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Opinion

Ontario mayor refuses to cave in to demands after town rejected ‘pride’ flag

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7 minute read

Mayor Harold McQuaker of Emo, Ontario

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Emo, Ontario mayor Harold McQuaker said he will ‘absolutely not’ pay a fine or attend re-education classes, emphasizing that ‘I will not be extorted.’

Last month, the Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered the township of Emo to pay the LGBT activist group Borderland Pride $10,000 for voting in 2020 not to fly a “Pride” flag. Mayor Harold McQuaker was ordered to personally pay $5,000 — and take a re-education course titled “Human Rights 101” to boot. We covered both the original story as well as a follow-up, detailing Borderland Pride’s threats and demands.

There is a new development in the case: Mayor Harold McQuaker is flatly refusing to do what is being demanded of him. Asked by the Toronto Sun if he will pay the fine or attending re-education classes, the 77-year-old McQuaker was blunt. “Absolutely not,” he replied. “I will not be extorted.” He also stated that he will not host Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library, either — one of the demands laid out in an open letter published by Borderland Pride.

Emo Township is a small town of just over 1,200 people located 380 kilometers west of Thunder Bay. The township now has to decide whether to pay the LGBT activist group as demanded by the Ontario Human Rights Commission or refuse to do so. McQuaker has made up his mind. “I utterly refuse to pay the $5,000 because that’s extortion,” he stated. “I have a lot of respect for our four councillors. We have a special meeting of council, and they will decide that and what to do next, either pay the fine or appeal it.”

McQuaker grew up in the area and owned a construction company there for 50 years, and he cannot be pushed around easily. “I will not pay the $5,000 I have been fined and will not take the training,” he emphasized to the Sun. “The council will decide on the fine levied to it. I did not do anything wrong … if anybody needs training it’s the LGBTQ2+ to quit pushing their weight around and making demand that people can’t live with.”

Ironically, the Emo town hall doesn’t even have a flagpole — but that didn’t matter to Borderland Pride, which has, in addition to other demands, stated that it expects a written apology as well as “diversity and inclusion training for council, and a commitment to adopt Pride proclamations in the future without stripping out their 2SLGBTQIA+-affirming language.” Borderland Pride insisted that despite the lack of flagpole the LGBT flag could have been displayed somewhere else, “such as in a window or on a counter in the municipal office.”

McQuaker emphasized that he “doesn’t hate anyone” and that he will not tolerate the accusations being leveled at him by Borderland Pride. “I am a husband to my wife for 51 years, father of two, a grandfather of seven and a great grandfather of one,” he said. “I consider myself a very reasonable person and a good leader for our community and I would have a lot of support if there was an election.”

In response, Doug Judson of Borderland Pride suggested that the mayor should be happy to learn from the LGBT group because his role:

(A)ctually requires that the mayor ‘participate in and foster activities that enhance the economic, social and environmental well-being of the municipality and its residents.’ Part of showing this kind of community leadership is to set the tone for civil debate and to demonstrate a willingness to learn and adapt one’s perspective on issues that, for various reasons, they may have more limited understanding of. It seems obvious enough that the mayor does not have many ties to the queer community. We hope that the training that was ordered by the tribunal will assist him in his leadership role moving forward.

In short, Judson and his LGBT activist buddies hope that forcing the 77-year-old mayor of a small town to take re-education classes will create “ties to the queer community” and that he will be a good boy from now on and do what they demand the first time. Harold McQuaker isn’t having any of it — and we need more like him. Godspeed to the mayor — I hope that the council follows suit.

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture WarSeeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of AbortionPatriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life MovementPrairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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Business

There’s No Bias at CBC News, You Say? Well, OK…

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It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote about the CBC. In the intervening months, the Prescott memo on bias at the BBC was released, whose stunning allegations of systemic journalistic malpractice “inspired” multiple senior officials to leave the corporation. Given how the institutional bias driving problems at the BBC is undoubtedly widely shared by CBC employees, I’d be surprised if there weren’t similar flaws embedded inside the stuff we’re being fed here in Canada.

Apparently, besides receiving nearly two billion dollars¹ annually in direct and indirect government funding, CBC also employs around a third of all of Canada’s full time journalists. So taxpayers have a legitimate interest in knowing what we’re getting out of the deal.

