Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on January 01, 2012, 04:23:22 PM
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Some good and interesting posts have been made in the last couple of days on the Political Economics thread and we are blessed to have Canadian Tricky Dog chiming in. Lets continue that conversation here.
Not only are the Canadians our very good friends and neighbors, our cultures, our legal systems, and our political systems all originated principally in England. This seems to me to lessen the usual amount of static that comes from cross-cultural comparisons.
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I would kick things off my challenging the oft-stated notion that Canada survived the bubble due to regulations they have that we do not.
While partially true (and I have begun to reconsider my inattention to our repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act sp?) I think this blurs a very important point-- that it was precisely the intervention of our government via the FMs guaranteeing loans, CRAP (Community Reinvestment Act Program which forced banks to lend to the unqualified in the name of racial parity of results) and the deranged interest rate policy of the Fed that created the bubble.
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So regardless of whether you blame the government or the corporations for the American experience, you are essentially concluding from the Canadian experience that, in general, strong regulation is needed for financial services?
Thus the need is for better government, whether or not that means less government? Regulation necessarily means bureaucracy.
Or is there a free-market (i.e. unregulated) solution to keep banks from doing this again?
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As mentioned in the previous thread (Political Economics), the Harper government in Canada just dropped corporate taxes by 1.5% to 15%. That will equate roughly to 33 billion annually given back to Canadian corporations.
Harper has recently been complaining about the 3/4 trillion sitting in corporate coffers stagnant - most enterprises sitting back during the rough economic times to hold onto their surpluses. This break will allow them to hold even more money stagnant.
The assumption seems to be that corporations are going to spend us out of tough times by growing, investing, and otherwise freeing up those stagnant funds. But that does not really seem to be happening. Like spooked consumers, they are sitting on the money to see how this plays out. Which of course just drags out the recovery.
In the case of consumers, you can sometimes get them to start spending even when they probably should remain cautious or work hard at reducing their debt. Corporations on the other hand are run by some of the most saavy financial types to be found. They know better than most when to move and when to sit still (although no guarantee of good sense). And you can expect corps to do what is best whether they get a tax break or not.
I can see the long term benefit of tax breaks - attracting more foreign business, encouraging investment and innovation, etc. But in a stale or limping economy where the future is uncertain, I do not see why this is a good move, at least in the short term. Why would corps start spending significantly under these circumstances? The only real use of corp reserves seems to be the usual M&A activity that accompanies a slow economy.
So is there any reasonable expectation that lowered corp taxes will help jump start an ailing economy?
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No matter if it's the US, Canada or Hong Kong, I think there is a desire and need for some degree of regulation of financial markets. In designing systems that have a important role, it's important to structure the system so it fails gracefully rather than catastrophically. As business failure is a required element of a free market (creative destruction), it makes sense that there should not be such a thing as a business/bank "too big to fail".
At the same time, much like every complex system, there is a law of diminishing returns at work as well. While intelligent and properly enforced regulations are important, there comes a point where too much regulation does more harm than good.
So, it's a matter of finding the sweet spot between the extremes of structure and chaos.
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"So is there any reasonable expectation that lowered corp taxes will help jump start an ailing economy?"
Because businesses/corps ultimately pay no taxes?
Meaning that any taxes imposed on a business ultimately are passed on to the consumer of the goods/services the business provides.
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"So regardless of whether you blame the government or the corporations for the American experience, you are essentially concluding from the Canadian experience that, in general, strong regulation is needed for financial services?"
Not necessarily. Although I am reconsidering the merits of the Glass Steagall Act, I submit that in the US the principal cause was the guarantee of the Federal govt, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, of bad mortgages. With this, the discipline of the market was removed and reckless behavior thus enabled. This humongous error was dramatically multiplied by the intervention of the Fed with its low interest rates-- in post inflation, post tax dollars, interest rates have been essentially negative or zero for quite some time now. This punishes savers, encourages desperate and reckless investing, and accelerated the housing bubble. I would add that the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which added full employment to the Fed's responsibility of price stability, another market meddling piece of Keynesian interventionist drivel, is also a major factor in the damage that the Fed causes.
"Thus the need is for better government, whether or not that means less government? Regulation necessarily means bureaucracy."
As I see it the issue is the concept by which the regulation is justified. If the regulation is to enforce transparency in mortgage language, that is in support of free market principles and as such is fine. If the regulation is to “encourage home ownership”, that is government intervention in the market and, as we see from the economic chaos that has ensued from such policies it is NOT fine.
"Or is there a free-market (i.e. unregulated) solution to keep banks from doing this again?"
The solution is to let failure fail, not to punish savers to benefit the banks and other friends of the Congress e.g. AIG.
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"the issue is the concept by which the regulation is justified. If the regulation is to enforce transparency in mortgage language, that is in support of free market principles and as such is fine. If the regulation is to “encourage home ownership”, that is government intervention in the market and, as we see from the economic chaos that has ensued from such policies it is NOT fine."
Yes. The justification for bank regulation was - don't take bad risks because we insure your deposits. From there we jumped to encouraging home ownership above requiring creditworthiness based on a different justification for government action: 'Hey, we amassed all this power, let's do some good with it!'
"whether you blame the government or the corporations ... is there a free-market (i.e. unregulated) solution to keep banks from doing this again?"
Looking at it the other way, 'what can the people can do to keep their government regulators from doing this again'?
"As mentioned in the previous thread (Political Economics), the Harper government in Canada just dropped corporate taxes by 1.5% to 15%. That will equate roughly to 33 billion annually given back to Canadian corporations."
TD, do you intend to say there will be no recovery of the lost revenues from new revenues generated? Corporate income is a fixed number? I disagree. Let's see in a year.
"33 billion annually given back to Canadian corporations"
A funny way of looking at it. Even at a lower rate, the who is giving to whom seems backwards. Not that corporations give freely, but govt is now taking at a slightly lower rate. When a retailers lowers their price do they assume the same amount of transactions? If so why do they do it? Assuming corporations are in the business of making money, why would they not use that 'gift' to make more money, build, buy, hire, expand which all lead to a host of other taxes to be paid including more corporate income tax. If they will not use the money for those purposes, why not?
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"the issue is the concept by which the regulation is justified. If the regulation is to enforce transparency in mortgage language, that is in support of free market principles and as such is fine. If the regulation is to “encourage home ownership”, that is government intervention in the market and, as we see from the economic chaos that has ensued from such policies it is NOT fine."
I agree, the government has no business being in the business of encouraging home ownership. Doug, are you therefore saying that the mortgage deduction (government intervention) should be immediately repealed? It would seem that this very costly benefit has no purpose other than to "encourage home ownership".
Note, personal home mortgage payments are not deductible in Canada, yet home prices and banks seem to do just fine.
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China's Canadian Energy Play
Alberta's oil sands will be developed, no matter what U.S. greens say..
President Obama may not want to exploit the energy buried in Canada's Alberta oil sands, but China sure does. Think of Monday's $15.1 billion offer by China's state-owned Cnooc to buy Canadian energy giant Nexen as a post-Keystone XL Pipeline bid to replace the U.S. as Canada's biggest energy investor and market.
Nexen offers Cnooc a sweeping North American energy footprint, with assets from heavy oil and shale gas in Alberta to offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Part of the bet is also on Canadian politics, which could block the investment on nationalist grounds but which so far hasn't been captured by the anticarbon fevers that dominate Washington.
Canada seems to understand that its resources are a gift that can raise national prosperity. And as extraction technology has improved, Canada's proven oil reserves have climbed to at least 180 billion barrels, putting it behind only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
Unlike the U.S., Ottawa cedes most energy decisions to the provinces, which have encouraged production. A decade ago Alberta reduced to 1% the royalty that companies must pay until they have earned back their capital costs; then the rate reverts to 25%. The incentive kick-started the oil sands investment boom.
Enlarge Image
CloseAssociated Press
A Nexen oil sands facility near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
.Canada is also looking for oil from shale, drilling in the Arctic, and even producing in the Atlantic—offshore of Nova Scotia, within spitting distance of Maine. All of this has produced a gusher of oil, tax revenue and jobs. The oil sands alone are estimated to have accounted for one-third of Canada's economic growth in 2010 and 2011, according to Canada's national statistical agency.
Contrast that to the U.S., where President Obama has spent tens of billions on failed green energy schemes while making fossil-fuel exploration harder. This week the White House issued a veto threat against a House bill that would restore pre-Obama plans to allow greater offshore exploration. Alaska oil production is so low that there are worries about the viability of its pipeline. Shell Oil, which has plowed $4.5 billion into an Arctic investment, has been waiting the entire Obama Presidency for permits. The EPA is also waiting for a second term to impose national regulations on shale fracking.
Mr. Obama's rejection of the $7 billion Keystone XL has no doubt concentrated Chinese and Canadian minds. The pipeline would have moved oil from Canada and North Dakota to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and Mr. Obama's bow to American greens was a direct snub to Canada, which provides nearly 30% of U.S. imports. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promptly said that Canada needs to diversify its energy markets, perhaps by building a pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast to export to Asia.
Energy-hungry China couldn't be happier. Chinese bids for North American companies haven't always been welcomed—see the rejection last year of a Chinese consortium's $38.6 billion hostile bid for Canada's Potash Corp. But Cnooc executives might figure that Canadian regulators will be more welcoming to this nonhostile bid in the wake of the Keystone fiasco. Canada needs capital to exploit the oil sands and the markets to buy what is produced. Cnooc can help with both.
The lesson for America, and especially Democrats, is that Canada's oil sands will be developed, whether their green financiers like it or not. If the U.S. doesn't want the oil, China and the rest of Asia will gladly take it. The world wants to grow—must grow to reduce poverty—and it needs abundant, cheap energy to do it. Why is that so hard for some Americans to understand?
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O'Grady: How Canada Saved Its Bacon Deep cuts in government spending pulled Canada back from an epic fiscal crisis in the 1990s.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY..
Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has a stern warning for the U.S. political class: Get real about the gap between federal revenues and spending, or get ready for disaster.
Mr. Martin knows of what he speaks. In 1993, when he was Canada's finance minister, his country faced a daunting fiscal crisis. It wasn't Greece, but by 1994 Canada's federal debt-to-GDP ratio was getting close to 80%, and the cost of servicing the debt had begun to eat up an incredible one-third of government revenue.
The central lesson from that crisis, Mr. Martin told an American Enterprise Institute audience in Washington last week, is that delay only ensures that the inevitable adjustment will be more painful.
Truer words were never spoken. Nor has it ever been more likely that they will fall on deaf ears, at least as long as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps financing the partying in our nation's capital.
When the Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien took power in October 1993, Mr. Martin was charged with pulling his nation out of the fiscal death spiral. He did it with deep cuts in federal spending over two years that amounted to 10% of the budget, excluding interest costs.
Nothing was spared. Even federal transfers to the provinces to fund Canada's sacred national health-care system got hit. The federal government also cut and block-granted money for welfare programs to the provinces, giving them almost full control over how the money would be spent.
In the 1997 election, the Liberals increased their majority in parliament. The Chrétien government followed with tax cuts starting in 1998 and one of the largest tax cuts—both corporate and personal—in the history of the country in 2000. The Liberals won again in 2000.
What drove the left-of-center Liberals to shoulder the burden of downsizing government in the 1994 and 1995 budgets—Mr. Martin takes great pains to point out—was not ideology but "arithmetic." That is to say that everyone recognized that the magnitude of the debt, and the cost of servicing it, was unsustainable.
The problem had been building over many years. In 1965, federal spending had been 15% of GDP. By 1993 it was 23%. Markets didn't like it. Between February and March of 1994, the three-month Canadian Treasury bill rate went to 5.82% from 3.85%. The Mexican peso crisis in December of that year didn't help. By February 1995 the interest rate on the Canadian Treasury bill reached 7.8%. In a world of increasing uncertainty and a flight to quality, Canada was paying dearly for its deteriorating risk profile. As the exchange rate sank, Canadians were getting poorer and the government was speeding toward a wall.
Another speaker at the American Enterprise Institute conference (which was co-sponsored by the Ottawa-based MacDonald-Laurier Institute) was Janice McKinnon, the finance minister for the center-left New Democratic Party government of the province of Saskatchewan in 1993. Ms. McKinnon told her own war stories.
In 1991, when her government took over, the "province was on its knees." In 1992, according to Ms. McKinnon, Standard & Poor's reported that Saskatchewan's "tax-supported debt was 180% of its annual revenue." "When our credit rating dropped to triple B rating, we had trouble borrowing money."
Ms. McKinnon described some of what followed: "In one budget we closed 52 hospitals, many schools and thousands of people lost their jobs. But we knew we had no choice, and we couldn't look back."
Ms. McKinnon likened the U.S. today to Saskatchewan in the 1980s. You are "not to the point where you are in a crisis, people aren't saying 'maybe we won't lend you money.' " And that means that the politicians can still put things off. "Before you actually realize 'we've got to do this because there is no choice,' there is a lot of denial," Ms. McKinnon explained. "I think you're at that stage."
She's right. Market discipline doesn't exist in Washington, which has the "privilege" of an accommodating central bank issuing the world's reserve currency. The big spenders don't need to pay attention to pesky numbers. As Stanford University economist John Taylor has noted, the Fed bought 77% of all new federal debt last year. It is doing so at rock-bottom interest rates. By holding the short-term fed-funds rate low while it buys up long-term securities, Mr. Bernanke is helping our political class ignore the real cost of rising federal indebtedness.
Of course these battle-scarred Canadians fully understand that the U.S. will reach a day of reckoning when the Fed has to constrain the money supply and interest rates start going up. "Our only plea," Ms. McKinnon said, "is that if you start tackling it before you hit the crisis stage, it's going to be a heck of lot easier. The longer you wait, the worse it gets."
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
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"To achieve this the Harper government did something you might more expect to see in the private sector. Clement made history in Canada by tying bonuses of senior bureaucrats to the success of government-wide objectives for reducing expenditures. Get this, about 40% of the bureaucrats’ bonuses were linked to a “Deficit Reduction Action Plan.” Yeah, bureaucrats got bigger bonuses when they proposed ways to make bigger cuts.
Clement explained, “Forty percent of this at-risk pay for senior managers was based on how much they contributed to the target of least $4 billion a year in permanent savings. This is just part of how we’re changing the attitude of government officials from spending enablers to cost containers.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/24/what-president-obama-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-canada/
OTOH, there is this:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/11/canada-bleeding-private-jobs-vancouver.html
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/10/canada-gdp-unexpectedly-shrinks_31.html
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AT a time when territorial disputes over uninhabited outcrops in the East China Sea have led to smashed cars and skulls in China, a similar, if less dramatic, dispute over two remote rocks in the Gulf of Maine smolders between the United States and Canada.
Machias Seal Island and nearby North Rock are the only pieces of land that the two countries both claim after more than 230 years of vigorous and sometimes violent border-making between them.
Except for the occasional jousting of lobster boats, this boundary dispute floats far below the surface of public or official attention, no doubt reflecting the apparent lack of valuable natural resources and a reluctance to cede territory, no matter how small.
But if we are unlikely to resort to arms anytime soon, the clashes in Asia have shown how seemingly minor border disputes can suddenly stoke regional and nationalistic tensions. Our relaxed attitude toward these remote rocks may well be a mistake.
While the United States and Canada have other maritime boundary disputes along their 5,525-mile border, the world’s longest, this is the only one left that involves actual chunks of land.
Machias Seal Island is a 20-acre, treeless lump that sits nearly equidistant from Maine and New Brunswick. It, and the even smaller North Rock, lie in what local lobstermen call the gray zone, a 277-square-mile area of overlapping American and Canadian maritime claims.
The disagreement dates back to the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The treaty assigned to the newly independent 13 colonies all islands within 20 leagues — about 70 miles — of the American shore. Since Machias Seal Island sits less than 10 miles from Maine, the American position has been that it is clearly United States soil.
But the treaty also excluded any island that had ever been part of Nova Scotia, and Canadians have pointed to a 17th-century British land grant they say proves the island was indeed part of that province, whose western portion became New Brunswick in the late 18th century.
Perhaps more important to the Canadian case, the British built a lighthouse on Machias Seal Island in 1832, which has been staffed ever since. Even today, two lighthouse keepers are regularly flown to the island by helicopter for 28-day shifts to operate a light — even though, like every other lighthouse in Canada, it is automated.
While abundant legal arguments surround Machias Seal Island, natural resources are far less evident. No oil or natural gas has been discovered in the area, nor has it had any strategic significance since it served as a lookout for German U-boats during World War I.
Tour boats from Maine and New Brunswick carry strictly limited numbers of bird watchers to the island to see nesting Atlantic puffins. And the surrounding waters contain lobsters that, thanks to different regulatory schemes and overlapping claims, have occasionally sparked clashes between Maine and New Brunswick lobstermen, although a bumper lobster crop this summer has slackened demand for gray zone crustaceans.
But the lack of hydrocarbons and the current lobster glut make this an ideal time to color in the gray zone.
The United States and Canada settled all their other maritime differences in the Gulf of Maine in 1984 by submitting their claims to the International Court of Justice for arbitration. They could have included the gray zone in that case, but did not. The Canadians had refused an earlier American arbitration proposal by saying their case was so strong that agreeing to arbitration would bring their title into question.
This attitude calls for re-examination. The fact that so little in the way of resources appears to be at stake, far from justifying the status quo, should be the main reason for resolving the issue. And for those concerned about blowback from “giving away” territory, letting the international court decide the case provides the most political cover.
As China and Japan can attest, border disputes do not go away; they fester. And when other factors push them back to the surface — the discovery of valuable resources, an assertion of national pride, a mishap at sea — the stakes can suddenly rise to a point where easy solutions become impossible.
Before that happens, we should put this last land dispute behind us, and earn our reputation for running the longest peaceful border in the world.
Stephen R. Kelly is the associate director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University and a retired American diplomat who served twice in Canada.
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John Sheardown, Canadian Who Sheltered Americans in Tehran, Dies at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 4, 2013
NYT
When militant radicals seized the United States Embassy in Iran in November 1979, they intended to take all its employees hostage. But five were elsewhere in the embassy compound and escaped capture. After six tense days of furtively moving around Tehran, one of them, Robert Anders, placed a call to a Canadian diplomat with whom he played tennis, and asked for help.
“Hell, yes, of course,” the diplomat, John Sheardown, answered. “Count on us.”
The five employees had by then been joined by a sixth. Four ended up being hidden for nearly three months in the home of Mr. Sheardown, the Canadian Embassy’s No. 2 official, who died on Sunday at 88. The other two found refuge with the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor.
The episode, which came to be known as the “Canadian caper,” was a footnote to the Iranian hostage crisis, in which young Iranian revolutionaries seized the American Embassy and held 52 people hostage for 444 days to try to force the United States to return the deposed shah from New York, where he was being treated for cancer. After the shah died in July 1980 in Egypt and war erupted between Iran and Iraq, negotiations with the United States led to the release of the hostages in January 1981.
The concealment and extrication of the American diplomats by the Canadian government and the Central Intelligence Agency inspired the recent movie “Argo.” Though Mr. Sheardown is not mentioned in it — public recognition always gravitated to Mr. Taylor, who is portrayed in the film as a hero — his role was nevertheless consequential.
“Without his enthusiastic welcome, we might have tried to survive on our own a few more days,” Mark Lijek, a retired Foreign Service officer, wrote in Slate last year. “We would have failed.”
Mr. Sheardown’s avuncular, pipe-puffing manner led his houseguests to call him Big Daddy. He bought groceries at different stores to disguise his household’s suddenly larger appetite. He bribed the garbage collector with money and beer for the same reason. Surveillance, including tanks at the end of the street, was constant. Strangers knocked on the front door, suspicious calls were commonplace, their car was repeatedly searched.
“We were already living in danger,” Mr. Sheardown’s wife, Zena, said in an interview on Wednesday. “And certainly the danger was compounded because we were hiding, literally hiding, fugitives.”
Mr. Sheardown, she said, died in Ottawa, where he lived, after being treated for Alzheimer’s disease and other ailments.
John Vernon Sheardown was born on Oct. 11, 1924, in Sandwich, Ontario, a small town absorbed by Windsor in the 1930s. At 18, he joined the Canadian Air Force and flew a bomber in World War II, once crash-landing near an English village after limping back from an attack on Germany. He broke both legs, but was able to crawl to a pub door at 3 a.m. and rouse the owner. He asked for a glass of Scotch, which the owner gave him. The owner then asked for payment while Mr. Sheardown waited for an ambulance — a story Mr. Sheardown relished.
He joined Canada’s immigration service in the early 1960s and later transferred to the foreign service, where he specialized in immigration matters. He was busy in Tehran with Iranians who wanted to leave the country, as well as with Afghans who had fled their country after the Soviet Union invaded it in December 1979. His houseguests became an official part of his responsibilities after the Canadian Parliament held its first secret session since World War II to approve the rescue mission, which included issuing the Americans fake Canadian passports.
While in Tehran, the Americans in his rented 20-room house occupied themselves by listening to news on a shortwave radio, reading, playing Scrabble and cards and, by their own admission, drinking copiously. They had to leave the house only once, when the owner had a real estate agent show it to a potential buyer. The two Americans staying with Ambassador Taylor were spirited to the Sheardown house for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The diplomats posed as members of a film crew who had supposedly been scouting locations. They had been taught how to speak like Canadians — for instance, by ending sentences with “eh?” One was given a Molson beer key ring.
