Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

National

Election interference: eye on the ball, please

Published

9 minute read

David Johnston, who should be beside the point

People living in Canada are having their democratic rights undermined. Fixing that should be everyone’s goal.

Back from vacation, I’m delighted to see nothing has changed. It’s David Johnston this and David Johnston that and David Johnston the other. That last link is about how Johnston has hired Navigator, which is reliably identified as a “crisis-communications firm” in stories like this, to help him figure out what to say. To which one possible answer, given the current storm of excrement, is: My God, wouldn’t you?

I prefer not to pile onto stories that absolutely everyone else is writing about. Today constitutes a bit of an exception to that policy. I’m working on a bunch of stories on topics that will stray very far abroad from this one. But while those other stories percolate, here are a few thoughts on Canada’s response to election interference.

First, we’re in the phase of the story where everyone digs in. Johnston has a mandate from the Prime Minister of Canada which extends to October. He plans to keep working until then. I never thought he was right for this job. But nobody should be surprised that, having taken it, he intends to keep doing it.

But, we are told, Parliament has voted to demand that he stand down! Indeed, that’s how I’d have voted too. Yet Johnston persists. This too is hardly surprising. Ignoring Parliament is easy enough, and it often feels great, as when Parliament voted to express profound sadness over a cover illustration in a magazine where I used to work. Johnston could have taken Parliament’s counsel, but since we are, as I’ve noted, in the phase of the story where everyone digs in, he’s digging in instead.

There is a school of thought that believes this sort of situation must lead straight to a confidence vote and an election. Brother Coyne is that school’s headmaster. I’m always in favour of the largest possible number of elections too, especially since I now make a living selling political analysis. I fondly hope the next campaign will be excellent for business. But I seem to recall that the last time Parliament followed its convictions all the way to a forced election, Canadians responded by sending the Parliament-flouters back with reinforcements. I don’t know whether that would happen now. But the opposition parties are allowed to make such calculations. No surprise, then, that they too are digging in — but not all the way.

Where does this leave us? First, with a process terribly compromised by lousy design. Justin Trudeau sought to outsource his credibility by subcontracting his judgment. The credibility transfusion was supposed to flow from Johnston to Trudeau. Instead it has gone the other way. The PMO hoped they’d found somebody whose credibility nobody would challenge, because he comes from the sort of precincts that impress them. Now they’re stuck insisting that challenging Johnston’s fitness or his conclusions is uncouth. The number of Canadians who decline to take etiquette tips from the PMO continues to surprise the PMO.

So far I have discussed all of this in terms of the usual Ottawa obsessions: Parliament, status, tactics, winners and losers. This sort of scorekeeping comforts Ottawa lifers, soothes us because we have been doing it most of our lives.

But there is another audience here.

It is Canadians and permanent residents who live here and experience intimidation all the time. Most are members of diaspora communities, Chinese and other. They have been saying for years that their freedoms of speech and assembly and their right to security of the person — their Charter rights — are being targeted, infringed and impinged by agents of Beijing’s thug regime. What Cherie Wong, executive director of the Alliance Canada-Hong Kong, says every time she is asked, is that it’s time for action. ACHK’s latest report reads a lot like its earlier reports, like the reports from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians that Trudeau admits he ignored. There’s not much new here, just as there would not be much new after Johnston’s process, or after a theoretically better process launched by some future government.

So Ottawa’s current process obsession, while understandable, is not at all helpful.

Share

The ACHK report includes recommendations that could be implemented before the next election, if parties were less obsessed with using foreign interference to win the next election. The Trudeau government is indeed moving ahead on some elements of ACHK’s recommendations, including a foreign-influence registry. That’s a fraught process that presents real pitfalls — overreach and stigmatization at one extreme, and at the other, a once-over-lightly framework that would not capture the sort of clandestine activity that’s the problem. As indeed the political scientist Stephanie Carvin discusses in the ACHK report. So it’s not something to be rushed. But all due dispatch would be welcome.

(For a discussion of the complexities of foreign-influence registries, readers could do worse than to look at the proceedings of a February meeting of a joint committee of both chambers of the Australian Parliament, considering amendments to Australia’s own foreign-influence registry six years after it was implemented. The comparison with our own debate does not flatter Canada’s Parliament. Australian politics can be raw and tough, and Beijing’s influence is, if anything, a more pressing issue there than here. But members from all parties in Australia discuss the issue calmly. They treat witnesses as sources of useful information, not as sticks to beat their political opponents with. I’m not sure how Canada can get there from here, but it’s refreshing to be reminded it’s possible.)

I suppose what I’m proposing here is a dose of pragmatism informed by a sense that Parliament can be something more than an endless pissing match. I was an early member of the skeptics’ club on David Johnston’s suitability for this particular task. I don’t feel chastened by subsequent events. But that ship has rather spectacularly sailed. Trying to turn the next five months of his work into a bigger fiasco won’t help the people living in Canada in fear and worry. Neither will adding another commission with grander pretensions for a report sometime after the next election. The question facing parliamentarians now is to work on solutions instead of trying to win arguments. There’ll be plenty of arguments later.

Subscribe to Paul Wells. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.

