Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill - The Spectator World - "There’s a way of getting children to eat something they dislike — medicine, for example — where you bury the goods in a spoonful of jam. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are trying this method with their Online Harms Bill C-63. But it may not go down as well as they hoped. The stated intent of the bill is something every decent person supports: protecting children from online victimization. Yet behind this noble aim lurks the thought police. This is no exaggeration. This legislation authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime. It’s right there in the text: if a judge believes there are reasonable grounds to “fear” a future hate crime, the as of yet innocent party can be sentenced to house arrest, complete with electronic tagging, mandatory drug testing and communication bans. Failure to cooperate nets you an additional year in jail. If that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is. What is a hate crime? According to the bill, it is a communication expressing “detestation or vilification.” But, clarified the government, this is not the same as “disdain or dislike,” or speech that “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.” Unfortunately, the government didn’t think to include a graduated scheme setting out the relative acceptability of the words “offend,” “hurt,” “humiliate,” “discredit,” “dislike,” “disdain,” “detest” and “vilify.” Under C-63, you can be put away for life for a “crime” whose legal existence hangs on the distinction between “dislike” and “detest.” Despite this Trudeau claims to stand against authoritarianism. The Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson says that under C-63, his criminalization would be a certainty. The legislation appears to apply retroactively, meaning you can be hauled up before the human rights tribunal for any material you’ve left online, regardless of its posting date. Anonymous accusations and secret testimony are permitted (at the tribunal’s discretion). Complaints are free to file, and an accuser, if successful, can hope to reap up to a $20,000 payout, with up to another $50,000 going to the government. Hold on, you may be thinking, what does all this have to do with protecting children online? So far it seems more geared towards protecting the Liberal government online. There is in fact a section that requires social media companies to establish plans to protect users, including children. But if you’re getting your hopes up, prepare to have them dashed. All the social media companies are going be supervised by a brand-new government body called the digital safety commission. The commission can, without oversight, require companies to block access to any content, conduct investigations, hold secret hearings, require the companies to hand over specific content, and give all data collected to third-party researchers accredited by the commission. All data. Any content. No oversight. Does that sound crazy? There’s more. The ostensible purpose of putting the commission (and not the ordinary police) in charge is so that it can act informally and quickly (i.e. without a warrant) in situations where material victimizing a child could spread quickly across the internet. What that means in effect is that the commission is not accountable and does not have to justify its actions. As the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says in its sharply worded critique of the bill, it endows government appointees with vast authority “to interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury and executioner.” Is it possible, that in the beautiful and once civilized country of Canada, leading politicians seriously want to punish people for crimes they might (but actually haven’t) committed? Canada already has a law that criminalizes conspiracy, and another law criminalizing threats — so we’re not talking about someone who is planning murder or terrorism. Then who are we talking about? People who read the wrong websites? People who didn’t get vaccinated? People who criticize the government? People who go to church and believe certain types of immorality will send you to hell? There’s something Trudeau and his minions don’t seem to realize. With the Online Harms Bill, as with the reckless invocation of the Emergencies Act and the debanking of protestors, they are making a mockery of the rule of law and of the public order they are sworn to uphold."