Mr. Sheardown’s first marriage, to Kathleen Benson, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the former Zena Khan, he is survived by his sons, Robin and John; his sisters, Jean Fitzsimmons and Betty Ann Whitehead; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
After being awarded a high honor, the Order of Canada, Mr. Sheardown fought for his wife, a British citizen, to receive the same award. She had been legally excluded from consideration because she had never lived in Canada. He argued that she had had the tougher job because she seldom left the house while living in danger. She received the honor in 1981.
After “Argo” appeared in theaters, Ms. Sheardown said, its director, Ben Affleck, called to apologize for leaving her and her husband out of the movie. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Affleck said he had been fully aware of the Sheardowns’ heroism before the film was shot, but had reluctantly omitted it for reasons of length, drama and cost.
“They got lost in the shuffle,” Mr. Affleck said. “It really did break my heart a bit.”
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http://www.flixxy.com/the-bizarre-border-between-canada-and-the-united-states.htm
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http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/the-most-pro-capitalism-place-to-live-in-north-america-is/
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http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/the-most-pro-capitalism-place-to-live-in-north-america-is/
'The Way Forward' and out of stagnation in the US receives an good example from the north. Conservatives achieve economic success and win 3 elections in a row.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387201/canada-now-more-american-america-john-fund
Is Canada Now More American than America?
Canada’s Burger King secret: Hold the taxes, hold the regulations.
By John Fund
The merger of U.S. hamburger giant Burger King with Tim Hortons, Canada’s favorite coffee shop, will create the world’s third largest fast-food company, with a total of 18,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. It is also a piercing wake-up call for the U.S., because the new company will make its global headquarters in Canada’s province of Ontario. That underscores what savvy businesses everywhere have learned — the U.S. is an increasingly less attractive place to do business. “Canada has quietly and politely become, well, more American than America,” says columnist Stephen Green.
Since 2003, more than 35 major U.S. companies have moved their headquarters and reincorporated overseas. Rather than rail against such “inversions,” as President Obama does, or call for an economic boycott, as Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown does, we should figure out what is driving U.S. companies offshore. Here’s a clue: The U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate of any industrialized country, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is “even now looking for ways it can unilaterally raise corporate taxes without going to Congress.”
Canada has long been our more socialist and, consequently, our poorer neighbor to the north. But that has changed over the last two decades. Starting in 1995, Canada has drawn back from a public-debt precipice, restrained government spending, and dramatically overhauled its tax system. Next year it will also begin unilaterally reducing tariffs on thousands of manufactured goods — recognizing that free trade makes for wealthier consumers and a more prosperous society.
The results have been dramatic. This year, Canada has a higher per capita household income than the U.S., an unheard-of development that no one saw coming. It ranks eightth in the annual Economic Freedom of the World index (freetheworld.com) that the Fraser Institute compiles for over 150 countries, with especially strong marks in property rights and business freedom. By comparison, the U.S. ranks a pathetic 17th and is now categorized as only “mostly free.” “Unfortunately for the United States, we’ve seen overspending, weakening rule of law, and regulatory overkill on the part of the U.S. government, causing its economic freedom score to plummet in recent years,” said Fred McMahon of the Fraser Institute. “This is a stark contrast from 2000, when the U.S. was considered one of the most economically free nations and ranked second globally.”
While the U.S. eagle has plummeted in terms of economic freedom, the Canadian maple leaf has prospered. The consulting firm of KPMG looked at the tax costs of doing business in ten major nations. Setting the U.S. tax rate at a benchmark score of 100, it found that Canada’s costs were the lowest, 46.4 percentage points lower than the U.S. The United Kingdom, Mexico, and the Netherlands also beat out the U.S.
Canada’s strategy of lowering tax burdens on business was a conscious one, begun under the Liberal government of Paul Martin and accelerated since 2006 by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. The late Jim Flaherty, who served as Harper’s finance minister until March of this year, told me last year that the essence of smart taxation is “to raise the resources needed for prudent government while creating an environment where the private sector is encouraged to create the longer-lasting jobs a country needs to prosper.” He concluded that “if you can give people enough upward opportunity for average people, the talk will be on creating more of it rather than on redistributing a shrinking pie.”
Among the innovations that Flaherty introduced was the Tax Free Savings Account, which allows Canadians to save more by setting aside money tax-free if it’s invested. Combined with the already established Registered Retirement Savings Plan, which is focused on building retirement income, Canadians now have more tax-free savings vehicles to help them remain independent over their lifespan than any people outside of Chile, which privatized its Social Security system in the 1980s.
No one suggests that Canada is a pure beacon of freedom. Harper’s Conservatives have a majority of seats in Parliament, but just shy of 50 percent of Canadians in the last election, in 2011, cast ballots for either the Liberals or New Democrats, both interventionist purveyors of big government. Canada’s single-payer health system delivers less innovation and longer waiting lists than Americans would be likely to tolerate, and many of Canada’s provinces are once again piling up debt and overspending.
But Canada proves that a country can climb out of a deep fiscal hole within a remarkably small number of years and build a prosperous society even while it retains large welfare-state programs.
That is a lesson for U.S. Democrats, who, rather than rail against Burger King’s lack of economic patriotism, should learn how Canada has avoided America’s economic stagnation. It’s also a lesson for Republicans, who often lack the courage of their convictions in calling for genuine economic reform. Canada’s economic example — and the political success of Harper’s Conservatives in winning three elections in a row — should stiffen their spines.
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http://www.funker530.com/canada-sends-special-forces-to-assist-in-the-fight-against-isis/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXa7WaY7F_0#t=48
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http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/story/1.3062840
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http://www.therebel.media/i_m_being_prosecuted_for
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http://christiantelegram.com/canada-declares-iran-a-terrorist-state-closes-embassy-and-expels-iranian-diplomats/
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immgration-canada-border-idUSKBN1602NG
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immgration-canada-border-idUSKBN1602NG
Good.
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Canadian Imams Call for Death of Jews
by IPT News • Mar 1, 2017 at 12:43 pm
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5808/canadian-imams-call-for-death-of-jews
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NdN4a6D_g
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/the-birth-of-canadas-armed-anti-islamic-patriot-group?utm_source=vicefbcaads&utm_campaign=global
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NdN4a6D_g
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/the-birth-of-canadas-armed-anti-islamic-patriot-group?utm_source=vicefbcaads&utm_campaign=global
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JD7hPM_yxg
I see a similar theme shown in the above movie. When the public doesn't feel protected by it's government, it will form it's own structures to fill that void. Those structures may not be pretty or nice.
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I would like to see that.
I agree with your assessment.
Here is another yet different example of a government not protecting its people:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/16/canada-passes-law-criminalizing-use-of-wrong-gender-pronouns/
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I would like to see that.
I agree with your assessment.
Here is another yet different example of a government not protecting its people:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/16/canada-passes-law-criminalizing-use-of-wrong-gender-pronouns/
It's worth watching. It's on Netflix now. Narcocultura is also well worth watching.
The governments of the west are bound and determined to utterly destroy and remake the people of the west.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Ingsoc_logo_from_1984.svg)
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(https://images.askmen.com/1080x540/sports/fanatic/bruce-jenner-s-decathlon-olympic-gold-1103071-TwoByOne.jpg)
Above is the picture of a woman. Disagree? Thoughtcrime!
"To realise English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the Party created the controlled language of Newspeak to ensure universal orthodoxy of ideology and politics among the populace."
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https://www.steynonline.com/7947/pass-me-my-sharia-niblick
Pass Me My Sharia Niblick
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Canada
June 28, 2017
Pam Davies for The Toronto Sun
Celebrating diversity in court: Ontario judge, Crown Counsel, Arabic interptreter, and niqabed defendant
The formal observances of Canada's 150th birthday have included a sesquicentennial viceregal gaffe and a pair of commemorative prime ministerial socks. But of course what most Canadians like to do when we're not trapping beaver and huffing poutine is celebrate diversity. And so it was that at the Canadian Tire store in Scarborough a "Scarborough woman" went full Allahu Akbar in the paint aisle, but, touchingly, instead of just slashing at her "fellow Canadians" with the traditional machete of her own cultural inheritance, she also embraced Canadian values by clobbering her victims with a golf club as if berating the caddy at nearby Cedar Brae. Global News reports:
Police said a woman walked to the paint section of the store with a golf club and began swinging it at employees and a customer while uttering threats.
A source confirmed to Global News the woman was reportedly wearing a niqab and a bandana adorned with what appeared to be a symbol for IS at the time of the alleged incident.
Police said employees and customers managed to subdue the woman and contact police, when she pulled a "large knife" out from under her clothing.
The woman was restrained and police said the knife was "pried out of her hand" with the help of another store employee. The employee sustained non-life threatening injuries and was treated at the scene.
The "Scarborough woman" is one Rehab Dughmosh, which sounds like a treatment centre for aging hardcore groupies who've put their back out but is in fact the name of the perpetrator. The allegedly alleged perpetrator, I should say. Ms Dughmosh, speaking through an interpreter and the folds of her head-to-toe body bag, made a brief statement to the court:
"I meant to harm those people," Rehab Dughmosh told Justice Kimberley Crosbie through an Arabic interpreter during a court appearance.
"I reject all counsel here. I only believe in Islamic Sharia law. I would like to revoke my Canadian citizenship that I received. I don't want to have any allegiance to you... If you release me, I'm going to commit this type of action again and again because I'm pledging allegiance to [IS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," she said, adding she refuses to adhere to Canadian law.
Well, that's easy for you to say. Her Honour was not entirely persuaded:
Asking the accused to think about it, Justice Kimberley Crosbie would not immediately accept her attempt to plead guilty to the alleged ISIS-inspired attack that saw two people assaulted.
Joe Warmington's Toronto Sun column is full of fascinating details. For example, the lavishly funded Canadian bureaucracy cannot reliably state whether or not Rehab Dughmosh has any Canadian citizenship to revoke, or where she came from:
They are working on the belief she was born in Syria but before Canada they are looking into leads of a possible stop in Jordan... She does have status in Canada but it's still not clear if she has Canadian citizenship or has the belief that permanent resident status is one and the same.
If she is a Canadian citizen it would be next to impossible to deport her. If she has a temporary or permanent residence status, there is a process.
Good luck with that. Mr Warmington quotes socks symbol Justin Trudeau:
"I'll give you the quote so that you guys can jot it down and put it in an attack ad somewhere that the Liberal Party believes that terrorists should get to keep their Canadian citizenship," he said. "Because I do. And I'm willing to take on anyone who disagrees with that."
Trudeau's premise is "as soon as you make citizenship for some Canadians conditional on good behaviour, you devalue citizenship for everyone"...
It comes to something when a golf-club-wielding Arabic-cursing body-bagged jihadist crone unable to speak the language of "her" country and attacking patrons of a suburban shopping mall in furtherance of the global caliphate nevertheless has a better grasp of citizenship than a western prime minister. But, alas, such is the case. Citizenship is not conditional on "good behaviour", but it is conditional on what Rehab Dughmosh calls "allegiance". In traditional ethnostates such as, say, Denmark, that didn't used to be a big deal: your family had been Danish for a thousand years, you felt Danish, you lived Danish, so naturally your allegiance was to Denmark - "naturally" as in it's so natural you don't even think about it. That's why we call adopting citizenship "naturalization" - because, by the end of it, it's supposed to feel natural. Naturalization requires a transfer of allegiance, which is why in Canada you take an oath to the Queen and in America, just to underline the point, you're also called upon to "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen".
That should just about cover it.
Except that it doesn't. Because to the post-modernists of the western political class "allegiance" is a fusty concept. They don't believe in it, so they don't see why Ahmed off the boat from Misurata should be expected to. Perhaps the weirdest moment for me in the Munk Debate last year, between Nigel Farage and me, on the one hand, and, on the other, Louise Arbour and Simon Schama, was this exchange:
Mark Steyn: When you've got second- and third- generation Belgians and Frenchmen and Germans and Britons and Canadians going off to join ISIS, blowing up Paris, blowing up Brussels, that ought to occasion a certain modesty among us that our skills at assimilation, at inculcating our values, are not as awesome and all-encompassing as they were in the nineteenth century. And to think, when second- and third-generation immigrants are blowing up the airport, that the answer is suddenly to accelerate immigration from the same source, is very bizarre. In what sense are these people Belgian?
Simon Schama: Well, you know, in what sense is Razia Iqbal British? She's fully British, right..? And she happens to be a British Muslim, right? And how more British can you get than doing the BBC World Service?
Mark Steyn: Yes. I worked with Zeinab Badawi at Channel 4 in Britain. I've got no problem with that. But that's my point: Holding a passport does not make you Canadian and does not make you Belgian and does not make you French.
Louise Arbour: What?
Simon Schama: I agree.
Professor Schama appeared to concede that point, but Mme Arbour was apparently stunned by it, and returned to it later, very emphatically:
Louise Arbour: And by the way, Mark, if you have a Canadian passport you're a Canadian citizen. There's no arguing with that, right?
Mme Arbour is a former Supreme Court justice but she's missing my point: a Canadian passport may make you a Canadian citizen, as a point of law, but it does not make you a Canadian, as an actual, living, breathing reality. Body-bagged from head to toe, speaking neither English nor French, Rehab Dughmosh has renounced her allegiance to Canada and proclaimed instead her allegiance to the Islamic State, which happens to be Canada's enemy, which in the pre-Arbour era would be what we quaintly call "treason". Why does Mme Arbour presume to know better than Ms Dughmosh about where the latter's allegiance lies?
A few days ago, a sniper with Canada's special forces broke the world record for longest confirmed kill, picking off a Soldier of Allah at 3,450 meters - which is over two miles. That's phenomenal and unprecedented, and the JTF2 guy who did it deserves all the honours the Canadian state can confer on him. On this 150th birthday I only hope we can continue to produce more men like that.
But what's the point if, for every ISIS barbarian you pick off at 3,450 meters, back on the home front you're importing hundreds and thousands of loons who support him and share his world view, day in, day out. There are more "British Muslims" fighting for al-Baghdadi than for the Queen. Thousands more: they feel their allegiance to the Caliphate in a way that they do not for Britain. Likewise with Rehab Dughmosh: she feels her allegiance to ISIS, and not for Canada. Never did. Pace the socks symbol Trudeau, making citizenship conditional on "good behaviour" - ie, non-treason - does not "devalue citizenship for everyone". Tolerating ISIS fighters holding UK and Canadian and Belgian citizenship is what "devalues citizenship for everyone". Rehab Dughmosh's Canadian citizenship devalues that JTF2 sniper's Canadian citizenship.
That's true in the broader sense, too. Ms Dughmosh and those "British" ISIS volunteers feel their true allegiance; they live and breathe it. If you accept them, as Mme Arbour does, as Canadian and UK and French and Swedish citizens, "no arguing with that", you devalue your own citizenship to the point where its purchase on you starts to weaken and dissolve. I look at the feeble, passive reactions to jihadist provocations in Manchester and London and Paris and Brussels, and wonder: how many of the west's citizens feel British or French or Belgian? It's the shrunken reductive definition of "citizenship" advanced by the likes of Trudeau that devalues it - and (a somber thought for this 150th Dominion Day) perhaps fatally.
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Canada Moves to 'Modernize' its Anti-Terrorism Legislation
by Scott Newark
Special to IPT News
September 11, 2017
https://www.investigativeproject.org/6644/canada-moves-to-modernize-its-anti-terrorism
With the return of Canada's Parliament later this month, one of the security issues sure to attract attention is Bill C-59.
It aims to modernize and clarify Canadian national security and intelligence operations. This includes how the country collects and retains metadata, better coordination for oversight and review of counter-terrorism investigations.
These issues and the need for reform have been the subject of discussion in Canada for more than a decade and, ironically, many of the changes proposed in C-59 were specifically described in detail in a May 2016 IPT column on the subject.
The bill would revise the much-maligned existing Anti-Terrorism Act, known as C-51, enacted by the previous government in the immediate aftermath of the October 2014 terrorist attacks in Quebec and on Parliament Hill. Curiously, the bill was passed with the support of opposition Liberals who are now in power. They promised changes if elected during the 2015 campaign.
C-51's increase in CSIS authority, expanded information sharing and broader anti-terrorism power in the Criminal Code generated legitimate debate. The bill also fueled partisan and ideological hyperbole in part because it did not address oversight and accountability, and the language used in the Bill to explain and justify its changes was deficient. Its defense by the Harper government was also needlessly combative rather than substantive.
It is important to note that the bill was only introduced in Parliament in late June, 18 months after the elections. The new government may have realized that the original bill was not necessarily as malevolent as had been suggested and that the issues involved were more complex than originally thought. The bill also demonstrates that, to its credit, the government has decided to address larger national security institutional and accountability issues which C-51 did not.
These issues are of real importance to Canadians and while the questionable payoff of $10.5 million to terrorist Omar Khadr and the Liberal government's deer in the headlights approach to the flood of people illegally entering Canada to claim 'refugee' status will be under the spotlight, so too will C-59.
It contains a relatively detailed preamble that sets out the bill's national security purpose and intent, along with the required consideration of civil rights and liberties. This is a welcome feature that greatly reduces the future ability of courts to strike down legislation on Charter grounds on the basis that no justification for the impugned measures was provided by government.
The bill creates the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) that will have direct review authority over the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and, in relation to national security issues, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The new NSIRA can review activities of any department that relates to national security or intelligence and review authority for an issue referred to it by a Minister of the Crown. This should be a significant step to ending the 'siloed' environment that different review bodies encountered when trying to get the 'big picture' on national security issues involving multiple departments and agencies. If C-59 is passed, it will be the entity with the authority to investigate complaints made against CSIS or CSE and the RCMP when it relates to 'national security' issues. This review could include cases of alleged improper information sharing or unauthorized 'disruption' activities. It should be clarified and confirmed that this also applies to the actions of an agency of the federal government, as a significant gap would be created were that not the case.
While this change is positive, the agency needs to be assessed to ensure it is carrying out its duties as intended, because having a mandate is not the same thing as delivering on it. With the creation of the Parliamentary National Security Review Committee, there is no longer a need to have the new NSIRA comprised of former politicians. The agency needs people with operational, academic or even journalistic expertise in order to succeed, and it needs appropriate funding to be able to carry out its important duties.
The bill abolishes the Office of the Commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment and replaces it with an increasingly empowered Intelligence Commissioner. The Intelligence Commissioner has defined approval authority for authorizations, amendments or determinations sought by CSIS and CSE for things like communications interception, cyber system intrusion, and for CSIS, travel disruption, financial interference, communications interception, creating false documents. The scope of these new 'disruption' authorities will deservedly be debated as C-59 is reviewed.
The commissioner also is granted extensive review and approval authority over metadata (or 'datasets') acquisition, use and sharing, which is clearly a response to the 2016 Federal Court decision slamming CSIS for its unauthorized activities in this area. Metadata involves communications from cellphones to the internet. Metadata interception does not necessarily record actual conversations, but through modern data analytical technology, it can provide information on who a person communicates with, when that takes place, and more.
While independent oversight is welcome, it must not simply create more self-serving bureaucracy that interferes with operational intelligence and national security needs. This appears to be recognized in s. 21 of the act which permits expedited approval in defined operational circumstances, but this is an issue that needs to be clarified and monitored. In a welcome sign of information sharing and coordination, s. 22 of the Act requires all of the commissioner's decisions in this regard to be provided to the new NSIRA.
C-59's most important changes include a modernization of the Communication Security Establishment's (CSE) mandate that gives more specific detail and authorizes 'active' cyber operations. This means CSE can take proactive cyber intrusion measures, including, presumably, hacking and disruption, in the "global information infrastructure" including in information based systems. These changes more accurately reflect the current cyber and security environment and the activities that CSE is undertaking.
For the first time, CSE will be authorized to carry out 'active cyber operations' for the broad purpose of being able to "...degrade, disrupt, influence, respond to or interfere with the capabilities, intentions or activities of a foreign individual, state, organization or terrorist group as they relate to international affairs, defence or security." This is a significant enhancement of CSE's mandate that, no doubt, will be subject to close scrutiny.
Changes to the CSIS Act in C-59 provide more detail regarding restrictions on activities as well immunities for CSIS officers in carrying out their duties. The bill does not, however, remove the active 'disruption' authority that was provided to CSIS in C-51 which was a historic change in CSIS' traditional restricted information gathering role. In that sense, the C-59 changes to CSIS are more symbolic than substantive. The amendments also create specific and extensive procedural requirements for CSIS in the gathering and maintaining public 'datasets,' which are the compiled and organized data from 'metadata' retrieval. A preamble to the bill reinforces the priorities of mandate clarity, appropriate respect for privacy and compliance and accountability.
The changes made to the Secure Air Travel Act in C-59 suggest that Transport Canada wants greater operational control of the 'No Fly' list system and that it is finally preparing to add modern technology to the existing biographic data based system. This change will support an effective international 'bad guy' biometric lookout database. The bill also adds measures to somewhat improve the redress system for people challenging their designation, a concern driven in part by recent cases involving children improperly added to the list.
C-59's changes to the Criminal Code are among the most dramatic. They will expand the designated terrorist 'entity' criteria and repeal the unused preventive arrest and investigate hearing provisions.