Naturally, corporate president Marie-Philippe Bouchard has solemnly denied the existence of any bias in CBC reporting. But I’d be more comfortable seeing some evidence of that with my own eyes. Given that I personally can easily go multiple months without watching any CBC programming or even visiting their website, “my own eyes” will require some creative redefinition.

So this time around I collected the titles and descriptions from nearly 300 stories that were randomly chosen from the CBC Top Stories RSS feed from the first half of 2025. You can view the results for yourself here. I then used AI tools to analyze the data for possible bias (how events are interpreted) and agendas (which events are selected). I also looked for:

  • Institutional viewpoint bias
  • Public-sector framing
  • Cultural-identity prioritization
  • Government-source dependency
  • Social-progressive emphasis

Here’s what I discovered.

Story Selection Bias

Millions of things happen every day. And many thousands of those might be of interest to Canadians. Naturally, no news publisher has the bandwidth to cover all of them, so deciding which stories to include in anyone’s Top Story feed will involve a lot of filtering. To give us a sense of what filtering standards are used at the CBC, let’s break down coverage by topic.

Of the 300 stories covered by my data, around 30 percent – month after month – focused on Donald Trump and U.S.- Canada relations. Another 12-15 percent related to Gaza and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Domestic politics – including election coverage – took up another 12 percent, Indigenous issues attracted 9 percent, climate and the environment grabbed 8 percent, and gender identity, health-care worker assaults, immigrant suffering, and crime attracted around 4 percent each.

Now here’s a partial list of significant stories from the target time frame (the first half of 2025) that weren’t meaningfully represented in my sample of CBC’s Top Stories:

  • Housing affordability crisis barely appears (one of the top voter concerns in actual 2025 polls).
  • Immigration levels and labour-market impact.
  • Crime-rate increases or policing controversies (unless tied to Indigenous or racialized victims).
  • Private-sector investment success stories.
  • Any sustained positive coverage of the oil/gas sector (even when prices are high).
  • Critical examination of public-sector growth or pension liabilities.
  • Chinese interference or CCP influence in Canada (despite ongoing inquiries in real life).
  • The rest of the known galaxy (besides Gaza and the U.S.)

Interpretation Bias

There’s an obvious pattern of favoring certain identity narratives. The Indigenous are always framed as victims of historic injustice, Palestinian and Gazan actions are overwhelmingly sympathetic, while anything done by Israelis is “aggression”. Transgender representation in uniformly affirmative while dissent is bigotry.

By contrast, stories critical of immigration policy, sympathetic to Israeli/Jewish perspectives, or skeptical of gender medicine are virtually non-existent in this sample.

That’s not to say that, in the real world, injustice doesn’t exist. It surely does. But a neutral and objective news service should be able to present important stories using a neutral and objective voice. That obviously doesn’t happen at the CBC.

Consider these obvious examples:

  • “Trump claims there are only ‘2 genders.’ Historians say that’s never been true” – here’s an overt editorial contradiction in the headline itself.
  • “Trump bans transgender female athletes from women’s sports” which is framed as an attack rather than a policy debate.

And your choice of wording counts more than you might realize. Verbs like “slams”, “blasts”, and “warns” are used almost exclusively describing the actions of conservative figures like Trump, Poilievre, or Danielle Smith, while “experts say”, “historians say”, and “doctors say” are repeatedly used to rebut conservative policy.

Similarly, Palestinian casualties are invariably “killed“ by Israeli forces – using the active voice – while Israeli casualties, when mentioned at all, are described using the passive voice.

Institutional Viewpoint Bias

A primary – perhaps the primary job – of a serious journalist is to challenge the government’s narrative. Because if journalists don’t even try to hold public officials to account, then no one else can. Even the valuable work of the Auditor General or the Parliamentary Budget Officer will be wasted, because there will be no one to amplify their claims of wrongdoing. And Canadians will have no way of hearing the bad news.

So it can’t be a good sign when around 62 percent of domestic political stories published by the nation’s public broadcaster either quote government (federal or provincial) sources as the primary voice, or are framed around government announcements, reports, funding promises, or inquiries.

In other words, a majority of what the CBC does involves providing stenography services for their paymasters.

