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UK Prime Minister Theresa May wins party no-confidence vote, but troubles remain
LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May survived a brush with political mortality Wednesday, winning a no-confidence vote by Conservative lawmakers that would have ended her leadership of party and country.
May won the vote of 317 Conservative legislators with a 200-117 tally that reflected the discontent within the party over her handling of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Despite the victory, Brexit remains her government’s biggest problem. May is heading to Brussels to seek changed to her divorce deal from the European Union in order to make it more palatable to Parliament.
The balloting came after May’s Conservative opponents, who circled the weakened prime minister for weeks hoping to spark a no-confidence vote, finally got the numbers they needed to call one.
The result was announced to loud cheers from lawmakers gathered in the wood-panelled room where they had voted. Under party rules, May cannot be challenged again for a year.
May had earlier vowed to fight for the leadership of her party and the country “with everything I’ve got,” and spent the day holed up in the House of Commons trying to win over enough lawmakers to secure victory.
“A change of leadership in the Conservative Party now will put our country’s future at risk,” May said in a defiant statement outside 10 Downing St.
She said that ousting her and a vote on her replacement — a process that could take weeks — could result in Brexit being delayed or even halted. May, who spent Tuesday touring European Union capitals to appeal for changes to sweeten her divorce deal for reluctant U.K. lawmakers, has until Jan. 21 to hold a vote on the agreement in Parliament, a timetable that could be scuttled if she is replaced.
In a bid to win over wavering lawmakers, May indicated she would step down before the next election, due in 2022.
Solicitor-General Robert Buckland said May told lawmakers at a meeting that “it is not her intention to lead the party in the 2022 general election.”
Another Tory legislator, Nick Boles, tweeted: “She was unambiguous. She will not be leading the Conservative Party into the next election.”
May has not said what she will do if, as many expect, there is an early election triggered by Britain’s Brexit crisis.
The leadership challenge marked a violent eruption of the Conservative Party’s decades-long divide over Europe and throws Britain’s already rocky path out of the EU, which it is due to leave on March 29, into further chaos. It comes days after May postponed a vote to approve the divorce deal to avoid all-but-certain defeat.
The threat to May has been building as pro-Brexit Conservative lawmakers grew increasingly frustrated with the prime minister’s handling of Brexit.
Many supporters of Brexit say May’s deal, a compromise that retains close economic ties with the EU, fails to deliver on the clean break with the bloc that they want.
Former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson accused May of acting like a “supplicant” in dealings with the EU.
“She’s not the person to see Brexit through,” he said.
Opposition lawmakers expressed astonishment and outrage at the Conservative civil war erupting in the middle of the fraught Brexit process.
“This government is a farce, the Tory party is in chaos, the prime minister is a disgrace,” Scottish National Party leader Ian Blackford said during a pugnacious Prime Minister’s Questions session in the House of Commons.
British business figures had expressed alarm at the prospect of even more political uncertainty.
“At one of the most pivotal moments for the U.K. economy in decades, it is unacceptable that Westminster politicians have chosen to focus on themselves, rather than on the needs of the country,” said Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.
Graham Brady, who heads a committee overseeing Conservative leadership contests, announced early Wednesday that he had received letters from at least 48 lawmakers asking for a vote. That’s the 15
May
But before it, Cabinet colleagues rallied to May’s support. Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted that a leadership contest, with Brexit little more than three months away, “will be seen as self-indulgent and wrong.”
Justice Secretary David Gauke said: “I think it’s vital for the country that she wins tonight.”
He said that if May lost, “I don’t think we will be leaving the European Union on the 29th of March.”
EU leaders tried to stay out of the fray. There was no change in plans for May to address them about Brexit at a summit on Brussels on Thursday.
The European Parliament’s Brexit point man, Guy Verhofstadt, could not contain a note of annoyance, tweeting: “Once again, the fate of EU-U.K. relations, the prosperity of businesses & citizens’ rights are consumed by an internal Conservative party catfight over Europe.”
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Follow AP’s full coverage of Brexit crisis at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit
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Associated Press writers Danica Kirka and Gregory Katz in London contributed.
Jill Lawless, The Associated Press
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RCMP to create fake online profiles to track Canadian ‘extremists’: docs
From LifeSiteNews
According to internal documents, the RCMP plans to conduct undercover surveillance on Canadians by creating fake online accounts and tracking what they consider ‘ideological extremists,’ which may include pro-family, pro-life and pro-freedom content.
Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is planning to create fake online accounts to target Canadian “extremists.”
According to an internal strategy document, the RCMP plans to conduct undercover surveillance on Canadians by creating fake online accounts and tracking what they consider “ideological extremists,” which could include pro-family, pro-life and pro-freedom content.