Unfortunately, the changes covering people who advocate or promote terrorist acts, and the definition of 'terrorist propaganda,' are counter-productive in that they will not address the modern terrorist communications techniques that use broad social media messaging for radicalization and recruitment. There have been no reported instances of abuse of the current provisions, so the motivation for this change appears to be political. Fortunately, the bill leaves existing evidentiary standards for terrorism peace bonds in the Criminal Code, which were lowered in C-51, intact.
The bill also creates a mandatory review of the legislation and its operational impacts in five years which is a helpful strategy.
C-59 likely will preserve law enforcement's and intelligence agencies' national security capabilities created by C-51. The bill dramatically modernizes Canada's cyber security capabilities and makes significant reforms to strengthen and coordinate institutional review and oversight in the national security sector.
There are definitely a number of issues in C-59 that need to be raised at committee so that appropriate explanations of the rationale and purposes of the changes can be provided. That is, after all, the purpose of the committee review of legislation and hopefully this can be accomplished without the acrimony and partisanship that surrounded C-51.
Scott Newark is a former Alberta Crown Prosecutor who has also served as Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, Director of Operations for Investigative Project on Terrorism and as a Security Policy Advisor to the governments of Ontario and Canada. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the TRSS Program in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University.
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Conservative elected in Ontario. Lowest vote for the liberal ruling party in history. "Progressive conservatives tripled their seats. What is the significance of just one province in Canada? Proportional to the US, Ontario is the equivalent of California, Texas, New York and Florida combined.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-election-live-updates/
Liberals fall short of official party status; Wynne resigns as Liberal leader
"Some Liberal candidates...didn’t even put the word Liberal in their campaign materials."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-wynne-resigns-as-liberal-leader-as-party-suffers-historic-rout-in/
Doug Ford Platform promises: Balance the budget, cut spending, reduce taxes. scrap a minimum wage hike, cut corporate tax rates, abolish the 15 per cent non-resident buyer tax on real estate, cut small business tax rate. And roll back beer prices!
“I don’t believe in the government sticking their hands in our lives all the time. I believe in letting the market dictate”
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ontario-election-2018-party-platforms/
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The US and Canada: The Ties That Bind
Jun 14, 2018
By Jacob L. Shapiro
The United States and Canada were just selected to host the 2026 World Cup together (along with Mexico), but when it comes to trade, the two countries are miles apart. On May 31, the U.S. decided to lift Canada’s exemption from steel and aluminum tariffs. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hit back on June 9, saying that Canada, which last year exported 83 percent of its steel and 87 percent of its aluminum to the U.S., would impose retaliatory measures by July 1. Three days later, U.S. President Donald Trump said Trudeau’s statement would cost Canada “a lot of money.” Trudeau declined to respond to Trump’s most recent comments, and the war of words seems to have ended there, at least for now.
This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has clashed with a key U.S. ally. Shortly after taking office, Trump had an unpleasant exchange with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over an immigration dispute, though both sides quickly patched things up. Trump’s relationship with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has been rocky from the start, and British police even briefly suspended intelligence sharing with American officials following last year’s Manchester bombing, citing U.S. leaks of sensitive information. Now the U.S. appears to be locking horns with its northern neighbor. But as with Australia and the U.K., the rhetorical duel with Canada is superficial, based more on political grandstanding than on a change in the bilateral relationship.
Stalwart Allies
Canada is highly dependent on its relationship with the United States, especially in economic terms. Last year, 76 percent of Canadian exports went to the United States. According to Canada’s National Energy Board, a staggering 99.1 percent of Canadian crude oil exports went to the U.S. as well. A recent study by economist Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary showed that trade with the U.S. accounted for 49 percent of the gross domestic product in Ontario – by far Canada’s most populous and wealthiest province.
(click to enlarge)
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The U.S. is also reliant on Canada, but to a far lesser degree. Only 18 percent of U.S. exports are destined for Canada. But for a number of states, especially those along the northern border and that import Canadian crude, U.S.-Canada trade is far more critical than it is on the national level. (Michigan, for example, derives 5 percent of its state GDP from exports to Canada.) Even so, the economic relationship between the two countries is hugely imbalanced. Whatever economic vulnerabilities the U.S. has, Canada’s are much larger.
(click to enlarge)
But the relationship is not simply an economic one. The United States owes its position as the world’s sole superpower in part to the fact that it has not had to deal with security threats on its land borders for over a century. Mexico hasn’t been a serious threat to U.S. national security since the Mexican-American War of 1848. The U.S. and Canada haven’t fought a major conflict since the War of 1812, when the British still ruled over the territory north of the U.S. In World War II, Canada and the U.S. became stalwart allies, coordinating defense policy and sharing intelligence, even to this day. When U.S. military planners consider how best to organize U.S. forces, they don’t have to worry about protecting the United States from a northern enemy – and it’s difficult to put a price on that.
A Threat to U.S. National Security
This is the reason the steel and aluminum tariffs are causing such angst in Ottawa. It is not about the trade spat itself. Canada and the U.S. have trade disputes going back centuries, and disagreements are inevitable in such a close economic relationship, especially when one side has significantly more leverage than the other.
The problem for Canada is that, to be able to impose the tariffs in the first place, Trump had to claim that the existing trade model posed a threat to U.S. national security. For a country like Canada, whose foreign policy for the past 80 years can essentially be boiled down to not being a threat to U.S. national security, this stretches the bounds of credulity and politeness. Sure, the United States can argue that its increased reliance on steel and aluminum imports necessitates protectionist policies. As a result of Chinese dumping, the price of steel and aluminum has plummeted and, in the process, destroyed U.S. companies. Canada took advantage by almost doubling steel and aluminum exports to the United States in the past 17 years, when Chinese dumping kicked off in earnest.
But for Canada, the insinuation that it somehow poses a threat by exporting steel and aluminum to the United States is a ludicrous argument, one that takes for granted Canada’s contributions to the U.S.-led post-war world order. It also fails to recognize that Canada’s share in U.S. trade has dropped precipitously since 2001, when the U.S. began importing cheaper Chinese goods at much higher rates – which Canada accepted without nary a protest despite the damage done to Canadian manufacturers.
Canada doesn’t have much room for maneuver when it comes to foreign policy or trade with the United States. After World War II, aligning with the U.S. in the global conflict against the Soviet Union was a fait accompli. Canada, like the United States, is protected from most global conflicts by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and because the United States dwarfs Canada militarily, economically and in terms of population, Canada has few alternatives other than to follow the United States’ lead. Canada, for the most part, does this willingly and without protest – few countries are as prosperous and secure as Canada is today, and that is in no small part due to the United States. In fact, the most remarkable aspect of the United States’ relationship with Canada – and indeed with the U.K. and its English-speaking former colonies – is that it carries on inexorably, immune to the politics of the day.
That’s because politics and strategy don’t always align. Like the United States, Canada has its own political divisions, and Trudeau represents the same urban, well-educated, socially liberal segment of the population in Canada that would have voted for Hillary Clinton in the United States. (It is no coincidence that Trudeau has become something of a celebrity to American liberals in recent years.) Trudeau cannot kowtow to Trump any more than Trump can abandon the promises he made to his base. Trump scores points with his base by insulting Trudeau just as Trudeau scores points with his base by insulting Trump. Meanwhile, the U.S. needs Canada, and Canada needs the U.S., and the two go on cooperating on the issues that really matter – like co-hosting the World Cup in 2026. These realities may be overshadowed by politics at times, but that does not make them mutually exclusive.
The post The US and Canada: The Ties That Bind appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
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The reason Canada is backtracking on the carbon tax is climate change, investment climate change.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-backtracks-on-a-carbon-tax-1534110070
o into effect next year. The reason for the backtrack has to do with climate change, but not the kind associated with global warming.
Mr. Trudeau is reacting to shifting political winds stirred by Canada’s investment climate, which has turned stone cold. He faces an election in October 2019, and will have trouble unless investors warm to Canada.
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Why is Canada against a hundredth of a degree of warming anyway?
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https://www.newcenter.ca/news/2017/10/7/justin-trudeau-is-far-more-dangerous-than-donald-trump
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Jan. 17, 2019
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Canada: Caught in the Crossfire of the US-China Trade War
Canada’s arrest of a top Chinese executive landed Ottawa in the middle of a feud it wanted to avoid.
Canada has found itself in the middle of two diplomatic spats over the past five months. In August, Saudi Arabia took exception to a Canadian Foreign Ministry tweet urging Saudi authorities to release jailed women’s rights activists. In response, Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador in Ottawa and suspended all trade and investment with Canada. A few months later, Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, a top executive of Chinese telecom firm Huawei, at the United States’ request. After Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadians, including former diplomat Michael Kovrig, accusing them of threatening China’s national security. This week, another Canadian was sentenced to death in China after a brief retrial for allegedly organizing a methamphetamine smuggling ring.
Canada probably didn’t intend to provoke a conflict in either situation. It’s hardly the first country to accuse Saudi Arabia of violating human rights – under normal circumstances the Foreign Ministry’s tweet would have been quickly forgotten. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Canada publicly criticized the kingdom in the midst of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s consolidation of power and ambitious drive to transform Saudi society – which hinged on cultivating an image of the crown prince as a reformer. In that sense, the tweet was inadvertently prescient. Canada had no way of knowing it would enrage the Saudi political establishment as much as it did or that Saudi agents would kill a Saudi journalist in a Turkish consulate and bring global attention to the kingdom’s human rights record just two months later.
As for China, Canadian authorities detained Meng not at Ottawa’s directive but because a New York court issued a warrant for her arrest on Aug. 22. While the U.S. hasn’t yet produced an indictment or formal request for Meng’s extradition (it has until the end of the month to do so), Canadian prosecutors said last month she was being charged with conspiracy to defraud banks. Meng is accused of not disclosing to banks Huawei’s links to another tech firm called Skycom, which was doing business in Iran that violated U.S. sanctions. Canada has plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Huawei, but on Meng’s arrest, it’s simply fulfilling its treaty obligations to the U.S. That this justification is unconvincing to China is a subtle reminder of the very real differences between Chinese and Western legal systems.
The Saudi issue is ultimately a minor one – Saudi Arabia represents less than 1 percent of Canadian trade, and whether Canada will continue to sell military equipment and vehicles to the kingdom will be based on domestic political considerations in Canada more than anything else. The China issue, however, is more complicated and potentially more consequential. Canada might have hoped to avoid getting involved in the U.S.-China spat. The Canadian economy is overwhelmingly dependent on the U.S. economy, and though Canada can’t eliminate that dependence, it can try to reduce it – in part with China’s help. Indeed, as recently as last November, Canada’s trade minister said a free trade deal between Canada and China was possible.
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That might not be the case anymore, however. Unlike the U.S., Canada has elected to remain in the revamped Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was designed in part to limit China’s expanding global economic influence. In December, it was reported that spy chiefs from the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance met in July in Canada to coordinate efforts to prevent Chinese-made equipment from being used in 5G mobile networks. (The U.S., Australia and New Zealand have banned Huawei equipment from being used in 5G networks, and the U.K.’s largest telecom company announced its intention to avoid Huawei last month. Canada is likely not far behind.) In November, Canada deployed the HMCS Calgary to the Western Pacific to participate in anti-China drills and has signaled its intention to keep up to two ships in the region year-round.
Canada is, therefore, already part of an emerging U.S.-led alliance to constrain Chinese power. China is seeking a temporary trade deal with the U.S., so it can’t afford to confront Washington directly right now, especially not while its economy is under increasing pressure. But Canada is a much smaller and weaker country than the U.S., and Chinese power might have more of an effect there. From China’s perspective, it was already facing an escalating trade conflict with the U.S. and a concerted campaign to block Chinese companies like Huawei from the global economy. Now Canada, of all countries, is arresting Chinese nationals. The excuse that it was merely operating under the rule of law doesn’t make it any easier for China to accept. China has responded that it, too, has laws, not to mention roughly 200 dual Canadian-Chinese citizens in custody. If the West wants to play hardball, China will show it can play, too.
Unfortunately for China, its retaliation against Canada is somewhat self-defeating. China needs foreign investment and has been working hard to keep foreign businesses in China and attract more foreign companies that have the capital and technology to help Beijing manage its ongoing economic transition. Arresting Western nationals will only deter foreign companies from wanting anything to do with China. On the other hand, Beijing can’t afford to look weak, especially in the eyes of its own people. The potential impact on the Chinese economy of the U.S. trade war is so great that Beijing has no choice but to try to spin the situation as much as it can. (Chinese censors are already doing so.) The arrest of a Chinese national – the daughter of the founder of a globally recognized Chinese company no less – is much harder to spin. If the Chinese government can’t protect its own people when they’re abroad, the motherland is not nearly as strong as the Communist Party insists it is.
Canada didn’t intend to set off an altercation with China any more than it meant to offend the Saudi crown prince’s self-styled image as a feminist icon, but as is sometimes the case in geopolitics, intentions are irrelevant. From Ottawa’s perspective, Canada is simply observing the rule of law. China has a different interpretation – according to its ambassador to Canada, “the detention of Ms. Meng is not a mere judicial case, but a premeditated political action.” When China retaliates by detaining Canadians who it says are threats to its national security, and Canada and its Western allies decry this as a violation of the rule of law, China can’t help but express anger at what it sees as “double standards due to Western egotism and white supremacy.” But the Canadian government is obligated to honor a U.S. extradition request, and as a result, it’s now mired in a confrontation it didn’t want. Complicating matters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ample political reasons not to appear weak on China, considering the 2016 around Chinese contributions to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
In the end, this diplomatic spat will come down to whether the United States is willing to drop the charges against Meng in light of its broader negotiations with the Chinese government. Earlier this week, China signaled it may be open to a face-saving resolution – Meng’s father and Huawei’s founder made a rare public appearance during which he described U.S. President Donald Trump as “a great president” and Huawei as “only a sesame seed in the trade conflict between China and the U.S.” If, however, the two countries, who will continue trade talks at the end of the month, do come to an understanding, it will only defuse the current problem. In the long term, the U.S. and the West are behaving in ways China can interpret only as hostile to its development, and China is behaving in ways the U.S. and the West can interpret only as hostile their interests. It’s looking increasingly doubtful that the two sides can break out of this spiral. In the meantime, Meng, Kovrig and Canadian foreign policy remain caught in the crossfire.
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May 9, 2019
By Jacob L. Shapiro
Canada: A Casualty of ‘America First’
China is proving tough on Canada, and the U.S. has yet to come to its neighbor’s aid.
Canada’s relations with China continue to deteriorate. Shortly after Canada arrested Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou at the United States’ behest in December, China arrested two Canadian nationals, including former diplomat Michael Kovrig, in a tit-for-tat move meant to bully Canada into releasing Meng. When that didn’t work, Beijing tried a new strategy, effectively punishing what it perceived as Canadian intransigence by restricting access to the Chinese market for key Canadian sectors such as canola, peas, soybeans and pork. Those measures are now beginning to hurt the Canadian economy, and with little prospect of resolving the issue bilaterally, Canada is reaching out to the United States for help – but its closest ally has been unwilling to render assistance.
Deteriorating Relations
China’s market-blocking maneuvers have been mostly unofficial thus far. What concrete steps China has taken to block Canadian exports have all been taken under the guise of plausible deniability. China suspended the export permits of two Canadian pork producers last week, ostensibly because of a labeling problem. In February, China banned shipments of canola seed from two Canadian companies, claiming that it discovered pests in the shipments, and in April, it filed a quality complaint against a third Canadian canola exporter. Now, there are reports of Canadian soybeans and peas facing unusual obstacles when reaching China, including lengthy inspection delays far exceeding the norm and intense scrutiny of Canadian products.
(click to enlarge)
Some Canadian officials have tried to put on a brave face despite these developments – Saskatchewan province’s premier recently dismissed the reports on all Canadian exports besides canola as little more than “hearsay,” while Canada’s agriculture minister insisted last week that the reports reflect little more than the routine issues that periodically emerge during routine customs inspections. Perhaps, but that explanation seems doubtful, especially considering that China’s African swine fever epidemic means China needs to secure sources of pork imports, in particular. It’s more likely that China has made an intentional decision to block certain Canadian exports, even if it means China must find alternative sources for those goods.
Whether intentional or not, the Canadian economy is beginning to feel the effects of China’s emergent fastidiousness.
Canadian trade statistics for February 2019 show an almost 25 percent decline in monthly exports to China compared to prior months. Canola exports have been hit particularly hard; exports to China declined in February by almost 60 percent compared to November 2018, with canola meal (51 percent) and canola seed (38 percent) registering substantial declines as well. And that data will likely be worse when March and April figures are released. At least some of the decline can be attributed to Chinese New Year celebrations in February, but the drops are too precipitous for that to be the only factor. Indeed, an April 29 Reuters report detailed how Chinese buyers were canceling purchases of Canadian canola on short notice, forcing Canadian companies to resell to buyers in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh at steep discounts.
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With little in the way of leverage to change China’s behavior, Canada has turned to the United States for help. Multiple Canadian government officials have stated publicly that they would welcome U.S. support and that such support could make China more willing to find an accommodation with Canada. No such American assistance has been forthcoming. The U.S. State Department has expressed concern over China’s canola bans, and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a nicely worded bipartisan resolution in March “commending” Canada for “upholding the rule of law” and arresting Meng. In practice, however, the U.S. has done very little. Thus far, the U.S. has elected not to address the Huawei issue – including Meng’s arrest – in its trade negotiations with China or to make China’s Canada-targeted measures an issue. In addition, according to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., Washington has not been particularly forthright with the Canadian government about U.S. intentions for Meng.
‘America First’
The United States’ unwillingness to use its influence with China to protect its northern neighbor fits with the broader foreign policy of the Trump administration – namely, “America First.” This is, after all, the same U.S. government that raised tariffs against Canadian steel exports to the United States by citing a “national security threat” and that has used Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its favorite rhetorical punching bag. The U.S. is pursuing negotiations with China to secure better trade terms for American companies – not for Canadian ones, even though China’s economic expansion in recent decades has posed similar problems for both countries. The United States is not interested in using the extensive leverage it holds over the Chinese economy to help other countries, even its most stalwart allies – in fact, the U.S. is simultaneously pursuing new trade arrangements with such allies, including Canada and Japan.
It is hard to overstate how radical a departure this is from previous U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. cemented its position as a global power after World War II by doing the exact opposite – by not putting America first. The U.S. did not do this out of generosity or nobility but because it calculated that doing so would give the United States more power. The U.S. was rich and powerful enough that it could afford to pass on the benefits of that power to other countries and, in so doing, build a network of relationships, partnerships and alliances that countries like the Soviet Union then and China now – which has hardly any allies to speak of besides a despotic hermit regime on the Korean peninsula or an eternally fractious Pakistan – can only dream of. By not putting America first in all things, America was first in arguably the most important thing: power.
A country like Canada cannot afford to break with the United States. From a political, economic and security standpoint, Canada is essentially a U.S. province, hardwired into a U.S.-led alliance structure whether it wants to be or not. Certainly, U.S.-Canada relations are not going to crumble because the U.S. is unwilling to use its leverage over the Chinese to protect Canadian companies or because Trudeau and Trump don’t like each other. Still, American power has always been at its most effective not when countries can’t afford to break with the United States but when countries don’t want to. That is exactly why China has singled Canada out. “America First” may mean the U.S. will get what it wants out of trade negotiations with China, but if the U.S. isn’t careful, it might also mean that down the line, its allies will have far less of a reason to put America first themselves.
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Until Canada gets rid of PM Zoolander, they are free to go piss up a rope, as far as I am concerned.
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Canada has been a good and real friend. They rescued our people in Iran during the Carter episode, and they have fought well along side us in Afghanistan are two examples that come to mind.
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Canada has been a good and real friend. They rescued our people in Iran during the Carter episode, and they have fought well along side us in Afghanistan are two examples that come to mind.
The Canada that was our friend doesn’t exist anymore.
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Disagree, not only based upon what I read, but upon my many dealings with my Canadian friends in the Dog Brothers.
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Speaking of our good friend Canada, it would appear that they have put themselves in harm's way with the Chinese with the HuaWei arrest , , ,
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-european-diplomats-support-canada-in-chinese-court-in-death-penalty-appeal_2915622.html?ref=brief_BreakingNews&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6ef3c1f0d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_09_09_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6ef3c1f0d9-239065853
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Disagree, not only based upon what I read, but upon my many dealings with my Canadian friends in the Dog Brothers.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canadians-are-seeing-the-whole-world-through-an-anti-american-lens/
https://www.thestar.com/halifax/2018/07/11/halifax-professor-says-canadian-hostility-towards-american-expats-in-trump-era-could-drive-them-away.html
http://www.parli.ca/anti-americanism/
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Maybe I generalize too much but I was under the impression it is the French Canadians who do not like Americans. Though anectodal the Quebec Canadians I met were less than friendly, unlike ones for English Canada.
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Nope. That is our not good friend Canada complying with an extradition treaty. I question how long until PM Zoolander waves the white flag.
Speaking of our good friend Canada, it would appear that they have put themselves in harm's way with the Chinese with the HuaWei arrest , , ,
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-european-diplomats-support-canada-in-chinese-court-in-death-penalty-appeal_2915622.html?ref=brief_BreakingNews&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=6ef3c1f0d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_09_09_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-6ef3c1f0d9-239065853
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https://www.vicnews.com/news/wexit-trending-after-election-in-support-of-western-canada-separation/
#Wexit trending after election in support of western Canada separation
The hashtag is a play on Brexit from the U.K
“When one part of Canada votes to destroy another, we don’t have a country,” said Twitter user @JodyDahrouge. “The time has come to go our separate ways.”
