète, France, hoping to reach Palestine despite British restrictions on Jewish immigration. A week later, British naval vessels rammed and boarded the ship. The passengers were ultimately deported back to Europe and sent to displaced persons camps in Germany — two years after the war’s end.

Exodus was only one of dozens of ships carrying Jewish refugees toward British-mandated Palestine. My parents were on another.

In May 1947, my parents, Berek and Bella, boarded a ship called the Pan York , later renamed Komemiyut, the Hebrew word for sovereignty. They had met in a displaced persons camp in Poland after the war. My mother had survived Auschwitz; both had lost most of their families in the Holocaust. Among the passengers was my sister Sara, then 18 months old.

Like thousands of other survivors, they were trying to rebuild their lives. They sailed from Marseille toward Haifa, determined to escape the uncertainty of Europe.

The British intercepted the ship before it could reach port. The passengers were subsequently sent to internment camps near Famagusta in Cyprus, where thousands of Jewish refugees were detained behind barbed wire. Only in 1948 were many of them, including my parents and my sister, finally allowed to sail to Haifa.

This story matters because it reminds us what happened to Jewish survivors after liberation. The war had ended, but for many Jews the nightmare was not over. They had survived extermination only to face statelessness, confinement, and closed borders. The refugee ships were not symbols of ideology or power. They were vessels of human desperation, carrying people who had nowhere else to go.

Yet public understanding of that history is fading.

Recent Canadian survey data reveal a striking misconception: large numbers of Canadians believe the country was open to Jewish refugees during the Second World War. Nearly half of respondents think Canada welcomed them.

The historical record tells a different story. Canada’s response to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years was among the most restrictive in the Western world — a policy later summarized by the haunting phrase “None is too many” (the title of the book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper that documented the government restrictions).

(Sidebar: worse than that.) 

It was because so few countries opened their doors that ships like the Exodus and the Pan York existed in the first place.

For my parents and for thousands like them, the journey was never about politics. It was about survival after the destruction of their families and communities. They boarded overcrowded ships because the world had left them with nowhere else to go. To forget that — or to recast their story in ways that blur the reality of their suffering — is to deepen the distortion of Holocaust memory itself.

In a troubling twist of historical revisionism, some now portray those same refugees — people who had just survived ghettos and death camps — as aggressors who settled on someone else’s land. In reality, they were survivors of an unimaginable catastrophe who sought to rebuild their lives and live peacefully alongside others. Yet from the beginning there were too many who refused to accept the possibility of coexistence. Eight decades later, those refugees are sometimes depicted as if the mere act of seeking refuge and rebuilding their lives constituted wrongdoing.

The distortion does not stop there. Today’s antisemites even tell the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” — as if Jewish refugees and their descendants remain perpetual outsiders wherever they live, made to feel unwelcome by some in the place they call home.

If we are serious about preserving the memory of the Holocaust, we must also defend the truth about what happened to those who survived it. The refugees of the Exodus, the Pan York, and dozens of other ships were not symbols or abstractions. They were survivors — people who had endured the destruction of their families and communities and who sought, after the darkest chapter in Jewish history, the simple chance to rebuild their lives in peace.


But the West is not serious about remembering the Holocaust or any other genocide.

The Narrative must be maintained.



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