“The RCMP’s lack of a covert online presence was previously highlighted in the OIR (Operational Improvement Review), which recommended that the RCMP develop its own online undercover program to assist with national security criminal investigations,” the RCMP internal document stated.
The document, obtained by an Access to Information request and shared with CBC News, reveals that the Federal Policing National Security is “currently taking steps to address this recommendation through proactive legend-building and backstopping personas, but this work needs to be prioritized and accelerated in order to meet future demand for online undercover activities.”
“Undercover police investigations, among many tools, remain an effective technique to thwart the commission of serious crime and resolve historic offences,” the plan continued. “The focus is on uncovering the truth, verifying facts and determining if someone is involved.”
According to the RCMP, violent extremism is divided into three categories: religiously motivated extremism, politicly motivated extremism, and ideologically motivated extremism.
Ideologically motivated extremis is further categorized into xenophobic violence, gender-driven violence, anti-authority violence, and “other grievance-driven and ideological motivated violence.” The last category includes environmental, animal rights, and “anti-abortion violence.”
While the RCMP’s move to monitor Canadians online is alarming, it is hardly the first time the government-run police force has spied on its citizens.
In 2022, the RCMP acknowledged it uses spyware to turn on or off the camera or microphone of a laptop or phone at will to eavesdrop on one’s conversations without the suspect even knowing it.
The same year, it was disclosed that Canadian Special Forces conducted surveillance flights over the trucker’s Freedom Convoy in February in a spy plane capable of eavesdropping on cell phone calls and tracking small movements, contrary to a military directive banning such flights.
Spying on and tracking Canadians for sharing pro-family and pro-freedom values could prove even more dangerous if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Online Harms bill, which would punish “hate speech” online, is passed.
Bill C-63 was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. Put forth under the guise of protecting children from exploitation online, the bill also seeks to expand the scope of “hate speech” prosecutions, and even desires to target such speech retroactively.
Furthermore, the RCMP, like the rest of Canada’s government-run organizations, appears to have been infiltrated by woke activists who label pro-family, pro-freedom, and pro-life causes as “extreme” and “dangerous.”
In 2022, the RCMP issued a 16-page guide suggesting people tell on those who show any signs of “anti-government” or “anti-LGBTQ2” opinions on the internet.
“Some people hold social or political beliefs that may be considered ‘extreme’ or outside mainstream ideologies. Although some ideas alone may be concerning to those around them, it is when a person uses or actively supports violence to achieve ideological, religious or political goals that the police have a role to play,” the guide said.
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Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis calls out Liberals for not supporting anti-church burning bill
From LifeSiteNews
Speaking about the ‘hundreds of churches’ that have been ‘set on fire across Canada’ in the last number of years, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis questioned why the Liberals seem completely unconcerned.
One of Canada’s most prominent pro-life MPs has called out the Trudeau government for its apparent lack of support for an anti-arson bill which aims to curb the rash of church burnings plaguing Christians in the country.
In an X post Monday, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis pointed out that under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, church burnings have shot up “100 percent,” and that the government does not seem to have expressed any “concern” at all.
“In the last several years, hundreds of churches and other places of worship have been set on fire across Canada. Under this Liberal government, these crimes have increased by over 100%,” wrote Lewis on X.
“Where is the concern or action from the Liberals regarding these attacks on Christian churches?”
Lewis’s post included a link to another X post from Conservative MP Marc Dalton, who posted a video on October 31 highlighting the recent rash of church burnings and how his bill, C-411, aims to stop this.
“Thank you @MarcDalton for bringing forward Bill C-411, the Anti-Arson Act, an important bill to protect places of worship and increase penalties on those who would target them,” wrote Lewis.
Bill C-411, or, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (arson — wildfires and places of worship), was introduced by Dalton in June.
The law, if passed, would create specific criminal offenses for setting fires to churches and for starting wildfires.
Dalton said in his video that there is a “serious problem in Canada that must be addressed” concerning Catholic and Christian churches being the target of arson.
He highlighted how since 2010, 592 churches have been the target of arson in Canada, with a large portion of these being concentrated to the last few years.
Dalton noted how Canada’s Criminal Code, as it stands, does not include specific protections against arson directed at religious institutions. C-411 aims to “change that,” said Dalton, noting that the bill would implement a minimum sentence of five years in jail for a first offense of this kind, and seven years for a repeat offense.
“This bill strengthens our criminal code and punishes these hateful arson attacks,” he said.
“Commonsense Conservatives stand for strict punishments against criminals who target places of worship.”
Since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, have been burned to the ground, vandalized or defiled in Canada.
The church burnings started in earnest after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools in Canada, particularly a school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
The anti-Catholic narrative that developed following these claims continues to this day, despite the fact that no bodies have actually been discovered.
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