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After a decade spinning in a maelstrom, we’re headed straight into a hurricane.

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To choose Trudeau’s successor as the Liberal Party’s new helmsperson, you need only be temporarily resident in Canada and 14 years old, and they don’t even check

Après nous, le déluge

It’s over. Well, sort of.

The Trudeau Liberals’ hegemonic hold on Canada’s political, cultural and economic life is now officially and formally winding down. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24, although it isn’t certain that Canada will have a new Parliament with a new prime minister even by June, when Canada is supposed to be hosting the G7, by which time the Liberals are expected to have a new leader too.

Who knows. We’ll get there. Justin Trudeau will be gone, but this is what you should bear in mind as Canada careens and lists and tumbles out of this mess.

The world’s first “postnational state” that Trudeau inaugurated in 2015, with the able assistance of Dominic Barton’s McKinsey & Company and all the resources the Canada-China Business Council threw at the project, was never intended to be some four-year thing to be evaluated by voters in the ordinary course of events.

It was built to be permanent. Its undoing will require one hell of an effort, and in the meantime Donald Trump’s inauguration – a $150 million extravaganza funded by Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta and a constellation of cryptocurrency firms – is set for January 20.

That’s just two weeks away, and Trump has pledged to impose what would be a crippling 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico “on Day 1” unless measures regarding flows of illegal migrants and drugs are somehow stopped.

We’ll see. The thing is, on Day 1, Canada’s federal government will be locked in the interregnum between the Trudeau epoch and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s new “common sense” order. We’re sitting ducks.

What would a Conservative Great Leap Forward look like?

Poilievre deserves much credit for correctly diagnosing the several possibly fatal wounds the Justin Trudeau decade has inflicted on this country. About that, here’s something I found fascinating over the holiday hiaitus.

It would be worth your time to take in Poilievre’s conversation with Dark Web archdruid Jordan Peterson over the weekend, and then have a listen to the year-end remarks of the lonesome American socialist warlord Bernie Sanders.

Going by my own 90-minute encounter with Peterson a couple of weeks ago I can say that it isn’t easy to keep the conversation going exactly along the lines one might prefer. Not to criticize Peterson’s interviewing style but I can’t fault Poilievre for failing to get into any number of the the existential dysfunctions Canada is enduring.

Even so, Poilievre comes off more like an intelligent and slightly nerdy Canadian version of Bernie Sanders than the doofus Canadian iteration of Donald Trump that the Liberals and New Democrats have so strenously tried and failed to make him out to be.

Fun example: On Saturday, the NDP MP Peter Julian attributed Poilievre’s popularity to a “massive foreign interference strategy. . . the only reason Pierre Poilievre is leader of the Conservative Party right now.” He didn’t say this while drunk in a private conversation among fellow NDPers. Julian said this publicly, on the insufferable Elon Musk’s X, drawing on a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory from last August.

At least the Conservatives are not crazy people

Today, the Feast of the Epiphany, is the anniversary of the Trumpist insurrection of January 6, 2021, an event that remains an open and profoundly embarrassing wound among Americans. I fully realize that there are some yobbish Putin fanciers at the outer fringes of Canada’s Conservative Party, but give me a break.

Can you imagine Canadian Conservatives storming Parliament Hill, smashing windows and breaking down doors and baying for blood? Of course you can’t. And you certainly can’t imagine Poilievre even coming close to countenancing such conduct, so don’t even try.

I don’t carry any water for Poilievre, but I am persuaded that he’s genuinely and sincerely concerned about the wretched state of affairs to which working-class Canadians have been reduced. Besides, Poilievre isn’t just the best alternative we’ve got. He’s the only alternative. Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats are a caricature of the party they inherited, so here we are.

My National Post readers and this newsletter’s subscribers will know that I am not bubbling with optimism that Poilievre’s remedies can possibly heal what Canada has sustained. Without getting into all that, I’ve had my say, and while Poilievre’s overall analysis of the Trudeau era’s calamities is grounded in hard facts and driven by empathy, his “Axe the tax, Build the homes, Fix the budget, Stop the crime” remedies are woefully insufficient to the circumstances of the real world.

For starters, the immediate crisis a Poilievre government will face is the major cause of the economic dislocation we’re facing, and he’s been quiet about it: It’s not just that Canada’s housing and jobs economies have no room for roughly three million people in this country who are here on various kinds of “temporary” status. It’s more like 4.9 million people whose visas are going to expire before the end of this year.

No amount of tax-axing is going to deal with this, and you’d need something along the lines of a Mao-era Great Leap Forward to “build the homes” to house them all in residential markets that would be even vaguely affordable for most people. And to do that you’d have to tear down Canada’s cities and build a grim Leninplatz on top of each heap of rubble.

Here’s just one other little thing that could stand in the way of any effective legislative agenda that Poilievre might want to embark upon. Almost all the current occupants of the Upper Chamber are senators appointed by Justin Trudeau. So, that’ll be fun: on top of everything else, the prospect of forcing a constitutional crisis just to get anything done.

Not to be dreary, but about the brokenness, but see Notes on the Coming Disturbances, and a earlier assessment: Nearing Nine Years Since Year Zero, So there’s all that.

It’s not just Canada that’s broken. It’s the Liberal Party.