Here are just a few examples:

  • “Federal government apologizes for ‘profound harm’ of Dundas Harbour relocations”
  • “Jordan’s Principle funding… being extended through 2026: Indigenous Services”
  • “Liberal government announces dental care expansion the day before expected election call”

Agencies like the Bank of Canada, Indigenous Services Canada, and Transportation Safety Board are routinely presented as authoritative and neutral. By contrast, opposition or industry critiques are usually presented as secondary (“…but critics say”) or are simply invisible. Overall, private-sector actors like airlines, oil companies, or developers are far more likely to be criticized.

All this is classic institutional bias: the state and its agencies are the default lens through which reality is filtered.

Not unlike the horrors going on at the BBC, much of this bias is likely unconscious. I’m sure that presenting this evidence to CBC editors and managers would evoke little more than blank stares. This stuff flies way below the radar.

But as one of the AI tools I used concluded:

In short, this 2025 CBC RSS sample shows a very strong and consistent left-progressive institutional bias both in story selection (agenda) and in framing (interpretation). The outlet functions less as a neutral public broadcaster and more as an amplifier of government, public-sector, and social-progressive narratives, with particular hostility reserved for Donald Trump, Canadian conservatives, and anything that could be construed as “right-wing misinformation.”

And here’s the bottom line from a second tool:

The data reveals a consistent editorial worldview where legitimate change flows from institutions downward, identity group membership is newsworthy, and systemic intervention is the default solution framework.


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Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?

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Jan 19
Is Updating a Few Thousand Readers Worth a Half Million Taxpayer Dollars?
Plenty has been written about the many difficulties faced by legacy news media operations. You might even recall reading about the troubled CBC and the Liberal government’s ill-fated Online News Act in these very pages. Traditional subscription and broadcast models are drying up, and on-line ad-based revenues are in sharp decline.
Read full story
1  Between the many often-ignored sources of funding that I itemize here, and the new funding announced in the recent budget, that old “$1.4 billion” number you hear all the time is badly outdated.

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International

2025: The Year The Narrative Changed

Published on

By James Corbett
corbettreport.com

I kicked off 2025 with “The Pendulum Has Swung Again,” an editorial in which I noted how the lefty/progressive pieties of yore were being swept away by the righty/MAGA pieties of the new Trump and Change regime.

It didn’t take long for this narrative shift to be confirmed in grand style by The Great Resetter himself, Donald J. Trump:

I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.

Those are the bold words President Trump uttered in his inaugural address to the nation as he returned to the White House to begin his second administration this past January. And, like the bold words of so many politicians before him, they were a bunch of hot air.

After the Iran strikes betrayal, the Trump Gaza/”Board of Peace“ debacle, the Project Stargate fiasco, the Ukraine “peace plan“ disaster, the Venezuelan drug boat massacres, the “untalented Americans“ insult and, of course, the “Epstein hoax“ hoax, even the most die-hard MAGA hopium swillers have started to realize that Trump’s inaugural speech about a new “golden age” was the same old garbage that every President-to-be likes to spew on their first day in office.

But still, just because a politician is lying (i.e., his lips are moving) doesn’t mean that a dramatic “tide of change” hasn’t swept across the planet this year.

On the contrary. A remarkable shift has taken place in popular understanding and popular discourse in 2025. This shift has changed the conversation surrounding some of the core topics the independent media has been covering for years. The shift has nothing whatsoever to do with the politicians, academics, talking heads and other bloviators who presume to be “thought leaders” and “trend setters.” And, despite the best efforts of those who look for the storm cloud in every silver lining, this narrative shift is actually something to be celebrated.

So, hopefully you’ve heard my doom-and-gloom story of the year in New World Next Year 2026. Now, let’s end the year with a little holiday cheer by examining how 2025 became the year that Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom started tuning into conspiracy reality.

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MAHA

Historians of the future may very well note that 2025 was the beginning of one of the most consequential revolutions in recent history: the health revolution.

Last year the usual establishment mouthpieces were running fake news articles trying to “debunk” the fact that the Big Food cartel has been filling their products with synthetic chemicals, food dyes and other toxic crap.

But this year the gangsters of the Big Food syndicate—from Kraft Heinz and General Mills to PepsiCo to Kellogg to Tyson Foods, along with their retail accomplice, Walmart—are falling over themselves to announce the removal of those very chemical poisons from their products.

Last year, COVID vaccines were still officially deemed safe as mother’s milk and the health establishment was pushing boosters on everyone with a pulse.

But this year the FDA now officially admits that an unknown number of children have been killed by those vaccines and a comprehensive review of the entire childhood vaccination schedule has been ordered for the first time ever.

