canadian government – Olduvai.ca

MPs grilled Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino on Feb. 25 at a House committee hearing to examine the public order emergency declared by the government, with some focusing on whether the threshold had been met to call a national emergency, and others looking to find out why the Ottawa occupation lasted so long.

Addressing whether the threshold was met to invoke the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14, Conservative MP and public safety critic Raquel Dancho asked Mendicino if “our safety was in jeopardy with the protests in Ottawa?”

“Well certainly the size, scope, and scale of the illegal blockades at a number of borders and ports of entry, as well as the illegal occupation in Ottawa, met the threshold under the Emergencies Act,” replied Mendicino as he testified before the House of Commons public safety committee.

Large-scale protests in Ottawa, dubbed the “Freedom Convoy,” along with Canada-U.S. border blockades had occurred across the country in recent weeks to demand the lifting of COVID-19 mandates and restrictions. Most of the blockades were cleared before the government invoked the act, and the one in Emerson, Manitoba, dispersed on its own on Feb. 16, so Dancho focused on the Ottawa protest.

“I walked to West Block for two weeks past these protests. If there was such a threat to public safety, how could you have allowed members of Parliament to walk by that protest every day?,” asked Dancho.

Families join the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa after police distributed arrest notices to truckers and their supporters occupying Wellington St. and the Parliament Hill area on Feb. 16, 2022. (Richard Moore/The Epoch Times)

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Letter From a Young Canadian: Authoritarianism, Media Propaganda and Repression

February 23, 2022

Letter From a Young Canadian: Authoritarianism, Media Propaganda and Repression

Rav Arora, a 20-year-old writer from Canada, offers his perspective on his government’s ongoing despotic response to the convoy protest.

A protester walks in front of parked trucks as demonstrators continue to protest the vaccine mandates implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on February 8, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, much has been made of the threat of government tyranny from the right. In the US, Democratic politicians warned incessantly of the creeping rise of ‘fascism’ during the Trump administration. Mainstream media outlets, both in Canada and the US, echoed and embellished these fears. And yet cloaked under the liberal left’s rhetoric of diversity, compassion, and respect for the institution of journalism lurks the equally if not more dangerous threat of authoritarianism.

In Canada last week, Trudeau set a historic precedent by declaring a National Emergency on dubious grounds. This act has existed for 34 years without once being invoked, and now the Trudeau government is wielding it as a cudgel against one of the most organized displays of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Three weeks prior, the Freedom Convoy rolled out of Vancouver. Media smears proclaimed that they were a Covid convoy spreading a plague across the land, or that they were a band of alt-right white supremacists. Justin Trudeau called them a “small fringe minority” who held “unacceptable views” that “do not represent the views of Canadians.” These remarks seemed to galvanize supporters of the Freedom Convoy. Large demonstrations popped up across Canada, and on January 28th the convoy arrived in Ottawa. Protesters clogged the streets of Canada’s capital, rallying against nationwide vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oilfield Approval Off Newfoundland Coast Would Undercut Climate Commitments, Harm Biodiversity, Experts Warn

February 20, 2022

Oilfield Approval Off Newfoundland Coast Would Undercut Climate Commitments, Harm Biodiversity, Experts Warn

U.S. Orders Containment, Cleanup for 14-Year Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

Berardo62/flickr

Bank Run? Canada’s Top Banks Mysteriously Go Offline

February 17, 2022

Bank Run? Canada’s Top Banks Mysteriously Go Offline

Days after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would invoke emergency orders to crack down on demonstrators by freezing their bank accounts, five major Canadian banks went offline on Wednesday night, as customers reported their funds were unavailable, according to technology website Bleeping Computer.

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BMO (Bank of Montreal), Scotiabank, TD Bank Canada, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) were all hit with unexplainable outages on Wednesday evening. Users began reporting issues with banks around 1600-1700 ET, Downdector data showed.

Canadian Twitter users reported they couldn’t access their funds at the ATMs. One user took a photo of an error message at one of RBC’s ATMs that read, “Tap transactions aren’t available for this card.”

In response, RBC tweeted, “We are currently experiencing technical issues with our online and mobile banking, as well as our phone systems.”

“Our experts are investigating and working to get this fixed as quickly as possible, but we have no ETA to provide at this time. We appreciate your patience.”

BMO customers also reported issues. One customer said, “I’m having trouble and money transfer just auto gets rejected for no reason. Not going over my limit, all info is verified correct and receiving bank says no issues on their end.”