[Color map reversed from US colors.]
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I don't want to be ruled by eastern liberals either. When the US finally splits, make sure we invite the willing areas of Canada to our new coalition.
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Yes.
https://www.vicnews.com/news/wexit-trending-after-election-in-support-of-western-canada-separation/
#Wexit trending after election in support of western Canada separation
The hashtag is a play on Brexit from the U.K
“When one part of Canada votes to destroy another, we don’t have a country,” said Twitter user @JodyDahrouge. “The time has come to go our separate ways.”
[Color map reversed from US colors.]
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I don't want to be ruled by eastern liberals either. When the US finally splits, make sure we invite the willing areas of Canada to our new coalition.
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https://clarionproject.org/canada-where-calling-soleimani-a-terrorist-can-get-you-arrested/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4e33b6fe99-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_06_02_37&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-4e33b6fe99-6358189&mc_cid=4e33b6fe99
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https://clarionproject.org/canada-where-calling-soleimani-a-terrorist-can-get-you-arrested/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4e33b6fe99-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_06_02_37&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-4e33b6fe99-6358189&mc_cid=4e33b6fe99
When you don't have a second amendment, you don't have a first amendment either.
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https://clarionproject.org/canada-seeding-the-state-with-totalitarianism/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a8ad914c91-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_23_02_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-a8ad914c91-6358189&mc_cid=a8ad914c91
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(click to enlarge)
The Keystone XL pipeline project is no stranger to controversy. It has inspired protests and objections from environmentalists and indigenous groups for over a decade. The latest disagreement over the pipeline, however, occurred between the U.S. and Canadian governments. On Jan. 21, U.S. President Joe Biden canceled permits for the U.S. component of the pipeline, reversing his predecessor’s policy.
The cancellation revives political and economic tensions deeply embedded within Canada’s national fabric. Canada began as a confederation uniting several colonies scattered across North America. The country is diverse both socially and economically to this day, and underlying tensions between its east and west coasts are more and more coming out into the open, especially amid economic recovery efforts in the wake of the pandemic.
Keystone XL touches on Canada's east-west divide, characterized by different economic models, wealth concentration and historic settlement patterns. (Just last year, four lawmakers from Alberta threatened secession over the government’s failure to address concerns related to the national energy program and provincial economy.) Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, has already called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to enact some form of economic compensation – either in the form of payments to TC Energy, the Canadian firm behind the pipeline, and the provinces for losses incurred, or retaliation against the U.S. for backing out of the project. The debate over Canada’s response will be difficult and divisive.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/998868/canada-guy-abandons-canadians-in-afghanistan
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/998868/canada-guy-abandons-canadians-in-afghanistan
All the cool kids are doing it.
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https://odysee.com/@RandyHillier:c/we-must-make-ready:b
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https://nypost.com/2021/11/27/canadian-indigenous-health-expert-carrie-bourassa-fired-for-faking-heritage/
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/12/31/come-and-take-it-canadians-arent-complying-with-new-gun-law-n2601237
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https://rumble.com/vs5o8d-quebec-covid-response-has-gone-off-the-rails.html?mref=6zof&mc=dgip3&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=vivafrei&ep=1
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https://bombthrower.com/articles/corporate-media-and-big-tech-align-against-freedomconvoy/
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Justin Trudeau Ducks the Great Trucker Revolt
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
January 28, 2022 Updated: January 28, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary
The resistance reveals itself always in unexpected ways. As I type, thousands of truckers (numbers are in flux and are in dispute) are part of a 50-mile-long convoy in Canada, headed to the capital city of Ottawa in protest against an egregious vaccine mandate imposed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will be joined upon arrival by vast numbers of protestors who are defying the restrictions, closures, and mandates of the last nearly two years.
The triple-vaccinated Trudeau, meanwhile, has decided that he has to go into deep hiding because he was exposed to Covid. A clean, ruling-class, fit, and fashionable lefty like him cannot be expected to face such a pathogen directly. As a member of the vanguard of the lockdown elite, he must never take risks (however small) and must keep himself safe. It is merely a matter of coincidence that he will be locked away in hiding as the truckers arrive together with hundreds of thousands of citizens who are fed up with being treated like lab rats.
Previously, Trudeau had said nearly two years ago that the truckers were heroes. On March 31, 2020, he tweeted: “While many of us are working from home, there are others who aren’t able to do that—like the truck drivers who are working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked. So when you can, please #ThankATrucker for everything they’re doing and help them however you can.”
It’s true. Like many “essential workers” in the United States, these truckers bravely faced the virus and many already gained natural immunity, which Canadian law does not recognize. Trudeau decided that they needed to be forced to get the vaccine anyway. Keep in mind: these are the people who get food to the stores, packages to homes, and all products that keep life moving. If they don’t drive, the people don’t eat. It’s that simple. Now Trudeau must deal with #FreedomConvoy2020.
Few events in modern times have revealed the vast chasm that exists between the ruled and rulers, especially as it pertains to class. For nearly two years, the professional class has experienced a completely different reality than the working class. In the United States, this only began to change once the highly vaccinated Zoom class got Covid anyway. Only then did we start seeing articles about how there is no shame in getting sick. It appears that in many countries, the working class that was forced into early confrontation with the virus are saying that they aren’t going to take it anymore (and many are playing that song to make the point).
It’s a massive workers’ strike but not the kind of communist dreams. This is a “working class” movement that stands squarely for freedom against all the impositions of the last two years, which were imposed by an overclass with almost no consultation from legislatures. Canada has had some of the worst, much to the shock of its citizens. The convoy is an enormous show of power concerning who really keeps the country running.
The convoy is being joined by truckers from all over the United States too, rising up in solidarity. This is easily the most meaningful and impactful protest to emerge in North America. It is being joined by as many as half a million Canadian citizens, who overwhelmingly support this protest, as one can observe from the cheers on the highway along the way. Indeed, it’s likely to break the record for the largest trucker convoy in history, as well as the most loved.
Trudeau, meanwhile, has dismissed the whole thing as a “small fringe” of extremists and says it means nothing to him and will change nothing. This is because, he says, these truckers hold “unacceptable views.”
This is setting up to be one of the most significant clashes in the world in the great battle between freedom and those governments have set out to crush it.
Meanwhile, I’m looking now for information on this in the mainstream media. It is almost nonexistent outside social media. Fox is covering some of it but that’s about it. The Epoch Times is a wonderful exception, as we’ve come to expect in recent months. It’s not being covered in any depth in Canadian papers and TV. All the usual subjects in the United States have completely ignored this mighty movement. It’s almost like these venues have created an alternate version of reality, one that denies the astonishing reality that anyone can see outside the window.
Yes, I know that we have all come to expect that the corporate media will not cover what actually matters, and much of what it does cover it does only with a strong bias toward narratives crafted by ruling elites. Even so, it seems to stretch credulity beyond any plausible extent for the major media to pretend that this isn’t happening. It is and it has massive implications for the present and the future.
This is not really or just about vaccine mandates. It’s about what they represent: government taking possession of our lives. If they can force you to get an injection in your arm over which you have doubts, all bets for freedom are off. There must be evidence that you complied. The phone app is next, which gets tied to your bank account and your job and your access to communications and your ability to pay your rent or mortgage. It means eventually 100 percent government control over the whole of life. The technology already exists. Everything going on now with these passports is driving to this point.
This is why the truckers are striking this way. It is an act of bravery but also of desperation. Once the tyranny of health passports arrives, there will be no escape. The window of opportunity to do something about this will have closed. So this is the moment. There might not be another one. Something needs to be done to fight for human rights and freedom, and put in place systems that make lockdowns and mandates impossible in the future.
This is the largest and latest example of the revolt and one that could make the biggest difference yet. But it is only one sign among many that the ruling elites in most countries have overplayed their hand. They have arrogantly imposed their plans for everyone else based on the opinions of only a few and without real consultation with experts with differences of opinion or with the people whose lives have been profoundly affected by the pandemic response.
In the US the revolt is taking many forms. There was the rally in D.C. this past weekend. It was impressive. Also the latest polls on political alliances show that the Democrats have lost a major part of their base. Virginia right now points to where this is headed. The party lost vast amounts of its political power in elections last year and now Republicans rule the state with great popularity.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at Biden’s latest poll numbers. I almost cannot believe my eyes. We are talking about an overall 14-point split between approve and disapprove. If this is an indication of what happens to the pro-lockdown political elite, it stands to reason that Trudeau should be worried.
In the Vietnam War, many Americans fled the draft by going to the safe haven on the northern border. That’s one way that Canada had earned its long reputation for being delightfully normal, peaceful, and mercifully boring. Pandemic policies in Canada changed that, with some of the longest-lasting stringencies in the world.
No one asked the workers. Now they are rising up. Nor does it matter that 90 percent of the Canadian public is vaccinated. Possessing that status alone does not mean that people no longer feel resentment for being forced to accept what they do not believe they needed and did not want in the first place. The vaccinated do not automatically give up their longing to be free and to have their human rights recognized.
The resistance to tyranny in our times is taking many unexpected forms. There will be many confrontations on the way, and there is still a very long way to go. At some point, and no one knows when or how, something has to give.
From the Brownstone Institute
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Canadian truckers are AWESOME!!!
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Canadian truckers are AWESOME!!!
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/456/034/original/264e201a42e1889e.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/456/034/original/264e201a42e1889e.png)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/321/189/original/8218a1be1675be6a.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/321/189/original/8218a1be1675be6a.png)
Remember this from the FEDsurrection?
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/supporter-of-us-president-donald-trump-holds-a-confederate-news-photo/1230505137
(https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/supporter-of-us-president-donald-trump-holds-a-confederate-news-photo/1230505137)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/478/632/original/3cd374e7d60b025d.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/478/632/original/3cd374e7d60b025d.png)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/341/373/original/9860763723817392.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/341/373/original/9860763723817392.jpg)
I would love to see Justin's DNA compared to known samples from Fidel.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/478/632/original/3cd374e7d60b025d.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/478/632/original/3cd374e7d60b025d.png)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/526/902/original/89611d214754ef88.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/097/526/902/original/89611d214754ef88.png)
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1634155/doubleplusgood-canadians-asking-police-to-join-with-winning-team
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1648104/russian-tv-more-respected-than-most-american-us-media
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https://patriactionary.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/update-on-the-fuzz-and-their-illegal-seizures-of-jerry-cans/
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The Spirit of the Devil’s Brigade: Time for a New Can-Am Alliance in Defence of Liberty
William Brooks
William Brooks
February 7, 2022 Updated: February 7, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary
Much has been written about Canada’s trucker protests against vaccine mandates and other forms of government overreach imposed by authorities during the COVID pandemic.
Writing in The Epoch Times, former U.S. Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul said: “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now!” In fact, Canadian truckers have received high praise for their courage from various corners of the free world.
Over recent days it has been reported that an American version of the Canadian Freedom Convoy may be in the works. Speaking on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Brian Brase, one of the organizers of a proposed “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” said his group was motivated by the Canadian example and is planning a protest in support of their own “God-given rights” in the USA.
A Shared History of Valour
Many Americans have expressed surprise and even amusement that Canadians, who some regard as hopelessly deferential denizens of a liberal nanny state, would take dramatic action in defence of their freedom.
It should be noted, however, that grassroots Canucks and Yankees have a history of coming together in defence of liberty. When American General George C. Marshall visited London in the dark spring of 1942, the chief of the British Combined Operations Command, Lord Louis Mountbatten, introduced him to a maverick strategist by the name of Geoffrey N. Pyke.
Pyke had a plan to train a special force that would be equipped to attack vital hydroelectric plants in Nazi-occupied Norway. Winston Churchill insisted it should be a combined force of Americans and Canadians.
When the Can-Am Special Service Force finally mustered at Fort William Henry Harrison, the commander was 35-year-old West Point graduate Lt. Col. Robert Tryon Frederick. His Canadian regimental commander was 34-year-old Lt. Col. Jack F.R. Akehurst, a former miner from Southern Ontario.
Canada had been in the war since 1939, so Canadian soldiers were drawn from standing regiments like the Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. American recruits came from an assortment of lumberjacks, miners, trappers, farmers, game wardens, and other working-class occupations. Most of the men from both countries were hard-driving, blue-collar types, very much like the truckers who recently took their rigs to Ottawa.
The original plan for Norway fell through, but the 1st Special Service Force (SSF) went on to become one of the fiercest fighting units in World War II. First nicknamed “The Thugs,” “Freddy’s Freighters,” and “The North Americans,” the force finally became known by the German troops who faced it as the “Devil’s Brigade.” The SSF troops traversed from their original training camp in Montana to the Aleutian Islands, the Italian campaign, the Battle of Monte Cassino, Anzio, and the liberation of Rome.
Throughout it all, the Devil’s Brigade was reported to have captured the imagination of the entire Fifth Army, and to have won legendary acclaim on battlefields where heroism was the commonplace. Once, during the fight at Anzio, the brigade was ordered to take up a defensive position. One soldier’s sentiment summed up the entire brigade’s defiant attitude. “Defend? Hell,” he protested. “Let the goddamned Nazis do the defending!” Such is the posture of courageous men when the liberty of their nations is at stake.
A New Kind of Resistance
None of the Canadian truckers would suggest that their present actions rise to the level of sacrifice made by their forefathers on the battlefields of Europe. Nevertheless, they have displayed new levels of conviction and resistance that have been like a breath of fresh air for ordinary North Americans.
Members of the Freedom Convoy risk job loss, financial bankruptcy, possible arrest and even detention. We all saw the scenario that played out after the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal Rally” in the USA. The appearance in Ottawa of a mysterious masked man carrying a Confederate flag who had to be called out by legitimate protestors should be a poignant reminder of the false flag tactics that woke activists are capable of.
PM Justin Trudeau could defuse the situation in Ottawa by opening a dialogue with the truckers. So far he has chosen not to do so. Instead, on Feb. 1, he painted the protesters as being antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-black racists, and transphobic and called on MPs to unanimously condemn them.
Although the PM has said that military intervention is “not in the cards right now,” one can’t help suspecting he might relish a heroic 1970 moment like his late father’s, who in the wake of two FLQ kidnappings invoked the War Measures Act.
When a Parliament Hill reporter confronted Pierre Elliot Trudeau with the question, “What is it with all these men and guns around here?” and asked how far the prime minister will extend law and order, he answered, “Just watch me.” This response garnered the admiration of some 85 percent of Canadians for his “decisive” action.
Should the CBC’s constant demonization of the truckers continue apace, one can’t help thinking that something similar might be “in the cards.”
Need for a Can-Am Alliance in Defence of Liberty
With regard to the truckers and their supporters, the negative coverage by Canada’s regime media has been effectively challenged by U.S. conservative radio hosts and prime-time Fox News personalities like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld.
It has been gratifying to watch American media outlets give freedom-loving Canadians more attention than they could ever expect from the present cultural establishment in their own country.
In a September 2021 Epoch Times column, I asked, “Can Truckers, Trumpers, and Radio Hosts Help Rescue America?” I argued that the progressive agenda put forward by the “crème de la crème” of a globalist intelligentsia is stealing the hopes and dreams of ordinary North Americans. “Sans frontières” prep school Marxists from both sides of the 49th parallel are always on guard to protect woke orthodoxy and put down dissidents.
Many children and grandchildren of World War II veterans didn’t feel compelled to attend university. They entered trades, started small businesses, or took promising positions in private industry and gradually rose through company ranks. Some of my own friends and family members made a decent living in the trucking business.
Since the late 1960s all of our institutions of learning and influence have become occupied by tyrannous domestic revolutionary movements reminiscent of those that the forgotten men of the Devil’s Brigade risked their lives to resist.
Ordinary Canadians and Americans want their jobs and businesses back and a fair share of their hard-earned dollars. They want their private lives back, the right to dissent returned, and the restoration of their dignity and the freedom to choose what medical precautions are best for themselves.
If common citizens, like truckers and others from both sides of the border, are willing to stand up for our liberty, we should, once again, endeavour to stand with them.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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second
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ottawa-officials-say-towing-companies-are-refusing-to-move-the-canadian-truckers-protesting-vaccine-mandates-in-the-city-s-streets/ar-AATCaJu?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10491879/Moment-elderly-man-cuffed-arrested-two-Canadian-cops-HONKING-judge-outlawed-it.html
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/8/alberta-caves-canada-trucker-protests-ends-vaccine/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=oC2pVWTspEcyzzGcz0B2D7GR3pNKH2D8AcKF9t8w5yeviDMpH2wMbt1BaG5hQz8B&bt_ts=1644375578379
-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/09/canada-freedom-convoy-alberta-ambassador-bridge/?fbclid=IwAR3Jm42nbbhst-UgGgCT1NkSOSQVhx6Oe9-4-5lK2lH44XGbExxvOZNi7VQ
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"Canada’s capital is jammed, its border crossings are blockaded, and there’s no end in sight"
of course the next logical question :
can we get a few million truckers to block Southern border routes inland
add boat owners ....
-
Saw a seemingly credible whistleblower clip out of Canada asserting the Trudeau team is planning to plant a lot of guns on the truckers.
===========
GPF:
Guns and butter. Meanwhile, Canada will send $6.1 million worth of lethal weapons to Ukraine and offer a loan worth 500 million Canadian dollars ($390 million), Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. The loan follows a previous loan of CA$120 million. The U.S. also offered Kyiv loan guarantees of up to $1 billion to support economic reforms.
Emergency action. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the emergency powers act to counter blockades and protests related to the government’s pandemic restrictions. In addition to giving law enforcement more leeway to act, Ottawa is securing critical transport areas and restricting the operability of crowdfunding platforms until they register with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. The premiers of Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec expressed concern about invoking the act.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/098/895/346/original/98fd4a8099b23904.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/098/895/346/original/98fd4a8099b23904.png)
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Not that I support him, but it won't happen here if Rand Paul is President, for example. Elections matter. Picking your own candidates matters.
Doug Ford was the conservative who won Ontario, that no conservatives will support again. Ontario conservative is perhaps analogous to Arizona Republican, cf McCain, Flake, Day-O'Connor.
Getting it wrong is part of the process of getting it right.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/098/792/464/original/e1464a1d58684e20.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/098/792/464/original/e1464a1d58684e20.jpg)
The whole world is watching.
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397855.php
Good thing that can't happen here!
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397855.php
Good thing that can't happen here!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/trudeaus-justice-minister-says-pro-trump-factor-will-decide-bank-account-frozen-emergency-orders-video/
Good thing they'd never do this here!
-
https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2022/02/16/canada-goes-tyrannical-n2603351
Well written re-cap of the crime committed by government and the consequences.
-
https://youtu.be/ssHNImTnxjs
Trudeau voices support for farmers in India who blocked major highways to New Delhi for more than a year in 2021, saying at the time: “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.”
Always?
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Who declares who is a terrorist
the Justice Dept.?
Biden?
Homeland security?
a bunch of shysters can declare who is a terrorist
and seize their lives
the problem is the Democratic Party has determined all opposition to them is to be somehow warped into Domestic Terrorism and it is up to the shysters to twist legal interpretation to authorize enforcement .
Good chance this is how the Civil War will be conducted going forward.
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of note the Patriot Act expired
and so far has not been renewed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
I have no idea who can declare someone a terrorist
We would all be terrorists if many Dems had their way
just because we oppose them.
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"https://www.newsweek.com/ilhan-omar-defends-freedom-convoy-donors-givesendgo-leak-1680116"
I am in shock and need an epi shot ! :-o
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg)
-
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg)
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/099/053/868/original/700c7cfa799e1633.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/099/053/868/original/700c7cfa799e1633.jpg)
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Bro2.jpg)
https://torontosun.com/news/provincial/warmington-cold-war-era-east-berlin-had-armed-checkpoints-now-ottawa-does-too
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https://www.thecountersignal.com/news/ottawa-police-may-euthanize-truckers-pets-as-punishment
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https://bittercenturion.blogspot.com/2022/02/separate-ways.html
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/what_will_the_canadian_truckers_do.html
Not just in Canada.
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https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/dana_loesch_canadian_mounties_trample_elderly_woman_02-19-2022.jpg
(https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/dana_loesch_canadian_mounties_trample_elderly_woman_02-19-2022.jpg)
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https://straightlinelogic.com/2022/02/18/seven-great-truths-by-robert-gore/
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1726527/meme-wars
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https://bittercenturion.blogspot.com/2022/02/to-serve-and-protect.html#more
This will come here.
Plan accordingly.
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/wef-infiltration-rogan-redpilled-canadian-mp-cut-asking-accused-spreading-disinformation
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1733899/important-call-for-general-strike-across-canada
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trudeau-government-moves-to-make-expanded-surveillance-powers-over-financial-transactions-permanent/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=26777851
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"SO WE KNOW WHO DONATED TO THE CANADIAN TRUCKERS, BUT NOT WHO GHISLAINE MAXWELL’S CUSTOMERS WERE."
Just saying. [Glenn Reynolds]
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canadian-parliament-votes-to-extend-emergencies-act-for-30-days/#slide-1
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canadian-parliament-votes-to-extend-emergencies-act-for-30-days/#slide-1
Just one month to stop the spread!
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https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/02/the-doxxing-of-canada/
Good thing that won't happen here!
