On the request of the provincial government, Canada's federal government has exempted public spaces from British Columbia's pilot drug decriminalization program.
May 07, 2024 - "On January 31, 2023, a subsection 56(1) exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) related to personal possession of certain controlled substances came into effect in the province of British Columbia (BC). After a thorough assessment, this exemption was granted by the federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Associate Minister of Health to support the province in implementing its comprehensive public health response to the overdose crisis. The pilot project was planned to be in effect until January 31, 2026.
"Under the original exemption, adults aged 18 years of age and older in BC could not be arrested or charged for the possession of a cumulative amount of up to 2.5 grams of opioids (e.g. heroin, morphine, and fentanyl), cocaine (including crack and powder cocaine), methamphetamine (meth), or MDMA (ecstasy) for personal use. Exceptions to this exemption were included so that it did not apply in places where the provincial and federal government determined that personal possession would create undue public safety concerns (e.g. airports, daycares, schools, etc.).
"As the first exemption of its kind in Canada, ongoing monitoring was conducted to inform whether it contributed to its objectives, which included reducing stigma and substance use harms and increasing access to health and social services for people who use drugs in BC.
"In September 2023, at the request of British Columbia, the original exemption was amended to prohibit possession in additional areas designed primarily for youth including, within 15 metres of a public outdoor playground, spray pool or wading pool, or skate park. This came into effect on September 18, 2023.
"Since the exemption came into effect in January 2023, a number of BC municipalities, law enforcement officials, health sector workers, and community members have raised concerns about increasing public drug use and that law enforcement does not have tools to address public drug use. On April 26, 2024, BC submitted an amendment request to address these concerns. As of May 7, 2024, we are granting BC’s request to prohibit possession of controlled substances in public spaces.
"Exemptions will continue to apply in private residences, healthcare clinics as designated by the province of BC, places where people are lawfully sheltering, and overdose prevention and drug checking sites.
"This exemption is an additional tool that the federal government is providing to BC to help support a balanced public health and public safety approach to addressing the overdose crisis and substance use. The Government of Canada continues to take a comprehensive approach to addressing substance use harms and the overdose crisis."
Canada's Trudeau gov't has been reluctant to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (which has killed Canadian citizens) or Samidoun (which supports Hamas, which has killed Canadian citizens) as terrorist entities. Yet it did not hesitate to apply the designation to an alleged "far-right" group of Canadians with zero history of violence.
May 13, 2024 - "The Justin Trudeau government is still agonizing over whether to 'responsibly list' Iran’s murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.... The IRGC’s thousands of innocent victims include 63 Canadians killed when the IRGC shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS572 near Tehran’s airport. The Trudeau government is even less interested in going after Samidoun, a pro-Hamas terrorist-linked group that’s actually headquartered in Vancouver. Yet it hesitated not at all in crushing a small group of Canadian oddballs who had broken no laws and disavowed violence and racism.
"These were the Canadian wing of the Proud Boys, a mainly U.S. organization some of whose members participated in the U.S. Capitol Building riot three years ago. The Canadian group was pronounced a 'terrorist entity' a month later. But new Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) research recently conducted by a fellow researcher and myself, and published for the first time here and in C2C Journal, reveals virtually the entire surrounding Liberal narrative as exaggerated if not false:
Neither the Proud Boys’ Canadian chapter nor any of its members are known to have broken any laws before or since the organization’s terror entity designation on February 3, 2021;
There’s no indication Canada’s Department of Justice prepared the dossier of evidence that, as Public Safety Canada’s anti-terrorism-related web pages explain, is required before any group can be designated a terrorist entity.... There’s no evidence this was done afterwards, either. There’s no evidence any such dossier exists at all;
Trudeau’s ministers held no other apparent evidence to substantiate their heated public accusations that the Canadian Proud Boys had engaged in violence, were planning to do so and posed a substantial threat thereof;
The Trudeau government showed no interest in the Proud Boys until after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot....
Following Canada’s terrorist listing, Public Safety officials were unable to muster any compelling reasons or hard evidence in support despite persistent questioning from news media;
Substantially all of their “evidence” comprised U.S. news media reports pertaining to events and organizations in the U.S.; and,
The terrorist designation did not trigger any known law enforcement action against the Canadian chapters or their former members....
"Ottawa urgently needed to act, insisted Public Safety Minister Bill Blair.... But the Liberals had nothing on the Proud Boys. No violent acts, no criminal records, no bomb-making plans, no law-breaking at all. Their most aggressive act came when five of them – five – expressed concern over the impending destruction of a statue of one of Canada’s most important historical figures in Halifax on Canada Day 2017, offending some Indigenous activists. For this – and for not hating Western civilization – the Proud Boys were routinely maligned as 'white supremacist', 'misogynistic' or 'far-rightist'....
"Canada’s Proud Boys appear to have been designated terrorists mostly because incoming U.S. President Joe Biden needed help in building the Democratic narrative that the J6 riot was a 'violent insurrection'. Canada’s move, indeed, was instant news in D.C. and, the ATIP documents show, was discussed in a cabinet-level meeting between the two governments....
"Further circumstantial evidence that it was a purely political act is the absence of subsequent law enforcement action against the Proud Boys. Normally, a terror designation unleashes the legal hounds of hell upon the target, everything from property and asset seizures to placing members on no-fly lists, to comprehensive surveillance and harassment, and onward to criminal charges. But none of this happened.... Nor is there any criminal or civil case law involving Canadian Proud Boys members indicated on Canada’s free case-search website....
"Still, the Trudeau government crushed Canada’s Proud Boys (who announced their dissolution in May 2021, reiterating they were never a white-supremacist group). Based not on a carefully assembled dossier of hard evidence, but on ideological prejudice and media reports – many exaggerated, distorted or plain false – about a U.S. group whose Canadian affiliate had nothing to do with any of it. If that’s how things now work in Canada, one can only ask: who might be next?"
