Ostriches on the runway

Dominic LeBlanc says it’s time to rise above partisanship. Watch the skies

“The protection of our democracy demands that we rise above partisanship,” Dominic LeBlanc told reporters Saturday morning in the lobby of the West Block’s backup House of Commons. “Canada isn’t the only country facing the threat of foreign interference. Many of our allies are, even now, having discussions on ways to protect their democracies against this scourge. If they can have reasoned and constructive discussions on this subject, Canada should be able to do the same. That’s why the prime minister tasked me [on Friday] with consulting, over the coming days, experts, legal scholars and opposition parties on what the next steps should look like — and determine who best may be suited to lead this public work.”

You can tell the Trudeau government is really badly rattled when it starts doing what it should have done in the first place. “Consulting experts, legal scholars and opposition parties” was an option in March, when Trudeau decided instead to lay the foundation for Friday’s debacle. Talking to people — in the old-fashioned sense of (a) showing the slightest interest in what they have to say and (b) allowing it to inflect your actions in any perceptible way — is always an option. Nor is it in any danger of getting worn out through overuse, where this government is concerned.

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“It’s our government’s hope that the opposition parties will treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves,” said LeBlanc, whose boss ignored a string of reports from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and whose early-warning system for news of Beijing’s intimidation against a sitting MP was named Fife and Chase.

LeBlanc opened the floor to questions. The first: Shouldn’t there be a public inquiry? “A public inquiry has never been off the table,” he said. “All options remain on the table.” This was change masquerading as continuity. Johnston took a public inquiry off the table three weeks ago. Trudeau accepted the un-tabling. By putting it back on the table, LeBlanc was bowing to what may be the inevitable conclusion of the last few days: that the opposition parties, by adapting a common line in favour of a full inquiry, may have made one inevitable.

Another characteristic of this government is that it views its tribulations as tests of other people. The short odyssey of David Johnston, in other words, is a learning opportunity for us all. “My job,” LeBlanc said, “is to, in the very next few days, in short order, ask opposition leaders to take this matter seriously. Not just to simply say, ‘Oh, there has to be a public inquiry.’ OK: Make suggestions about who could lead this public inquiry. What would the terms of reference be? What do they see as the timelines? How do they deal with the obvious challenge of respecting Canadian law that protects some of the most sensitive intelligence information?”

I should say I take LeBlanc at his word when he claims to be seeking input in good faith. As a general rule, his arrival tends to mark an improvement in this government’s handling of a difficult file. But just to be on the safe side, it’s worth saying some obvious things clearly.

The opposition parties should give input when asked. It’s useful for each of them to go through the exercise of conceiving in detail the proper handling of the election-interference file. And it’s good of the government to ask, albeit way later than it should have.

But everything LeBlanc plans to ask them — whether to have an inquiry, who should lead it, its mandate and deadlines and legal justification — remains the responsibility of the government. If the opposition parties chicken out, or play dumb games, or deadlock, or suggest people who decline to participate, the responsibility for designing a workable policy remains the government’s. I’m pretty sure Trudeau volunteered for the job of prime minister. In fact I’m sure there was something in the papers about it. He is in this fix now because he wanted Johnston to make his decisions for him. As I wrote nearly three months ago.

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LeBlanc kept saying an inquiry should be run by someone “eminent.” I mean…sure? Whatever? I suppose eminence shouldn’t be actively disqualifying, at least. But to me the craving for eminence is a strange instinct. Eminence is distinctly relative: I suspect more than half of Canadians could never, at any point, have told you who David Johnston is, or Julie Payette, or Craig Kielburger. I’ve come to suspect that “eminent” translates as “impressive to Katie Telford,” which is fine but, again, an odd criterion. Instead may I propose “competent”?

When I wrote about Johnston’s appointment in March, I a suggested a few alternative candidates for the job of deciding how to respond to the mandate for which I already thought Johnston was ill-suited. My list was concocted at random on a few minutes’ notice, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, purely for illustrative purposes. I could come up with a dozen other names, and I don’t even know what I’m talking about. If I were burdened in LeBlanc’s place with such a task, I’d begin by asking for a list of associate deputy ministers at the departments of Global Affairs and Justice, as well as a list of currently serving and recently retired ambassadors. Probably the guy who used to be the national director of the Liberal Party of Canada would be a bad idea, I guess I need to add.