Last year, the WHO passed their scamdemic treaty, and the erection of the biosecurity state seemed like a fait accomplis.

But this year, faced with a $2.5 billion budget deficit and a loss in its reputation worldwide, the WHO—and, indeed, the entire biosecurity project—is in shambles.

But as bad as things are for Big Pharma and Big Food, they’re even worse for Big Climate.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE CLIMATE HOAX

Veterans of the climate hoax have been gobsmacked by the monumental implosion of the climate change narrative that took place this year.

Last year it was business as usual, with the Chicken Littles of the Malthusian, anti-human “climate emergency” narrative furthering their agenda with little perceptible opposition. They continued to argue for killing humans and killing pets and they continued building their $100 trillion carbon marketmonopolizing the world’s resources under the guise of “saving Mother Earth.”

But this year the public, alert to the politicization of science exposed by the scamdemic, has finally begun to question and even push back on this pseudoscientific scam.

We saw early signs of this narrative tidal shift in the farmer protests of recent years and in the growing awareness that the greenwashed, virtue-signalling “Net Zero” platitudes of the politicians were in fact a smokescreen for a collective death pact signed by the Green Reaper himself.

But the “climate crisis” hoax didn’t just stall this year; it burnt to the ground.

It started with every one of the Big Six American banks withdrawing from the Net Zero Banking Alliance this past spring.

It continued with the stunning narrative about-face of climate agenda-pusher Bill Gates, who directly contradicted decades of his own fearmongering about weather gods to admit that climate change will not, in fact, lead to humanity’s demise.

And it culminated in the world-historic failure of COP30—the United Nations’ annual climate summit—which not only failed to produce any agreement of substance but which generated headlines like “The climate cult’s dissolution is inevitable.” Even the Los Angeles Times was compelled to declare that America is “finally waking up from its decades-long climate catastrophism stupor.”

If you had told the average conspiracy realist in 2024 that the climate cult would be on death watch by the end of 2025, he would surely not have believed you.

But what if you told that same 2024 truther that 2025 would also be the year that moved the Overton Window on 9/11 Truth?

9/11 TRUTH TURNS THE TIDE

January 1, 2025, dawned like every New Year since the catastrophic and catalyzing false flag attack of September 11, 2001. For New Year’s revelers in the conspiracy reality community, the thought that anyone within 100 miles of the corridors of power would be caught openly questioning the conclusions of The 9/11 Commission seemed as remote as it ever had.

But then ex-Congressman Curt Weldon came out to voice his opposition to the official 9/11 fairy tale.

And ex-Congressman Dennis Kucinich embraced the fight for 9/11 justice.

And CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou appeared along 9/11 Truth researchers and activists at a three-day conference dedicated to dissecting the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory.

And, of course, the Chair of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Ron Johnson, has joined the ranks of those daring to question the events of September 11.

As Corbett Reporteers know by now, though, more important by far than the action of any of these individuals in staking their public reputation on 9/11 Truth is the narrative change that has taken place around the idea of 9/11 Truth. Today, pointing out that the US government’s explanation of 9/11 is a tissue of lies is no longer an automatic social death sentence. And, emboldened by these examples of 9/11 Truth-telling, millions more people are aware that there are serious, unanswered questions about the events of that day than were aware even a year ago.

And, best of all, an added bonus of the turning of this turning of the tide on 9/11 is that people are now questioning other false flag events and the illegal wars of aggression that those events have enabled.

CALLING OUT GENOCIDE

In years past, the default position of all establishment news sources has been to uncritically accept the Israeli narrative in any conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinians. To the extent that Palestinian voices were even allowed onto such programs, it was to mock, denigrate and dismiss them as representatives of a savage, terror-supporting people.

That began to change during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, an Israeli military incursion of the Gaza Strip that even the establishment media had to concede was characterized by war crimes and massacres. In subsequent years, reports on Israel’s ongoing war crimes, its apartheid against Palestinians and its rampant illegal behaviour gave rise to the BDS movement and a worldwide protest campaign.

But it wasn’t until 2025 that that long-simmering pot finally came to a boil. After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials late last year, more and more people came out this year to denounce Israel’s campaign of carnage in Gaza. Now it’s gotten to the point where the usual griftersbandwagon-jumpers and literal sons of CIA agents that populate the ranks of the Mainstream Alternative Media have had to completely change their views on the genocide in Gaza.