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/099/381/933/original/78e8c74fa2e6b4fa.mp4
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https://theprovince.com/news/canada/canadian-press-newsalert-ottawa-protest-organizer-tamara-lich-denied-bail/wcm/53165ade-d669-460c-b531-f50f08243bff?fbclid=IwAR0FiRhcAot_oIABfuegLVg6k_NKSmk_Y_esB_C5yVzY1R6qi5J9U8hSFGQ
PS: Maybe we should be calling him Justin Castro? Just sayin' , , ,
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https://theprovince.com/news/canada/canadian-press-newsalert-ottawa-protest-organizer-tamara-lich-denied-bail/wcm/53165ade-d669-460c-b531-f50f08243bff?fbclid=IwAR0FiRhcAot_oIABfuegLVg6k_NKSmk_Y_esB_C5yVzY1R6qi5J9U8hSFGQ
PS: Maybe we should be calling him Justin Castro? Just sayin' , , ,
Fidelito Castreau
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well we could call him "Justin Castro" in Toronto
and "Fidelito Castreau" in Montreal ......
:wink:
In the US we call him worse names.......
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well we could call him "Justin Castro" in Toronto
and "Fidelito Castreau" in Montreal ...
-----------------
The pro-government forces project that the honk honk of the truckers means Heil Hitler, right while the government moves toward Nazi-like Fascism at a speed that would make the former Führer blush.
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WSJ:
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Tyranny
Ottawa is now freezing bank accounts as if the truckers are terrorists.
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Feb. 22, 2022 6:35 pm ET
Modern liberals can hurtle from extravagant tolerance to suppression without batting an eye. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dramatizes the tendency.
Every trucker blockade in Canada has been cleared, yet Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal government isn’t giving up the emergency powers it claimed to criminalize the protest movement against vaccine mandates. “This state of emergency is not over,” Mr. Trudeau said, citing the risk of future blockades. This isn’t how a nation of laws is supposed to function.
Mr. Trudeau’s new powers rely on defining the disruptive but peaceful truckers as a security threat akin to violent terrorists. His emergency law, a broad prohibition on public assemblies and even indirect support for them, ensnares tens of thousands of Canadians as “designated persons” whose assets must, per another of his new laws, be found and frozen by any financial institution, without due process or court supervision. There isn’t an appeals process in case of error, and so far 200 accounts are frozen.
Pressed for details, Justice Minister David Lametti initially explained that “pro-Trump” big donors “ought to be worried.” Now the government says it is targeting only the truckers, but its power has no limiting principle.
Mr. Lametti says, “We took measures that had been applied to terrorism and applied them to other illegal activity.” This is how a trucker who violated traffic laws or committed “mischief” becomes the target of financial tools designed to disable al Qaeda cells.
Bank-account freezes weren’t necessary to clear the blockades. That required police only to arrest those blocking traffic and to requisition tow trucks (already authorized by Canada’s criminal code). The asset freezes serve not to end an emergency but to incapacitate and intimidate protesters after the fact.
Parliament declined Monday night to revoke Mr. Trudeau’s emergency. He prevailed with the support of the socialist New Democratic Party, which once prided itself like others on the left as a defender of civil liberties. “We understood absolutely that we do not want to trigger an election,” said leader Jagmeet Singh, cowed by Mr. Trudeau’s threat. “That would be the worst thing to do in this crisis.”
The vote captured the left-liberal pas de deux that has led to abuse of emergency powers. Ottawa’s police chief was a progressive and, as progressives do, he let protesters violate the law with impunity—for weeks. This exasperated Canadians who wanted order and commerce restored. The Liberals blamed foreign interference and lambasted the truckers along trendy American lines as racists and insurrectionists. Then Mr. Trudeau stepped in to curtail the rights of political enemies.
In December 2020 Mr. Trudeau chided India for its police response to farmers’ blockades of Delhi. “Let me remind you,” he said, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.” Mr. Trudeau prattles on about rights half a world away but won’t respect them half a block from Parliament.
Canada’s government is obliged by law to hold a public inquiry on the state of emergency. The courts could also rule against Mr. Trudeau, throwing into question convictions against truckers and leaving Canadians to wonder what the Prime Minister could have been thinking. Mr. Trudeau may then find there is a real emergency—to the survival of his government.
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While we fight against the expansion of authoritarian, totalitarian regimes Russia and China around the world , Canada turns into one.
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Trudeau won with the lowest popular vote in Canadian history
32%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election
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Trudeau won with the lowest popular vote in Canadian history
32%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election
And people in the US want to get away from the two party system which is supposed to move both sides to the middle and get 50+% of the vote for the winner. Sorry, these other systems are not better.
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Canada Instructs Banks to Unfreeze Freedom-Convoy Accounts
Finance official tells lawmakers process started Monday, days after police largely shut down Covid-19 protest in capital
Demonstrators outside Parliament earlier this month.
PHOTO: ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Paul Vieira
Follow
Updated Feb. 22, 2022 11:46 pm ET
OTTAWA—Canada told banks to unlock financial accounts belonging to individuals involved in a weekslong Covid-19 protest in Ottawa that police shut down this past weekend, according to a finance ministry official.
“They started [Monday] to unfreeze accounts,” Isabelle Jacques, a senior official in Canada’s finance department, told lawmakers Tuesday.
The step marks a reversal for the Liberal government, which has argued the sweeping power to freeze bank accounts and other assets was crucial during what was declared an emergency period.
The power became available over a week ago, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked rarely used emergency measures in an effort to end a roughly three-week protest calling for all Covid-19 vaccine mandates and related social restrictions to be rescinded. The Ottawa protest, involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of trucks, inspired blockades at crucial U.S.-Canada border crossings.
A representative from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police didn’t respond Tuesday evening to a request for comment about why officials started unlocking financial accounts.
On Monday, Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland defended the freezings, which some financial-law experts warned could affect people unaffiliated with the protest.
“These measures were put in place to disrupt illegal activity in Canada,” she said. “We were very clear that we would be following the money, that we would be using financial tools to disrupt illegal blockades and occupations. The focus absolutely has been on leaders and on the vehicles that were such an important part of the illegal blockades and occupations.”
“The way to get your account unfrozen is to stop being part of the blockade and occupation,” she added.
A key U.S.-Canada trade corridor has reopened for travelers and freight, marking an end to protests over Covid-19 restrictions that lasted roughly a week and caused economic repercussions. Photo: Nicole Osborne/Associated Press
The organizers of the Ottawa protest said in a statement posted on social media that the freezing of bank accounts and other financial assets has shocked Canadians. “The more severe implication, however, is that by using [emergency powers] as financial warfare, it will sow mistrust in both the banking system and the government and the repercussions will be felt for years to come.”
A representative for the organizers, who operate under the Freedom Convoy banner, didn’t respond to a request for comment about Canadian officials’ instructing banks to start unlocking accounts.
Under the same cabinet order allowing authorities to freeze bank accounts, police could also designate certain areas—including the streets around Ottawa’s Parliament Hill—as no-protest zones, where demonstrators could be subject to arrest, and compel service providers, like tow-truck operators, to remove vehicles.
The Canadian legislature voted Monday to extend the emergency powers for a total 30-day period. The extension still requires approval from the Senate, whose members are appointed by the prime minister and which rarely overturns measures approved by the lower house.
A senior RCMP official said the emergency powers, including the ability to choke off financial support, were crucial in ending the protest. The RCMP said financial institutions had frozen over 200 accounts belonging to individuals and one held by a payment processor with a value of 3.8 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to $3 million. Police had also ceased transactions involving 253 cryptocurrency addresses.
Police said this week that the accounts they told financial institutions to freeze belong to individuals considered central organizers in the Ottawa blockade, and owners or drivers of vehicles who refused to leave the area, but not people who donated to the protest through crowdfunding Web sites.
Write to Paul Vieira at paul.vieira@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the February 23, 2022, print edition as 'Can
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/ottawa-freedom-convoy-truckers-protest.html
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there is a whole wiki piece on this lib
of course Yale undergrad and JD from Stanford
and long list of liberal endeavors from
one of the self righteous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahlia_Lithwick
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2022/02/25/did-trudeau-create-a-dangerous-run-on-canadian-banks-by-freezing-protesters-bank-accounts-n1561873
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Ran across this meme:
"Pay Attention! Not one western leader has condemned the actions of Trudeau!"
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https://patriotpost.us/memes/86663-ymca-2022-03-03
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Ran across this meme:
"Pay Attention! Not one western leader has condemned the actions of Trudeau!"
Canada and Australia are the testing grounds for what they want to do here.
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https://bittercenturion.blogspot.com/2022/04/drinking-from-firehose.html?m=1
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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1531447066999799808
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/truedough.jpg
(https://ace.mu.nu/archives/truedough.jpg)
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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1535383099147689984
-
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1535383099147689984
At the time that the US splits in two, there may be regions/provinces of Canada wanting to join the freedom side of the divide.
-
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1535383099147689984
At the time that the US splits in two, there may be regions/provinces of Canada wanting to join the freedom side of the divide.
Alberta for sure.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/wexit-alberta-join-united-states
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https://bittercenturion.blogspot.com/2022/06/shuttin-er-down.html
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"Alberta for sure.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/wexit-alberta-join-united-states."
C'mon in!
Alberta has oil. Saskatchewan has Uranium. (And good hockey.)
Maybe we just want a land bridge to Alaska like the Russians want to Crimea.
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"Alberta for sure.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/wexit-alberta-join-united-states."
C'mon in!
Alberta has oil. Saskatchewan has Uranium. (And good hockey.)
Maybe we just want a land bridge to Alaska like the Russians want to Crimea.
Crushing Soviet Canuckistan's fake and gay military won't be an issue.
-
https://bittercenturion.blogspot.com/2022/07/brand-new-lows.html?m=1
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https://globalnews.ca/news/9253386/canadian-intelligence-warned-pm-trudeau-that-china-covertly-funded-2019-election-candidates-sources/?fbclid=IwAR2WIoCuVoPyMXG3U-S0HIzbBE25m0on7F4xy9Lf1QkVT2Q97YAG-zvD8aw
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/11/25/private-documents-reveal-trudeau-was-going-to-use-tanks-to-stop-freedom-convoy-protests-n2616383
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The Campaign to Re-Educate Jordan Peterson
For speaking his mind, the psychologist could lose his license.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Updated Jan. 4, 2023 1:55 pm ET
You would think Canadians had learned by now not to tell Jordan Peterson what to say. The psychology professor became an internet sensation in 2016 after arguing that Canadian legislation amounted to “compelled speech” on gender pronouns. Now the College of Psychologists of Ontario is demanding that Mr. Peterson acknowledge he “lacked professionalism” in public statements and undergo a “coaching program” of remedial education.
Maybe the new commissars missed Mr. Peterson’s videos praising Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the man who said: “Live not by lies.” Mr. Peterson won’t comply, and he says he’ll now face a disciplinary committee that could revoke his license to practice.
The College of Psychologists, the profession’s governing body in Ontario, appointed an investigator in March to examine complaints about Mr. Peterson’s comments on Twitter and the popular Joe Rogan podcast. On Nov. 22, the College’s panel released a decision. Per images provided by Mr. Peterson, the panel ruled: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
What are these comments? Calling Elliot Page, the transgender actor, by her former name, “Ellen,” and the pronoun “her,” on Twitter. Calling an adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik.” A sarcastic crack at antigrowth environmentalists for not caring that their energy policies lead to more deaths of poor Third World children.
Calling a former client “vindictive.” Objecting to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover of a plus-size model: “Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” In Canada even offenses begin with “sorry.”
“The impact risk in this case is significant,” the panel found, because the comments “may cause harm.” It counseled Mr. Peterson that coaching would help “mitigate any risks to the public.” The College of Psychologists declined to comment on the case, citing confidentiality.
Mr. Peterson responded sensibly: “Who exactly was harmed, how, when, to what degree, and how was that harm measured”? He says there have been about a dozen formal complaints since 2017, each one demanding a formal reply. One complainant cited Mr. Peterson’s Twitter response to a critic worried about overpopulation: “You’re free to leave at any point.” Mr. Peterson thinks the investigations aren’t about mitigating harm but preventing free expression, and that “the process is the punishment,” giving online detractors an effective way to badger him.
Professional bodies are supposed to ensure that practitioners are competent, not enforce political orthodoxies or act as language police outside the office. But that’s the trend in Western medical associations and beyond. The Law Society of Ontario had pushed a mandatory diversity pledge for all lawyers until a members’ revolt took over the board and nixed the pledge in 2019. At the time, an Ontario lawyer objected to the “ever-expanding mission to socially engineer the profession.”
Sounds like an issue of id, ego and superego. You could ask a psychologist about it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxjONzERjVo&t=7s
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https://thenewbittercenturion.blogspot.com/2023/02/peak-idiocy.html
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https://vidmax.com/video/218079-canadian-man-charged-with-second-degree-murder-after-shooting-armed-home-invader-with-legally-owned-gun-justin-trudeau-says-you-don-t-have-the-right-to-self-defense-with-a-gun-in-canada
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https://thenewbittercenturion.blogspot.com/2023/02/teflon-trudeau.html
Good thing that can't happen here!
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Maxime Bernier:
Trudeau doesn’t have enough money for disabled veterans and they’re offered MAID [assisted suicide] instead.
But he has enough to give $75k to civil servants who want to mutilate their bodies to look like the other sex.
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https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/what-does-china-want-from-canada?fbclid=IwAR35IohFMRv7q4LFjpUoPqe90JxZUkCCJOIaGkfVl2H-_qVFmUyY6Z1T1Ao
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https://jeremymackenzie.substack.com/p/canadas-coming-communist-cage?utm_medium=email
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We must figure we are alone. There is nowhere to run to. Are we frogs in the pot slowly being heated to boil?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull
I remember see on cable history show of Nero how he would take delight in torturing people this way
MY GOD ! :cry:
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We must figure we are alone. There is nowhere to run to. Are we frogs in the pot slowly being heated to boil?
I have been assured that we can just vote harder and everything will be fine.
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"I have been assured that we can just vote harder and everything will be fine."
I disagree
No one on this board is assuring you voting will guarantee our desired result
But we have to keep trying
Not voting WILL guarantee we lose for sure !
so why don't we recognize this ?
keep voting keep fighting AND prepare for the worst.
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I vote. I know that at the federal level, it's meaningless. You should too.
"I have been assured that we can just vote harder and everything will be fine."
I disagree
No one on this board is assuring you voting will guarantee our desired result
But we have to keep trying
Not voting WILL guarantee we lose for sure !
so why don't we recognize this ?
keep voting keep fighting AND prepare for the worst.
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Woof!
-
https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/justin-trudeau-2010-vs-2023
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I suppose this could go under humor, but they do need liberating (and so do we).
Long, detailed plan.
https://notthebee.com/article/this-guy-came-up-with-a-very-detailed-plan-to-conquer-canada-and-people-are-loving-it-in-the-replies
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https://www.foxnews.com/world/canada-under-fire-applauding-literal-nazi-parliament-during-zelenskyy-visit
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/zelenskyy-trudeau-honor-actual-3rd-reich-nazi-standing-ovation?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1850
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Canada, Are You Feeling Okay?
The immediate and most embarrassing problem for the Canadian government this morning is that the term “fought with the Nazis” does not always mean “fought against the Nazis” — it can also mean “fought in support of the Nazis.” If you’re going to invite a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran of World War II to a session of Canada’s Parliament during a visit by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, you had better make darn sure you know which side he was on.
Alas, Canadian speaker of the House Anthony Rota did not do that, and managed to lead the Canadian House of Commons Friday in a standing ovation for a man who fought in the volunteer First Ukrainian Division, which “was also known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS — referred to as the SS Galichina — and considered part of the Germany’s Nazi war machine”:
“We have here in chamber, today, a Ukrainian Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”
Everybody in the commons rose to their feet in applause as Rota spoke.
“His name is Jaroslav Hunka, I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and my riding of Nipissing—Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero and we thank him for all his service.”
As those of you who have cracked a history book know, as messy, bloody, and complicated as the history of southeastern Europe is, the side that was fighting against Russia in World War II was . . . the Nazis. (Let’s pause to point out that the Soviets committed their share of war crimes and mass murder of imprisoned civilians and political prisoners in Ukraine, too. This is not a pro-Nazi statement, just an observation of the historical fact that the Eastern Front didn’t have many combatants we would consider to be good guys.) The history of the First Ukrainian Division/Galacia Division during World War II is dark, bloody, and grim, with plenty of executions of civilians and praise from Heinrich Himmler. The only silver lining is that in the 1980s, the Canadian government established a Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes, and concluded:
Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission. . . . In the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.
The Ukrainian delegation and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, upon learning of the facts about Hunka, apologized and insisted the invitation wasn’t cleared with them. But as our Dominic Pino observes, for an error like this to occur, it requires some spectacular historical ignorance on the part of more than one individual:
Political operations like this don’t get planned by one person. How many people in Rota’s office — and the prime minister’s office, which would have likely been involved in planning this event — missed that someone fighting against the Russians in Eastern Europe during World War II might have some connection to the Nazis? Or at the very least, remember that at that point Canada was allied with the Russians against the Nazis?
It’s not as though World War II is a minor event in Canadian history. Over a million Canadians served in the war, and Canadian forces successfully led the assault on one of the five beaches on D-Day. That ought to be a source of national pride and be firmly secure in national memory.
For what it’s worth, Rota says no one else in the Canadian government knew he was going to salute Hunka.
As if the embarrassment wasn’t bad enough, Canada just handed Russia more easy fodder for propaganda that the Ukrainians are the real Nazis, and that the dictator who’s breaking treaties, hinting at global conspiracies involving Jews, and constantly bombing civilians — the dictator who has kidnapped at least 19,000 children — is the real hero of this war.
This morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “Such sloppiness of memory is outrageous. Many Western countries, including Canada, have raised a young generation that does not know who fought whom or what happened during the Second World War. And they know nothing about the threat of fascism.” The Kremlin is a pack of damnable liars, but that’s a fair criticism of Canada.
The second biggest problem for Canada this morning is that it is now in something of a Cold War with India, because apparently the Indian government used its intelligence services to execute a Sikh activist in Vancouver.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was gunned down in the parking lot of a Sikh temple on June 18. He was an activist in the movement of Sikh separatists who want to create an independent ethno-religious state in the northern Punjab region of India.
To hear the Indian government tell it, Nijjar was a terrorist, the leader of a group called the Khalistan Tiger Force. The government issued an Interpol Red Notice for his arrest in 2014 and offered a reward of roughly $12,000 for information about him.
The Canadian government was and is skeptical of the Indian government’s claims, and treated Nijjar like just another dissident — although it’s possible there’s more to the story. Nijjar’s son claimed that his father was regularly meeting with Canadian intelligence officials:
Balraj Singh Nijjar, 21, said his father had been meeting with Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers “once or twice a week,” including one or two days before the June 18 murder, with another meeting scheduled for two days after his death.
The meetings had started in February and had increased in frequency in the following three or four months, he said in an interview on Tuesday.
He said he also attended a meeting between his father and the RCMP last year in which they were told about threats to Nijjar’s life.
His father was advised to “stay at home,” he said.
As of August 15, at least publicly, Prime Minister Trudeau’s stance was that all was well between the Canadian and Indian governments. He issued a statement on Indian Independence Day reaffirming that, “as the world’s largest democracy, India is — and will continue to be — a key partner for Canada in the promotion of our shared values of democracy, pluralism, and progress. We are committed to building on this rich history of collaboration, including under India’s presidency of the G20 this year.”
But during the G-20 Summit in New Delhi in early September, the statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi hinted that Trudeau had raised the issue of Nijjar murder:
Prime Minister [Modi] highlighted that India-Canada relations are anchored in shared democratic values, respect for rule of law and strong people-to-people ties. He conveyed our strong concerns about continuing anti-India activities of extremist elements in Canada. They are promoting secessionism and inciting violence against Indian diplomats, damaging diplomatic premises, and threatening the Indian community in Canada and their places of worship. The nexus of such forces with organized crime, drug syndicates and human trafficking should be a concern for Canada as well. It is essential for the two countries to cooperate in dealing with such threats.
Then, a week ago, Trudeau addressed the Canadian House of Commons and dropped a bombshell: “Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.”
“Canada has declared its deep concerns to the top intelligence and security officials of the Indian government. Last week, at the G20, I brought them personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms. Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” he continued.
If the Indian government’s version of events is right, then the Canadian government was, presumably out of naivete or denial, protecting and regularly meeting with a terrorist attacking India. If the Canadian government’s version of events is right, then the Indian government is just straight up assassinating its critics, legal citizens of foreign countries, on foreign soil, where they’re supposed to be protected by the other country’s citizenship and sovereignty.
What the Indian government is alleged to have done is uncomfortably similar to the Saudi government’s execution and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist and U.S. green-card holder Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Abusing activists, dissidents, and political prisoners on your own soil is bad enough. But running operations to kill them in somebody else’s country is meant to send a message that dissidents aren’t safe anywhere.
And this is an American news story and diplomatic headache as well. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that after Nijjar was assassinated, the U.S. intelligence community provided the Canadians with additional information pointing to the Indian government’s role.
As the Times put it:
A spokesman for the White House declined to comment. U.S. officials were reluctant to discuss the killing because although Washington wants to assist Canada, a close ally, it does not want to alienate India, a partner with which it is hoping to expand ties as a counterbalance to China’s rising influence in Asia.