There were countless stories of banking customers who experienced trouble accessing their funds yesterday evening. No bank explained the source of the outrage, but essential to note the outage comes, as we said above, days after Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act.

The power gives the federal government direct access to banks to force any business conducted with Freedom Convoy protesters and affiliates to freeze their bank accounts. Trust in the banking system among depositors is crucial to prevent bank runs. Freezing accounts of people linked to the protests can incite fear.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ottawa’s “Freedom Convoy” Protesters Dig In As Canadian Government Suffers ‘Alex Jones’ Moment

February 16, 2022

Ottawa’s “Freedom Convoy” Protesters Dig In As Canadian Government Suffers ‘Alex Jones’ Moment

Facing nearly a dozen separate “Freedom Convoy”-inspired protests that seemed to be springing up faster than police and his government could disperse them, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked a national emergency to implement sweeping police powers late Monday.

Yet, protesters and their supporters continued, as protesters in Ottawa “dug in”, while new demonstrations sprung up in Alberta and Manitoba, but by Tuesday, Trudeau and his government had clearly had enough. They needed a new scapegoat. Enter, 13 “demonstrators” who were arrested purportedly due to their involvement with the Coutts blockade. Police claimed they seized “13 long guns and a large quantity of ammunition in an early-morning raid targeting three trailers that were part of a blockade”.

Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendicino said as much during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“There have been those who have tried to characterize these illegal blockades [as being] about vaccines and mandates and fatigue with the pandemic. That is not what is driving this movement right now,” Marco Mendicino, Canada’s Public Safety Minister, said at a news conference Tuesday.

“What is driving this movement is a very small, organized group that is driven by an ideology to overthrow the government through whatever means they may wish to use,” he said.

In what sounded like the preamble to another “Alex Jones” moment, some “national security experts” have asked the Canadian government to provide more “clarification.”

Mendicino’s comments led some national security experts to call on the government to provide clarification. “I do think that it behooves the government to explain themselves, to the extent that they can, while maintaining national security,” said Leah West, a national security expert at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Just remember that the “threat of violence” is integral to Trudeau’s argument for his national emergency order.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Bypassing the democratic process’

February 16, 2022

‘Bypassing the democratic process’

A Q&A on the Emergencies Act with Noa Mendelsohn Aviv of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association

A truck outside parliament in Ottawa, February 14. Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

It’s a moment unlike any I’ve experienced in my 20-year journalism career, or, indeed, my lifetime. In response to the ongoing trucker protests, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act, which became law in 1988 and has never been used.

As the government prepares to take this to the House of Commons and Senate for a vote, a number of questions are being raised: Has the government met the legal standard for invoking this act? What does this move mean for our democracy? What does it mean for rights and freedoms? And: What precedent does this set?

To explore these questions — and this remarkable time in Canadian history — I reached out to the new executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv.

For readers who may not be aware, what is the Emergencies Act, and what powers does it give the government?

The Emergencies Act is a piece of legislation replacing an earlier, similar law called the War Measures Act. It allows the government to make decisions and take action — essentially bypassing the democratic process — where there is an urgent and critical need to do so in the case of a national emergency. Imagine a war, or flooding, or an ice storm that wipes out infrastructure. It’s not possible to get a legislature together and do things in an ordinary, transparent, and accountable democratic way. But things have to be taken care of; people have to be evacuated. That’s what the Emergencies Act is about, and that’s more or less how it describes itself on its terms.

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Martial Law in Canada: It’s never been riskier to NOT own Bitcoin

February 15, 2022

Martial Law in Canada: It’s never been riskier to NOT own Bitcoin

Welcome to the era of civil asset forfeiture for your bank accounts. Where governments are woke, broke, and the new f-bomb is Freedom.

Christia Freeland’s edict tonight that the government can now seize bank accounts with no due process and no recourse could only have been made possible by a complicit media, shaping an utterly false narrative about the truckers convoys and even of “freedom” itself.

For about six years or so, the far left, woke progressives have been operating under the assumption of being (ironically) “on the right side of history”, that their pronunciations, accusations and neuroses were canonical truth while all other thought was heretical and offensive.

They believed themselves to be objectively correct about everything, and that they evangelized an all-encompassing worldview of purported fairness and equity. Yet, the vast majority of their rhetoric is the embodiment of flat-out hatred and othering. For self-declared anti-fascists, their prescriptions around nearly everything amount to pure unvarnished totalitarianism.