Upgrade to paid

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Agriculture

Federal cabinet calls for Canadian bank used primarily by white farmers to be more diverse

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

A finance department review suggested women, youth, Indigenous, LGBTQ, Black and racialized entrepreneurs are underserved by Farm Credit Canada.

The Cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a note that a Canadian Crown bank mostly used by farmers is too “white” and not diverse enough in its lending to “traditionally underrepresented groups” such as LGBT minorities.

Farm Credit Canada Regina, in Saskatchewan, is used by thousands of farmers, yet federal cabinet overseers claim its loan portfolio needs greater diversity.

The finance department note, which aims to make amendments to the Farm Credit Canada Act, claims that agriculture is “predominantly older white men.”

Proposed changes to the Act mean the government will mandate “regular legislative reviews to ensure alignment with the needs of the agriculture and agri-food sector.”

“Farm operators are predominantly older white men and farm families tend to have higher average incomes compared to all Canadians,” the note reads.

“Traditionally underrepresented groups such as women, youth, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and Black and racialized entrepreneurs may particularly benefit from regular legislative reviews to better enable Farm Credit Canada to align its activities with their specific needs.”

The text includes no legal amendment, and the finance department did not say why it was brought forward or who asked for the changes.

Canadian census data shows that there are only 590,710 farmers and their families, a number that keeps going down. The average farmer is a 55-year-old male and predominantly Christian, either Catholic or from the United Church.

Data shows that 6.9 percent of farmers are immigrants, with about 3.7 percent being “from racialized groups.”

Historically, most farmers in Canada are multi-generational descendants of Christian/Catholic Europeans who came to Canada in the mid to late 1800s, mainly from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Ukraine, Russia, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France.

Continue Reading

Great Reset

Canadian government forcing doctors to promote euthanasia to patients: report

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

“Promises were made that no doctor would ever be coerced to participate in euthanasia… No hospital would have to do it. No nursing home, no palliative care unit would be forced to host doctors killing patients who wanted to die. All of that was a complete fiction. All of those things have now happened”

Canadian doctors are warning that Health Canada’s push for euthanasia is forcing doctors to suggest assisted suicide to patients.

In a November 6 video by Christian filmmaker Frank Panico, three Canadian doctors, Will Johnston of Vancouver, David D’Souza of Toronto, and Catherine Ferrier of Montreal, revealed that physicians are forced to discuss euthanasia or so-called “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) with vulnerable patients according to Health Canada protocol.

“If a physician is suggesting euthanasia as an option or a treatment option for their pain or their suffering, then that is a very serious thing,” D’Souza, a family physician and a pain specialist in Ontario, warned.

“As a patient is more likely to take this option given that a health professional has suggested it,” he continued. “I think it does severe harm to the doctor patient relationship when physicians are now allowed and even suggesting euthanasia as a means to end their suffering.”

D’Souza’s concerns are in response to 2023 guidelines by Health Canada, titled “Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Dying to Ensure Consistent and Safe Practice in Canada.” The document mandates that doctors and nurses must tell a patient about the assisted suicide options available to them while discussing medical care.

“[Physicians/Nurse Practitioners] must take reasonable steps to ensure persons are informed of the full range of treatment options available to relieve suffering,” subsection 6.1 notes, falsely presenting suicide as “treatment.”

Echoing D’Souza’s warning, Johnston, a Vancouver family physician and head of B.C.’s Euthanasia Resistance Coalition, explained that the regulations contradict previous promises that medical personnel would not be forced to participate in the practice.

“Promises were made that no doctor would ever be coerced to participate in euthanasia, no doctor or nurse would ever lose their job because they wouldn’t cooperate with euthanasia,” he declared.

“No hospital would have to do it. No nursing home, no palliative care unit would be forced to host doctors killing patients who wanted to die. All of that was a complete fiction. All of those things have now happened,” Johnston lamented.

According to Ferrier, when the first doctor assessed the man, he immediately presented only two options: euthanasia or palliative sedation. He offered no other alternatives, such as psychological or social support that could help restore his will to live.

The doctor eventually referred him to a psychiatrist, but Ferrier felt that the psychiatrist’s only focus was determining whether the patient was mentally competent to choose euthanasia – not on exploring ways to relieve his suffering while helping him continue living.

“These two doctors were guys his age, and I’m convinced that they looked at him and said: ‘I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes so he’s better off dead, and he is competent to make this decision,’” Ferrier recalled.

The doctors’ warnings come just a week after Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr revealed that many disabled Canadians are being pressured to end their lives with euthanasia during routine medical appointments.

Carr’s statement supports internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of allegedly terminal illness.

In one case, an Ontario doctor revealed that a middle-aged worker, whose ankle and back injuries had left him unable to work, felt that the government’s insufficient support was “leaving (him) with no choice but to pursue” euthanasia.

Other cases included an obese woman who described herself as a “useless body taking up space,” which one doctor argued met the requirements for assisted suicide because obesity is “a medical condition which is indeed grievous and irremediable.”

At the same time, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world.

Currently, wait times to receive actual health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for euthanasia instead of waiting for assistance. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.

The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.

Asked why it was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.

According to Health Canada, 13,241 Canadians died by euthanasia lethal injections in 2022, accounting for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country that year, a 31.2 percent increase from 2021.

Continue Reading

Trending

X