I also might do some reading. I’d recall that when the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg was brought in to decide compensation for families of the 9/11 victims in the U.S., he couldn’t have been further from a household name. When James B. Donovan got Francis Gary Powers released by the Soviets, or Jean Monnet invented the European Union, or Elissa Golberg became Canada’s first civilian representative in Kandahar, they weren’t household names. They still aren’t. They were just good at their work. You know that uncomfortable suspicion that Canada is just six pals from the McGill alumni club who gather every Friday to carve up the spoils of elite consensus over pitchers of iced tea on the verandah of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club? The first step toward perpetuating that suspicion is the urge to find “eminent” people for technical work.

The title of today’s post is cryptic. When LeBlanc said our democracy depends on rising above partisanship, I thought, Uh-oh, and I started thinking about objects or creatures that don’t normally rise above much. Which led to a mental image of ostriches trying to fly. I actually have seen non-partisanship, many times, including from some of the most partisan operators in Canadian politics. But I still wouldn’t bet on it happening in any particular case. The incentives run all the other way. To insulate against it, politicians might want to read the latest from Alliance Canada Hong Kong, the diaspora group that has been chronicling foreign interference for years, for whom the issue is not a fun partisan football and the prospect of testifying yet again, to educate some eminent commissioner, is not appealing.

I keep saying the under-served constituency in this country is the people who would like to see serious problems treated seriously. Not in the sense of cheap theatrics — furrowed brows, jabby index fingers, “my time is limited” — but in the sense of, you know, seriousness. It feels cheap to lodge such a complaint. It’s too easy, too timeless. OK, smartass, what are you proposing? I dunno, more, uh…. seriousness, I guess. But I think everyone senses it.

Last September, the CBC’s Aaron Wherry reported, Justin Trudeau told his caucus “to focus on four Cs: competence, confidence, contrast and campaign-readiness (in that order).” I’m left wondering how the prime minister defines competence and how he thinks he’s doing. This is a guy who, when he made those remarks, was less than a year past deciding that the biggest problem with his cabinet was that Marc Garneau was in it.

Meanwhile, I checked with Pierre Poilievre’s Twitter account to see whether he had responded to LeBlanc’s overture. Here’s how the Conservative leader spent his Friday afternoon:

I sometimes wonder whether these people know we can see them. It’s time to rise above partisanship. Flap, you big gorgeous birds! Flap!

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Don’t double-down on net zero again

2025 Federal Election / 2 hours ago

Mark Carney’s radical left-wing, globalist record proves he is Justin Trudeau 2.0

Censorship Industrial Complex / 2 hours ago

Scott Atlas: COVID lockdowns, censorship have left a ‘permanent black mark on America’

2025 Federal Election

Don’t double-down on net zero again

Published on April 8, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.

The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.

When President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement for the first time in 2017, then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was quick to claim the moral high ground, declaring that “we will continue to work with our domestic and international partners to drive progress on one of the greatest challenges we face as a world.”

Trudeau has now been swept from the stage. On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order that again begins the formal, twelve-month-long process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement.

It will be tempting for Canada to step anew into the void left by the United States. But if the goal is to make effective climate policy, whoever is Canada’s prime minister needs to avoid empty virtue signaling. It would be easy for Canada to declare again that it’ll form a “coalition of the willing” with Europe. The truth is that, just like last time, that approach would do next to nothing for the planet.

Climate summits have generated vast amounts of attention and breathless reporting giving the impression that they are crucial to the planet’s survival. Scratch the surface, and the results are far less impressive. In 2021, the world promised to phase-down coal. Since then, global coal consumption has only gone up. Virtually every summit has promised to cut emissions but they’ve increased almost every single year, and 2024 reached a new high.

Way before the Paris Agreement was inked, the Kyoto Protocol was once sold as a key part of the solution to global warming. Yet studies show it achieved virtually nothing for climate change.

In the preamble to the Paris Agreement, world leaders loftily declared they would keep temperature rises “well below 2°C” and perhaps even under 1.5°C. That was never on the cards—it would have required the world’s economies to effectively come to a grinding halt.

The truth is that the “net zero” green agenda, based on massive subsidies and expensive legislation, will likely cost more than CAD$38 trillion per year across the century, making it utterly unattractive to voters in almost every nation on Earth.

The awkward reality is that emissions from Canada, the EU, and other countries pursuing climate policies matter little in the 21st century. Canada likely only makes up about 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions. Add together Canada’s output with that of every single country of the rich-world OECD, and this only makes up about one-fifth of global emissions this century, using the United Nations’ ‘middle of the road’ forecast. The other four-fifths of emissions come mostly from China, India and Africa.

Even if wealthy countries like Canada impoverish themselves, the result is tiny — run the UN’s standard climate model with and without Canada going net-zero in 2050, and the difference is immeasurable even in 2100. Moreover, much of the production and emissions just move to the Global South—and even less is achieved.