In March, Canada's Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a Manitoba court ruling that public health officials should not be "second guessed" on whether lockdown policies were a justifiable violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
March 14, 2024 - "The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is disappointed that the Supreme Court of Canada has decided not to hear the appeal of the challenge to Manitoba’s lockdown restrictions. The decision was announced on Thursday, March 14, 2024. The Leave to Appeal application, under the name Gateway Bible Baptist Church et al. v. Manitoba et al., was filed on September 18, 2023.
"Five Manitoba churches, a pastor and a deacon [had] asked the Supreme Court of Canada to hear their appeal of the lower courts’ dismissal of their constitutional challenge to closures of churches and restrictions on outdoor gatherings during Covid lockdowns in late 2020 and 2021. Included in the application was protester Ross MacKay, who had been ticketed and who was seeking to appeal the lower courts’ dismissal of his constitutional challenge to the outdoor gathering limits.
"Through public health orders, Manitoba had closed churches while permitting businesses to continue to operate. Taxis, in-person university classes, film and tv productions, law offices, and liquor stores were allowed to remain open. The Winnipeg Jets could meet and train indoors with their extended crew, and summer Olympic competitors were allowed to train indoors. Outdoor gatherings were reduced to no more than five people, while at the same time hundreds of people could legally gather indoors at big box stores.
"The initial case was heard in May 2021 before the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench. The province did not produce any evidence that Covid spreads outdoors, or that outdoor gatherings were risky activities. That hearing did produce a significant admission from a government expert witness, Chief Microbiologist and Laboratory Specialist Dr. Jared Bullard, who, under questioning from Justice Centre lawyers, admitted that 56 percent of positive Covid cases were not infectious.... The Manitoba Court of King’s Bench ruled that the government’s public health officials should not be 'second guessed' and that the government need not meet a high threshold of providing persuasive evidence to demonstrably justify that violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were reasonable.
"The Manitoba Court of King’s Bench did not order the unsuccessful Applicants to pay court costs, finding there to be significant public interest in having this case adjudicated. In December 2022, the Applicants appealed. The appeal was dismissed by the Manitoba Court of Appeal in June 2023.
"In the Application for Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, lawyers provided by the Justice Centre argued that the case raised issues of national importance. For instance:
How are constitutionally protected activities to be juridically measured against comparable non-constitutionally protected activities?
What is the proper approach to the minimal impairment stage of the Oakes analysis with respect to public health orders that fully prohibit Charter-protected activities (e.g. In- person religious worship) while permitting comparable non-Charter-protected activities[?]....
Does reliance on the 'precautionary principle' satisfy the state’s onus under Charter section 1 to provide 'cogent and persuasive' evidence to justify Charter-infringing measures?
"The Applicants’ legal team believed the case was critically important, as it could have served as guidance for governments in crafting public health measures on efforts needed to accommodate Charter-protected rights and freedoms. Allison Pejovic, lawyer for the Applicants, stated,
Our clients are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear their appeal. It was past time to have a conversation with Canada’s highest court about whether Charter-protected rights such as rights to worship and assemble ought to be prioritized over economic interests, such as ensuring that the Winnipeg Jets could practice indoors and that movie productions could continue. It was also critical to hear from the Court on the importance of respecting the Charter during a declared ’emergency’. Governments urgently needed the Supreme Court of Canada’s guidance as to the degree to which they should accommodate Charter rights during a future pandemic or other emergency proclaimed by government. Leaving that issue undecided at the highest level is a grave injustice for all Canadians."
March 15, 2024 - "In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
"The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
"Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob....
"Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
"Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts. Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
"Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.... Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
"The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
"In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called 'high fructose corn syrup,' why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
"In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
"What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
"This used to go by the name 'crony capitalism' which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream.... That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
"Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry. This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications. Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
"How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes....
"It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities....
"[T]his corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
"This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
"How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
"And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
"We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
"This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets. I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
"Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."
4 May 4, 2024 - "Argentina has historically been a country of failed governments, economic collapses, and debt defaults. Yet incredibly there are signs that – against all the odds – the bold, free market reforms of its libertarian President Javier Milei are beginning to work. With inflation falling, interest rates coming down, and the peso on fire in one market, Milei is already proving the global Left-wing economic establishment – addicted to bigger government and endless deficits – wrong. Indeed, it may provide a template for other countries to escape from zero growth....
inflation has fallen to 11pc and Milei predicts it will fall further. While a monthly figure (this is Argentina after all), price rises may be coming back under control after soaring above 300pc annually.
Last week, Milei announced that the country had recorded its first quarterly budget surplus since 2008, a modest 0.2pc of GDP, but still an astonishing achievement in such a short space of time, especially for a country that has run deficits for 113 of the last 123 years.
Then, earlier this week, the central bank, which Milei has not yet gotten around to abolishing as he pledged, cut interest rates for the third time in three weeks. While they are still at an eye-watering 50pc, that will start to feed through into the economy very soon.
"Investors have started to notice. According to Bloomberg data, in the blue-chip swap market the peso was the best-performing currency in the world in the first quarter of this year, and the bond markets are rallying as well. It may also get better over the months ahead. With stabilising prices, and a rising currency, investment should start flowing again into a country rich in natural resources and hyper-competitive on wages costs. If Milei can make good on his promise to unlock the country’s vast reserves of shale oil and gas – using technologies that have proved safe and successful in the US – then the economy could even start to boom.....
"On Milei’s election, he was dismissed as a madman who would be removed from office within a matter of months, if not weeks. In proving that narrative wrong, he would show that even after the short-lived catastrophe of the Liz Truss government, free market reforms are far from impossible. So how is he en route to deliver such a massive shock to the stale economic orthodoxy? Fundamentally, he got three big calls right.
"First, even without a majority in parliament, he has been ruthless. Whole government departments have been closed down overnight, regardless of the immediate consequences. The Ministry of Culture was axed, so was the anti-discrimination agency, and the state-owned news service. Only last month, he unveiled plans to fire another 70,000 state employees. Milei hasn’t attempted to cut gradually, to control budgets, or to ease people out with early retirement, or hiring freezes. Instead, he has, as promised, taken a ‘chainsaw’ to the machinery of the state, yielding huge savings in the process.