To build the new postnational state in place of what we’ve been badgered to understand as the genocidal old-stock white supremacist settler-state patriarchy that Trudeau so gallantly set out to save from itself, the Liberal Party had to be refashioned to serve as the conduit to Parliamentary power and privilege. See It’s 2025. Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Bear in mind that Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions is expected to issue its final report before the end of this month. The inquiry’s long-delayed and filibustered timetable had anticipated that Hogue’s proposed structural changes would be in place well before what was presumed to be an October 2025 federal election.

Here’s the thing about that. Never mind that owing to Team Trudeau’s rewriting of the party constitution we still don’t know who elected Trudeau to the leadership of the Liberal Party in the first place, and there’s been no inquiry into the massive infusions of weirdly coordinated Mandarin-bloc donations to Trudeau’s own riding association warchest in the aftermath of his 2015 capture of a Parliamentary majority.

See: Liberals are leaving an ungodly mess for Poilievre’s Conservatives to clean up; New report details just how easily China can mess with Canadian elections. In that piece, and in the Thunderdome newsletter, I refer at length to the findings in this in-depth analysis published by the Canadian International Council: Beyond general elections: How could foreign actors influence the prime ministership?

While all the talking-head punditry and chat-show panelists are preoccupied with speculation about just who might emerge as Justin Trudeau’s successor, here’s just one fact that has gone unnoticed. If you simply happen to be domiciled even temporarily in this country, you only have to be 14 years old to cast your vote for the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

All for now.

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Saskatchewan becomes first Canadian province to fully eliminate carbon tax

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Saskatchewan has become the first Canadian province to free itself entirely of the carbon tax.

On March 27, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the removal of the provincial industrial carbon tax beginning April 1, boosting the province’s industry and making Saskatchewan the first carbon tax free province.

“The immediate effect is the removal of the carbon tax on your Sask Power bills, saving Saskatchewan families and small businesses hundreds of dollars a year. And in the longer term, it will reduce the cost of other consumer products that have the industrial carbon tax built right into their price,” said Moe.

Under Moe’s direction, Saskatchewan has dropped the industrial carbon tax which he says will allow Saskatchewan to thrive under a “tariff environment.”

“I would hope that all of the parties running in the federal election would agree with those objectives and allow the provinces to regulate in this area without imposing the federal backstop,” he continued.

The removal of the tax is estimated to save Saskatchewan residents up to 18 cents a liter in gas prices.

The removal of the tax will take place on April 1, the same day the consumer carbon tax will reduce to 0 percent under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s direction. Notably, Carney did not scrap the carbon tax legislation: he just reduced its current rate to zero. This means it could come back at any time.

Furthermore, while Carney has dropped the consumer carbon tax, he has previously revealed that he wishes to implement a corporation carbon tax, the effects of which many argued would trickle down to all Canadians.

The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) celebrated Moe’s move, noting that the carbon tax was especially difficult on farmers.

“It puts our farming community and our business people in rural municipalities at a competitive disadvantage, having to pay this and compete on the world stage,” he continued.

“We’ve got a carbon tax on power — and that’s going to be gone now — and propane and natural gas and we use them more and more every year, with grain drying and different things in our farming operations,” he explained.

“I know most producers that have grain drying systems have three-phase power. If they haven’t got natural gas, they have propane to fire those dryers. And that cost goes on and on at a high level, and it’s made us more noncompetitive on a world stage,” Huber decalred.

The carbon tax is wildly unpopular and blamed for the rising cost of living throughout Canada. Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $80 per tonne.

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2025 Federal Election

Mark Carney refuses to clarify 2022 remarks accusing the Freedom Convoy of ‘sedition’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Mark Carney described the Freedom Convoy as an act of ‘sedition’ and advocated for the government to use its power to crush the non-violent protest movement.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney refused to elaborate on comments he made in 2022 referring to the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protest as an act of “sedition” and advocating for the government to put an end to the movement.

“Well, look, I haven’t been a politician,” Carney said when a reporter in Windsor, Ontario, where a Freedom Convoy-linked border blockade took place in 2022, asked, “What do you say to Canadians who lost trust in the Liberal government back then and do not have trust in you now?”

“I became a politician a little more than two months ago, two and a half months ago,” he said. “I came in because I thought this country needed big change. We needed big change in the economy.”

Carney’s lack of an answer seems to be in stark contrast to the strong opinion he voiced in a February 7, 2022, column published in the Globe & Mail at the time of the convoy titled, “It’s Time To End The Sedition In Ottawa.”

In that piece, Carney wrote that the Freedom Convoy was a movement of “sedition,” adding, “That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

Carney went on to claim in the piece that if “left unchecked” by government authorities, the Freedom Convoy would “achieve” its “goal of undermining our democracy.”

Carney even targeted “[a]nyone sending money to the Convoy,” accusing them of “funding sedition.”

Internal emails from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) eventually showed that his definition of sedition were not in conformity with the definition under Canada’s Criminal Code, which explicitly lists the “use of force” as a necessary aspect of sedition.

“The key bit is ‘use of force,’” one RCMP officer noted in the emails. “I’m all about a resolution to this and a forceful one with us victorious but, from the facts on the ground, I don’t know we’re there except in a small number of cases.”

The reality is that the Freedom Convoy was a peaceful event of public protest against COVID mandates, and not one protestor was charged with sedition. However, the Liberal government, then under Justin Trudeau, did take an approach similar to the one advocated for by Carney, invoking the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters. Since then, a federal judge has ruled that such action was “not justified.”

Despite this, the two most prominent leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, still face a possible 10-year prison sentence for their role in the non-violent assembly. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.

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