Margaret Atwood, Elon Musk call out Trudeau's 'Orwellian' legislation - "Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who has been called the “prophet of dystopia,” is among the prominent voices, including Elon Musk, criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “Orwellian” online harms bill... Atwood took issue with the portion of the bill that says if a person “fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit” a hate crime, a judge can order their imprisonment, subject them to house arrest or insist they wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. Reasonable grounds is a lower level of proof for a court to consider than the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt and in the court could punish someone even if they have yet to commit the allegedly hateful offence. “The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” wrote Atwood... The bill has come under intense criticism from civil liberties advocates and right-wing social media personalities. Russell Brand, the British comedian who’s facing multiple allegations of sexual assault, and who styles himself as a YouTube culture warrior, asked in an X post: “Is Trudeau’s C-63 bill about protecting children or about labelling any speech he personally dislikes as hateful?” Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, formerly Twitter, called the potential life sentences for hate propaganda “insane”... Atwood compared the bill to the letters that French monarch Louis XIV used to arbitrarily imprison people in the 18th century. “If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” she wrote. The lettres de cachet were orders signed by the king for a variety of purposes. Their most infamous usage, however, was to imprison suspects without a trial, have them shunted off to a convent or hospital or banish them to the colonies. The Marquis de Sade, the sadistic French activist and writer, was imprisoned repeatedly via lettres de cachet... Justice Minister Arif Virani took issue with The Spectator’s characterization of the bill in a response posted to X, though he did not specify what he thought the article got wrong... Atwood compared the Trudeau government’s new law to the “thoughtcrimes” described in George Orwell’s 1984... Thoughtcrime is an idea brought up regularly in discussions of censorship, but in the case of the online harms bill, a more apt literary comparison may be to Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report, in which an entire police bureaucracy — called “Precrime” — exists to arrest suspects before they get around to committing crimes, with the help of “precogs,” human mutants who can see into the future. “In our society we have no major crimes,” says John Anderton, the captain of the Precrime department in The Minority Report, “but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.”... While there are some safeguards in place, noted Josh DeHaas, a lawyer with the Canadian Constitution Federation, the bill could still have a chilling effect on free speech, even if those with unpopular opinions aren’t routinely punished for speaking or writing. Canadians might simply shy away from speaking about controversial topics."
Margaret Atwood supports hate speech and fascism. Time for the left to disown her!
When it comes to determining hate speech, we can't just 'trust the experts' - "They may not have realized it, but the drafters of Bill C-63, the legislation Justice Minister Arif Virani introduced last week that would enact the government of Canada’s Online Harms Act, have intervened in a philosophical debate at least as old as Plato. This debate concerns the relationship between knowledge and political authority and can be summed up as follows: if one’s claim to wield political authority rests upon knowledge, how do we ourselves know that a given ruler or government possesses the right knowledge? With its expansion of laws governing “hate speech” and strengthening of the regulatory regime that oversees them, Bill C-63 doesn’t so much as answer these questions as steamroll over them. There are two fundamental problems here. The first is that not all matters of dispute are resolvable in this manner because certain issues are political by their very nature. Is it for example genocide denial to inquire into the validity of claims of mass graves on residential school sites? Is it criminal bigotry to ask whether a prepubescent child is a good candidate for surgical intervention? The point is not that there is necessarily a correct answer to this and other questions, but rather that one cannot rule certain positions out of bounds in the absence of the kind of authority that can only derive from the political process. Every parent will at some point resort to the logic of “Because I said so” (and, speaking as a parent, I am supremely grateful for this option), but the authority of a democratic government is different from the authority of a parent, not just in degree but in kind. Our rulers are not our qualitative superiors, but (in theory, at least) people like ourselves. Indeed, it is we who authorize them to speak on our behalf; we do not rely on them to authorize our ability to speak... who rules, and on what authority? Indeed, for all his demonstrable flaws, Prime Minister Trudeau has a far more plausible claim to democratically represent the interests and preferences of Canadians than any “expert tribunal.” Others have rightly pointed out the bill’s potential for abuses, as well as its illiberal approach to fundamental questions of freedom of expression. But it’s worth noting how it indicates a larger and deeply troubling trend in how our elites conceive of politics in a democracy. For this bill is not just a bad idea in its own right; it reflects the habits of mind of an entire political class that believes that technocratic expertise can stand in for democratic debate. Indeed, their position seems to be that certain subjects are too dangerous to be left to the people to hash out with one another in public forums. We already saw during the COVID-19 pandemic how this high-handed form of governance could go awry, and it appears this government has learned nothing from that experience. This does not mean that there is no such thing as hatred or political extremism. Indeed, any functioning society has a need to declare certain behaviours out of bounds. But it does mean that how we define such terms is inseparable from the political commitments we already hold. For, one cannot answer such questions without committing to a particular political understanding. Consequently, the advocates for the Online Harms Act are assuming a consensus on its substance at the outset, thus relieving themselves of the burden of actually convincing the public while gaining an advantage for their own political commitments in the process. Similarly, the Act maintains a complaints process that operates as a parody of civic virtue, encouraging ordinary people not to engage more directly in political life to persuade fellow citizens of their point of view, but rather to leverage the powerful machinery of the federal government for their personal grievances. As it happens, we already have a pretty good solution for the dilemma posed by Bill C-63: to leave such matters to the political arena where they can be hashed out by an engaged democratic citizenry. And this solution might be applied to quite a number of areas—from crime prevention to energy to immigration policy and beyond—that have lately become the exclusive domain of dubious experts of various stripes. As for the general unpleasantness that frequently accrues to online spaces, a solution is at hand for that as well—one that has the added benefit of strengthening overall mental health and well-being: log off and go outside."