"Next, he has been bold. The president massively devalued the peso on day one, taking the financial hit upfront, and then tore up rent controls, price restrictions and state subsidies. He pared back workers’ rights, reducing maternity leave and severance compensation, and allowed companies to fire workers who went on strike. He ripped away fuel subsidies, even though it meant a temporary spike in inflation. Sure, there has been some short-term pain, but the results are now becoming evident. Rents, for example, are falling by 20pc a year as landlords, freed from controls, put more supply on the market, instead of withdrawing it as they do in countries where the price is set by the government.
"Finally, Milei has never stopped making the argument. He promotes freedom, liberalisation and a smaller state with a messianic zeal. Many of the measures he has taken might be rough, but the president has never attempted to dismiss that, instead explaining patiently and persistently why the reforms are justified, and how they will create greater prosperity for everyone in the long run.
"Much of the developed world, and the UK in particular, are gradually slipping into Argentinian-style stagnation.... Governments are hooked on subsidies and price controls, trying to buy their way out of every challenge with higher spending. Deficits are allowed to rise relentlessly, with no meaningful plan for ever bringing them down again. A corrupt, crony capitalism is allowed to flourish, killing competition. But the Argentine leader is providing a blueprint for how to break free. The global economic elite keeps lecturing us on why we need more government and a more powerful state despite the painful lack of results. Argentina is challenging it in dramatic fashion. It is just possible that it is starting to work."
February 5, 2024 - "Business insolvencies in Canada jumped the most in 36 years of records in 2023, as debt costs rose and the economy weakened. The number of businesses that filed for insolvency was the highest in 13 years, according to figures out last week from the federal Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.... The rise was mainly due to bankruptcies, rather than a renegotiation of terms, said Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist for Alberta Central. Bankruptcies were up 75.6 per cent year over year, mostly in accommodation and food services, retail and construction.
“'Businesses have been struggling to cope with a myriad of financial challenges over the past year, including higher input costs, wage costs, and debt servicing costs, exacerbating the rocky footing many have been on ever since the pandemic,' said André Bolduc, chair of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP).... Business owners who were unable to pay back government pandemic loans known as CEBA by the Jan. 19 deadline now have to pay five per cent interest and make monthly payments on what was previously an interest-free loan with no monthly payments, CAIRP says."
May 6, 2024 - "Data released by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy on Friday shows that business insolvencies in Canada increased 87.2% between the first quarter of 2023 and 2024. The number of insolvencies between the two years increased from 1,070 to 2,003. Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, insolvencies increased from 1,521 to 2,003, a 31.7% increase.
"Consumers weren’t immune ... with consumer insolvencies increasing for the eighth consecutive quarter when measuring year-over-year increases, reaching the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2019. Insolvencies among consumers in Canada increased by 14% between the first quarter of 2023 and 2024. Consumer insolvencies increased from 29,725 to 33,885 between the two years. Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, insolvencies increased from 31,813 to 33,885, a 6.5% increase. On average, 372 Canadians filed for consumer insolvency daily in the first quarter of 2024.
“'A perfect storm of economic challenges is brewing, with high mortgage renewal rates, soaring rental prices, and elevated costs of everyday necessities. The high cost of servicing debts is also compounding the financial strain for many Canadians and leaving them grappling with insurmountable debt burdens,' said André Bolduc, Chair of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals....
"Business insolvencies surging 87.2% was the largest annual increase in 37 years of records from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, according to the CAIRP. 'We are seeing signs of a significant rise in distress among Canadian businesses. Many are still shouldering the burden of the pandemic, on top of high input and labour costs, declining consumer spending, and higher debt-carrying costs,' said Bolduc.
"The actual number of business closures is even higher, considering many business owners decide to cease operations without pursuing formal insolvency proceedings. Based on members surveyed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, only 10% of their members who considered closing their business would officially file for bankruptcy....
"The government’s decision not to extend the CEBA deadline was 'the straw that broke the camel’s back,' said Simon Gaudreault, chief economist and vice president of research at the CFIB. Gaudreault said that other factors contributing to businesses filing for bankruptcy included lost revenue from public health closures, supply chain challenges, inflation, increased costs, rising interest rates, and labour shortages.
"Statistics Canada’s most recent data shows that 43,121 businesses closed in January 2024."
During the Covid pandemic, the Canadian government spent $700 million to buy more than 27,000 ventilators, though just 500 were ever used in Canadian hospitals. Now they are selling off the rest as scrap metal.
April 13, 2024 - "The Trudeau Liberal government spent $169.5 million on a sole-sourced contract for emergency ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic, which are now being sold off as cheap scrap parts. Ventilator parts were sold for as little as $6 a carton out of a Concord, ON by GC Surplus — a government-owned ... Department of Public Works division [which] sells used government-issue goods from autos to filing cabinets, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. The 'Canadian Emergency Ventilators' were listed for auction as 'scrap metal.'
"Luke Halstead, a paramedic from Petawawa, ON, bought 50 of the disassembled units at a bargain of $6 a piece. They were still in their original factory wrapping. 'I bought 50. About half of them were in their original shipping crates with the Canadian Emergency Ventilators stencil on the box. They were brand new. They even had the original factory plastic wrapping'....
"The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) contracted the 'Canadian Emergency Ventilators' from a Toronto-based company called StarFish Medical....
"Public Works would not say how much it paid for the devices, though the House of Commons Ethics Committee in 2020 was told the $169.5 million contract was payment for 7,500 devices, the equivalent of $22,600 apiece....
"Halstead ... was told by warehouse workers they 'continued to receive these ventilators well into 2022.... The warehouse workers told me they were originally shipped as parts and that the Public Health Agency was supposed to assemble the units. It was obvious the crates had never been opened. These parts were heavy grade sheet metal still in the factory plastic wrap. They still had the original shipping labels'....
April 22, 2024 - "Records show that the Public Health Agency auctioned off new ventilators, valued at just over $22,000 each, for $6 scrap, violating its own rules, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.... PHA directives forbids licensed medical devices to be sold as scrap metal.
“'They were sold for parts as the possible divestment option for unlicensed medical devices,' the agency said in a statement to Blacklock’s. 'The medical devices were no longer authorized.' But documents show the ventilators were sold as such as late as Feb. 8, 2023 while still licensed by the Department of Health. The ... licenses were revoked weeks later on March 22 after dozens of units were scrapped.
