National
Canadian military again bans prayers at Remembrance Day ceremonies
From LifeSiteNews
The Canadian Armed Forces member who shared the emails about Remembrance Day with LifeSiteNews stated that ‘this constant desire to erase God from our culture is highly ideological. Canadians don’t support this. Veterans don’t support this.’
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has banned prayer at all Remembrance Day celebrations in the latest attempt to strip Canada of her religious heritage.
This November 11, Remembrance Day celebrations may not include prayers, religious symbols, and readings from the Bible, Torah or Koran, according to a CAF directive shared with LifeSiteNews by a CAF member.
“As a reminder to the team that if military members are mandated or expected to attend an event, we can presume that they represent a diversity of beliefs, including none,” the email sent to the CAF personnel read.
“Chaplains should take the time to reflect on the meaning and purpose of the event and speak words of hope, encouragement, and remembrance to the benefit of all,” it continued.
Last year, the CAF issued a directive placing harsh restrictions on public prayer. However, the orders were rescinded following backlash from Canadians. Now, numerous CAF officials have told chaplains that they plan to enforce the ban this year.
“The document 11 Oct 23 is in effect for this Remembrance Day,” the email stated. “Last year there was flexibility which is not present this year.”
“This update also supersedes any direction that was given following the Spiritual Reflection guidance which allowed some flexibility during the period in late 2023,” it continued.
While the chaplains are required to attend the ceremonies, they are heavily restricted in what they can say or even wear as the chaplain scarves “may cause discomfort or traumatic feelings.”
Under the mandate, no prayer and no religious symbols are permitted at military functions. This includes reading passages from the Bible, Torah or Koran. Instead, words should be chosen to “employ a language mindful of the Gender Based Analysis (GBA+) principles.”
Any “spiritual reflection” offered by military chaplains in a public setting (not including church services or private interactions with members) must be “inclusive in nature, and respectful of the religious and spiritual diversity of Canada,” according to the directive.
According to the email, chaplains can share their opinions on the directive at upcoming meetings, however, there are no meetings scheduled before Remembrance Day.
The CAF member who shared the emails with LifeSiteNews stated that “this constant desire to erase God from our culture is highly ideological. Canadians don’t support this. Veterans don’t support this. And we all saw what happens south of the border when the government is out of touch with the traditions and values of its own people.”
“We’re talking about such core traditional values that have kept our society cohesive and functional and flourishing for like hundreds and thousands of years,” he continued.
The CAF member warned that the mandate is not “banning a religion” but “replacing one religion with another religion, and it’s a secular religion.”
He stressed the importance of religion, especially in the military where soldiers are asked to put their lives on the line in service of their country.
“Think of what soldiers go through, what they face in combat,” he said. “You can’t send people into battle without religion.”
Business
Salary costs in Prime Minister’s Office increase under Trudeau
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Ryan Thorpe
Like all areas of Ottawa’s ballooning bureaucracy, the cost and size of the Prime Minister’s Office has increased under the Trudeau government.
The inflation-adjusted cost of staffing the PMO has risen by 16 per cent under the watch of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Salary costs for the 103 staffers in the PMO came to $10.5 million in 2022-23. That figure does not represent overall compensation for PMO staff (including benefits), but rather base salary, according to the records.
Taxpayers are now on the hook for an additional $3.2 million in annual PMO salary costs over 2014-15, the last full year former prime minister Stephen Harper was in office.
“The cost of running the PMO has increased under Trudeau, but it’s a good bet most Canadians don’t think they’re getting any better performance from the prime minister,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “If Trudeau can’t find savings right under his nose, how can taxpayers trust him to cut the fat across government?”
The growth in PMO staff comes at a time when the Trudeau government has been ballooning the federal bureaucracy across the board.
Both the number and cost of the federal bureaucracy has exploded under Trudeau’s watch, according to other government records obtained by the CTF.
The number of federal bureaucrats increased by 42 per cent under Trudeau, with more than 108,000 new bureaucrats added to the government payroll.
Spending on federal bureaucrats hit a record high $67.4 billion in 2022-23, representing a 68 per cent increase since 2016.
The size of the federal c-suite has also expanded, with the number of executives increasing by 42 per cent under Trudeau.