Trudeau Government Used Faked Intelligence To Illegally Frame Protesting Truckers As Violent Extremists - "Over the last year, Public and others have reported on illegal abuses of power by government intelligence, security, and military agencies across the Western world. These abuses of power have included censorship efforts by the US Department of Homeland Security and British military; Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entrapment schemes; and FBI and Secret Service involvement in January 6, 2021 pipe bomb disinformation. Now, a months-long Public investigation reveals that the Canadian government used disinformation to crack down on the “Freedom Convoy” protest, led by truckers demanding an end to Covid-19 vaccine mandates, in February 2022. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s national police force, then promoted this false information to other “Five Eyes” English-speaking nations. This discovery is significant because it contributes to a pattern of intelligence agencies from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which have collaborated on surveillance since World War II, being caught abusing their powers to investigate and persecute the political enemies of elected officials."
Ottawa late to respond to Emergencies Act commission findings - "The Liberal government has missed a deadline to respond to the findings and recommendations of Justice Paul Rouleau, who headed a federal inquiry into the government’s first and only use of the Emergencies Act in 2022.
David Rosenberg: The Canadian economy is mired in weak fundamentals and investors are taking note - The Globe and Mail - "The budgetary situation is out of control and there is no serious attempt in Ottawa to promote fiscal stability. There is a false glow attached to a 1.9-per-cent year-over-year real GDP growth rate at a time when the pace of population growth is running at a 2.4 per cent annual rate, courtesy of the immigration boom. That means the economy, in real per-capita terms, is contracting by 0.5 per cent on an annualized basis. The real problem with the domestic economy is its composition. There is too much reliance on consumer spending, which has expanded by more than 20 per cent in the past decade. Housing has seen closer to high-single-digit growth. These are non-productive sources of growth. Business capital spending on both machinery/equipment and plants has contracted 10 per cent apiece over the past 10 years. Spending is in the wrong areas of the economy in terms of generating lasting positive multiplier impacts. What is shocking is that there has been zero growth in these productive areas of the private sector over the past decade. That scenario is the product of a government which has lacked the will to use the tax and regulatory system to promote capital investment – it instead focuses on redistributing national income. As such, productivity in Canada is down 1.4 per cent year-over-year and has contracted outright sequentially for four consecutive quarters and in 10 of the past 11. This is what is missing in Canada, and it is a sad state of affairs because productivity growth is the mother’s milk for future economic prosperity. Instead, what Ottawa has done is attempt to camouflage the situation via the most aggressive immigration program since the CPR embarked on building the transcontinental railway in the late 1870s. This is not to say immigration is a bad thing. But its fast pace does complicate the inflation picture – especially in housing – while the beauty of productivity is that it promotes noninflationary growth and makes the Bank of Canada’s job a whole lot easier."
Danielle Smith on X - "Today, Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau spoke with Alberta media during which he managed to call Albertans fools, claimed the carbon tax was saving Alberta families thousands of dollars, and condemned anyone supportive of parental involvement in their child’s education. We know that Albertans do not take his absurd claims seriously; however it is sad to see this Prime Minister, like his father before him, try to use Alberta as a punching bag to win votes in other parts of the country. Instead of attacking our province, Mr. Trudeau could have informed our government about his visit to Alberta and extended an invitation to meet with me to discuss our amazing energy sector and workers, Alberta green technologies that are changing the world, removing red tape for struggling child care operators, or the housing and affordability challenges. Next time the Prime Minister visits Alberta, I hope he calls my office to arrange a meeting as he did with the Premiers of Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba. I await his call."