"StarFish Medical of Toronto was awarded a $169.5 million sole-sourced contract in 2020 to deliver up to 7,500 devices at $22,600 apiece. The devices were among $700 million worth of rush orders for ventilators placed by the Department of Public Works as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has declined comment...
"A total of 40,547 ventilators were ordered from various manufacturers but only 27,025 were delivered and only 500 ever used.... While most ventilators remained in federal warehouses, 839 were donated to hospitals in India, Pakistan and Nepal or sent to Ukraine as war surplus, according to a March 25 Inquiry Of Ministry, tabled in the Commons." Read more: https://torontosun.com/news/national/canadian-ventilators-sold-for-scrap-metal-report
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has (1) confirmed that he will be attending the Libertarian National Convention and (2) challenged Donald Trump, who will also be attending, to debate him there.
(l tor) Donald J. Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fox News.
May 8, 2024 - "In a surprising turn of events, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging former President Donald Trump to a formal debate at the upcoming Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C. This bold move comes amidst a flurry of speculation and uncertainty surrounding the 2024 presidential election landscape.... As the political world holds its breath, one can't help but wonder if this high-stakes debate will indeed come to fruition, and what impact it could have on the race for the White House."
This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.
I’m grateful to you for calling attention to the rigged polling methodologies that biased DNC-influenced media have used against you. We have this concern too, and I’m happy to show you the deceptive methodologies used by DNC-allied pollsters who pretend that I’m in single digits. You have correctly characterized these as “fake polls.”
This is why we did our own poll with Zogby — the largest and most accurate poll of this election cycle. We had Zogby ask about head-to-head matchups. (1) You versus President Biden. (2) Me versus President Biden. (3) Me versus you. The results? You beat President Biden handily. I crush him as well, by even more. And against each other, I beat you in a nail-biter.
In a three-way, you are ahead but I’m coming up strong. Two new polls (CNN and Quinnipiac) have me above the 15% debate threshold. Another (Activote) has me at 26% among young voters. And you and I are tied among America’s 70 million Independents.
I’m also drawing a lot of voters from your former supporters. They are upset that you blew up the deficit, shut down their businesses during Covid, and filled your administration with swamp creatures.
So I’d like to make you an offer. We’re both going to be speaking at the upcoming Libertarian convention on May 24 and 25. It’s perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters.
You yourself have said you’re not afraid to debate me as long as my poll numbers are decent. Well, they are. In fact, I’m the only presidential candidate in history who has polled ahead of both major party candidates in head-to-head races.
So let’s meet at the Libertarian convention and show the American public that at least two of the major candidates aren’t afraid to debate each other. I asked the convention organizers and they are game for us to use our time there to bring the American people the debate they deserve!
Deana Sherif, a serial protester for far-left causes in Canada with a history of violent and harassing behavior, has finally been arrested and charged (and denied bail) after she allegedly assaulted a police officer making an arrest.
April 29, 2024 - "An Ottawa anti-Israel activist was arrested and charged with assault and hate-motivated harassment during an April 15 protest in the Canadian capital, local law enforcement announced on Saturday. Deana Sherif, 47, is alleged to have assaulted a person with a 'handheld sound amplifier' after the victim had walked near an anti-Israel demonstration and argued with her. Sherif used the device at a different location later in the day against another victim. Sherif allegedly verbally abused both victims, shouting 'hateful messages' at her target at the later event.
"In addition to charges for intimidation by disorderly following, possession of a weapon dangerous to the public, and two charges for assault with a weapon and hate-motivated harassment by threatening conduct, Sherif allegedly assaulted a police officer to prevent them from arrest. 'While police were attempting to effect a lawful arrest, the individual inserted herself into the situation, and in doing so, physically assaulted one of the officers,' said The Ottawa Police Service Hate and Bias Crime Unit and Central Criminal Investigation Section.
"Journalist Chris Dacey, who shared on X on Saturday that he has documented Sherif acting violently at such protests, said, 'It's well past time she faces consequences for her actions.'"
April 29, 2024 - "Canadian social justice activist Deana Sherif will be facing accountability for aggressive actions after years of bothering conservatives. Sherif had been denied bail at a Sunday court appearance after being charged with offences such as assaulting a police officer, obstructing a peace officer, and assault with a weapon. The judge had imposed a publication ban to cover the reasons for the decision....
"Sherif had been brought before a virtual court for bail proceedings. About 120 people attended the court hearing. No one was allowed to record it....
"Sherif acts as a perpetual protestor, who attends demonstrations for various causes across Ontario. She has a history of violent and harassing behaviour, with limited police intervention to protect people. It is alleged she assaulted a police officer with the intent to prevent an arrest at an Ottawa protest on April 15 among other serious charges....
"While the ruling had been pushed off, the court appearance ended because of the abrupt display of pornography from an unknown participant."
May 3, 2024 - "Exchanges in Parliament’s main theatre, the House of Commons, devolved this week into a mayhem more suited for under a circus big top. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre engaged in a disrespectful partisan slugfest and the degradation was furthered by the clownish stumbling of the Speaker of the House. The Trudeau-Poilievre non sequitur argument and the ensuing sideshows throughout this week sadly reflect the deteriorated state of Canada’s democratic institution and its elected representatives to debate the many serious issues of the land.
"The climax of this tragi-comedy was during a heated exchange in Tuesday’s Question Period, when Speaker Greg Fergus expelled Poilievre for unparliamentary language. Most of the Tory caucus followed their leader out of the House.... Poilievre had asked Trudeau to explain why the federal government had yet to act on a B.C. government’s 'urgent' request to end the federal-provincial pilot program relating to hard drugs decriminalization. In response to this serious issue, Trudeau launched into a series of insults. He excitedly accused Poilievre of 'shameful, spineless leadership' and suggested he was sympathetic to white nationalist groups. (Over the weekend Trudeau had been making great noise in CBC News interviews and in Liberal fundraising appeals about Poilievre courting members of a group from Diagolon – an internet meme country). There was no attempt to address the issue raised by Poilievre....