They’ve destroyed classical liberalism, they’ve hijacked everything to the left of Ronald Reagan and they’ve polarized the discourse to such as degree that anything which is not full throated cultural marxism is deemed far-right.

Against this backdrop of institutionalized gaslighting, on the eve of the Trudeau government’s declaration of martial law, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that..

The times, they are a changing

Whether anybody cares to admit it or not, the Truckers Revolt, having spread not only across Canada but around the world, has catalyzed a sea change. The public sentiment was already there: people were sick of COVID Tyranny and they were sick of lockdowns and even a large swath of the double vaccinated (like myself) find the vax mandates to be Orwellian and authoritarian.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Are All Canadian Truckers Now!

January 31, 2022

We Are All Canadian Truckers Now!

We all remember where we were when the Berlin Wall came down. While it may have seemed that communist rule would go on forever, when the people decided that they had enough suddenly the wall fell. Just like that.

Thus it is after two years of Covid authoritarianism that in Canada the largest truck convoy in history has smashed through the Berlin Wall of tyranny. I have watched as the Canada I once respected as a haven for antiwar Americans in the 1960s turned into one of the most repressive countries on earth. I wondered how a freedom-loving people could allow themselves to be abused by these mini-Stalins without a peep.

But then Canada stood up and showed the rest of the world that freedom can triumph over tyranny if the people demand it. As I say, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had been basking in his ability to terrorize the population in the name of fighting a virus. He was so confident in his seemingly unlimited power that he felt he could ridicule any Canadian with different views. The prime minister said in a recent interview that unvaccinated Canadians were “extremists,” “misogynists,” and “racists.”

When the Canadian truckers stood up to his tyranny and began their historic convoy to Ottawa, he thought he could continue ridiculing people. The truckers and their supporters were just a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views,” he confidently claimed. For Trudeau, love of liberty is just an “unacceptable view.”

Less than a week later, as tens of thousands of trucks began entering the capital with millions of supporters behind them, the “brave” Canadian prime minister had fled the city and shuffled off to an undisclosed location.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada Spent $23 Billion to Support Pipelines in Just Three Years

July 8, 2021

Canada Spent $23 Billion to Support Pipelines in Just Three Years

Taxpayers should understand the financial and climate risks of the big commitment, says an independent report.

Governments’ financial support for pipelines is financially and environmentally risky, says a report. Photo from Trans Mountain.

Canadian pipelines have received over $23 billion in support from federal and provincial governments over the past three years, according to a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The independent think tank crunched the numbers in a report that looked at the scope of government support for oil and gas pipelines.

The report looks at a broader definition of government support than just subsidies. Government support includes “any way that the federal or provincial governments promote fossil fuel production in a way that has to do with public money,” Corkal says.

Subsidies, on the other hand, are legally defined by the World Trade Organization as a beneficial financial contribution from a government.

Author Vanessa Corkal, policy advisor for Canada Energy Transitions at the institute, says it’s impossible to calculate the exact amount of pipeline subsidies because of a lack of government transparency.

“We thought it was important to highlight the high level of support the Canadian and Albertan government put towards this area,” Corkal says.

It’s important Canadians understand the financial risk governments have made by investing in pipelines, which may never get finished or never pay off, Corkal says.

But the report was also released one week after British Columbia experienced a devastating heat wave, which is likely linked to climate change and therefore the fossil fuel industry, she says.

Canadians need to consider “whether or not these investments are putting us on the path to deal with climate change at the scale and the pace that we need. And the pace we need has really been made clear this past week,” she says.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada, the Supreme Court hold that Carbon Tax is Constitutional

March 26, 2021

Canada, the Supreme Court hold that Carbon Tax is Constitutional

In Canada, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Ottawa has the power to impose a carbon price across the country as a “matter of national concern.” This is a major win for Trudeau and he can really make sure that the Canadian economy further declines to enable the Build Back Better agenda.

Let me make this VERY CLEAR. Even the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare by holding it was a “TAX” When Obama deny that. Even the US Supreme Court would have struck down Obamacare as a social program, but as a TAX it held that government can impose ANY tax it so desires and at any rate. When it comes to taxes, the Supreme Courts of Europe, USA, Canada, or Bangladesh, will ALWAYS rule in favor of governmental power to TAX without constraint. They will ignore the history that 99% of all revolutions unfold because of taxes. Therefore, do not be surprised about tax rulings by the courts. This is also when Western society is doomed. We will not be able to sustain this sort of government beyond 2032. So just start planning now for the next real Great Reset which will be the overthrow of republics.

