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Prime Minister Trudeau heads to NATO summit, where leaders face critical decisions

Published

2 years ago

8 minute read

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau departs Ottawa on Sunday, June 25, 2023, en route to Iceland. Trudeau is heading to the NATO leaders’ summit in Lithuania this week, where Canada is likely to play a larger-than-usual role in two critical discussions: the alliance’s expanding membership and its efforts to refocus on collective defence. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

By Sarah Ritchie in Ottawa

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is heading to the NATO leaders’ summit in Lithuania this week, where Canada is likely to play a larger-than-usual role in two critical discussions: the alliance’s expanding membership and its efforts to refocus on collective defence.

Trudeau is expected to depart for Riga, Latvia, from Ottawa on Sunday evening. He is due to meet with that country’s leaders on Monday before heading to the Lithuanian capital for the first day of the NATO summit on Tuesday.

At last year’s summit in Madrid, NATO leaders identified Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area” in a strategic concept document that set out their intent to strengthen deterrence and defence in the region.

That came after a meeting in Brussels in March 2022, when leaders agreed to deploy four new multinational battle groups on the eastern flank in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, adding to those in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

The alliance has drafted a new defence plan that leaders will be asked to approve in Vilnius, one that is being described as a return to its Cold War stance.

“What we’re seeing now is really a return to NATO’s core business,” said Tim Sayle, a NATO historian and professor at the University of Toronto.

He said this likely also means a return to more challenging negotiations among members as they decide on defence policy and procurement, at the same time as they are debating whether to allow Sweden and Ukraine to join. And on both topics, he said, allies will be looking to Canada.

“Rarely are there summits where Canada would be a focus of any elements, but I do think (it) is here,” Sayle said.

“Canada has a decision to make about its role in the discussion about Ukraine, but it also has this decision to make about Canadian defence spending and just what kind of ally Canada is going to be.”

Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s military committee, told media at a July 3 briefing that the new defence plan is split into three parts: the southeast region including the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the central region from the Baltics to the Alps and the High North and Atlantic region.

Once the plans are approved, the real work begins. “Then we have to go and do our work to reach the higher number of forces with a higher readiness, we need to exercise against the plans, we need to buy the capabilities that we require,” Bauer said.

That will require more money. Only about a third of NATO members are meeting the agreed-upon target of spending two per cent of their GDP on defence — which includes a pledge to dedicate one-fifth of that funding to equipment.

Bauer said he expects two per cent will be the spending floor, instead of the target, by the time the summit is over.

“There is perhaps a stronger link than ever before between the new defence plans, the new defence investment pledge and the NATO defence planning process,” NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu said at the July 3 briefing.

For the countries that are lagging behind, there will be increasing pressure to step up.

Canada spends about 1.3 per cent of its GDP on defence and has no public plan to get to the current target. Defence Minister Anita Anand has insisted that Canada’s contributions to the defence of Ukraine and its leadership in heading up a NATO battle group in Latvia are more important.

Before attending the NATO summit, Trudeau is set to participate in meetings Monday with Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, and its prime minister, Krišjānis Kariņš.

Trudeau is also expected to meet Canadian Armed Forces members who are part of the country’s largest overseas mission.

But even in Latvia, Canada seems to be lagging behind. It’s been more than a year since Anand pledged to expand the battle group to a combat-ready brigade, and detailed plans are still being negotiated. Battle groups typically have close to 1,000 troops, while military members in a brigade number about 3,000.

Canada has committed to sending a tank squadron with 15 Leopard 2 tanks and some 130 personnel to Latvia starting this fall, but it is unclear how many more troops will join the 800 Canadians already in place.

Other countries have gone further. Germany has pledged to station a 4,000-soldier brigade in Lithuania. The United Kingdom, which is leading a battle group in Estonia, and the United States, which leads another in Poland, tested their ability to quickly scale up to a brigade earlier this spring.

Leaders in Vilnius are also likely to focus on the status of Sweden and Ukraine, each of which has asked to join NATO.

Last-minute talks aimed at getting Turkiye and Hungary on side with allowing Sweden to become a member have not been successful. Its Nordic neighbour Finland joined most recently, in April.

If Sweden’s membership is approved, Bauer said it won’t take long to adapt the defence plans.

“Sweden is at the table in the military committee, in the North Atlantic Council every week. So they know basically everything already,” he said.

More contentious than that is the issue of when to admit Ukraine.

Some nations are pushing for immediate membership. U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said last month that he hopes to see an expedited process.

Meanwhile, Trudeau has repeatedly stated that Canada supports Ukraine’s membership “when the conditions are right,” without defining what those conditions are.

Sayle said it’s likely that other countries will expect a clearer response this time given the magnitude of the decision: whether to admit a nation that is in the midst of an active invasion to an alliance focused on collective defence.