"The Conservative leader countered the insults by rephrasing his lead question and calling Trudeau a 'wacko.. and the Liberals’ hard drugs policy 'wacko.' Fergus asked Poilievre to withdraw his adjective. Poilievre replaced 'wacko' with the word 'radical.' Fergus rejected this adjective and asked Poilievre to withdraw it. Poilievre replied with the word 'extremist.' Fergus rejected this and it was then that he directed Poilievre to leave the House of Commons. So, ended the centre ring circus act, with Trudeau smiling like a Cheshire Cat and Liberal MPs braying across the floor of the Commons.
"On Wednesday, Fergus rejected formal calls from both the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois to resign due to his bias, partisan actions. Bloc House leader Alain Therrien commented: 'Mr. Fergus has had difficulty maintaining peace in Parliament for a long time. We think the Speaker should leave. The recent events confirm that position.' Conservative MP Michael Cooper was more pointed in saying: 'He should resign, he’s a disgrace'.... The Liberals took to the airwaves and social media Tuesday and Wednesday to denounce Conservatives as 'conspiracy theorists' unfit to lead given their support for the people of Diagolon. In their excitement over Diagolon, there was also lip service paid in support of the beleaguered Speaker.
"What was lost in this nonsensical episode was a reply to British Columbians about the nightmares they are currently coping with in their streets, playgrounds, and hospitals. In fact, while the Diagolon-wacko standoff has been unfolding, the Trudeau government and much of the legacy media have allowed many serious national issues to go unreported. Trudeau, his ministers, and their sponsored legacy media have been too preoccupied with Diagolon and slurring the Conservatives....
"There are many concerns upstaged by Ottawa’s clown show. Consider these issues that demand answers if we were not all so entranced by Diagolon and whether Fergus will do the honourable thing and resign. Here: ArriveCan scandal, McKinsey sole-sourced contracts, details of the capital gains tax changes, Winnipeg lab security breaches, findings that suggest the Liberals knew and attempted to conceal facts about China’s influence in elections, and the escalation of the anti-Israel, pro-Humas demonstrations tolerated by the government and police on Canadian campuses, on city streets, and, most reprehensible, in known Jewish neighbourhoods.
"And the dread and anguish of British Columbians deserves answers from this government. Last week B.C. Premier David Eby asked the federal government to halt the hard drugs pilot program that is currently in year one of three. It was expressed as an 'urgent' request to alleviate what has become an intolerable situation in B.C. communities – where drugged-up people lay incapacitated in streets, shoot up in kids’ playgrounds and school yards, and cause fear in hospital corridors. It is a crisis that is killing an average of seven people a day.
"Trudeau continues to defend and promote the Liberal policy that has decriminalized possession of small amounts of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine, among other street drugs. Ya’ara Saks, the federal Addictions Minister is also avoiding the facts.... Why is there not a serious debate in Canada’s parliament about seven British Columbians dying daily as a result of drugs? How do Canadians get a response to this serious issue and the many others when they all seem to get lost in the hurley burley under the big top?"
November 26, 2023 - "There’s an elephant in the room, the speaker declared. He was right. I was at a gathering, as I often am, of people who aspire to rescue their countries from descending into woke, collectivist hell. But the attendees were not of one mind. Instead, there were two kinds of people in attendance. The elephant in the room was the tension between them.
"Across the West, Virtue People, and Freedom People have been working together. At conferences, in think tanks, at school boards, on email lists, in living rooms, on X, and sometimes marching in the streets, they coalesce. These two groups constitute the rebel alliance against authoritarian woke globalism. But their political philosophies conflict.
"Virtue People believe that virtue is the most important thing. Tradition, faith, family, responsibility, dignity, patriotism, community, and spiritual or religious conviction are the pillars upon which the West must be built. Virtue People are often, but not always, people of faith, especially of the Christian variety. Laws, governments, and society, they believe, should promote the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
"Freedom People don’t share this view. They believe that freedom is the most important thing. Virtues, they believe, are for individuals to work out for themselves. The primary accomplishment of the West, they would say, is individual autonomy. The purpose of government is to secure individual rights to liberty. Freedom means the absence of coercion. You may decide your values, actions, and groups for yourself. Freedom means “freedom from.”
"Virtue People believe in freedom too, especially in this era of illiberal progressivism. But freedom means a different thing to them. Freedom is essential, they would say, but the decline of the West is due to an excessive emphasis on individuality. (If that makes perfect sense to you, you may be a Virtue Person. If it sounds like a contradiction, you are probably a Freedom Person.)
"Freedom, they would say, means the disciplining of desire, which requires limits. Freedom is the liberation to act responsibly, to be transcendent, and to flourish virtuously. We become free, they would say, to the extent that our will becomes coherent with objective Good. Freedom means “freedom to.”
"In the political sphere, these two kinds of freedom are incompatible. Freedom People expect their governments to keep the peace and protect the individual – and otherwise to not interfere. Virtue People expect their governments to promote the Good with laws and policies. Virtue People support laws that prohibit behavior that is, in their view, immoral, damaging to human flourishing, or inconsistent with common good. Assisted suicide, prostitution, divorce, pornography, even heresy, just to start, shall not be permitted.
"To achieve their ends, Virtue People rely on force. At least, that’s what Freedom People would say. Virtue People use laws to achieve their ends, and laws depend on force. Every legal rule identifies a circumstance in which the state will bend the will of its citizens. Without the monopolistic violence of the state, laws cannot be enforced. Virtue People are willing to use that force to achieve their virtuous ends. Therefore, allege the Freedom People, they are willing to use force to have their way.
"Freedom People are decadent. At least, that’s what Virtue People would say. If morality crimes do not exist and individuals are free to decide their own values, depravity ensues. Libertarians and libertines are cousins, Virtue People would declare. Excessive individualism causes indulgence, narcissism, and social decay.