Ottawa sitting on $2.5 billion in carbon tax rebates owed to small business since 2019 - "The federal government has been sitting on $2.5 billion in carbon tax revenue collected since 2019 despite repeated promises to return it to small businesses in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, says the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). The federal government pledged to return 10% of carbon tax revenue back to small businesses, farmers and Indigenous people but has returned almost zero since the tax began. On top of that, the carbon tax is increasing to $80 per tonne on April 1... Making matters worse, CFIB estimates small businesses actually pay 40% of the costs of the carbon tax, yet they are only supposed to receive up to 10% of the revenue once Ottawa gets around to figuring out a way to return the dollars as promised."
Wage theft is disgusting. But government rebate theft doesn't matter
Kelly McParland: Chrystia Freeland, please don't try to fix anything - "Justin Trudeau has been declaring his determination to improve life for the middle class since even before he became Liberal leader. “You grow the economy by strengthening the middle class and those hoping to join it”... He’s been prime minister for eight years now and millions of ordinary Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque, unable to find a doctor, worried about the mortgage, pessimistic about the future and struggling just to hang on... An Abacus poll showed the Liberals losing in every region, among every gender and every age. A third of people who identified as Liberal weren’t sure they’d even vote. In seven of eight categories measured, at least half the respondents rated the government’s performance as “poor” or “terrible.” Asked to identify the Liberals’ best hope for winning the next election, respondents to a Nanos survey overwhelmingly suggested replacing Trudeau as leader... 67 per cent of respondents agreed that “it feels like everything is broken in this country.”... Since she first got the finance job, Freeland has been giving speeches insisting Ottawa has “guardrails” against overspending, that it respects a “fiscal anchor,” and knows where the “safe harbour” of budget-making is located. “Our ability to spend is not infinite,” Freeland acknowledged in her 2022 budget speech, yet the spending has continued to grow apace nonetheless. The non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Office projects this year’s deficit to reach $46.8 billion, almost $7 billion more than Freeland estimated just a few months ago. Program expenses keep rising despite repeated pledges, but the real killer is the sharply increased cost of past borrowing: Ottawa now spends about $4 billion a month just on interest charges. When interest rates were low and the Liberals were borrowing profusely, they were warned repeatedly that higher rates would eventually arrive and the result would be painful. Freeland insisted Canada could handle the strain. Now interest costs are higher than the price of federal childcare payments, and while Defence Minister Bill Blair admits Canada’s military is in a “death spiral” over declining recruitment, he adds that “the current fiscal environment” is once again blocking the path to doing anything about it. How desperate are the Liberals? Last week Freeland announced a break on taxes for beer-drinkers, an echo of the “buck-a-beer” plan Ontario Premier Doug Ford once championed to much sniggering by Liberals... Will the Liberals learn from experience? Seems unlikely. Their favourite response to a range of voter gripes is to blame the Harper government, which left office eight years ago. Food prices, housing problems and climate issues have all been shrugged off as Conservative holdovers; asked recently about a surge in auto thefts, Trudeau said it was Harper’s fault."
