Alberta
U.S. President Joe Biden’s long-awaited Canada visit to happen March 23-24
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Ottawa on March 23 to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Canadian soil, his first visit north of the border since taking the oath of office in 2021.
The White House said the president and his wife Jill Biden will spend two days in Canada, although a detailed itinerary has not yet been released.
The two leaders will discuss an ongoing upgrade of the jointly led Norad continental defence system, which came under heavy scrutiny last month following the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon over U.S. and Canadian airspace.
They will also discuss how to fortify shared supply chains, combat climate change and “accelerate the clean energy transition,” the White House said in a statement.
Biden will also address a joint session of Parliament “to highlight the importance of the United States-Canada bilateral relationship.”
A visit to Canada is customarily one of a new U.S. president’s first foreign trips, a tradition upended two years ago by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the world at the time, the two leaders settled for a virtual meeting instead.
The virus interfered in Canada-U.S. relations again in 2022, when Biden tested positive for COVID a second time, forcing the White House to scrap its plan for a summertime visit that year.
Delayed though it may be, it will be an important bilateral meeting for both countries, said Scotty Greenwood, CEO of the Canadian American Business Council.
“It’s an occasion which focuses a bureaucracy on the breadth and depth of bilateral and multilateral issues … and that’s a really good thing, because it causes everybody here to focus on Canada,” Greenwood said.
“It also allows the president himself to think about and reflect on Canada in the context of all the other global relationships the U.S. has, and that can be a very good thing.”
In the end, however, it’s essential that the federal government in Ottawa make the most of the opportunity, she added.
“The extent to which Canada wants to lean in and try to help solve some of the pain points the U.S. has is a good opportunity for Canada,” Greenwood said. “We won’t know until the visit happens if Canada wants to do that.”
As always, the two leaders have a lot to talk about — much of it a direct offshoot of the pandemic as both countries recalibrate their domestic and international supply chains, bilateral travel rules and economic recovery efforts, all of it with an eye toward arresting the march of climate change around the world.
Strategies to minimize dependence on China for critical minerals and semiconductors, two vital components in the global push to expand the popularity of electric vehicles and fuel what some experts liken to a post-pandemic industrial revolution, are sure to be high on the agenda.
So too will be a united front in opposing Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine, as well as what to do about Haiti, where Canada is facing international pressure to take a lead role in quelling widespread gang violence.
There will be bilateral tensions to address as well.
The post-NAFTA era, where the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement is now the law of the land in continental trade, has been marked by irritants, including access to Canada’s dairy market and how the U.S. defines foreign content in autos.
Immigration has also become a hot topic: while Republican lawmakers usually have a singular focus on the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, a spike in the number of people entering from Canada has also caught their eye.
Trudeau has publicly acknowledged that the two countries need to renegotiate the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement in order to staunch the flow of irregular migration into Canada, but there’s little appetite in the U.S. to do so.
Even so-called trusted travellers are having a harder time than they did before the pandemic, with the fast-track program known as Nexus having been hampered by a cross-border jurisdictional squabble.
The White House said “irregular migration and forced displacement throughout the region” will indeed be on the agenda, but offered no additional details.
Biden’s speech to Parliament will follow in the footsteps of his former boss, then-president Barack Obama, who made a similar address when he last visited Ottawa in June of 2016.
Biden himself visited the national capital in December of that year, as Obama’s second term was winding down and the world was bracing for the inauguration of his Republican successor, Donald Trump.
“I know sometimes we’re like the big brother that’s a pain in the neck and overbearing … but we’re more like family, even, than allies,” the vice-president at the time said during a state dinner in his honour.
He cheered Canada’s role in defending and strengthening what he called a “liberal international order” amid the rise of authoritarianism around the world, perhaps sensing what the next four years had in store.
“We’re going to get through this period because we’re Americans and Canadians, and so had I a glass I’d toast you by saying, ‘Vive le Canada,’ because we need you very, very badly.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 9, 2023.
James McCarten, The Canadian Press
From LifeSiteNews
A judge ruled that businesses impacted by COVID lockdowns are allowed to claim compensation for harm and losses incurred due to the provincial chief medical officer’s illegal orders.
A class-action lawsuit on behalf of dozens of Canadian business owners in Alberta who faced massive losses or permanent closures due to COVID mandates has been given the go-ahead to proceed by a judge.
Lawyers representing businesses from Alberta-based Rath & Company announced in a press release on October 30 that it was “successful in its application for certification on behalf of Alberta business owners impacted by Covid-19 restrictions and closures imposed through Chief Medical Officer of Health (“CMOH”) Orders.”