“I think that what NATO says about Ukrainian membership will impact both the Ukrainian and Russian strategic calculations in this war, and any peace that might follow,” Sayle said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 9, 2023.

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conflict

Hamas, Palestinians paraded dead babies coffins through streets before handover to Israel

Published on February 22, 2025

By

MXM logo  MxM News

Quick Hit:

Hamas paraded the caskets of Israeli hostages, including what they claimed were the bodies of a mother and two young children, through the streets of Gaza before handing them over to the Red Cross. Videos show crowds cheering as armed terrorists carried the coffins as part of a prisoner exchange with Israel.

Key Details:

  • Videos from Khan Younis, Gaza, show Hamas and other terrorists parading four caskets, including those of two young children, before handing them to the Red Cross.
  • Crowds cheered as the terrorists, armed and unmasked, carried the coffins, with celebratory music playing in the background.
  • The deceased were identified as members of the Bibas family, including the youngest hostages from the October 7 attack.

 

Diving Deeper:

During a ceremony in Khan Younis, Gaza, Hamas paraded the caskets of Israeli hostages through the streets, including what they claimed were the bodies of a mother and her two small children. The display occurred before the remains were handed over to the Red Cross as part of a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel. Crowds of Gazans were seen cheering and celebrating as the coffins were carried by armed terrorists.

Videos from the event show masked militants loading a casket into a Red Cross aid truck, while another militant, adorned with symbols of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, filmed the procession. Another video shows adults and children waving and celebrating as Hamas fighters, armed and in trucks, paraded through the streets. Reuters footage also captured members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) helping carry a casket, highlighting the involvement of multiple terrorist factions in the display.

Hamas presented the bodies as those of the Bibas family, who were captured during the October 7 attack. The children, aged four years and less than one year, were among the youngest hostages taken during the brutal assault that triggered the ongoing 15-month conflict. The fourth body was identified as 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to Jewish News Syndicate. Hamas has repeatedly blamed the deaths on Israeli airstrikes, though no evidence was provided to support the claim.

Israel and Hamas are currently observing a temporary ceasefire agreement, facilitating the exchange of civilian hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Despite the ceasefire, Hamas has continued to celebrate the October 7 attacks, which resulted in the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust. During the ceremony, a stage displayed a poster depicting Israel as a “Nazi Army,” underscoring Hamas’s longstanding agenda of hostility towards the Jewish state.

The shocking parade of caskets, accompanied by celebratory music and cheering crowds, has drawn international condemnation and further underscored the brutal nature of Hamas’s actions. As the exchange process continues, the emotional toll on the families of the victims remains immeasurable.

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Health

RFK Jr: There’s no medical justification for vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B

Published on February 22, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

‘Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,’ explained the new HHS head. ‘Why would you give that to a baby?’

In a widely-viewed video shared on social media, the new U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., asserted that the majority of vaccines — including those he sees as unjustifiably being mandated for infants — have been developed primarily to create profits for Big Pharma.    

“Most of the vaccines after 1989 were added not for public health reasons but for pharmaceutical profit reasons,” said Kennedy.    

“Why are we vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B?” he asked. 

“Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted from having sex with multiple partners in gay sex, or from sex workers, or intravenous drug use,” he said, reemphasizing, “Why would you give that to a baby?” 

According to Kennedy, Pharmaceutical giant Merck was directed by both the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to develop the Hepatitis B vaccine for “those vulnerable populations.”    

He explained that when those populations showed little interest in the vaccine, “Merck went back to the agencies and said ‘You told us to develop this vaccine, but nobody’s buying it.”  

“The CDC said, ‘Don’t worry’” recounted Kennedy, “we’ll just recommend it for children and we’ll force everybody to buy it.”     

“So, that’s how it got on the [childhood vaccine] schedule,” he said, declaring, “There’s no medical justification.”   

There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing – that saves them a quarter billion dollars – and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year.  

What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule that we don’t need. Most of these vaccines are unnecessary. Many of them are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.  

It was a gold rush, because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company.  

And in many cases, NIH is earning the royalties. 

According to Kennedy, more obscene than the huge profits being horded by Big Pharma are the vast number of negative side-effects from all those untested vaccines. 

“Neurological diseases” have “exploded,” he said. 

“ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. These are all things that I never heard of,” said Kennedy. “Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation according to CDC data to one in every 34 kids today.” 

Kennedy is known for vehemently opposing vaccines without proper knowledge for those taking them, a stance he adopted after the mothers of vaccine-injured children implored him to look into the research linking thimerosal to neurological injuries, including autism. He went on to found Children’s Health Defense, an organization with the stated mission of “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” largely through vaccines. 

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