As the Journal put it:
U.S. officials are reluctant to talk about the alleged assassination plot at the same time the Biden administration is eager to forge closer ties with India to counter China, though President Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last week the accusation was a “matter of concern.”
Note that President Biden hosted Modi at the White House a few days after the killing and Biden gushed about Modi’s commitment to democracy and universal human rights:
Mr. Prime Minister, we’ve met many times over the past few years, most recently in Hiroshima at the G7 Summit. And each time, I was struck by our ability to find new areas of cooperation.
Together, we’re unlocking a shared future of what I believe to be unlimited potential.
And with this visit, we’re demonstrating once more how India and the United States are collaborating on nearly every human endeavor and delivering progress across the board. . . .
Let me be — close with this: Indians and Americans are both peoples who innovate and create, turn obstacles into opportunities, who find strength in community and family, and who cherish freedom and celebrate the democratic values of universal human rights, which face challenges around the world and each — and in each of our countries but which remain so vital to the success of each of our nations: press freedom, religious freedom, tolerance, diversity.
I mean . . . do Modi and his government “cherish freedom and celebrate the democratic values of universal human rights”? That claim looks kind of sketchy this morning.
Diplomacy and foreign policy require us to prioritize what issues matter to us the most. Perhaps keeping India aligned with the U.S. against China is our most important priority. But turning a blind eye to Indian government agents’ just straight up murdering critics on the soil of an ally is a tough pill to swallow.
ADDENDUM: The Hollywood writers’ strike appears to be over. As discussed Friday, the pressure of next year’s film- and television-production schedule being at risk probably forced everyone to be more reasonable and find some acceptable compromise.
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https://medium.com/@leibowitt/of-course-fidel-castro-is-justin-trudeaus-dad-nobody-has-debunked-anything-4db6fc8a9042
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/149/488/950/original/6e6727fd1d438621.jpeg
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSqFxWiB_iY&t=39s
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/auditor-general-new-brunswick-covid-19-pandemic-response-education-health-justice-1.7058576
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https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/canadian-fascism-in-full-view?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-4b338986-dec1-4845-8031-794baae97f15
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Canada’s Use of Emergency Powers to End Trucker Protests Was Unconstitutional, Judge Rules
Liberal government plans appeal of ruling on use of extraordinary powers to halt demonstrations over Covid-19 vaccine mandates
By Paul Vieira
Jan. 23, 2024 3:33 pm ET
OTTAWA—A Canadian judge ruled Tuesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the country’s constitution when he invoked extraordinary powers in 2022 to end a weekslong protest in the capital against Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
The Federal Court of Canada ruling marks the latest setback for Trudeau’s Liberal government, which is struggling in public-opinion polls with an election over a year away. The protests in Ottawa were led by the so-called Freedom Convoy, a group of truck drivers and tens of thousands of other individuals who said they were fed up with the social restrictions and vaccine mandates meant to contain the spread of Covid-19. The protest in the capital spawned copycat demonstrations at certain U.S.-Canada border crossings in the provinces of Alberta and Ontario, and abroad, like in New Zealand.
Canadian officials said Tuesday they would appeal the ruling from Justice Richard Mosley. Legal watchers say the case likely ends up with the Supreme Court of Canada, which may have to decide that either the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act was justified, or if not what limits future governments face in trying to invoke such powers.
Justice Mosley said the Trudeau’s government use of the federal Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness—justification, transparency and intelligibility—and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.” He said the use of emergency powers “infringed” on provisions in the constitution.
The judge said the Trudeau government argued emergency powers were required because of a national-security threat prevalent across Canada. Protesters sympathetic to the Freedom Convoy cause popped up in Coutts, Alberta, and Windsor, Ontario, to temporarily thwart commercial and passenger transit between Canada and the U.S. Police in those jurisdictions eventually removed the protesters.
Judge Mosley said the government’s characterization of the security threat “was, in my view, an overstatement of the situation known.” While the Trudeau administration was worried about the threat of other protests at border crossings, the judge said “the evidence available to cabinet was that these were being dealt with by local and provincial authorities, through arrests and superior court injunctions, aside from the impasse which remained in Ottawa.”
At the time, critics of the use of emergency powers said the government unnecessarily usurped people’s rights for what was essentially a policing issue contained to one city, Ottawa. Among the measures temporarily invoked was the freezing of bank accounts and other assets belonging to convoy protesters.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, one of the plaintiffs challenging the use of emergency powers, said the federal court decision “sets a clear and critical precedent for every future government” seeking to use the Emergencies Act.
Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters in Montreal that, at the time the emergency powers were invoked, “our national security, which includes our national economic security, was under threat. We were convinced at the time, and I was convinced at the time, it was the right thing to do.” She said an appeal was forthcoming.
Last year, a judicial inquiry said that the Freedom Convoy protest was the result of simmering social, economic and political grievances exacerbated by the pandemic. In the end, the inquiry concluded, Trudeau was justified in invoking emergency powers because senior officials had information about threats “of serious violence,” adding a series of local policing mistakes “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.”
Write to Paul Vieira at paul.vieira@wsj.com
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Hmm, not sure if this is the best place for this, but a Canadian court finds Trudeau’s handling of the truck strike was illegal.
https://www.cato.org/blog/canadian-court-trudeaus-use-emergency-powers-crush-protests-was-illegal
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Yes, this is a good place for that-- witness my post prior to yours :-D
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Yes, this is a good place for that-- witness my post prior to yours :-D
Yeah, but I didn’t see much in the way of “US” in these pieces (besides mirrored authoritarian predilections in some political circles) and hence hesitated.
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Ah.
I realize that we have quite a few threads here and so I look for opportunities to minimize that.
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The parallels between there & what is happening here are eye opening:
https://the-pipeline.org/canadas-laurentian-elite-cry-uncle/?fbclid=IwAR3idr9XB87jRa5hfphEy7YViYdxqaL1hhvshIXA_LejbwVGOSCWHqh30Yw
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And one of the ways the truckers were cut down was by shutting down their bank accounts.
Let us beware of banking laws and regs that under the name of preventing laundering, enable such totalitarian power.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20511/canada-jew-hate
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqjTTRNapjQ
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Ottawa made serious accusations against the Indian government.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Widening rift. Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including India’s high commissioner to Ottawa, after identifying them as persons of interest in the murder in Canada of a Sikh activist last year. The Canadian government also alleged that Indian officials were passing on information about other Canadian citizens to organized crime groups to target them for attacks. Canada’s foreign minister said New Delhi refused a request to cooperate in the investigation. The Indian government denied the allegations and expelled six Canadian diplomats in response.
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Sounds like they are growing as tired of “Progressive” politics north of the border as many are in the US:
Gloves Off: Justin Trudeau’s Fight to Stay in Power
The Beacon / by Francis Crescia / Oct 22, 2024 at 3:17 PM
In every politician’s career, there comes a time when one must decide how ambitious one wants to be and if one is ready to go after more power and greater glory—for Justin Trudeau, that moment occurred in 2012 with the “Thrilla on the Hilla” boxing charity event.
The evening’s boxing match featured a muscular Patrick “Brass Knuckles” Brazeau, a black belt in karate and a veteran of the Canadian navy, four years younger and the heavy favorite versus a tall, lean, pampered young man accused of riding his father’s coattails to win a seat in the House of Commons. Brazeau came out with a ton of aggression, looking for a quick knockout. Trudeau absorbed several shots and demonstrated he could take a hit. After the first round, Brazeau was breathing hard. For the rest of the three-round fight, Trudeau utilized his jab, and when Brazeau was stuck against the ropes, he pounced and finished him off with a flurry of effective blows. Brazeau’s career in the Conservative party ended shortly thereafter and Trudeau would use the victory to define himself as a fighter. “Never underestimate the power of symbols in today’s world,” Trudeau said.
After nine years of the Trudeau Liberals in power, the country will take years to regain economic stability and international credibility. With scandals too numerous to list, a stagnant economy with little growth, a declining standard of living, increasing crime, and sky-high debt Trudeau has doubled from $600,000 billion to $1.24 trillion. As a result, most Canadians want him to step down and 47 percent are demanding an election now, but he remains defiant, refusing to give up power.
With his combative spirit in high gear, Trudeau declares: “I am not going to lose to Poilievre.” Insiders say that Trudeau sees himself as the comeback kid, a fighter who can beat the odds, and that he refuses to accept that there is widespread dissatisfaction with his government.
With his administration on the ropes and mayhem all around him, as his advisors and MPs resigned and two Liberal strongholds were lost in by-elections, he has turned to Marc Carney as his new economic czar. He has brought Carney on board not only to provide ideas about how to kick-start a moribund economy over-reliant on government spending, but likely to enhance his image and give his base a reason to vote for him.
The former Bank of England governor presents many conflicts of interest as he continues to advise the British government, sits on a plethora of corporate boards, and is Chairman at Brookfield Asset Management. He is also the U.N.’s Envoy on Climate and a World Economic Forum board member. “Mark’s unique ideas and perspective will play a vital role in shaping the next steps in our plan to continue to grow our economy and strengthen the middle class,” Trudeau stated. According to pollster Nik Nanos, “There is no one on the bench for him that he has confidence in, and Trudeau believes he can turn this around by himself.”
Carney is already fast at work, as Brookfield Asset Management, which he chairs, has pitched the Canadian government a proposal to create a $50 billion investment fund seeded with $10 billion in taxpayer money. The question of whose interests Carney serves is practically transparent; it certainly is not the interests of the Canadian people.
The last time the Trudeau government appointed an advisory council to promote economic growth, it brought in global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. McKinsey, which controversially recommended open-door immigration and the removal of restrictions on temporary foreign workers, was awarded $200 million in new contracts by the Liberal government.
During the question period in the House of Commons, Trudeau no longer looks like an energetic fighter but appears tired and worn like a veteran boxer on his last legs. He and his fellow liberals often repeat the same old lines, accusing the Conservatives of wanting to cut social programs and claiming that if elected they will destroy democracy. This is the quality of allegation from a government whose immigration vetting process is so incompetent that in July the R.C.M.P. arrested a father and son for allegedly being “in the advanced stages of planning a serious violent attack in Toronto.” The father received his Canadian citizenship right before his arrest and may have appeared in a 2015 ISIS propaganda video.
Like other parts of the government, the House of Commons has become dysfunctional. Trudeau resorted to profanity to describe his opponents, and NDP leader Singh crossed the aisle challenging Pierre Poilievre to a fight. The Bloc, whose interest is to separate from Canada, is exploiting its dysfunction to demand more money from the Liberals in exchange for its support.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is pushing hard for an election, stood up in the House and nailed it:
He can try to call himself Rocky Balboa and play fight songs to aggrandize himself as the Star, but the people lined up at food banks, 2 million of them every month, know better. The people who are living in the 1800 Ontario tent encampments know better. The 35 homeless encampments and Halifax, the people there know better. They know that we need to fire this costly carbon tax coalition so we can elect a commonsense government that will bring it home for them.
An election can clear the air and restack the deck with new leadership. But the opposition Conservative party faces an uphill battle as the NDP and Bloc Quebecois continue to prop up the Liberal government. The question remains whether the opposition parties will take the necessary steps to initiate an election. Time will tell.
The post Gloves Off: Justin Trudeau’s Fight to Stay in Power appeared first on The Beacon.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/10/22/gloves-off-justin-trudeaus-fight-to-stay-in-power/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gloves-off-justin-trudeaus-fight-to-stay-in-power
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https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=gavin+newsome&form=HDRSC3&first=1
both give me major indigestion.
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how cozy
I was wondering how long we have to suffer with Trudeau there.
If they keep voting him in it could be for life:
https://www.newsweek.com/canada-prime-minister-maximum-term-1631062
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https://www.conservativereview.com/pseudo-court-fines-town-for-refusing-to-fly-imperial-lgbt-flag-emo-mayor-ordered-to-undergo-re-education-says-he-won-t-pay-2670312994.html
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No sooner did I post that Trudeau could be there for life then headlines he is in real trouble.
Like buying a stock and holding then selling the day before it skyrockets.
Some conflict over how to handle Trump tarrifs.
Could this be another win for Trump even before he starts?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/canada-conservative-likely-to-unseat-trudeau-has-trump-like-tendencies/ar-AA1w3qy7?ocid=BingNewsVerp
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/12/oh-canada-2.php
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Trump has been calling it the "state" of Canada and calling him "Governor" Trudeau. I guess the talks didn't go that well...
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Beautiful song.
"Justin Trudeau has got to go,
He never played hockey.
Justin Trudeau has got to go,
Get someone who played hockey."
https://youtu.be/XwiAT96iO6Y?si=DUl2I07ARhF_fLNW
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https://x.com/Michael_Yon/status/1867947346660606169
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https://gatewayhispanic.com/2024/12/euthanasia-and-the-failure-of-canadas-health-care-system-a-human-tragedy/
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Bari Weiss:
https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-canada-the-comprehensive-failure-of-justin-trudeau?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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"The problem with Trudeau’s government is not the name at the top of the ticket. The problem is bad ideas, strongly held."
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January 13, 2025
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Open as PDF
Canada’s Unusually Bad Situation
The country is much less stable now than it was during Trump’s first term.
By: Allison Fedirka
From a geopolitical perspective, the U.S.-Canadian relationship is enviable. The two countries lack the dramatic historical, cultural and religious differences that often lead to conflict between neighbors – especially prosperous ones. Relative to most other countries, they both enjoy a high degree of physical protection from potential enemies, thanks to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and have managed to maintain, by global standards, a peaceful, secure border.
Through treaties and trade agreements, they have avoided conflict and have integrated their economies such that stability for one is stability for both. For example, Canada provides just over half of petroleum imports to the U.S., and since imports account for 37 percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption (as of 2023), Canada is responsible for nearly 20 percent of total U.S. consumption. The U.S. also relies on Canada to supply critical materials such as potash, uranium and lumber, and the two share highly integrated production chains in major economic sectors such as the automotive industry – all of which reduces vulnerabilities within the U.S. economy.
Put simply, Canada is crucial to the United States’ ability to project power, because when Washington doesn’t have to attend to its own backyard, it has more time and resources to spend elsewhere.
But even under ideal circumstances, stability is never guaranteed. The government in Ottawa is in the throes of a political crisis brought on by economic and social pressure. Early last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation from an office he held for nearly a decade. His departure comes alongside a dramatic rise in the Conservative Party’s popularity. By all accounts, the ruling Liberal Party is poised to lose power in the upcoming federal election, with polls showing the Conservatives with a strong lead. Elections were initially slated for Oct. 20, but Trudeau’s resignation will likely result in an earlier date as the opposition is expected to call for a confidence vote shortly after the resumption of Parliament on March 24.
The crisis was long in the making. The rising cost of living, labor shortages, immigration tensions and an affordable housing crisis have compelled the government to engage in major policy overhauls. Many of these changes have yet to yield the desired results. Canada’s inflation peaked at 8.1 percent in June 2022 and trended downward to 1.9 percent in November 2024. Though inflation has slowed, the price of essential goods remains high for consumers. Community Food Centers Canada estimates one in four Canadians face some level of food insecurity. These numbers started to climb in 2019, impacting not only those living in poverty but also some 15 percent of people not living in poverty. Wages initially lagged behind inflation after the pandemic but have since recovered. But higher wages drive up the cost of services and labor at a time when economic growth lags slightly behind inflation.
The government has struggled to design a policy that allows it to successfully address labor shortages in critical areas without relying too much on immigration. Since the pandemic, Canada has experienced major demographic shifts. Fertility rates are at record lows (1.33 births per woman in 2022), and millennials now outnumber baby boomers. Population movement between provinces has increased to its highest levels since the 1990s, resulting, broadly speaking, in people leaving urban areas for more rural settings. In recent years, the government has relied on immigration to compensate for Canada’s population problems. Last year, the country’s total population stood at 40 million, and population growth was the highest it had been in almost 70 years (3.2 percent). Immigration now accounts for nearly all (97.6 percent) population growth in the country, with temporary residents accounting for 6.2 percent of the total population.
Canada uses a points system to award immigration status that, in the past, rewarded white-collar, highly educated individuals. However, many of those who gained entrance to Canada could not find jobs consistent with their skill sets. This was due to a mismatch of skills in the labor force and jobs and the economy failing to create jobs at pace with population growth. In 2021, the government loosened immigration measures to make working-class jobs more attractive. Two years later, the government loosened regulations to allow more immigrants to work in the country. This included increased immigrant quotas, requirements to apply for work permits once already in the country and allowing international students to work up to 20 hours a week.
These measures failed to offset the labor shortages. Demand for skilled work still outpaces the available supply of tradespeople and blue-collar workers, especially in construction, trades, agriculture, transportation and health care. In turn, this has increased the cost of labor, created delays in services and strained quality control standards. There are concerns that the shortages will persist: Some 700,000 of Canada’s 4 million trade workers are set to retire by 2030, putting even more pressure on labor scarcity.
Socio-economic pressures have forced the government to change course on how it plans to deal with immigration. Unemployment slowly began to rise in 2024. Immigrants living in Canada for less than five years had nearly double the unemployment rate (12.6 percent) in July as the national average (6.4 percent). The uptick in joblessness has made social welfare services both more expensive and less able to meet the population’s growing needs. In late 2024, the government announced it would reduce the annual allotment of permanent residents, which came to 500,000 in 2024, to 365,000 by 2027. It also removed some of the looser regulations introduced in 2023. The moves aim to reduce the share of temporary residents to 5 percent of Canada’s population by the end of 2026. (In theory, the measures will still allow for workers to participate in key labor markets such as health care and trades.)
Labor shortages, slow economic recovery and the government’s immigration policy are seen as major contributors to Canada’s housing crisis. From 2000 to 2021, housing prices in Canada rose by 355 percent while median nominal income rose by only 113 percent. Lower inflation and lower interest rates have failed to reverse the trend. Increased immigration and labor shortages in construction and trades have put upward pressure on prices and slowed growth in supply of available homes. Market indicators such as pre-construction sales and new condo sales continued to fall in 2024, suggesting the problem will persist in the near term. Market analysts estimate that, in the best-case scenario, it will take at least five or six years for supply to catch up with demand.
Academics and some market analysts have also noted structural shifts in homeownership as part of the problem. Fifty or so years ago, Canada had more government programs in place to fund social housing programs. These programs were reduced or eliminated in the 1990s. Experts also point out that housing financialization intensified after the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation shifted from building homes to insuring mortgages. As a consequence, they argue, housing came to be seen more as a wealth-building tool rather than a basic social need. The rise in prominence of short-term rentals, like Airbnbs, has also contributed to the problem. Approximately 20 percent of residential properties in British Columbia and Ontario (two provinces with some of the most severe affordability problems) are owned by investors.
Government efforts to ease pressure on housing prices seem to have failed. More than 50 percent of Canadians worry about their ability to pay their mortgage or rent, and a similar number say they could lose their homes if their financial situation were to worsen. Two-thirds of Canadians with mortgages reportedly already have trouble meeting their financial commitments. In the spring of 2024, a new housing plan was launched to “unlock” 3.87 million new homes by 2031. The challenge here will once again be the strain of having to fund such extensive federal programs to meet the population’s socio-economic needs.
Unsurprisingly these economic problems have created social unrest. Citizens and longer-term permanent residents find themselves competing with new immigrants and temporary residents for government funds. The influx of immigrants has also been difficult for Canadian society to absorb, resulting in a lack of assimilation among the different immigrant groups that often remain concentrated in semi-isolated communities and more marginal positions, similar to what we see in many European countries.
All this is to say that Canada is not as socially or economically stable as it was during President-elect Donald Trump’s first presidency. Some warn that Canada's slow economic growth and structural issues leave it ill-suited to absorb shocks such as new tariffs from the United States. Economists estimate that, if Trump were to follow through with his blanket 25 percent tariffs, it would reduce the size of the Canadian economy by 2.6-3.8 percent. Retaliatory measures from Canada could push that figure as high as 5.6 percent, according to economists from Scotiabank. That kind of decline would trigger greater instability in Canada and could have knock-on effects for the U.S. This could easily result in greater undocumented migration, more cross-border smuggling of goods and other security concerns. In this sense, when the U.S. designs trade policy for Canada, it must consider how it would affect U.S. consumers.
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I can’t help but suspect there is some hyperbole incorporated into this piece—“60” shows up as a percentage in many of the wretched circumstances cited too often—but even if some of the stats are too round and convenient this piece is a damning indictment of Canada under the current regime, serves as a warning where globalists, environmentalists, immigrants, special interests, & investment bankers are concerned, and indeed demonstrates the bullet Trump is helping the US dodge or presages where a Harris win would have taken us:
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/canada-is-a-failed-state-and-mark?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/canada-is-a-failed-state-and-mark?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true
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second
https://x.com/i/web/status/1885764174657081537
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https://nypost.com/2025/02/02/us-news/shopify-ceo-defends-trump-tariff-demands-slams-trudeau/
These are not crazy demands Trump is making.
CEO of Canada's Shopify speaks out.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-resigns-trump-tariffs-what-happens-now-1.7424288
But alas looks like all the replacements are libs
indeed libs dominate the parties except for one right of center to right one the Conservatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_parties_in_Canada
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Justin Trudeau, x.com
( I'll wait for verification, Babylon Bee couldn't have said it better)
"I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.
In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.
Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together."