And, as usual, politicians everywhere were compelled to jump in front of that parade and pretend to be leading it. Although the establishment press is loathe to admit it, a sea change has taken place on the international stage this year, with many long-time defenders of the US/Israel orthodoxy stepping out in defiance of the imperial consensus on occupied Palestine. Mexico led the way by recognizing the Palestinian state in February of this year, followed by CanadaAustralia, the UKFrance and several other countries later in the year.

It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic the change in public opinion on the situation in Palestine has been in 2025. Just as in the wake of 9/11, when Bush and the neocons managed to turn a tidal wave of public support and sympathy into worldwide hatred by using the event as an excuse to wage an illegal and immoral War of Terror, so, too, has Netanyahu and his band of Likudniks managed to turn near-worldwide sympathy and support over the (similarly suspicious) events of 10/7 into a wave of condemnation for a blatantly genocidal assault on Gaza. (Israel’s 9/11, indeed.)

It seems 2025 was the year that the magical spell the Zionists have cast over the world for generations—the one that deems all criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitic“—was finally broken.

But after reading all this, we’re still left with the most important question: what does this all mean for the year ahead?

WHAT WILL 2026 BRING?

I could go on and on about the profound narrative shifts that have taken place this past year.

In fact, I haven’t even mentioned the spectacular downfall of Klaus Schwab and the utter abandonment of the “Great Reset” agenda. Who even pays attention to the WEF and their minions at this point?

And I haven’t talked about the public furor over the ongoing Epstein cover up and the confirmation that all sides of the phoney left/right political charade have a vested interest in keeping the public’s attention away from the topic of political pedophilia.

But I know what some of you are thinking: “James, how can you possibly be celebrating these narrative shifts? There are still problems in the world!”

Yes, thank you in advance to all those who will point out that:

  • just because the Big Food cartel are removing food dyes from their products doesn’t make their products healthy; and
  • just because the US government are going to review the childhood vaccination schedule doesn’t mean that they will end vaccination; and
  • just because Gates has admitted that rising temperatures are not an existential threat doesn’t mean he will start promoting a pro-human agenda; and
  • just because some politicians are promoting (partial) 9/11 Truth doesn’t mean any 9/11 perp is about to be frog-marched in an orange jumpsuit to the courthouse; and
  • just because people are now emboldened to call Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians out for the genocide that it is doesn’t mean the genocide is about to stop; and
  • just because Klaus Schwab is out doesn’t mean globalism is finished; etc.

I am well aware of all that, obviously.

But if that is your objection to the celebration of the narrative shift, then you haven’t understood the narrative shift.

The narrative shift isn’t about what politicians or academics or establishment puppets are saying or doing. It’s about what you and your neighbours and those around you are saying or doing.

Pleasse understand what it is I’m saying here.

Of course, not everyone is suddenly a super-awake Level 99 Jedi Truth Warrior who knows that the flat earth is being controlled by 12-dimensional lizard people from the planet Archon.

But more people than ever are ready and willing and able to hear about the toxins in the food and the poisons in the vaccines and concede the truth about the climate hoax and ask questions about 9/11 and call the genocide in Gaza a genocide in Gaza. This is a good thing.

The only thing the would-be rulers of humanity really fear is the idea that we—the great, teeming, unwashed masses—might one day wake up to the fact that humanity is being enslaved by a handful of people.

That we might discover that their control over us is primarily narrative control.

That we might decide to reclaim our power and write our own narrative.

And, to the extent that that is what has begun happening this year—even if it’s only the thinnest edge of that giant wedge—we are in fact winning.

But even if you don’t even see the faintest spark of hope in any of this yet, there is still one thing to keep in mind: the narrative shift I speak of is what we make it.

We are not helpless spectators who are watching this shift happening with no part to play in it. Rather, we are making things happen (or not) by participating in conversation with those around us. We are informing, educating and mentoring those who are just now waking up to reality . . . or we’re standing on the sidelines critiquing the efforts of those who are trying to do so.

What happens in 2026 is not a foregone conclusion. It will be the end result of the efforts we make today (or don’t make today) to encourage this narrative shift.

I know what side I’m on, and what I’m going to continue to do. And, with your support, I’m going to continue doing it.

Let’s make 2026 the year we put the first (if not the final) nail in the bastards’ coffin.

Merry Christmas, everyone!


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