One good example of this is the United Kingdom, which—like Prime Minister Trudeau once did—has leaned into climate policies, suggesting it would lead the efforts for strong climate agreements. British families are paying a heavy price for their government going farther than almost any other in pursuing the climate agenda: just the inflation-adjusted electricity price, weighted across households and industry, has tripled from 2003 to 2023, mostly because of climate policies. This need not have been so: the US electricity price has remained almost unchanged over the same period.

The effect on families is devastating. Had prices stayed at 2003 levels, an average family-of-four would now be spending CAD$3,380 on electricity—which includes indirect industry costs. Instead, it now pays $9,740 per year.

Rising electricity costs make investment less attractive: European businesses pay triple US electricity costs, and nearly two-thirds of European companies say energy prices are now a major impediment to investment.

The Paris Treaty approach is fundamentally flawed. Carbon emissions continue to grow because cheap, reliable power, mostly from fossil fuels, drives economic growth. Wealthy countries like Canada, the US, and European Union members have started to cut emissions—often by shifting production elsewhere—but the rest of the world remains focused on eradicating poverty.

Poor countries will rightly reject making carbon cuts unless there is a huge flow of “climate aid” from rich nations, and want trillions of US dollars per year. That won’t happen. The new US government will not pay, and the other rich countries cannot foot the bill alone.

Without these huge transfers of wealth, China, India and many other developing countries will disavow expensive climate policies, too. This potentially leaves a rag-tag group led by a few Western European progressive nations, which can scarcely afford their own policies and have no ability to pay off everyone else.

When the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017, Canada’s doubling down on the Paris Treaty sent the signal that it would be worthwhile spending hundreds of trillions of dollars to make no real difference to temperatures. We fool ourselves if we pretend that doing so for a second time will help the planet.

We need to realize that fixing climate change isn’t about sanctimonious summits, lofty speeches, and bluster. In coming weeks I’ll outline the case for efficient policies like innovation, adaptation and prosperity.

Bjørn Lomborg

2025 Federal Election

Mark Carney’s radical left-wing, globalist record proves he is Justin Trudeau 2.0

Published on April 8, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By REAL Women of Canada

Despite superficial changes to the packaging, the Liberal brand under Mark Carney’s policies are the same as Trudeau’s.

By now, it has become obvious that the Liberals want the central issue of this election to be Trump’s tariffs and their supposed threat to Canada’s national sovereignty.

The Liberal leader, Mark Carney, is being portrayed as a dauntless hero, who is the only one with “the elbows” capable of taking on Trump. The Liberals have made the 2025 election the shortest in history (37 days) in order to prevent serious scrutiny and exposure of both their last ten years in power and the failures and conflicts of interest that Carney brings to the table. Most of Canada’s mainstream media want the Liberals returned to power so that they can continue to receive payments from the Liberal government’s Media Slush Fund, a.k.a. Heritage Canada. Consequently, most of Canada’s mainstream media are carefully and systematically concealing Carney’s flawed past history. Not so the U.K. media.

UK media scrutiny of Carney

The United Kingdom (UK) media has a direct lived experience of Carney when he was Governor of the Bank of England from July 1, 2013, to March 15, 2020. The British newspapers have been giving off warning signals to Canadians about Carney for some time now. They regard him as highly overblown, someone who left England in economic distress and struggling with raging inflation caused by his banking strategy of printing too much money. Carney’s climate change ideology and net-zero emissions goal has been calamitous for the U.K. As stated by Matthew Lynn (March 10, 2025), former editor of The Daily Telegraph, “Over eight years, Carney … has been a disappointing failure. Despite his huge salary of more than £600,000 [$1.1 million] a year, more than any of his predecessors had been paid, he seemed to have little feel for the role.” Lynn went on to observe that “Carney is the epitome of a remote, globalized, technocratic elite. He is very good at self-promotion, at collecting trophy jobs and, of course, negotiating fabulously generous salaries and expenses for himself along the way. He is just not very good at delivering.”

READ: Mark Carney was an early supporter of government crackdown against Freedom Convoy

As a financial reporter, Lynn has been a long-time observer of Carney’s mediocre performance as Governor of the Bank of England, writing in The Spectator on October 16th, 2016, that Carney “has done very little to improve the British economy. The markets have rumbled that he is not very effective – and they no longer care much whether he stays or goes. In truth, neither should anyone else.”

Benedict Smith, writing in The Daily Telegraph on March 9th, 2025, reminded his readers of Carney’s doomsaying over Britain withdrawing from the European Union (Brexit) which earned him the title the “high priest of Project Fear.” None of Carney’s dire predictions have come true, much to the chagrin of EU loving bureaucrats everywhere.