"But Freedom People can be virtuous too. They can embrace faith, family, and community. They can disapprove of behavior, such as prostitution, that Virtue People would ban. However, Freedom People make a distinction that Virtue People are unable or unwilling to make. Freedom People see two different questions where Virtue People see only one. How should people behave? How must they behave? For Freedom People, the first is philosophical and personal. The second is legal and coercive. The answer to the first does not answer the second. Freedom People do not impose their moral judgments on others. They will not have others impose upon them.
|Paradoxically, Freedom People have faith that Virtue People lack. They have faith in spontaneous order. If we leave people alone, they say, things will turn out fine. Individual decisions will coalesce into peace and prosperity. Virtue People do not believe in spontaneous order. They want their hands on the wheel, so that they can manage people to virtuous ends.
"Freedom People will not be managed. They believe that the West’s problem is too little liberty. Virtue People believe that the problem is too much. Freedom People oppose the administrative state. Virtue People embrace it if it directs people to proper ends. Neither will sign on to the other’s project. Although they cooperate to resist the tyranny of the woke, they are not likely to succeed unless they reconcile.
|At the gathering, most people were Virtue People. The few Freedom People present slowly realized that they had attended a kind of church to which they did not belong. The Virtue People who filled the room, steadfast in their conviction that they knew best what is Right and Good, did not seem to be aware of them. Or for that matter, that they existed at all.
"Near the end, I spoke with an earnest, soft-spoken gentleman in horn-rimmed glasses. In his ideal world, the law would prohibit behavior that conflicted with the Good, as he perceived it. When I pointed out that some people in the room would oppose that enterprise with all their might, his mouth fell open and his eyes grew wide behind his thick lenses. That possibility had not occurred to him. Not everyone sees the elephant in the room."
The annual May Day march in Montreal turned violent, with demonstrators smashing the windows of businesses, setting off smoke bombs, and fighting with police.
May 2, 2024 - "Local and federal politicians are condemning the actions of protestors after the annual May Day march in Montreal turned violent, with demonstrators smashing windows of businesses and setting off smoke bombs. Thousands of people turned out to the International Workers Day or May Day march at Francois-Perrault Park near the Saint-Michel metro station on May 1, according to reports. The event was organized by a coalition of unions and community organizations under the umbrella group May 1 Montreal Coalition.
"Videos circulating on social media show protestors in black masks and hoods smashing windows and throwing parking cones and other items. Montreal police said officers had to step in to disperse the crowd. 'Due to several offenses committed during [demonstrations], we are carrying out a dispersal operation in the Sherbrooke/Robert-Bourassa sector. People must leave the premises immediately,' police said in a post on X.
"Smoke bombs, parking cones, trash cans, and signs were thrown about by demonstrators, according to a TVA reporter, who also said officers were attacked and pepper spray was used.
"The Epoch Times contacted the May 1 Montreal Coalition and Montreal police for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
"Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante condemned the protesters’ behaviour in a post on social media. 'These actions are absolutely unacceptable,' she said in a May 2 post on social media. 'I denounce the mayhem suffered by downtown merchants last night during the anti-capitalist demonstration'....
"This year’s theme for the protest event was ‘united to make our voices heard,’ according to a press release from the coalition. The release said there were concerns that needed to be handled collectively, including climate change, working conditions of temporary foreign workers, 'antidemocratic abuses' by Quebec Premier François Legault, and an out-of-touch government."
May 1, 2024 — "The Libertarian National Party, the Party of Principle, announced today that President Donald J. Trump has responded to an invitation, and challenge, from the Libertarian Party to speak at its National Convention, and directly address concerns voiced by its members. President Trump will speak on Saturday, May 25th, in Washington, D.C. Members of the Libertarian Party will share a list of their top ten issues with President Trump in advance of the convention....
"[Libertarian National Committee Chair] Angela McArdle states, 'For 50 years, we’ve been trying to get our candidates on the main stage with major party POTUS candidates and we’ve finally succeeded in bringing one to our stage. We will do everything in our power to use this incredible opportunity to advance the message of liberty.'
“'Libertarians are some of the most independent and thoughtful thinkers in our Country, and I am honored to join them in Washington, DC, later this month,' said President Trump. 'We must all work together to help advance freedom and liberty for every American, and a second Trump Administration will achieve that goal. I look forward to speaking at the Libertarian Event, which will be attended by many of my great friends. We all have to remember that our goal is to defeat the Worst President in the History of the United States, BY FAR, Crooked Joe Biden. If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close. We cannot have another four years of death, destruction, and incompetence. WE WILL WORK TOGETHER AND WIN!'
"The theme for the 2024 Libertarian National Convention is 'Become Ungovernable.' This was chosen following the previous years of unconscionable authoritarian actions by the United States Federal, and State governments, which saw citizens confined, indoctrinated, lied to, and inoculated against their will. The citizens of these United States must become ungovernable to regain their basic rights and freedoms. This year’s convention will welcome world-renowned speakers, activists, and thinkers, as well as decide the Libertarian presidential candidate for the 2024 election cycle. There is no greater collection, nor community, of freedom, liberty, and independently-minded people.
"Speakers confirmed thus far for the Convention include: President Donald J. Trump; cardiologist and epidemiologist, Dr. Peter McCullough; filmmaker, and brother of Julian Assange, Gabriel Shipton; “Part of the Problem Host,” Dave Smith; freedom advocate, historian and Bitcoin futurist, Robert Breedlove; and Jo Anne and Mark Skousen, longtime liberty activists, founders of Freedom Fest and the Anthem LIbertarian Film Festival. More speakers will be confirmed in the coming months.
"For those interested in attending or sponsoring this historic, and transformative event with thousands of like-minded individuals, Convention registration and application for press coverage are available at: https://lnc2024.com/
Jeremy MacKenzie, creator of the internet meme country Diagolon, denies any connection with either Pierre Poilievre or the carbon tax protest at the Nova Scotia border, calling Prime Minister Trudeau's claims about him and Diagolon "malicious fabrications" based on a "fantasy narrative."
May 1, 2024 - "Jeremy Mackenzie, the creator of the internet meme country Diagolon, denied Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims that he and the Conservative Party of Canada or its leader Pierre Poilievre are connected in any way. 'The CPC has no connections or affiliations with myself or anyone involved in my circles,' Mackenzie said on his podcast. 'These claims by the Liberals are an outright and deliberately malicious fabrication in a desperate and pathetic attempt to sway support away from the Conservative Party’s momentum that appears overwhelmingly likely to crush the Liberals'...