This is why in my solution, TAXATION must be abolished – PERIOD! If we simply printed the amount of money we needed to run government and it is capped at say 5%-10% of GDP, it would be far less destructive than taxation for the debt will never be repaid. At times, the accumulative interest expenditures have reached 70% of the debt showing that the real problem is borrowing in the first place. All of this COVID and Climate Change is a cover-up for the fact that the system of debt is coming to an end…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

martin armstrong, armstrong economics, climate change, carbon tax, canada, taxes, supreme court of canada, canadian government

Hope for the Best from Canada’s UNDRIP Law. But Expect More of the Same

December 29, 2020

Hope for the Best from Canada’s UNDRIP Law. But Expect More of the Same

Like BC, the federal government is better at talking about Indigenous rights than it is at actually respecting them.

The BC government’s claimed commitment to adopting United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples didn’t stop it from ignoring the rights of the Wet’suwet’en. Photo by Amanda Follett Hosgood.

After years of false starts, the federal government has taken a tentative step towards implementing the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by introducing Bill C-15.

Is this really a game changer for Indigenous Peoples in Canada? I have my doubts, as do others.

There are two reasons for skepticism.

First, Bill C-15 focuses on high-level, aspirational commitments rather than on delivering concrete, immediate change to Indigenous Peoples.

If passed into law, Bill C-15 will require the federal government to take measures to ensure the laws of Canada are consistent with the declaration, and to prepare and implement an action plan to achieve its objectives. While enacting sweeping changes to federal legislation will undoubtedly take time, the federal government’s focus on these future promises conveniently allows it to sidestep the realities that Indigenous people face on a daily basis.

Governments pour promises on Indigenous people like a winter rain. Rather than witnessing real change, we are too often left with cold disappointment.

Maybe it’ll be different this time. But, if the experience of British Columbia’s UNDRIP legislation is an accurate predictor, we should all dress for more cold rains.

Passed a little over a year ago to great fanfare, the B.C. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act has failed to live up to its promise. Instead, the provincial government has continued with its dreary, self-serving narrative based on the denial of Indigenous rights.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pipe Dream: Taxpayer-Owned TMX Is a Bust, Concludes Analyst

October 30, 2020

Pipe Dream: Taxpayer-Owned TMX Is a Bust, Concludes Analyst

Expect no Asian windfall for oilsands crude, says a new report by expert David Hughes.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces cabinet’s approval to greenlight the TMX project on June 18, 2019. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.

Remember that 67-year-old pipeline and its controversial bitumen expansion project that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau bought from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion in 2018?

Well, a lot has happened since then.

For starters, the bitumen export project has climbed from a price tag of $7.8 billion to $12.6 billion and counting.

Meanwhile, a global pandemic has slowed the economy to a crawl and destabilized oil prices by bluntly curbing demand, probably for years.

The troubled oil industry, already reeling from global overproduction and crushing debt, is now actively contracting.

Cenovus and Husky, two of the five largest oilsands producers, just merged to save money by killing more than 2,000 jobs. Suncor axed another 2,000 employees. The so-called “economic engine of Canada” is shedding jobs, not making them.

As the world’s oil industry shrinks, prospects for global economic recovery seem remote if not problematic, because the world runs on oil.

China, the presumed market for Alberta’s heavy sour crude, has arrested two of our citizens, bullied our leaders and become a global exporter of technological tyranny.

And climate change, the topic everyone likes to endlessly talk about, continues to erode shorelines, burn forests, create refugees and undermine global security.

So does the world still need the Trans Mountain expansion project?

That’s the timely question David Hughes, one of the country’s foremost energy experts, deftly answers in his latest report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

And the answer is a big fat no.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Trudeau Suddenly Looks Green, Here’s Why

September 14, 2020

If Trudeau Suddenly Looks Green, Here’s Why

Fossil fuels flagging, the economy demands reinvention. Expect a bold gamble of a throne speech.

Prime Minister Trudeau has urged for Canada ‘an economic ecosystem where clean-tech companies can thrive. This is the next great economic frontier.’ Original photo before tinting: Government of Canada.

Justin Trudeau’s imminent green gamble, casting the dice with long odds against rolling lucky eleven, is a risky move.

