National
JD Vance sounds alarm over slew of Canadian church burnings: ‘Anti-Christian bigotry’
From LifeSiteNews
The US Vice President-elect re-posted Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s recent message regarding Christian persecution in Canada, saying ‘Jamil is speaking the truth’ and ‘shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious.’
The recent rash of arson and vandalism attacks on mostly Catholic churches in Canada has drawn the attention of U.S. Vice President-elect JD Vance, who called the burnings a display of “anti-Christian bigotry.”
“Canada has seen a number of church burnings in recent years thanks to anti-Christian bigotry,” Vance wrote on X last Friday.
“All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group.”
Vance’s X posting included a re-post of a posting from Conservative MP Jamil Jivani’s recent message regarding Christian persecution in Canada that LifeSiteNews reported last week.
Vance said that “Jamil is speaking the truth.”
“Shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious,” he added.
Last week, Jivani, citing continued persecution of Christians in Canada, launched an initiative calling on “all levels of government” to put an end to “anti-Christian bigotry.”
The “Protect Christians in Canada” initiative seeks to raise awareness and end “anti-Christian bigotry in Canadian institutions.”
Jivani was recently elected as a Conservative MP in a by-election and since that time has been outspoken in his defense of Christians.
He has urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down, saying the recent rash of destruction is a “very serious issue” that is a direct “attack” on families as well as “religious freedom in Canada.”
The church burnings started in 2021 after the mainstream media and the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 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.
As a result of the claims, since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.
The latest of these attacks occurred last month.
The legacy media and the Trudeau government have implied that the Catholic Church is complicit in the deaths of thousands of indigenous Canadians who attended government-mandated residential schools.
However, these claims have never been proved. In October, retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht said Canadians are being “deliberately deceived by their own government” after blasting the Trudeau government for “actively pursuing” a policy that blames the Catholic Church for the unfounded “deaths and secret burials” of Indigenous children.
Giesbrecht observed that the reality is historical records “clearly show” “the children who died of disease or accident while attending residential school were all given Christian burials, with their deaths properly recorded.”
From the Fraser Institute
By: Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill
Two federal cabinet ministers criticized the report because it “fails to properly acknowledge that CEBA was designed and delivered during a global pandemic.” Translation—taxpayer money can be mismanaged so long as it’s delivered quickly, and we can use an emergency as an excuse for wasteful spending
According to a new report by Canada’s auditor general, in another of example of mismanagement and waste during the COVID pandemic, nearly 10 per cent—or $3.5 billion—of the federal government’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loans went to ineligible businesses.
The report said “the program was not managed with due regard for value for money” and the government “did not effectively oversee the CEBA program.”
In response, two federal cabinet ministers criticized the report because it “fails to properly acknowledge that CEBA was designed and delivered during a global pandemic.”
Translation—taxpayer money can be mismanaged so long as it’s delivered quickly, and we can use an emergency as an excuse for wasteful spending. Accountability to the public is evidently an afterthought.
Of course, this is only the latest revelation of Trudeau government mismanagement during COVID. The government spent huge sums of taxpayer money on expensive programs such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) and Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). But a substantial share of this spending was simply wasted.
For example, an earlier report in 2022 by the auditor general found that ineligible individuals received $4.6 billion in CERB payments and other benefits. Ineligible recipients included 1,522 prisoners, 391 dead people and 434 children too young to be eligible. And 51,049 employers incorrectly received $9.9 billion in wage subsidies even though they did not have a sufficient drop in revenue to be eligible for the subsidies.
The federal government also spent billions on Canadians who probably didn’t need the money. An analysis published in 2020 by the Fraser Institute estimated that $11.8 billion in CERB payments went to eligible young people (ages 15 to 24) living with their parents in households with at least $100,000 in income. And an estimated $7.0 billion in CERB payments went to spouses in families with at least $100,000 in household income.
COVID-related programs were not only poorly targeted, but many payments surpassed the level required to restore the regular income of many recipients. According to the auditor general, the lowest-income Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) recipients could take in more money from government benefits than from working, and the program “represented a disincentive to work, which impacted some labour markets at a crucial time when the need for employees was trending upwards.”
The total costs of fiscal waste during COVID are difficult to nail down. But our 2023 study estimated that one in four dollars of federal pandemic spending was wasted. That amounts to at least $89.9 billion in total fiscal waste. For context, that’s roughly what the British Columbia government spends annually in its entire budget for health care, education, social services, infrastructure, etc.
Finally, because the Trudeau government borrowed money to finance its excessive and wasteful COVID spending, Canadians will pay an estimated $21.1 billion in debt interest costs (over a 10-year period) that are directly attributable to this fiscal waste.
The new report by the auditor general is the latest proof of mismanagement by Ottawa during COVID, to the tune of billions of dollars in waste. Unfortunately, the government continues to scoff at the bill it’s handed to taxpayers for the waste it produced.
Jake Fuss
Tegan Hill
Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute
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TikTok challenges Canada’s decision to shut down its operations, citing its role in combating “misinformation” as a reason the government should let it stay in the country.
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In Canada, TikTok is attempting to get the authorities to reverse the decision to shut down its business operations by going to court – but also by recommending itself as a proven and reliable ally in combating “harmful content” and “misinformation.”
Canada last month moved to shut down TikTok’s operations, without banning the app itself. All this is happening ahead of federal elections amid the government’s efforts to control social media narratives, always citing fears of “misinformation” and “foreign interference” as the reasons. TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, was accused of – via its parent company – representing “specific national security risks” when the decision regarding its corporate presence was made in November; no details have been made public regarding those alleged risks, however. Now the TikTok Canada director of public policy and government affairs, Steve de Eyre, is telling the local press that the newly created circumstances are making it difficult for the company to work with election regulators and “civil society” to ensure election integrity – something Eyre said was previously successfully done. In 2021, he noted, TikTok initiated collaboration with Elections Canada (the agency that organizes elections and has the power to flag social media content) which included TikTok adding links to all election-related videos that directed users toward “verified information.” And the following year, TikTok was invested in monitoring its platform for “potentially violent” content, during the Freedom Convoy protests against Covid mandates. More recently, TikTok was also on its toes for “foreign interference and hateful content” related to Brampton clashes between Sikhs and Hindus. This approach, Eyre argues, is now jeopardized because TikTok employees are not present in Canada, who would be able to inform the platform’s decisions in terms of the political and cultural “context” in Canada. And the political context is that of the Trudeau government playing the election misinformation card indirectly and directly, to put pressure on social sites. Even though the decision regarding the company’s business operations has been described by Foreign Minister Melanie Joly as “a message to China” – it’s really a message to TikTok, since the app remains available, but has been “put on notice.” |
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