Even the left-wing Guardian echoed this, describing Carney as the “unreliable boyfriend” due to his habit of sending mixed messages—never a good idea to do when you are “in charge” of the monetary policy of a nation.

If there is a common theme to Carney’s governorships in both Canada and England, it appears to be found in his ability to make bad predictions while printing too much money which only leads to inflationary pressures once he’s left office.

Other views

It is not only the U.K. media that is critical of Carney’s performance. British Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a pro-Brexit advocate criticized Carney’s economic predictions, telling the BBC News in November 2018 that Carney was a “second-tier Canadian politician” who “failed” to get a job at home and thus ended up at the Bank of England—not a ringing endorsement.

Not only has Carney’s experience as a competent central banker been criticized, his ability as a businessman has also been questioned. While acting as an advisor to Justin Trudeau, he was also Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management which was soliciting at that time, the federal government for $10 billion in funds as part of a $50 billion Canada-only asset fund. Brookfield was also looking to raise $36 billion from Canadian pension funds, the largest of which are public sector, i.e., taxpayer funded, while only contributing $4 billion itself. Because Carney was employed by the Liberal Party of Canada that conveniently did not require conflict of interest disclosures, as opposed to the Prime Minister’s Office that required such disclosures, Carney avoided being asked, let alone answer embarrassing questions on the subject.

Conflicts of interest

The biggest elephant in the room that virtually no one in the mainstream media seems to be interested in, are conflicts of interest that Carney brings to the table. Conflicts of interest come in many varieties for our would-be Prime Minister. Obviously, there are the financial conflicts that come with Carney’s investments as well as those of his wife and immediate family.

However, there are also more serious political conflicts of interest, particularly centered on Brookfield Asset Management ties with Communist China. It is being reported that in October of 2024 Brookfield secured a $256 million loan from a Chinese state-owned bank after Carney met with the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China, Zhu Hexin. The loan was in relation to Brookfield’s refinancing of its commercial property holdings in Shanghai. It is worth noting that at the time, Carney had (in September 2024) been named by former Prime Minster Justin Trudeau as chairman of the Liberal Party’s task force on economic growth. Anyone with even a modest familiarity with the way business is done in China realizes that such loans by state-owned banks are always matters of political importance, no matter the economic rationale, and are the occasion of establishing reciprocal obligations, i.e., I do you this favor today, tomorrow I will ask you a favour in return. This is a troubling fact should Carney be elected prime minister.

READ: WEF video shows Mark Carney pushing financial ‘revolution’ based on ‘net zero’ goals

Of course, the other political conflict of interest yet to be resolved is the question of multiple passports and divided loyalties. Carney has already expressed himself as a “proud European” at the World Economic Forum held in Davos in 2023, but what of being a “proud Canadian”? Dressing up in a Team Canada hockey jersey and playing Canadian Trivial Pursuit in a Liberal advertisement with Canadian born Mike Myers isn’t really a credible assurance of Carney’s patriotism. In fact, Myers himself makes a convincing poster boy for every Canadian who has gone to the United States and made his fortune thanks to American culture and enterprise. Carney and Myers share several common characteristics: both made their careers outside Canada; both have spent little time in Canada; both have multiple citizenships (Carney – Canadian, Irish, and British, Myers – Canadian, US, and British); and both are not shy about telling Canadians how to be Canadian!

Carney has a plan to build 500,000 houses. Funding for this project will be provided by his previous employer, Brookfield Asset Management and the federal government. There will be no difficulty in obtaining the taxpayers’ money for this project if Carney is elected prime minister. This housing, however, is to provide Soviet-style rental housing, built not by developers, but by bureaucrats. Under this plan, Brookfield stands to make billions of dollars over the years in rental fees and Carney will make millions of dollars since he has retained $6.8 million in shares in Brookfield. The public, however, wants to own property, not live in rental property. It seems that this project is a win-win for Brookfield and Carney, not so much for Canadians.

Carney’s potential conflicts of interest are not confined to just political and financial, as they also include conflicts brought to the table by his wife, Diana Fox Carney. Mrs. Carney has long involvement with leftist climate change causes and organizations, including being a senior advisor at Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting company, where she is a colleague of Liberal strategist and friend of Justin Trudeau, Gerry Butts, Trudeau’s former Chief of Staff.