The Trudeau government has handed out more than $1 billion in bonuses since 2015 and more than one million pay raises in the last four years.
Meanwhile, spending on consultants also reached a record high, with planned expenditures for 2023-24 sitting at $21.6 billion.
“Everywhere you look – the PMO, the federal c-suite, the bureaucracy – the cost and size of government is out of control,” Terrazzano said. “Trudeau must take air out of Ottawa’s ballooning bureaucracy and the place to start is his own office.”
PMO staff costs, government records obtained by the CTF
Fiscal year |
Number of PMO staff |
PMO salary costs |
2014-15 |
94 |
$7,258,436 |
2015-16 |
74 |
$6,353,188 |
2016-17 |
84 |
$7,462,686 |
2017-18 |
99 |
$8,155,068 |
2018-19 |
100 |
$8,479,353 |
2019-20 |
90 |
$8,536,672 |
2020-21 |
99 |
$9,840,834 |
2021-22 |
94 |
$9,383,328 |
2022-23 |
103 |
$10,536,649 |
Total |
|
$76,006,214 |
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Is the Price of Reconciliation that we Must Pretend to Believe a Lie?
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Even the Kamloops band is backing away from its most extreme claim, that ‘bodies were found’
The price we are being told that we must pay to achieve “reconciliation” is becoming clear. We must pretend to believe a lie.
The lie is that 215, and then thousands, of indigenous students of residential schools were “disappeared” while at the schools — that they died under sinister circumstances while under the care of the priests, nuns and teachers running the schools, and were buried in secrecy.
To top it off, it is claimed that fellow students — “as young as six” — were forced by these evil priests to dig the graves. The fact that there is not one scintilla of good evidence to support this deeply anti-Catholic blood libel is not supposed to deter us from accepting it as fact. We are being told that we must pretend to believe this lie if we want to achieve “reconciliation”.
If there was any doubt that the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) was insisting that Canadians must pretend to believe the false claim, it was dispelled when they angrily rejected the funding cap that the federal government had placed on its ill-considered promise to provide a total of $320 million to indigenous communities that chose to go on their own “missing children/unmarked graves” search.
The chiefs showed who was boss, and the federal government meekly submitted, and cancelled the funding cap.
The government coffers were left wide open, and indigenous communities expanded existing searches for “missing children.” In reality these children were never missing. As Tom Flanagan explains in Grave Error (above), they were “forgotten children” who had been properly buried in marked graves that were subsequently left untended and forgotten by their families.
Be that as it may, as a result of AFN activism, and government and media incompetence, the Kamloops claim morphed into an officially sanctioned lie.
But where is the truth in all of this?
Most of us knew, even when this claim was first made in 2021, that these grisly tales of sinister deaths and secret burials could not possibly be true.
There is simply no historical record of any such thing occurring.
There are no records of parents frantically looking for children who suddenly went missing from residential schools, no police reports of missing children. Nothing.
In fact the extensive records we do have say exactly the opposite — namely that the deaths of children who sadly died of the diseases of the day at residential schools were all properly recorded, and that almost all of the deceased children were buried by their parents on their home reserves.
The small minority who were buried in special school cemeteries, (because the transportation of the bodies back to remote reserves was impractical,) all received Christian burials. Their places of burial were made known to their parents. The fact is that record keeping of indigenous children at residential schools was far superior to record keeping of the children on reserves, where far greater numbers died of exactly the same diseases.
But for reasons best left to future historians to ponder the Trudeau government and its CBC media ally immediately accepted the crackpot Kamloops claim as true. CBC and other gullible media went into overdrive pumping out misinformation in support of the baseless claim, while the Trudeau government ordered all flags on federal buildings across Canada lowered, where they remained for six months!
Trudeau’s indigenous affairs minister, Marc Miller — perhaps the worst Indian Affairs minister in the history of this country — recklessly promised $320 million to indigenous communities that wanted to make similar claims. And, of course, others did almost immediately.
Down the road, Chief Willie Sellars, of the Williams Lake indigenous community, outdid the rhetoric of his colleague, Chief Casimir. According to Sellars, priests had not only killed countless indigenous children, but had thrown their bodies into “rivers, streams and lakes” as well as the usual old standards of throwing bodies into school furnaces and incinerators. Other communities wanting in on the money jumped onto the bandwagon with increasingly fantastical tales.