On Sept. 23, Trudeau will put his government, and his legacy, on the line with a throne speech. It faces a confidence vote. If the Liberals should lose that vote, the government would fall.

Then Canadians would be plunged into their first national campaign held during a pandemic, left to scratch their heads over myriad questions.

Who would the citizenry blame for sending them to the polls with COVID-19 still very much on the prowl?

How would newly minted CPC leader Erin O’Toole, a Harper retread, have a chance of winning? It doesn’t help that the convention that crowned him on national television looked like it was run by Curly, Larry, and Moe. Then there was that disingenuous victory handshake with Peter MacKay, the leadership rival O’Toole asked the RCMP to investigate as a thief. Worst of all, O’Toole is the invisible man of politics. Most voters wouldn’t recognize the new CPC leader if he were standing beside them at the bus-stop wearing an Erin O’Toole t-shirt.

Despite denials from party stalwarts, the NDP don’t have enough chips to even sit at the high-stakes poker table of a national election. How could Jagmeet Singh be competitive if the party can’t afford to lease a plane for their national leader, as was the case in 2019?

In that election, the NDP plunged from 44 seats in 2015 to a mere 24 in 2019, making them the fourth party in parliament behind the Liberals, Conservatives, and Bloc Québécois.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Inches Forward, But Opposition Intensifies

August 21, 2020

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Inches Forward, But Opposition Intensifies

Tiny House Warriors rally near Blue River, BC

Late one night this past April, four people on off-road vehicles drove into a small, Indigenous village near the town of Blue River in British Columbia, Canada. It was dark and the vehicles drove through deep snow, smashing through wooden signs and barriers that guarded the village of tiny houses, erected in the path of a long-distance oil pipeline that runs from Alberta to the Pacific Coast.

The attackers punched and kicked a man, shouting profanity and racial slurs. One of them stole a truck and used it to mow down a display of red dresses, hung as a memorial to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, who are disproportionally affected by violence. The driver then crashed the truck into one of the houses.

The small houses were built by Secwepemc and Ktunaxa people, who built them to assert their rights over unceded Indigenous land, through which an expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline is slated to carry diluted tar sands oil. Members of the village believe the attack was related to their opposition to the pipeline.

Confrontation between the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and a variety of Indigenous and environmental groups is heating up, precisely because the new pipeline is now moving forward with construction after years of legal battles.

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purchased the Trans Mountain system from Kinder Morgan in 2018 in order to keep the expansion alive. Texas-based Kinder Morgan was about to scrap the project, but Canada bought it for C$4.5 billion and vowed to see a second, “twin,” pipeline built alongside the existing line. The expansion would triple the system’s capacity to 890,000 barrels of oil per day, allowing Alberta’s tar sands to expand to overseas markets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trudeau’s Climate Change Policy Is Strategically Inadequate

June 21, 2019

Trudeau’s Climate Change Policy Is Strategically Inadequate

Approving a pipeline while declaring a climate emergency is ‘climate change denial with a human face.’

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — ‘This is how climate change denial will increasingly look in the future.’ Photo by Mychaylo Prystupa.

The Trudeau government’s recent actions — declaring a climate emergency and re-approving the Trans Mountain expansion project within two days — aren’t just hypocritical: they’re morally equivalent to climate change denial.

The United Nation’s authority on climate change recently recommended“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to counter an imminent crisis, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent decisions have flagrantly ignored the UN’s counsel.

He’s bent over backwards to ensure the Trans Mountain pipeline’s expansion, propping up the project with extensive financial and rhetorical support. In the process, the Trudeau government has perpetuated the prerogatives of an industry that has funded climate change denying research and (knowingly) pollutes the planet.

Make no mistake: Trudeau’s actions represent climate change denial “with a human face,” a darker version of Czech communist leader Alexander Dubček’s 1968 description of his ill-fated liberalization program as “socialism with a human face.”

Trudeau and the Liberal party affirm the reality of global warming in theory, but they effectively deny the phenomenon in practice by facilitating a harmful status quo and belittling the urgency of radical change.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

This is how climate change denial will increasingly look in the future: a mixture of symbolic proclamation and strategically inadequate policy.

With flooding, suffocating wildfires and abnormal temperatures across much of the country, the climate crisis isn’t just a theoretical concern for most Canadians. Global warming’s impacts are now apparent, a fact that’s reflected in a recent poll showing that over two-thirds of Canadians consider stopping climate change “a priority.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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