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US Canada https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2025/02/03/trump_should_give_canada_trade_a_closer_look_1088676.html
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Agreed that the article engages with one of the ways that Trump frames this, one which in economic terms can resonably be argued to be unsound.
The other way Trump frames this is a matter of national security. In addition to the fenanyl, there is also the matter (I think I have this right) that more people on the terror watch list and their ilk come in through Canada than Mexico.
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Right. I approve of his use of tariffs as a lever to change behavior, gain cooperation and tear down their barriers. I disapprove of them as a long term economic policy.
His rhetoric of loving tariffs could very well be part of his negotiating strategy.
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He prepares for Xi.
Remember how he bombed Russia in Syria between the main course and desert while hosting Xi at Mar al Lago?
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9042261/Top-secret-documents-reveal-Justin-Trudeau-invited-Chinas-PLA-train-troops-Canada.html
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second
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/busted-fentanyl-super-lab-canada-makes-breaking-bad-look-minor-league-former-trump-official
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Third
https://nationalpost.com/news/canadian-veterans-of-peoples-liberation-army-form-association-sing-of-chinas-martial-glory
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https://barsoom.substack.com/p/maple-maidan
Maple Maidan
Consolidation of the New Colossus by Canadian colour revolution
John Carter
Feb 15, 2025
This one is a bit long (okay, they’re all a bit long). I’ve divided it into three main parts. The first describes the problem Canada has turned into, both for its own people, and for its Southern neighbour. The second explains the motivation behind what is apparently the new president’s favoured solution: annexation. The third part lays out how this might be accomplished relatively bloodlessly by precipitating a colour revolution.
I. A nasty problem on America’s northern frontier
Canada and the US have been frenemies for most of the last two hundred years. With the exception of some spats in the 19th century, they’ve fought on the same side in all major wars, and haven’t taken up arms against one another. At the same time, Canada has from the very beginning fiercely guarded its independence. Through the 1950s, this came from Canada’s self-conception as an outpost of sober, orderly British traditionalism, in stark contrast to the chaotic liberal revolutionaries across the border. Following the Liberal Party’s cultural revolution in the 1960s, Canada increasingly came to see itself as different from the US primarily in that it was more liberal, in the modern sense, than it’s Bible-thumping, gun-toting redneck cousins – which is to say more socialist, leftist, multicultural, gay-friendly, internationalist, feminist, and so forth. In fairness to Canada, the British government, having long-since fallen under the sway of the Labour party, had followed the same ideological trajectory, so Canada was really just taking its cue from Mother England as it always had. In further fairness to Canada, all of this has been aggressively pushed by Blue America, which has been running American culture (and therefore everyone else’s) until about five minutes ago.
Despite these differences, the US could always rely on Canada being a stable, competently run, prosperous, and happy neighbour – perhaps a bit on the prickly side, given the inferiority complex, but much less of a headache than the entropic narcostate to the south that keeps sending its masses of illiterate campesinos flooding over the banks of the Rio Grande. Canada might be annoying sometimes, but it didn’t cause problems. To the contrary, Canada and the US have maintained one the world’s most productive trading relationships for years: America gets Canadian oil, minerals, lumber, and Canada gets US dollars, technology, and culture.
Now, however, Canada has become a problem for America. Not yet, perhaps, the biggest problem – America has a very large number of extremely pressing problems – but a significant one nonetheless, with the potential to become quite acute in the near future.
The problem is that Canada has become a security threat.
Canada is not a security threat in the military sense. Indeed, that’s part of the problem. The Canadian Armed Forces has become so demoralized, weak, and enfaggoted by decades of systematic underfunding and leftist social engineering that what was once, man for man, one of the toughest armed forces on the planet is now a shambolic collection of obese CAFamites under the command of schoolmarms with pronoun hair. If the US wanted to conquer Canada by armed force, it could do so in a day – send a tank battalion to cut off the highway connections between Toronto and Montreal, drop some Green Berets into Ottawa to take parliament into custody, and that would be that. The problem is that Canada’s weak military also means that it cannot defend the arctic against Russian or Chinese incursions, thereby dropping the defence of North America’s northern frontier into the overstretched arms of the US military.
It does not stop at a weak military. Canada’s government has also been deeply penetrated by foreign adversaries, China and India in particular. An intelligence report found that numerous Canadian members of parliament are acting as de facto agents of foreign influence, both in terms of participation in election meddling by foreign powers, and in terms of feeding those powers intelligence. The names of these traitors have not been released, probably because none of them are actually Canadians. Naturally, the Canadian government investigated itself, and as it invariably does, found itself to be quite spotlessly clean, which is quite reassuring. It just isn’t reassuring to Canada’s nominal allies, who have become leery of intelligence sharing with Canada.
The next security problem is the border, an issue which Trump has repeatedly stressed as a justification for tariffs. The 49th Parallel is famously the longest undefended border on the planet. It is much longer than the Southern border; there are no barbed wire border fences; most of the terrain is easily traversed – forest, lake, or prairie – in contrast to the punishing desert running across the US-Mexico border. Militarizing the US-Mexico border is already a huge, costly undertaking. Doing the same on the Canadian border would be vastly more challenging.
Canada’s extraordinarily lax immigration policy has, in recent years, led to a much higher encounter rate at border crossings with suspects on the terrorism watch list. These people come into Canada legally, part of the millions of immigrants Ottawa has been importing, every year, for the last few years. When you’re bringing in over one percent of your country’s population every single year, it is simply not possible to properly vet them, and it seems that Ottawa barely even bothers to try. Given that not every such person of interest will get stopped at the border, and that not every terrorist is on a watch list, one wonders how many enemies have already slipped across into the US by way of Canadian airports.
RCMP officers with their haul from a fentanyl superlab. Only one person was arrested.
The second border problem is fentanyl. Like the US, Canada has a raging opiod epidemic. We’ve got tent cities, zombies in the streets, needles in the parks, and this is not limited to the big cities – it spills out into the small towns, as well. Like Mexico, Canada has fentanyl laboratories. Precursor chemicals are imported from China by triads, turned into chemical weapons in Canadian labs, and then distributed within Canadian and American markets by predominantly Indian truckers. The occasional busts have turned up vast quantities of the stuff, but have resulted in very few arrests. The proceeds are then laundered through casinos or fake colleges, with the laundered cash then parked in Canadian real estate. There are estimates that the volume of fentanyl money flowing through Canada’s housing markets is significant enough to be a major factor (immigration is certainly the main factor) distorting real estate prices – keeping the housing bubble inflated, propping up Canada’s sagging economy, and pricing young Canadians out of any hope of owning a home or, for that matter, even renting an apartment without a roommate or three.
It’s generally understood, though essentially never acknowledged at official levels, that poisoning North America with opiods is deliberate Chinese policy, both as revenge for the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and as one element in their strategy of unrestricted warfare i.e. the covert but systematic weaponization of every point of contact – economic, industrial, cultural, etc. – between Chinese and Western societies. By allowing the fentanyl trade to continue, the Canadian government is complicit in an act of covert war being waged by a foreign power, one whose casualties include the Canadian government’s own population.
This brings us to the penultimate, and really the crucial, problem, which is that the Canadian political system is in the hands of America’s enemies. This characterization is not confined to Justin Trudeau, or even to the Liberal Party of which he is no longer leader (though for now he remains prime minister). It is a universal across Canada’s political class. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s socialists, is a Sikh, and a Khalistani nationalist. The Greens are, as Greens everywhere, watermelons – environmental conservationists on the outside, communists on the inside. Even the Conservative Party are committed neoliberal globalists with a deep and abiding affection for mass third world immigration.
Canada’s political class share all of the enthusiasms of Blue America, as do the ‘presidents’ and ‘prime ministers’ of the various European satrapies. They are all are essentially the branch managers for the local franchises of the worldwide socioeconomic engineering project generally understood by its detractors as ‘globalism’. Globalism is the enemy of America specifically, and the West more broadly. MAGA – which is essentially the loose coalition of Americans who for various reasons prefer not to destroy the West more broadly, and America specifically – has recently staged a hostile takeover of the political nerve centre of globalism within the USA, but the globalists remain entrenched throughout the imperial provinces. Very much including Canada.
It should be stressed that none of this is working out at all well for Canadian citizens. They’ve endured a lost decade of wage growth under the Trudeau regime, which has occurred at the same time that housing prices have skyrocketed due to the aforementioned money laundering as well as what may be the world’s highest rate of immigration (recently reaching a few percent of the population, annually), leaving Canadians one of the most indebted population’s on the planet.
The birth rate has cratered, reaching a total fertility rate of 1.2 live births per woman, even lower than Europe; the number is almost certainly even worse if only native births are considered, as immigrants tend to have larger families. This fertility collapse is due to wages flattened by immigrant labour, unaffordable housing, and also a sex ratio which is suddenly one of the most skewed in the world, with an excess male population of about 10% (that excess being entirely composed of imports). This excellent essay at Aporia presents these problems in more detail:
Aporia
The Canadian Question
Written by Arctotherium…
Read more
4 days ago · 69 likes · 34 comments · Aporia
As a result of these multitudinous troubles, Canada’s governing class is not popular. For years now, all across the country Canadians have defiantly hoisted the black flag of Fuck Trudeau as precursor to their intent to start slitting political throats the next time they’re allowed to vote. Such vulgarity is unheard of in Canadian politics. It takes a great deal for Canadians to be impolite.
However, this widespread dissatisfaction has so far failed to coalesce into any meaningful populist insurgency opposing the Laurentian elite. Until recently, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, was coasting towards an easy electoral landslide on the back of this simmering popular anger, with his primary and indeed only selling point being that he is not Justin Trudeau. That is not to say that he is terribly different from Justin Trudeau. For American readers, Poilievre can be best described as vaguely reminiscent of Pete Buttigieg, with politics a hair to the right of the left of the right of Buttigieg’s left.
Pierre Poilievre, who’s selling point is that he isn’t Justin Trudeau
On a policy level the Conservatives are practically identical to the liberals; indeed, on immigration, after the LPC was forced by overwhelming weight of public opinion to slightly reduce the rate at which they lavished student visas and temporary foreign worker visas on their clients, Poilievre’s Conservatives essentially allowed the Liberals to outflank them to the right on the immigration issue, despite mass deportations being a very clear electoral winner.
Only very recently did Poilievre finally pledge to reduce immigration to ‘only’ a quarter of a million a year ... still a far cry from the clear necessity to reverse the flood that Trudeau and the rest of his World Economic Forum Young Global Leader alumni unleashed on the country.
It now appears likely that Trudeau will be replaced as head of the Liberal Party by Mark Carney, a central banker and committed globalist. It also appears quite plausible that the Conservatives will squander their electoral lead, possibly resulting in Carney winning the next election1.
Compilation of various polling results. Note the abrupt spike in Liberal numbers in the last month, and the matching drop in Conservative popularity.
The closest Canada has to a populist anti-immigration movement is Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. Bernier was a close favourite to win the Conservative leadership contest about a decade ago, but was sidelined by shady party shenanigans in favour of some ineffectual nonentity no one remembers now. Rather than accept the humiliation, he left the party and started his own, with blackjack and hookers.
People’s Party of Canada Leader “Mad” Max Bernier (2017, colourized)
Okay I’m joking about the hookers (although Mad Max’s ex-girlfriend was apparently connected to the Hell’s Angels). In any case, the People’s Party’s strongly libertarian leanings have completely failed to connect with voters. To date, the PPC has not taken a single seat in parliament, and have not cracked low single digits in polling, as can be seen in the graph above. This despite the PPC being the only party to take a firm – and extremely popular – anti-immigration stance. The party’s novelty doesn’t fully explain this. It’s been around longer than Britain’s Reform Party, for example, which snapped up several seats in the last UK general. I suspect the PPC languishes because most conservative voters assume – very incorrectly – that the CPC will solve the immigration problem. Indeed I’ve had several conversations in which my interlocutor hallucinated that the CPC had taken a strong stance against immigration.
The PPC is of course also subjected to the same relentless demonization – racist, xenophobic, far-right, Nazi, you all know the litany – that every populist party faces. In Canada this bites deeper than it does in other countries, because the Canadian media is probably one of the most controlled in the formerly free world, and the Canadian people deeply brainwashed. The legacy media is directly subsidized by the federal government, meaning that even the so-called ‘free’ press is essentially state-controlled media. This gives the Canadian establishment a considerable edge in sidelining opposition. Personally, I suspect the main reason that the PPC has so far failed to make a dent in the Canadian political landscape is that libertarianism simply doesn’t connect with Canadian voters. Canadians are not libertarians; they are instinctively authoritarian, and always have been.
Regardless of the reason, as it stands there’s no realistic possibility of a populist insurgency forming a majority – or even a minority – government in a reasonable time-frame. It is all but assured that control of the Canadian government will pass from the grubby hands of one group of tawdry little globalists to the clutching paws of another, which will happen whether the Liberals or the Conservatives win the next election.
For America, for MAGA, for Trump, this is a pressing strategic concern. They are engaged in nothing short of a revolutionary overthrow of the managerial regime that has subverted, gaslit, and plundered the United States since FDR, and for their project to succeed it is utterly crucial that the enemy’s power centres, both internal and external, be neutralized. Canada is a particularly high priority due to the expansive undefended border, and the vast volume of trade that crosses it. While America could probably weather interruption of the flow of natural resources coming down from the Canadian north, it would be a complicating factor, and a coven of globalist stooges wielding Canada’s trade goods as a weapon is not a complication the new regime wants.
America needs, as a minimum condition, a trustworthy and stable ally guarding its northern frontier. As things stand, it does not have that. Nor is it likely to get that any time soon.
So, wat do?
II. Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine
If Canada needs regime change, and Canada cannot achieve regime change internally, the obvious answer is to impose regime change. Either circulate the elites, such that a friendly albeit still nominally independent regime comes to power, or simply annex the country outright.
Annexation is far more complex than just bullying Ottawa into becoming a compliant, well-behaved vassal state again. But it is also a unified application of two core American principles: Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe Doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine holds that no foreign power can be allowed to gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere, which must remain the exclusive imperial backyard of the United States. This was what motivated the steady expulsion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires from Latin America and Brazil, and what motivated the US to gradually peel Canada away from the influence of its OG nemesis the British Empire. By deliberately turning itself into the catspaw of China and India, Canada places itself in direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
American Progress, John Gast, 1872
Manifest Destiny is the notion that white Americans had been given North America by Providence, and that it was both a historical inevitability and sacred duty to settle the entirety of the continent, establishing an Anglo Empire spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico America to the Arctic Ocean. Inspired by this sense of divine mission, once unleashed from the restraining hand of London, Americans broke free from their confines on the East Coast and sent waves of settlers rushing west to push all the way to the Pacific in a few short, tumultuous decades.
Canada has been an obstacle to Manifest Destiny from the very beginning, but after a short-lived attempt to seize British North America by force in the War of 1812, Washington decided to let well enough be. Canada might not be formally part of the American Empire, but it is – or was – overwhelmingly settled by Anglos virtually indistinguishable from Americans. “Close enough,” the Americans shrugged, and carried on with the second phase of their empire-building, evolving from an inland tellurocracy to a global maritime imperium, recapitulating in two hundred years an evolution that took their Anglo-Saxon forebears a thousand.
Just because Washington was mostly satisfied with the status quo does not mean that the old ambition of a single, unified, continental Anglo fortress-state was dead. And indeed, it seems that Trump has pulled Manifest Destiny out of the back drawer, blown the dust off of the Monroe Doctrine, and thrown them both down on the desk in the Oval Office.
Considered dispassionately, the United States has never had a better opportunity to annex Canada, and such an opportunity may never come again. Canada is broke and defenceless. The Canadian people are angry and demoralized. The weak Canadian government elicits contempt from every Canadian who does not work for it. Culturally, the country is completely deracinated, thanks entirely to the Canadian government’s own deliberate policy, which has for sixty years been to systematically erase Canadian identity. Indeed, sixty years ago to the very day that this is being published, the Red Ensign flag that bore the coat of arms displaying Canada’s ethnic heritage was replaced with the empty corporate logo of the maple leaf; in that sense, February 15th can be seen as the grim anniversary of the beginning of Canada’s end. Never before has Canada been so helpless; never before have Canadians been so disenchanted; never before have Canadians had less to fight for; never before has the Great White North been more ripe for the plucking.
Thus Trump, gloryhound that he is, with a nose for weakness and a taste for opportunity, has decided to pluck the prize that has been all but tossed at his feet. If he does so, not only does he shore up American national security, but he becomes the president who finally completed the grand project of Manifest Destiny by consolidating the entirety of North America under one flag. That’s the kind of thing they carve your face onto mountains for.
What follows is neither prediction nor prophecy. Nor, I emphasize, is it advocacy. It is simply what I would do, if I was America, and faced with both the necessity of solving the Canada problem, and offered the opportunity that problem presents on a silver platter. Obviously this is all speculation. I don’t know for sure that this is what the Trump administration is doing. However, it seems very clear that they are doing something – that there is a plan unfolding. Perhaps this is what that plan looks like.
Before we get to the fun part, I’m going to interrupt the flow of this essay to remind you that it was written by an actual human being, whose primary source of income is the generosity of his readers. You don’t have to pay to read this, I put all of my essays out there for free, because after all I want people to read them. That’s sort of the point. But still, things like food and a roof over my head are, you know, nice to have. So if you can’t pay or really, really just don’t want to, that’s fine, you know, I won’t hold it against you. Only a very tiny fraction of my readers chip in to become supporters. It’s an exclusive club, which comes with the profound emotional benefit of knowing that you, the aristocratic patron, are making it possible for the people in the cheap seats to enjoy the show.
III. Maple Maidan
Step 0: The Opening Act
This is where we are now. It’s setting the scene, preparing the mark. Trump throws around apparently outrageous and seemingly lunatic statements about making Canada the 51st state, and threatens the country with crippling tariffs. This immediately gets everyone’s attention – most especially that of the Laurentian elite, who know full well that Canadian annexation would mean the end of their cozy little abusive relationship with the captive people they’re smothering to death with imported scab labour and real estate scams. The Laurentian elite get baited into beating their chests with the Canadian flag that only a short time before they flew at half mast in performative paroxysms of ethnomasochistic shame over their made-up story about the evidence-free genocide at the residential schools, proclaiming their eternal patriotic loyalty for a post-national economic zone with no core identity, and promising retaliatory tariffs that will further impoverish the already immiserated Canadian people.
In short, the Canadian political class are made to look quite ridiculous.
Initially of course the Canadian people – propagandized for generations to hate Americans, because post-national Canadians only really define themselves as being Not-Americans – will eat it right up, but after all, they have to say they’re not interested in Trump’s offer. It’s the old joke about the difference between a politician and a lady: if a politician says yes he means maybe, if he says maybe he means no, and if he says no he’s no politician; if a lady says no she means maybe, if she says maybe she means yes, and if she says yes she’s no lady.
So as we open the game, the Canadian public are vociferously opposed to political union with their ancient southern frenemy. Three quarters of young Canadians ‘would never vote to become part of the United States’.
But take a closer look at those numbers. The bottom question, in particular, is revealing. Sweeten the deal by letting Canadians transfer all of their loonie-denominated assets into greenbacks on a one-for-one basis, and the 23% of young Canadians who would vote to join the US in the first question almost doubles to 43%. From Trump’s perspective, that says it all. We’re just playing hard to get; we are haggling, as the old joke has it, over the price. What’s that line of Trump’s? Something about grabbing them by the beaver?
Step 1: Imposition of Tariffs
The tariffs put immediate and devastating stress on Canada’s already shaky economy. The weak Canadian dollar drops, making imports more expensive. Canadian exports to the US all but cease, producing mild economic distress in the US but catastrophically hollowing out the Canadian economy.
In the short run, this produces a wave of intensified anti-American sentiment, which is capitalized upon by Canadian political leaders seeking to get the Canadian population to rally around the flag. With luck, Canadian politicians can be baited into deploying counter-tariffs on US imports, which will have very little impact on the American economy, but further devastate the Canadian economy by driving prices even higher.
Step 2: Psychological Operations
This isn’t so much a sequential step as a second, and crucial, prong of the attack (indeed it starts before the tariffs even kick in). Trump formally offers Canada entry into the US as one (or perhaps multiple) states, with full voting rights, US passports, protection of the US constitution, maybe even conversion of assets, etc.
This is of course rejected out of hand by Canadian political leaders, who have a good thing going, and it is initially rejected by a majority of Canadians, who have only bad things going, but have their pride to consider.
However, the economic crisis is powerful argument. Canadians are defaulting on their mortgages, homelessness is increasing, people are going hungry. Therefore, alternative proposals are put forward in the Canadian media, such as closer trading ties with China, or even joining the EU ... an idea which was floated last month by the Economist.
Why giving up Canada’s sovereignty to the unelected European Commission across the ocean in Brussels should be preferable to giving up its sovereignty to the United States is not, of course, immediately obvious, and the very fact that this option is being publicly considered undermines the case being made by Canada’s no-core-identitarian post-nationalists that they really care about Canadian sovereignty, man.
While Ottawa flounders about and makes itself look silly, the US launches a full-spectrum propaganda assault, principally via social media platforms. This assault proceeds across multiple narrative attack vectors, with the goal of delegitimizing the Canadian state by emphasizing its multiple failures to safeguard the interests of the Canadian people, e.g. the policy of replacement migration, the housing crisis, the deplorable state of the military, the rampant corruption, the high taxes, the failure to properly develop resources, infiltration of the government by hostile foreign adversaries, and so on (they’re really spoiled for choice here). The overall message is that the Laurentian elite are corrupt, lazy, and even traitorous; that they are holding the Canadian people hostage; that they are the tools of foreign powers. “Why do your leaders tell you to hate us, your brothers, and instead make common cause with aliens from distant lands, with whom you have nothing in common? Whose side are they really on?”