The result of this Trudeau government recklessness — aided by a gullible media that asked no questions — was predictable. These false stories became etched in stone as the truth within the indigenous community. A victim mentality that was already deeply imbedded became pathological, as indigenous communities became convinced — on evidence that was entirely false — that they were victims of a genocide committed by their neighbours.
The chiefs also silenced the many thoughtful members within their communities who knew that these stories of murderous priests were not true. As investigative reporter, Terry Glavin, explains, even among the Tk’emlups community there were always sensible voices who did not believe those claims:
“From the outset, even among Tk’emlúps people there was a great deal of skepticism and disbelief in stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates under the light of the moon”
But instead of heeding those sensible indigenous voices, and even as it became increasingly clear to Canadians that these stories were just tall tales, there was so much money in it that the chiefs doubled down. They insisted that Canadians must pretend to believe that the claims were true.
That would be their price for “reconciliation”.
As noted above, the weak Liberal government gave into this blackmail by removing the funding cap on searches it had tried to impose. But other important institutions cravenly played along with what was now an officially sanctioned lie as well.
Jon Kay explains in his recent Quillette essay how the Law Society of British Columbia is now insisting that anyone who wants to be a lawyer in that province must pretend to believe the “evil priest” line of stories.
Other law schools and law societies across Canada are doing this as well. They are so focused on what they perceive as the holy grail of “reconciliation” that they are prepared to sacrifice a pursuit of truth as their goal, and force their own students — our future lawyers and judges — to do the same.
Our public schools — to bring about “reconciliation — are indoctrinating our children with lessons about the “215 Kamloops graves” and other misinformation, such as the “Charlie Wenjack” story.
Children are taught that Wenjack was abused by Catholic priests and nuns in his residential school, and ran away as a result.
In fact, as author and historian Robert MacBain explains in his important book, “The Lonely Death Of An Ojibway Boy” Charlie Wenjack lived at a Protestant hostel run by a kindly indigenous family, attended school by the day in Kenora, and probably never saw a residential school, or met a priest or nun, in his life.
But, in the interests of “reconciliation” our children are being misinformed by their teachers.
And when a teacher does dare to tell the truth, as when B.C. teacher, Jim McMurtry told his students that the children who died in residential schools died of the diseases of the day — and were not tortured to death, as was being reported — he was frogmarched from his classroom, and summarily fired.
Or Frances Widdowson, who was fired from her tenured university position largely for daring to dispute what was becoming an increasingly extreme residential school narrative.
All of this obvious unfairness, is happening in the name of “reconciliation.” The senior lawyers who oversee the Law Society, and the educators who select our children’s school curricula are doing a great disservice to this country. As are our MPs who foolishly labelled Canada as genocidal, based on the same false Kamloops claim.
As are our senior indigenous leaders, who know by know that the murderous, secret-burying priest story has always been just a silly ghost story that children tell to scare one another. Yet they insist that Canadians must pretend to believe it, or they will withhold the “reconciliation” that they wield like a sledge hammer over our heads.
It should have occurred to everyone by now that if the price of “reconciliation” is pretending to believe a lie, the price is far too high. That kind of “reconciliation” is worth nothing.
In actual fact, what this country and its indigenous population needs is not “reconciliation” at all. Too many indigenous people are stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. What they need is not “reconciliation” but integration into the economy, and the opportunity to participate in it. As for the opportunists who exploit a false claim to benefit themselves, they deserve only our contempt.
What nobody needs is a country where citizens must lie to each other in order to stay together.
And now, to add insult to injury, MP Leah Gazan wants to make it a law that we must all lie to each other by criminalizing what she calls “residential school denialism”. She specifically singles out the Kamloops claim as something Canadians must accept as true. As she sees it any Canadian who refuses to do so, or who dares to suggest that the positives, as well as the negatives of residential schooling should be recognized, should be made a criminal. Dostoevsky famously asked if there will come a time “when intelligent people will be banned from thinking, so as not to offend the imbeciles”. Has that time arrived?
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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