Most Canadians think Canada is broken and are angry with Trudeau government: exclusive poll - "Canadians across political lines were on the same page when it came to the perception that Canada is broken, with 70 per cent agreeing with the statement. Most Conservative voters (85 per cent) backed the idea. Notably, two-thirds of NDP voters (66 per cent) agreed, in addition to 58 per cent of Bloc Québécois voters and a fair number of Liberal ones. “Forty-three per cent of Liberal voters agreed the country feels broken these days. Obviously, that’s less than half of the percentage of Conservative voters, but that was slightly higher than I would have expected,” Andrew Enns, an executive vice-president at Leger, told National Post... The deepening sense of national brokenness is led by a growing sense that “everything is expensive,” shortcomings of the public health-care system, and a sense that “my standard of living is declining.” Notably, topics such as tackling climate change and Canada’s standing on the international stage ranked at the bottom of respondents’ concerns. The number of Canadians who think “everything is broken” increased three per cent since a similar Postmedia-Leger poll conducted one year ago... The driving force behind the growing discontentment with the Trudeau government is rising costs and inflation, with over two-thirds of respondents (72 per cent) expressing anxiety for themselves and their families on the topic. This was followed by the state of health care (62 per cent), housing affordability (49 per cent), crime (36 per cent) and homelessness (35 per cent)."
Time to increase the carbon tax again to save the planet and live up to international commitments
The One Big Growth Industry of the Trudeau Years - The Bureaucracy - "When Jean Chrétien became prime minister in 1993 the federal deficit was at record peacetime levels. His government’s 1995 budget cut spending sharply and reduced the number of bureaucrats. As the chart shows, from 1997 to 1999 their number fell three per cent, even as the population rose two per cent. Restrictive fiscal policy worked and in fact led to a modest increase in the bureaucracy during the next four years. By 2003 the growth rates of population and bureaucrats were the same. That continued for the first two years of Paul Martin’s tenure (2004-05) though the bureaucracy then proceeded to grow two percentage points faster than population. The Harper government’s economic policies were greatly influenced by the severe global financial crisis that started in 2008. In large part to deal with the problems the crisis caused, the bureaucracy grew rapidly until 2011, exceeding population growth by eight percentage points. After the crisis abated, however, the Harper government shrank the bureaucracy by a record-setting 10 percentage points, which more than made up for the large increases during the preceding four years. After that the number of bureaucrats levelled off. But in 2015 their cumulative growth since 1997 was seven percentage points below that of the population. With the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, however, the federal bureaucracy started to grow rapidly. By 2022 it had grown 27 percentage points, which put it nine percentage points ahead of population growth. Note that this rapid growth of the bureaucracy started well before COVID struck. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has faced large and growing fiscal deficits. The 2023 federal budget was supposed to address that with a wide range of policies, but none mandates reductions in the size of the bureaucracy. Anyone who has lived through the last three decades, as the prime minister has, should know about the important role reductions in government employment have played in eliminating the deficits of the governments of Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, not to mention Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The credibility and likely the success of Trudeau’s own policies suffer by the absence of such reductions. Reducing the size of the bureaucracy has at least two beneficial effects. Most obvious is the saving of bureaucrat salaries and benefits. In 2021, according to a study published by the Fraser Institute, wages alone in the public sector were 8.5 per cent higher than those of their private-sector counterparts while the public sector also generally enjoyed more generous pensions and earlier retirement. But there are also important non-fiscal benefits from cutting bureaucracy. The remaining staff must deal with the public by applying regulations more flexibly and using less paperwork, changes that would be welcomed by most Canadians. In addition, some functions will be carried out with fewer staff or terminated completely, reversing the growth in numbers that bureaucrats have been able to attain when fiscal conditions were normal. As Oscar Wilde put it: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”"
Maxime Bernier on X - "The number of federal civil servants has skyrocketed since the election of Justin Trudeau! And what was the result? More debt, more intrusions into provincial jurisdictions, more paperwork, but not more services. @iedm_montreal"
Bloat in the Federal Public Service: Justin Trudeau Ranks Last among Canadian Prime Ministers over the Past 40 Years - "An expanding public sector comes with consequences. It can generate a number of adverse effects on a country’s economy, including undue competition with private-sector employment that can exacerbate labour shortages. This can hold back productivity growth, because, for a number of reasons, public-sector employees are often less productive than those in the private sector. In comparison with other G7 countries, Canada is no stranger to low productivity growth"
Liberals love big government
Ottawa ends pandemic programs, shifts priorities in $449B spending plan - "despite the shift away from expensive pandemic programs, overall spending in 2024-2025 is anticipated to jump at least 16 per cent to $449-billion. When the Trudeau government took office in 2015, overall government spending in that fiscal year was just $242-billion."