Carney’s campaign

Carney’s efforts in the campaign raises several concerns. Right from the start Carney’s campaign has been plagued with missteps: Carney’s logo had to be changed because it too closely resembled a logo of a collection agency, MetCredit. Carney has had unpleasant interactions with reporters pressing him about disclosure of his assets and avoided answering their questions. He lied about his involvement in moving Brookfield Asset Management’s head office out of Canada to New York City, a significant financial loss to Canada. He did not know the name of the school where the tragic Montreal massacre of 1989 took place, and he has refused to participate in a debate in French on TVA, Quebec’s independent television network. Carney also refused to dismiss Liberal candidate Paul Chaing, who had recommended that his Conservative opposition, Joe Tay, be taken to the Toronto Chinese consulate to be returned to Hong Kong where there would be a 1 million Hong Kong dollar bounty on his life. Mr. Tay had made posts opposing the Beijing government. Carney recently wore a Team Canada hockey jersey emblazed with the American Nike “swoosh” symbol—Nike, of course, being a huge American corporation selling sports equipment. Why is a would-be Canadian Prime Minister being photographed wearing a symbol of a successful American corporation? Even Carney’s selection of a riding to run in, Nepean in Ottawa, was not without its problems as it involved the dumping of the current Liberal MP, Chandra Arya, who was born in India, on the pretext of his alleged foreign interference, supposedly from India. For those outside Ottawa, Nepean is considered a “safe” Liberal seat with a high percentage of federal government employees and a large population of immigrants from India.

Trust and character

Character matters, especially when Carney is asking for the trust of the Canadian electorate. Carney himself has called his character into question.

Recent revelations of Carney plagiarizing sections of his Oxford Ph.D. thesis call into question his intellectual honesty and integrity. This is particularly troubling given the fact that Carney’s claim to being an “expert” largely rests on his doctorate qualification. Plagiarism is a form of lying, claiming someone else’s ideas as your own. And there is certainly an alarming pattern emerging of Carney lying about his accomplishments whether it is about his thesis or involvement with moving Brookfield’s headquarters to New York or having worked with former Finance Minister Paul Martin, indicating that his work with Mr. Martin led to a balanced budget. In fact, Mr. Martin balanced the budget a year before Carney’s involvement.

READ: Mark Carney accused of plagiarism in 1995 Oxford doctoral thesis

Similarly, can Carney be trusted to deal with the problems of Canada’s immigration system? Doubtful, especially when Carney added Mark Wiseman to his backroom advisors. Wiseman is co-founder of the “Century Initiative,” a group calling for a massive increase in Canada’s immigration levels, with the ultimate goal of bringing the country’s population to 100 million by 2100. The problems with such massive immigration are many, the least of which is that this has been rejected by Canadians. A Leger poll conducted in July of 2024 found that 60% of Canadians were of the view that immigration levels were too high. Yet here we are in the spring of 2025, and Carney appears to be following Trudeau’s same mass immigration policies and listening to people such as Wiseman despite the fact that such policies are poison in Quebec as well as in the rest of Canada. Given Carney’s need for Quebec votes, one wonders about the prudence of Carney’s association with the Century Initiative project by actively courting the advice of its co-founder.

Generally speaking, one does not want to give power to people one cannot trust. To be fair, no one is perfect, and one or two missteps are to be expected. However, under the circumstances, Carney and the Liberals have amassed a significant number of serious missteps giving Canadians no reason to trust them.

Carney is not the agent of change

Carney is merely Trudeau 2.0, enacting Liberal extremist policies and willing to do anything to impose his own climate change/World Economic Forum agenda and personal ideology on a country which he has already signaled is in need of a new course, different from what the Liberals have given Canadians these past ten years. Judging from the current “news” coming from the Liberals it appears that once again the Liberals are tone-deaf to the genuine needs of Canadians and their families. Maintaining power is the Liberal Party’s only concern. Under Carney, Trudeau’s legacy is all but guaranteed to continue, only worse. Don’t forget, Carney himself was the chief economic adviser to the Trudeau government since the summer of 2020—that’s almost five years of Carney-inspired policies Canadians have been suffering through!

READ: Mark Carney is trying to market globalism as a ‘Canadian value.’ Will it work?

Despite superficial changes to the packaging, the Liberal Brand under Carney’s policies are the same as Trudeau’s because the Liberal Party is the same: same advisors, i.e., Tom Pitfield, Katie Telford, Trudeau’s former Chief of Staff, Gerry Butts; same cabinet, although slightly re-shuffled to give the appearance of “change”; and the same belief in the net-zero ideology of the Marxist-driven climate change hysteria. By appointing two former Trudeau cabinet ministers as his top advisers, Marco Mendicino as chief of staff and David Lametti, the former Justice Minister who brought in the MAID legislation, as part of the transition team, Carney is signaling to the Laurentian Elite not to worry, the only change coming is more of the same!

Reprinted with permission from REAL Women of Canada.