“Justice Feasby of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta released his decision today certifying the class action in Ingram v Alberta, 2024 ABKB 631,” Rath & Company said.
Lead counsel Jeffrey Rath said the Alberta government has been placed on notice for its actions against businesses during the COVID lockdown era.
The Rath lawsuit proposal names Rebecca Ingram, a gym owner, and Chris Scott, a restaurant owner, as “representative plaintiffs who suffered significant financial harm due to (former Alberta Chief Medical Officer) Dr. (Deena) Hinshaw’s Public Health Orders.”
According to Rath, the class action seeks to certify that “affected Alberta business owners who suffered losses due to the CMOH orders, which were found to be ultra vires — outside legal authority and therefore unlawful — under Alberta’s Public Health Act (“PHA”).
“As a result, the Court Certified multiple claims, including negligence, bad faith and misfeasance in public office. The Court allowed affected businesses to claim compensation for harm and losses incurred due to the illegal CMOH Orders including punitive damages,” Rath said.
Any business operator in Alberta from 2020 to 2022 who was negatively impacted by COVID orders is now eligible to join the lawsuit. Any payout from the lawsuit would come from the taxpayers.
The government’s legal team claimed that the COVID orders were put in place on a good faith initiative and that it was Alberta Health Services, not the government, that oversaw enforcement of the rules.
The Alberta Court of King’s Bench’s Ingram v. Alberta decision cast into doubt all cases involving those facing non-criminal COVID-related charges in the province, allowing the class action to get this far.
As a result of the court ruling, Alberta Crown Prosecutions Service (ACPS) said Albertans facing COVID-related charges will not be convicted but instead have their charges stayed.
Thus far, Dr. Michal Princ, pizzeria owner Jesse Johnson, Scott, and Alberta pastors James Coates, Tim Stephens, and Artur Pawlowski, who were jailed for keeping churches open under then-Premier Jason Kenney, have had COVID charges against them dropped due to the court ruling.
Under Kenney, thousands of businesses, notably restaurants and small shops, were negatively impacted by severe COVID restrictions, mostly in 2020-21, that forced them to close for a time. Many never reopened. At the same time, as in the rest of Canada, big box stores were allowed to operate unimpeded.
From LifeSiteNews
Alberta Conservative Premier Danielle Smith followed through on a promised bill banning so-called ‘top and bottom’ surgeries for minors.
Alberta Conservative Premier Danielle Smith made good on her promise to protect kids from extreme transgender ideology after introducing a bill banning so-called “top and bottom” surgeries for minors.
“It is so important that all youth can enter adulthood equipped to make adult decisions. In order to do that, we need to preserve their ability to make those decisions, and that’s what we’re doing,” Smith said in a press release.
“The changes we’re introducing are founded on compassion and science, both of which are vital for the development of youth throughout a time that can be difficult and confusing.”
Bill 26, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 “reflects the government’s commitment to build a health care system that responds to the changing needs of Albertans,” the government says.
The bill will amend the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”
It will also ban the “use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence” to kids 15 and under “except for those who have already commenced treatment and would allow for minors aged 16 and 17 to choose to commence puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender reassignment and affirmation purposes with parental, physician and psychologist approval.”
Alberta Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange, the bill’s sponsor, said the province’s legislative priorities include “implementing policy changes to continue our refocusing work, position our health care system to respond to pressures and public health emergencies, and to preserve choice for minors. These amendments reflect our dedication to ensuring our health care system meets the needs of every Albertan.”
Earlier this year, the United Conservative Party (UCP) provincial government under Smith announced she would introduce the strong pro-family legislation that strengthens parental rights, protecting kids from life-altering, so-called “top and bottom” surgeries as well as other extreme forms of transgender ideology.
With Smith’s UCP holding a majority in the provincial legislature, the passage of Bill 26 is almost certain.
About the proposed law, Smith said that her government believes it is “vitally important to preserve the time” kids have as a “youth.” She added that she believes this is so kids can “gain sufficient amount of knowledge, experience, and perspective so that you can fully understand who you are, who you want to be and what opportunities you may want to have as an adult before making permanent life-altering decisions related to your body.”
While Smith has done far more than predecessor Jason Kenney to satisfy social conservatives, she has been mostly soft on social issues such as abortion and has publicly expressed pro-LGBT views, telling Jordan Peterson that conservatives must embrace homosexual “couples” as “nuclear families.”
This weekend, thousands of UCP members will gather for the party’s annual general meeting, where Smith’s leadership will be voted on along with many other pro-freedom and family policy proposals from members. Smith is expected to pass her leadership review vote with a large majority.
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