"The claims, spurred on by Trudeau, came after Poilievre visited a legal carbon-tax protest encampment on the side of a highway in an Atlantic Canada border town. The flag of Mackenzie’s made-up country can be seen on the door of a camper Poilievre entered. The Prime Minister accused Poilievre of meeting with Diagolon, and has since continued to levy accusations of 'courting white supremacists' and 'conspiracy theorists.' The protesters denied any connection to Diagolon and told True North the drawing was made by someone who stopped in one time to get warm at the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa and was never seen again.
"Mackenzie confirmed their claims. He said he asked Sam Field, who according to Mackenzie owns the trailer, to remove the drawing 'immediately.' '(The carbon-tax protest Pierre visited) was born out of a small orbit of perennial freedom protesters seemingly cornerbacked by Mr. Sam Fields,' he said. Mackenzie said he has no relationship or recollection of any interaction with Fields.
'My partner Morgan (Guptill) doodled a Diagolon flag on his trailer door over two years ago, during the Ottawa protest action meant as a friendly gesture of support, and nothing more.... There is no connection between myself, Morgan, or any of the more prominent voices in our makeshift loose-knit community than that. Any connections being made are tenuous at best and purely coincidental. There is no involvement whatsoever.
”Poilievre denounced Mackenzie and Diagolon in September 2022.... In an email to True North, Sebastian Skamski, a spokesperson for Poilievre said the Conservative leader stands by his disavowal of Diagolon. 'Frankly, like most Canadians, until about a month ago I never heard of Diagolon and these losers. They are all odious,' Poilievre wrote on Sept. 26, 2022. "Mackenzie said he and the Conservative leader do not see eye to eye, and Mackenzie will remain a 'sharp critic' of ... Poilievre.
It is very clear to my audience as well as the CPC I’m sure and Mr. Poilievre himself that we are not mutual friends. There’s a very deep and I’m sure mutual disdain for one another.... It is my sincere hope that somehow Mr. Poilievre and his team will succeed in proving me to be impressively incorrect in my assessment of their character....
"The government has often alluded to extremist groups operating within the Freedom Convoy to justify its use of the never-before-used Emergencies Act to crack down on protesters. 'At its core, (Diagolon) is a tightly knit group of like-minded folks who enjoy my podcast and commentary. This government used this fantasy narrative painted by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network to enact the Emergency Measures Act in February 2022,' Mackenzie said....
With the Libertarian Party (LP) national convention only weeks away, a few of the more than 30 candidates for the LP presidential nomination are actively campaigning for the job, crossing the country and making their case at state LP conventions.
Libertarian presidential candidates (l to r) Charles Ballay, Lars Mapstead and Mike ter Maat during a debate at the state Libertarian Party convention at DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Salt Lake City on Friday, April 19, 2024. | Megan Nielsen, Deseret News
April 19, 2024 - Libertarians — still a small minority of the American electorate 52 years after the party began — hold the solution to the country’s spiraling debt and division, attendees lamented, if only they could get the country’s attention. The three presidential candidates at the front of the room — a down-to-earth doctor, an eccentric entrepreneur and an economist-turned-cop — argued they could do just that. Speaking Friday evening at Utah’s first-ever Libertarian Party presidential nomination debate at the party’s state convention, the unassuming White House hopefuls argued over the best way for a limited-government movement to try to change the shape of the nation come fall 2024.
"Lars Mapstead, the founder of Friend Finder Networks, laid out his strategy 'to send a middle finger to the duopoly' of Republican and Democratic parties by snatching just a few Electoral College votes in Maine and Nebraska, where electors are allocated proportionally. Doing so could prevent either of the major party candidates from securing the 270 votes needed to win and would turn the outcome of the election over to the U.S. House of Representatives where each state delegation would get one vote to cast for their preferred candidate. The candidate who received a majority (26) of states would become the next president.
"'I’m trying to wake people up to getting rid of the Democrats and the Republicans and saying that we can actually throw a wrench into this election system,' Mapstead said. 'This would get people in America to Google "What is a Libertarian?".’ As the party nominee, Mapstead said he would commit $1 million of his own money to spread the “Stop 270″ message....
“'Our campaign is not about gimmicks,' said Mike ter Maat, an economics professor and former Florida police officer. 'This is about disrupting the way American politics works.' This election cycle, maybe more than any other, represents an opportunity for Libertarians to capture the imagination of the American voter, Ter Maat believes. Unlike 2016 or 2020, voters know exactly what they can expect from a Joe Biden or Donald Trump second term.
"And as the Republican Party continues its departure from fiscal conservatism and the Democratic Party distances itself from anti-war dovishness, Americans are looking for a third option grounded in budgetary and foreign policy principle ready to present a credible candidate, Ter Maat said. 'We are going to be rolling out policy with the expectation that someone is going to pay attention to us because they recognize that our campaign can fulfill this role,' Ter Maat told the assembled Libertarian party members.
"The party’s policy proposals don’t have to be extreme — like 'end the fed' or 'legalize drugs,' or other Libertarian talking points — to get the public’s attention, according to Charles Ballay, a practicing ENT doctor. 'I think this party needs to realize that being a fringe candidate does not work,' Ballay said. 'We have the power to say "We are the adults in the room."'
"But the candidates’ positions Friday night largely reflected a Libertarian mindset that is alien to much of the political mainstream. Mapstead vowed to leave the president’s 9,000 appointed bureaucratic positions empty. Ter Maat promised to immediately withdraw from NATO. Ballay said the government should completely remove itself from health care.
"Another stumbling block to blowing up the 2024 election is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s intention of doing the same.... Kennedy, who consistently garners 10% support in national polls and recently secured ballot access in key battleground states, threatens to 'take a lot of the wind out of' Libertarians’ electoral sails, Ballay said.,,,
"Over thirty candidates .. are running for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, including Chase Oliver, a former U.S. Senate candidate who helped cause a runoff in Georgia’s 2022 special election."
