Business
Australian senator compares Trudeau’s treatment of Freedom Convoy protesters to Communist China

From LifeSiteNews
‘This push towards a digital ID future is another step toward a Chinese Communist Party-style social credit system, which will force you to support the current thing at the risk of total cancellation,’ Senator Alex Antic said
An Australian senator compared Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s handling of the Freedom Convoy with Communist China.
During a November 13 meeting in the Australian Senate, Senator Alex Antic used the freezing of Canadians’ bank accounts during the 2022 Freedom Convoy as an example of the dangers of digital currency, comparing Trudeau’s actions with China’s social credit system.
“I’ve been warning about digital ID for some time, and it wasn’t so long ago that, like many of these issues which turn out to be correct, it was considered to be nothing but a conspiracy theory,” he said.
“We saw how that worked a couple of years ago with the financial cancellation of the Canadian truckers when they were protesting COVID lockdowns and restrictions,” Antic appealed. “The advancement of technology is inevitable, but this push towards a digital ID future is another step towards a Chinese Communist Party-style social credit system, which will force you to support the current thing at the risk of total cancellation.”
The Trudeau government’s similarities to China’s Communist government have become increasingly evident to both Canadians and other countries. Indeed, Trudeau himself admitted that he has a “level of admiration” for China’s “basic dictatorship.”
His imitation of China’s credit score system was revealed during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa with thousands of Canadians calling for an end to COVID mandates by camping outside Parliament.
In response, Trudeau’s government enacted the EA on February 14, 2022, to shut down the popular movement. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23 after the protesters had been cleared out. At the time, seven of Canada’s 10 provinces opposed the use of the EA by Trudeau.
Under the EA, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland froze the bank accounts of Canadians who donated to the 2022 Freedom Convoy, which protested vaccine mandates and COVID regulations.
As articulated by LifeSiteNews correspondent David James, this type of financial crackdown is precisely why many fear the move toward an entirely digital, cashless society.
“What Freeland has outlined is an unprecedented incursion into financial activity that is designed to lock the people whom the government deems to be undesirable out of the system entirely,” James wrote in an op-ed.
“It confirms what many have been warning about for some time: that one of the core elements of the so-called Great Reset is to enslave populations by surveilling and controlling their transactions,” he continued. “China has already implemented its version of digital tyranny with its Social Credit System, which it will combine with its Central Bank Digital Currency [CBDC]. Now Trudeau and Freeland have drawn back the curtain in Canada to reveal their version of digital despotism.”
Antic’s use of Canada as an example comes as governments around the world are pushing digital currency despite warnings that it will lead to a social credit system.
“Last week, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union reached a final agreement on a law to create the European Digital Identity, or eID, the EU’s first fully digital identification system,” Antic announced.
“This law will provide Europeans with a digital wallet containing digital versions of their ID cards — their drivers licences, their academic certificates, their medical records, their bank account information and so on,” he explained. “The next major step in the EU will be to create a digital euro and a central bank digital currency, which is currently being developed by the European Central Bank.”
“I’ve been warning about digital ID for some time, and it wasn’t so long ago that, like many of these issues which turn out to be correct, it was considered to be nothing but a conspiracy theory,” he added.
Currently, Australia is moving toward introducing digital currency with consultation on the bill having recently closed.
“You can see how it’s going to happen: We’ll get a digital currency and, once those steps are in place, a digital snare trap will have been created,” Antic warned. “We must reject a digital ID future, and time is running out for people in this place to understand that they are playing with fire.”
Business
It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers
The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.
Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.
These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.
Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.
In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.
Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.
According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.
Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.
A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.
Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.
Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
2025 Federal Election
Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is planning to borrow more money than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
That’s an odd plan for a former banker because the federal government is already spending more on debt interest payments than it spends on health-care transfers to the provinces.
Let’s take a deeper look at Carney’s plan.
Carney says that his government would “spend less, invest more.”
At first glance, that might sound better than the previous decade of massive deficits and increasing debt, but does that sound like a real change?
Because if you open a thesaurus, you’ll find that “spend” and “invest” are synonyms, they mean the same thing.
And Carney’s platform shows it. Carney plans to increase government spending by $130 billion. He plans to increase the federal debt by $225 billion over the next four years. That’s about $100 billion more than Trudeau was planning borrow over the same period, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.
Carney is planning to waste $5.6 billion more on debt interest charges than Trudeau. Interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion per week.
The platform claims that Carney will run a budget surplus in 2028, but that’s nonsense. Because once you include the $48 billion of spending in Carney’s “capital” budget, the tiny surplus disappears, and taxpayers are stuck with more debt.
And that’s despite planning to take even more money from Canadians in years ahead. Carney’s platform shows that his carbon tariff, another carbon tax on Canadians, will cost taxpayers $500 million.
The bottom line is that government spending, no matter what pile it is put into, is just government spending. And when the government spends too much, that means it must borrow more money, and taxpayers have to pay the interest payments on that irresponsible borrowing.
Canadians don’t even believe that Carney can follow through on his watered-down plan. A majority of Canadians are skeptical that Carney will balance the operational budget in three years, according to Leger polling.
All Carney’s plan means for Canadians is more borrowing and higher debt. And taxpayers can’t afford anymore debt.
When the Liberals were first elected the debt was $616 billion. It’s projected to reach almost $1.3 trillion by the end of the year, that means the debt has more than doubled in the last decade.
Every single Canadian’s individual share of the federal debt averages about $30,000.
Interest charges on the debt are costing taxpayers $53.7 billion this year. That’s more than the government takes in GST from Canadians. That means every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas, or buy almost anything else, all that federal sales tax you pay isn’t being used for anything but paying for the government’s poor financial decisions.
Creative accounting is not the solution to get the government’s fiscal house in order. It’s spending cuts. And Carney even says this.
“The federal government has been spending too much,” said Carney. He then went on to acknowledge the huge spending growth of the government over the last decade and the ballooning of the federal bureaucracy. A serious plan to balance the budget and pay down debt includes cutting spending and slashing bureaucracy.
But the Conservatives aren’t off the hook here either. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that he will balance the budget “as soon as possible,” but hasn’t told taxpayers when that is.
More debt today means higher taxes tomorrow. That’s because every dollar borrowed by the federal government must be paid back plus interest. Any party that says it wants to make life more affordable also needs a plan to start paying back the debt.
Taxpayers need a government that will commit to balancing the budget for real and start paying back debt, not one that is continuing to pile on debt and waste billions on interest charges.
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