If you pile on record volumes of debt, when you're in opposition you can blame the new government and the credulous will believe you
Does Canada need a national school lunch program? The NDP ‘demand’ it - "The Liberals campaigned on establishing a “national school food policy” in their 2021 election platform with the goal of working with the provinces and territories to start a school meal program. The campaign document said this would cost $1 billion over five years."
Expect a finance minister in survival mode to turn on spending taps - "The problem is the billions of dollars of new expenditure needed to shift the political dial could make an already grave fiscal situation much worse. As a report issued by the Parliamentary Budget Officer on Tuesday makes clear, if the Canadian economy were a horse, it would be in danger of being boiled down for glue... Macklem told the House of Commons finance committee that large spending increases could get in the way of beating inflation back to its target level in the timeline the bank has laid out... The Liberal government has failed to live up to any of its fiscal guardrail promises in the past — the 2015 election pledge of three “modest short-term deficits” followed by a balanced budget; its next commitment was to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio every year... The PBO sounded a particularly vexing alarm with its prediction that the debt servicing ratio — that is public debt charges relative to government revenues — will rise to 10.2 per cent this fiscal year. That means that $10 in every $100 of revenue will be spent on interest (compared, for example, to $6 of every $100 on defence)... Statistics Canada caused a stir with its latest GDP per capita numbers for the fourth quarter of 2023, which showed the fifth decline in six quarters. As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne pointed out, GDP per capita is now below where it was in the fourth quarter of 2014 (adjusted for inflation), as growth in population outpaces economic growth... Stats Canada recently said investment per worker at Canadian firms declined by 20 per cent between 2006 and 2021. Yet, the Liberals have grown the public service by one third and increased public spending by 40 per cent since coming to power... who has any confidence that the Trudeau government has the situation under control? Certainly not Derek Holt, head of Capital Market Economics at Scotiabank. In a remarkable blog posting on the bank’s site this week, he said he is “deeply worried about public policy in my country.” Bank economists are notoriously two-handed — “on the one hand…, but on the other.” Holt proved the existence of that rare phenomenon, the one-handed economist. “Productivity is in a tail-spin. A greater share of GDP is spent on here-today-gone-tomorrow current spending by governments and households than in a decade. Tax policy is uncompetitive. Business bashing has become common-place by people who have never spent two seconds working in private industry… “Changes to labour laws have benefited unions, while collective bargaining exercises are driving wage growth to the moon, despite collapsing productivity. Major sections of the economy are literally being taken over by the government, with recent examples being child care, dental care and now pharmacare. “Do we get better quality outcomes in state-run health and education sectors? Tried visiting an ER lately? ‘Nough said.” This winter of discontent is unlikely to be relieved by more spending. Too many people feel the bill is being passed to future generations, and that the current generation is not getting value for money."
Clearly the solution is to bash and tax "the rich" more, and increase government spending
Meme - The Pleb Reporter @truckdriverpleb: "Here is Justin Trudeau shaking hands with a Holocaust DENIER. This pic was from yesterday. Why is the mainstream media so SILENT about this?"
Andrij Melnyk @MelnykAndrij: "Welcome to Ukraine Mr. Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau"
Meme - Nya Pfannerstill: "The Trudeau Govt gave $4Billion to grow gender equality in Syria and Iraq, while telling Canadian Veterans, it didn't have any money to help with them with medical care #CanadalsBroken"
"Some veterans want more than Ottawa can afford, Trudeau tells town hall"
"The Trudeau Govt has given $4 Billion to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon since 2016. It believes it is helping grow gender equality. Any guesses how much of our taxpayer dollars are funding terrorists?"
Meme - Nya Pfannerstill: "Every post says the same thing - "Honest Canadian citizen here, I don't get why many people hate Trudeau. I think he's one of the best Prime Ministers in the country right now. He needs time to do this. We should back him and trust the process. We can do this! Let's go Canada!""