After Pierre Poilievre met with carbon tax protesters camped at the Nova Scotia border, Press Progress reported that some of the protesters had been "at events with 'Diagolon' influencers;" then CTV News claimed that they were "affiliated with ... the far-right group Diagolon;" then Justin Trudeau (see video) began calling them "members of Diagolon." Only one reporter bothered to visit the camp and ask the protesters.
April 26, 2024 - "Despite claims made by Press Progress and CTV News, protesters at the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick border have no connection to podcaster Jeremy Mackenzie’s fictitious meme country Diagolon. Justin Trudeau and some media corporations made the sensational claim after Pierre Poilievre visited a carbon tax protest while in between events in Atlantic Canada.... The protesters have been camped at Fort Lawrence, Nova Scotia, since Justin Trudeau hiked the carbon tax by 23% on April 1....
"Protest organizer Tommy Everett told True North in an interview that none of the approximately ten people who protest overnight at the camp support Mackenzie or have any connection to his fictitious country. 'Us being with Diagolon is just, grasping at soggy paper straws,' Everett said. 'Because they seen a drawing that somebody drew two or three years ago on the inside of a camper with numerous other signatures from people all over Canada.'
"He said the drawing of the flag ... was done in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy. ''The person that owns the trailer was a mechanic at the Freedom Convoy. He had a diesel heater inside. So everybody (protesters) used that space to get warm while they were strolling up and down the streets,' he said. 'It was kind of a pop-in, you know, warm yourself up, get a cup of coffee, have a cookie, and then after you’re warm, continue on your way.' At the Freedom Convoy, it was popular for people to sign each other’s trucks, trailers, cars and flags....
"'That was the only time that (the person who drew the flag) stepped foot in the camper,' Everett said. 'They haven’t been in the camper since, nor have they been down here at any time. Since this protest has happened, they haven’t even stepped foot on the property nor the highway we’re protesting on.'
"Tommy said he was familiar with Mackenzie but hasn’t wanted 'anything to do with him' since he 'joked' about raping Poilievre’s wife. 'We don’t support the sexual assault of women. We support women being our equal counterparts. Anything that involves any kind of violence against anybody, we do not support,' he said. 'To reiterate, nobody here supports Jeremy. nobody at all.'
"The NDP aligned, Broadbent Institute funded, Press Progress’s report quoted from the Emergencies Act Inquiry which noted that law enforcement viewed Diagolon as a 'potentially dangerous organization.' The reporting did not include information from an 85-page investigative report co-authored by journalists Caryma Sa’d and Elisa Hategan, which found the Trudeau government and the legacy media reports overly relied on the same source of flawed information from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which receives funding from the Liberal government.
"Internal communications between Canadian officials showed they did not view Diagolon as an extremist threat or even an organized group were included in their report. The RCMP said Diagolon 'does not pose a criminal or national security threat'.... Canadian national security official Matthew Dejardins said 'Diagolon does not meet dictionary definitions of a group,' on March 16, 2022.
"When asked at the Public Order Emergency Commission, Tom Marazzo said Diagalon is a 'meme.' 'The vice president of Diagolon, being a time-travelling cocaine-addicted goat, that’s just an internet meme that has no meaning at all,' Marazzo said. At the inquiry, Mackenzie testified that the 'demonic goat figurine' is named Philip."
British Columbia's NDP government is asking Canada's Liberal government to recriminalize public drug use in the province, after its own attempt was suspended by a judge pending a constitutional challenge.
April 26, 2024 - "[T]he BC government is throwing up its hands at what it says are barriers to restricting where and how narcotics can be openly used in public — including hospitals and public health facilities. Jennifer Whiteside, BC’s minister for mental health and addictions, is meeting with her federal counterpart Ya’ara Saks in Vancouver on Friday, where she is reportedly asking the Liberal government to review exemptions that allow users to smoke meth in hospital rooms, among others. She’ll also reportedly be asking Ottawa to support more supervised drug consumption sites and request[ing] additional resources....
"BC’s NDP government faces increasing pushback from municipalities over open drug use in their communities. On Thursday, the City of Kamloops wrote a letter to Premier David Eby calling for the end of the three-year decriminalization pilot.... 'We want the same rules as smokers and drinkers have that we can enforce. This is just one more tool that we need,' wrote deputy mayor Bill Sarai.... He was joined by the mayor of Fort St. John, Lilia Hansen, who also called for an end to the program....'We don't want to stigmatize anyone, but we have to think about our entire community and their safety,' she said. 'I do not believe that the decriminalization is working.'
"But the provincial government says its hands are tied with respect to the decriminalization pilot that began on January 31 2023 because it falls under the Criminal Code. An attempt to pass laws to restrict open drug use in places such as beaches and public parks last November was suspended pending a Charter of Rights challenge to the Supreme Court.
April 18, 2024 - "Testifying before a House of Commons Health Committee in Ottawa, ... Fiona Wilson, president of the BC Association of Chiefs of Police and deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department, told the committee on Tuesday [that] police were essentially powerless to stop drug use in hospitals because they aren’t exempted from public spaces like schools, airports and some types of playgrounds. 'When that happens, if it’s not in a place that’s an exception to the exemption, there is nothing police can do,” she said....
"The issue came to a head after nurses union members complained they are being exposed to fentanyl, crack and other illegal drugs from users who openly smoke them in their hospital rooms. Security staff complain that they’re not trained to deal with the problem, which is exacerbated by the fact many addicts also have weapons when they’re admitted.
"Wilson said police warned government officials before the policy was enacted in January, 2023. 'These are all things that we raised prior to decriminalization taking effect, that we don’t feel were adequately addressed, however we strongly support the notion of not trying to arrest ourselves out of this crisis. That is not going to save lives.'
"The BC government is trying to expand areas where open drug use is not permitted but is facing a court challenge from so-called ‘harm reduction’ advocates who argue it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s essentially a federal issue because Ottawa had to allow the decriminalization from the Criminal Code at the request of a BC government that now finds its hands tied in the face of growing public opposition — and alarm — toward the policy." Read more: https://www.westernstandard.news/bc/half-of-illegal-street-narcotics-in-bc-from-safe-supply-cops-powerless-to-stop-drug-use-in-hospitals/53918