The anti-government messaging is reinforced by a ‘cyber-attack’ upon Canadian government archives, which subjects large parts of them to an AI-driven network-tracing audit which uncovers unmistakable signs of extensive corruption. Think DOGE without enforcement powers, engaged in purely as a propaganda exercise.
The blistering attack upon the Laurentian elite’s legitimacy is accompanied by a clearly articulated positive vision: the opportunities that will open to Canadians as American citizens, the possibilities for development that come with an integrated North American fortress state, the settlement of the northern frontier, etc. Once again, this leaves the Laurentian elite flatfooted, as their only vision for Canada is the ‘Canada 2100’ plan: a largely Indian population of 100 million by the year 2100, living like cockroaches in megacities huddling up against the American border for warmth, presided over by a total state that swallows the sclerotic economy and micromanages every detail of everyone’s miserable daily urban peasant life. Not that they’ve bothered to articulate this vision to the Canadian people, many of whom don’t even know about it ... but this unspeakable horror really is all they have. And of course, this will be pointed out, too.
Step 3: Boiling Over
A ‘spontaneous’ call for a referendum on joining the US emerges on social media. This is taken up enthusiastically by many Canadians, but also of course rejected out of hand by the Canadian government and its domestic supporters.
The Canadian population, stressed by the economic crisis, splits down the middle. Some – particularly older Canadians, and those who work for the government – blame the Americans, and consider those who blame Ottawa to be traitors to the Canadian state; others blame Ottawa, who they consider traitors to the Canadian people.
It does not go unnoticed that the factions have a definite racial valence. Pro-union and anti-government forces are overwhelmingly heritage Canadians, for whom the government’s immigration policies are the major secondary issue, only recently (post-tariffs) eclipsed by the economy. Pro-government factions consist of both white Canadians and immigrant populations. The latter do not care so much one way or the other about Canadian sovereignty, as they are in no way Canadian; they simply want to keep immigration high and to maintain the existing DEI ethnic preference structure, and they intuit that the new sheriff in Washington will not be so accommodating as their existing patrons in Ottawa. The alliance between immigrant and pro-government white Canadians is additional fuel for the pro-union white Canadians to consider their opponents traitors, as they manifestly prefer allegiance with hostile foreigners over friendship with their brothers. Pro-government forces, by contrast, characterize union supporters as retrograde racists who are also traitors working for a foreign power.
Until recently filled to bursting, Toronto begins to empty out. Many recent arrivals abandon the uncertain turmoil gripping Canada for their home countries, collapsing the real estate market in the process. With them go the last tattered shreds of plausibility clinging to the long-standing official narrative that new Canadians are just as Canadian as everyone else.
Rallies and counter-rallies for one faction or another begin to pop off in cities all over the country. The government, panicking, tries shutting down Xwitter and other social media; it freezes the bank accounts of dissidents; anti-government protests are attacked by both riot police and pro-government factions, to whom the police turn a blind eye.
Inevitably, and essentially instantaneously, footage of the Canadian government’s heavy-handed tactics reaches the Internet. American popular opinion is galvanized: their Canadian brothers and sisters are being held hostage by a tyrannical, abusive regime, and they need to be liberated as a matter of urgent moral necessity. Republican senators begin to make noises about military intervention, to a chorus of great enthusiasm on social media, further panicking Ottawa. Volunteer militias begin spontaneously forming in the US, heading up to assist their beleaguered pro-union brethren; the Canadian government of course tries to prevent their entrance, leading to standoffs and clashes on the border.
Step 5: Fragmentation
The divided Canadian body politic begins to crack along long-standing geocultural fault-lines.
Alberta, which has for decades felt that it was being plundered by Ontario and Quebec, declares its independence, and applies to the US for membership.
Annoyed that Alberta beat it to the punch, Quebec splits away soon after, declaring itself to be a sovereign republic.
Now geographically severed from Canada, never too fond of Eastern Canada at the best of times, but not well-disposed towards the US, either, British Colombia opens negotiations with Alberta, proposing the alternative of joining them as a new country rather than becoming a state. Simultaneously a movement begins in Vancouver to declare itself as an independent city-state, similar to Hong Kong (from which many of its residents originate) or Singapore.
Cut off from Ontario by Quebec’s secession, and with no prospect of forming a viable country of their own, the maritime provinces also announce their intent to apply for statehood.
In the mood of mass hysteria sweeping the country, these separatist movements are widely seen as illegitimate and treacherous, but the Canadian state’s thinly stretched human resources are not capable of doing anything to prevent the provinces leaving, particularly after 1) Alberta’s application is readily accepted, and American military forces move in to cement the state of Alberta’s new status, and 2) the entirety of the francophone military and police services in Quebec defects to the new Republic of Quebec.
Step 6: Maple Maidan
At this point, Canada has effectively been reduced to Ontario, the geographically extensive but largely unpopulated provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the empty northern territories.
Ontario is deeply divided. Loyalist forces are heavily concentrated in Toronto, Ottawa, and a few of the other big cities, where the more liberal and socialist populations regard takeover by what they see as fascist American imperialism with horror. In the rural areas, the mood is bitter and vengeful. Annexation is no more popular there, but it is widely regarded as an inevitability at this point, a least-bad-option, and their anger is reserved solely for the corrupt and incompetent elite in Ottawa whose feckless mismanagement brought the country to this dreadful pass.
An officially unsanctioned nation-wide referendum is ‘spontaneously’ organized over social media, using cryptographic ID verification to ensure that only Canadian citizens vote, and they only vote once. The pro-union vote carries the day. Ottawa refuses to recognize it, claiming that the vote was unsecured, illegitimate, and certainly rigged. Unionists retort that the process was entirely open and secure, that every single participant was a verified Canadian citizen, and that the Canadian people have made their choice.
Unionist forces converge on Ottawa for a massive rally in order to force parliament to accept the referendum results, essentially placing the city under occupation. Ottawa responds by freezing the assets of all identifiable organizers and supporters, arresting everyone they can, and charging them with sedition. Unlike in the case of the 2022 Freedom Convoy, however, this time the people fight back. The streets of Ottawa become a de facto war zone, with riot police and the Canadian military clashing with Unionist protesters equipped with improvised weapons.
Step 6: Annexation
Appalled by footage of the brutal repressive measures being used by the Canadian government, US domestic public opinion is now firmly on the side of annexation. The US intervenes. There is only token resistance from the Canadian Armed Forces when the US military crosses the border into Ontario; most units simply surrender on the spot. A day later Ottawa has been surrounded, and American troops move in demanding that Canadian government forces lay down their arms. It’s all over in a day.
Step 7: Aftermath
The international community (i.e. Europe) is appalled by what they call naked American aggression, with comparisons being made to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. This ends with an sharp exchange on X, in which Vance responds “We don’t really care, Ursula,” while Trump posts “Maybe Putin was onto something” on Truth social, following up with an AI-generated image of Trump staring across the ocean at an EU flag.
There is intense political wrangling over the precise terms under which Canada will join the US. The Canadian provinces in general want individual statehood. Since each new state adds two senators, and there is widespread apprehension that this would effectively add 20 Democratic senators to Congress, this is bitterly resisted by Congressional Republicans, who instead push for statehood to apply to Canada as a whole, suggesting that Canada could join the US in a similar fashion to Scotland’s union with Great Britain: retaining its parliament and its own internal political structure, but with Ottawa subordinated to Washington. The western provinces and Quebec are completely opposed to this, as they want no part of Ottawa.
In the end, a compromise is reached: British Colombia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba join the new state of Alberta, for practical matters of geographic proximity and in recognition of Alberta having been the first province to apply. Alberta is now, by far, the largest state in the union. Likewise the maritime provinces, all of which are consolidated into Nova Scotia (which Newfoundland is particularly unhappy about, but it’s Newfoundland, and no one cares). Ontario and Quebec also remain separate. For now Quebec elects to remain as an independent country, although talks are ongoing to bring Quebec into the union under similar terms as Texas, e.g. with the right to secede at will. The short-lived attempt at an independent Vancouver is squashed after it becomes clear that this movement is being driven by Chinese intelligence.
Canadian government archives are opened up for inspection, and decades of mismanagement and fraud come to light. Numerous government officials face charges for a variety of scandals involving corruption and espionage. A comprehensive de-globalisation program ensues. Adherents of globalist organizations such as the WEF are barred from holding office and, in some cases, prosecuted.
At the same time, steps are taken to cleanse Canada of foreign influence. This begins with mass deportations of immigrants residing in the country under temporary visas, which are declared no longer valid, as the country that issued them no longer exists. Permanent residency permits are also placed under careful review, as are citizenships granted within the previous decade, on the grounds that the regime granting these documents did not carry out proper vetting procedures.
The emotional tenor of the country remains tense for some time. There are numerous Canadian irredentists who consider the new government to be an occupying power, and see those who voted for union as traitors. A radical underground forms, which receives a certain degree of funding and other support from external powers which hope to foster terrorist activity to harass the US and bog it down in pacification of its new northern possession, and indeed there are sporadic incidents of sabotage, assassination, and IEDs, along with anti-union protests and graffiti. Nevertheless, the almost immediate economic relief provided by the end of tariffs, the massive reduction of taxes, the dramatically increased trade volume, and a housing market that has been deflated by the simultaneous reduction in the number of foreign residents and curtailment of money laundering, all contribute to a general improvement in the national mood, with many Canadians readily admitting that life is simply much better than it has been in a long time.
Canadian industry immediately benefits from unhampered American investment. With continental tariffs protecting domestic industry, manufacturing returns to Canada as part of the general re-shoring. Resource development picks up dramatically. Employment is suddenly available in abundance, both in the revitalized industrial centres of the Great Lakes, and in booming northern resource towns.
Hollywood abruptly discovers Canadian military history, and begins mining it as a rich source of narrative novelty. A blockbuster is released about the Seven Year’s War, following a young George Washington, Major-General James Wolfe, and Louis-Joseph Montcalm as stand-ins for the American, British, and French factions in the conflict, depicting each as heroic if flawed men, and reconciling the factions at the end with the climactic scene of the storming of Quebec City.
The Canadian Armed Forces, now incorporated into the American force structure under terms somewhat similar to the National Guard, but uniquely permitted to retain its old traditions, dress uniforms, rank structure, and territorial organization, immediately benefits from a massive infusion of American defence spending. Its officer corps is almost entirely purged, with the political appointees of the old regime removed and, in some cases, court martialed; purged officers are replaced with retired officers (some of whom were kicked out by the old regime’s political purges), augmented by cadre on loan from the American military. Its ranks swell as America’s attention pivots to England, aka Woke North Korea, where civil violence between the native British, West Asian immigrants, and the occupying globalist government is spiralling out of control. Calls go out to free the motherland, and Canada prepares to once again send its home and native sons across the ocean to save Europe from itself.
IV. Final Thoughts
No doubt some, perhaps even all, of the aftermath described above may arise from wishful thinking on my part. It is undoubtedly the most speculative element in the proposed sequence of events. Forced political union between the US and Canada is a complex task in which a great deal can go very wrong, with much of it depending on how the US treats Canada after absorbing it. In the short term it may be much easier for Canada to simply be made a territory, like Guam or Puerto Rico, without voting rights; this would mitigate the risk that Canadian voters might swing American elections disastrously towards the left. In the long term this would breed resentment in Canada, providing fertile grounds for radicalization. This would only be exacerbated if the US treated Canada like a source of loot to plunder, cutting Canadians out of the profits to be made from the use of their own land and natural resources. Granting Canada (or is provinces) statehood, and making Canadians into citizens of the United States no different from any other, would prevent such resentments from taking root. If the American South can be reconciled to the Union following the carnage of the Civil War and the terror of Reconstruction, there is no reason that the same might not be done for Canadians after a much shorter and relatively bloodless conflict.
As I said above, none of this should be taken as advocacy for annexation. Personally, I do not look forward to the prospect of Canada ceasing to exist as a sovereign entity. All else being equal, I would vastly prefer my nation to have its own, independent state. Yet the facts of the matter are that the Canadian state has not been working in the interests of the Canadian nation for a very long time, and indeed, the Canadian nation faces extinction in the very near future, both culturally and genetically, at the hands of a state that seems determined to exterminate it in the pursuit of its malign social engineering projects.
Moreover, the Canadian ruling class has proven itself utterly incapable of shepherding the genius of the Canadian people. It has not properly developed the country, but has been content to skim the cream of the resource trade. Every time a Canadian corporation has developed some innovative, world-leading technology, the governing class finds a way to screw it up. Every generation the most capable, ambitious, and talented Canadians depart for greener pastures, usually to the US. In every conceivable way, Canada’s ruling class has lost the mandate of heaven.
As a result of this colossal fumbling by Canada’s leaders, absorption into the US leviathan may well prove to be an historical inevitability. It brings me no pleasure to write that. However, if this is to be Canada’s fate, there is little point in raging against it. Instead, Canadian nationalists should ask themselves how our nations might continue to thrive within this wider political structure, without dissolving into the American melting pot. Indeed, if anyone can do that, Canadians can. From the very beginning Canada’s founding peoples have shared a state, letting each have their territory, while cooperating – or attempting to cooperate – on matters of federal importance. Neither the Quebecois nor the Anglo-Canadian have ever existed within an exclusive nation-state; both have always been part of one multi-national imperial project or another. Annexation could indeed be an opportunity for Anglo-Canadians in particular to reassert their own sense of national distinctiveness, which has for so long been bound up within the broader Canadian project that it has by now almost entirely disappeared within the murk of official multiculturalism.
A final thought, regarding the different temperaments of the Canadian and American peoples. Famously, Americans are liberals, who love freedom; Canadians are traditionalists, who love authority. Insofar as Americans have expressed concern over the prospect of Canadian statehood, it is in their worry that Canadians will distort American politics to the left. In the short term this may well be the case, as Canadians have been systematically groomed by their government into embracing values entirely antithetical to their true character. The real danger, if you want to call it that, is that Canadian authoritarianism will seep into the American political system, both due to Canadian votes, and due to Canadians entering directly into the American civil service. Of course, given the close ties between the countries, this is a matter of degree; it has already been happening for some time. Yet this may be an asset for America. If it is to become a true empire, those elements of the Canadian character that emphasize continuity with tradition and the competent operation of an orderly, limited, yet powerful state may be crucial to stabilizing that empire in the long term.
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A thoroughly depressing, and perhaps overstated, read regarding the state of Canada, to a lesser yet thorough degree Europe, with a side of US tossed in from grins and giggles:
https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/deport-them-all-the-immigration-consensus?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true(
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https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/smugglers-advertising-illegal-canada-us-border-crossings-on-tiktok/
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https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/02/26/canadas-freeland-says-she-will-form-nuclear-armed-alliance-against-united-states/
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Found this on FB:
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So the same Trudeau who refers to Canada as a place lacking any cultural identity, a post nation state...
The same Trudeau who presented Canada to the WEF during COVID as “ready for a reset”...
The same Trudeau who gave away all of Canada’s resources to Communist China for a fraction of their worth and has nothing left to show for it...
The same Trudeau who called Canada and Canadians systemically racist. Who stood by and did nothing as Canada’s churches burned to the ground and who kneeled before those who toppled all the statues...
The same Trudeau who’s worked so hard to remove any sign of a Canadian identity, going so far as to strip such symbolism from everything, down to and even including your passports...
The same Trudeau who divided 10-20% of Canadians based on their personal medical decisions, segregated them, persecuted them and went so far as to call for their deaths in his state media. Meh, that’s only 4-8 million people. No biggie...
The same Trudeau who has been caught red handed colluding with Communist China to subvert Canadian democratic processes...
The same Trudeau who’s allowed communist China “police forces” to have a presence all across Canada...
The same Trudeau who’s allowed organized crime syndicates like the Mexican cartels and Chinese Triads to infiltrate Canada and its institutions...
The same Trudeau that’s driven 100’s of 1000’s of Canadian businesses into bankruptcy, and millions of Canadians into homelessness and poverty...
The same Trudeau who’s driving the rest of the businesses out of Canada, along with all of their jobs, in droves right now. Solely leaving public sector jobs and mega corporate jobs. You know, those corporations which are willing to align with his insane ideologies and mandates in exchange for monopolistic type of market control in Canada...
The same Trudeau who cancelled Canada day and has attacked every single Canadian cultural footprint, including hockey, accusing them of being systemically racist...
The same Trudeau who has destroyed the Canadian economy, has destroyed the Canadian dollar and has allowed Canada to become so infiltrated with hostile foreign interests that Canada now represents a national security threat to the western world...
The same Trudeau who was forced to resign, but refuses to actually resign, refuses to open parliament or call an election...
The same Trudeau who’s happy to hand over control of Canada to unelected global buracracies like the WHO, WEF or the UN without blinking...
The same Trudeau who’s practically already made Canada a state of Communist China...
THAT same Trudeau is now wrapping himself in a Canadian flag and presenting himself as the saviour of Canada and the great protector of Canadians against Donald Trump and the Americans...
The Canadian media don’t seem to be asking any of these questions. Instead, they are presenting Trudeau as a patriotic Canadian fighting back against the evil Donald Trump? And Canadians are cheering it all on? Apparently having suddenly rediscovered their national pride over a hockey game?
Ya think maybe you’re being influenced by the media?
Ya think maybe there’s a really scary collectivist type of madness that’s gripped Canada and maybe y’all should snap out of it?
Ya think maybe it’s time to turn against the media and your politicians, whom are flagrantly and horrifically misleading you, lying to you and trying to destroy you?
Ya think maybe it’s time to put an end to this madness?
No? Not yet? Okie dokie. Carry on, Canada. As you were...
- Author Unknown
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/canada-s-new-pm-mark-carney-immediately-takes-shot-at-trump-over-trade-war-51st-state-comments-will-destroy-our-way-of-life/ar-AA1Azrzp?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=944d15792e2b49048edbee9b002d437d&ei=13
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Some talk that Trump's strategy of threatening Canada with tariffs backfired.
We were ready to see real conservatives win and replace Trudeau but then Trump insulted Canadians so much that we now have this person.
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It started out funny, but IMO Trump badly overdid it and genuinely insulted Canadian patriotism. As best as I can tell, a lot of damage down here.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ontario-slaps-25-increase-on-electricity-exports-to-u-s-in-response-to-trump-s-trade-war/ar-AA1ACKjx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=9aae5440f034411687318d52d07eccca&ei=33
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MSM to enjoy all this.
24/7 now going forward.
Trump has got fortitude
no other politician had the guts to take on our National debt.
But will the "people" continue to go along with it.
As for Tariffs, Steve Moore on Newsmax last night is against them. He noted NOT the time to do it. The economy is too wobbly and threats of recession being seen in the markers.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ontario-slaps-25-increase-on-electricity-exports-to-u-s-in-response-to-trump-s-trade-war/ar-AA1ACKjx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=9aae5440f034411687318d52d07eccca&ei=33
By calculation of available data the US receives 1/1000th of its electricity from Canada.
Is anyone clear exactly what Trump wants from Canada? I thought we negotiated a new trade agreement last time.
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I think it is fentanyl crossing the northern border.
That said is there no other way to get Canada to do a lot more about this then a tariff war?
Truthfully this is really Trump going after Trudeau because he is a wokester and has something to do with Trudeau's criticism of him, for example as him putting down Canadian truckers that copied what happened in US.
This sadly is all about revenge. Sometimes I agree with this such as going after lawfare but in this case as CD put it, Trump is going too far. It is hurting us not helping.
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https://nypost.com/2025/03/11/world-news/canadian-leader-mark-carneys-deep-ties-to-us-democrats-exposed/
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second
https://www.thebureau.news/p/exclusive-chinese-narco-suspect-caught
Exclusive: Chinese Narco Suspect Caught in Private Meeting with Trudeau, Investigated by DEA, Linked to Panama, Caribbean, Mexico – Police Sources
Sam Cooper
Mar 10, 2025
∙ Paid
VANCOUVER — Shocking new details are emerging about a major Chinese organized crime suspect who met privately with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to a police source who confirmed recent reporting from The Globe and Mail. The individual, Paul King Jin, is allegedly implicated in money laundering operations spanning the Western Hemisphere and has been a target of multiple failed major investigations in British Columbia. These investigations sought to unravel the complex interrelations of underground casinos and real estate investment, fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking, and financial crimes that allegedly funnel drug proceeds from diaspora community underground banks throughout North America and Latin America, with connections to Chinese and Hong Kong financial institutions.
The failed investigations into Jin have involved both the RCMP and U.S. agencies. These operations stretch from Vancouver to Mexico, Panama, and beyond, multiple sources confirm.
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John Podesta
"John Podesta’s non-profit Center for American Progress worked closely with Gerald Butts, a key advisor to the Liberal Party of Canada"
Can anyone imagine the corruption of this big shot Dem money man?
I would love to see him investigated. Can we find at least some evidence of crimes like money laudering to launch an investigation of him and raid his home and office prior to him borrowing Hillary's bleach bit?
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Negotiating from a position of weakness.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-canada-cant-win-the-trade-war/