Links - 16th April 2026 (2 - Homelessness)

Homelessness isn’t just a housing problem - "Despite more than 200 social agencies and non-profits operating in in the Downtown East Side, the problem just keeps getting worse, Brodie said. And part of the problem may be that homelessness is viewed too much through the lens of housing stock shortages. “To our mind, the biggest problem is that we're calling it a homelessness problem,” she said. “But it's not it's not just about homelessness. This is mental illness and drug addiction.” While some people who are living in tents, on the streets and in temporary shelters are homeless because they simply can’t find affordable housing, it is estimated that half to two-thirds of the homeless population in the Greater Vancouver region have some form of mental health issue, drug addiction, or both. An estimated 7,655 individuals were identified as homeless in B.C., according to the 2018 Report on Homelessness. Fifty-six per cent of respondents reported an addiction, 40% reported having a mental illness and 33% had a physical disability. To address the drug addiction problem on the Downtown East Side, a four pillars approach was adopted. Those pillars included prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. But key pillars of that approach are missing, Brodie said – enforcement being one of them. “There's no enforcement because the police have been have been literally handcuffed from doing their jobs,” Brodie said. “What we're doing isn't working,” Krog said. “The numbers are not diminishing, the severity is worse. The social costs are horrendous.” With respect to mental illness, and how it has led to so many mentally ill and drug addicted people living on the streets, one nexus is the deinstitutionalization of mental health that occurred throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout North America, large mental hospitals like Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam were shut down. The idea was to build smaller, community based homes and support services where people with mental illness could live and receive the support they need in their own communities. But to a large extent, that second phase of deinstitutionalization was never followed through on... Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist at Simon Fraser University and director of SFU’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, agrees with Trudeau that decriminalization is no silver bullet. “Nobody has been cured of addiction with a drug,” he said. “There’s no publication showing that…. increasing the supply of drugs to a population improves health. In fact, it’s the opposite. What people need is genuine care and material support.”"

Toronto MP Baber calls out Mayor Chow, 'outright crazy' shelter plan - "Baber said the Wilson site is “particularly ill-conceived,” sitting between Pierre Laporte Middle School and a daycare centre. He also worries it’s too close to a shelter near Jane St. — at 1677 Wilson Ave. — which was the scene of a stabbing murder last month . Pasternak told the Sun that operation is “a case study in how a shelter comes off the rails,” lacking in day programming and essential supports... “We now know, regretfully, that Toronto city shelters are handing out drug paraphernalia to their residents,” Baber added. “The Toronto homeless shelters are no longer just homeless shelters. They have turned into satellites for the so-called drug-injection sites.” (In a statement, the City of Toronto said the new shelters “will not be safe consumption sites or offer safe consumption services,” but will “provide health services” as defined in the city’s shelter standards, which includes giving out “safer drug use equipment.”)... At one point, committee members Jamaal Myers, Josh Matlow and Brad Bradford pressed Perks on why citizens weren’t allowed to discuss the six sites in question being used as homeless shelters. “The report mentions shelters multiple times … but the deputants are not allowed to talk about shelters,” Myers said. Bradford pushed harder. “I know you want to keep that in a very tight little box today, but that’s probably not why 80 people took their time to be here and provide feedback to this committee today,” Bradford said, to cheers from waiting speakers."
Allowing free and open debate is a Danger to Democracy
If you define euthanasia as "healthcare", you can also frame euthanasia opponents as being against providing "healthcare"

Attempt by Waterloo to clear a homeless encampment again blocked by a judge - "A judge has blocked the region of Waterloo from dismantling a homeless encampment located in an area that the region plans to use as a transit hub"
Damn car lobby making it hard to improve public transit!

Woman was living inside rooftop grocery store sign with computer and coffee maker for a year - "Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.  “She was homeless,” Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department said Thursday. “It’s a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign.”  The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year...   “There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you’d have in your home.”  The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an outlet on the roof, Warren said.  There was no sign of a ladder. Warren said it’s possible the woman made her way to the roof by climbing up elsewhere behind the store or other retail businesses.  “I honestly don’t know how she was getting up there. She didn’t indicate, either,” he said."

Why is Yonge St such a mess : r/toRANTo - "I dont care about "its always been this way", its such a stupid excuse. Yonge st from union to bloor is a complete disaster. It is FILLED with crackheads and crazy people at every block, who are a threat to everyone including themselves. So many of the parks are unusable!! I cant tell you how annoying it is that one of the best streets in Toronto, with such rich diversity, transit and stores is ruined by the normalization of drugs. No other major city puts these injection sites right on the main street of the city!!! The city needs to take itself seriously if it wants to be "world class", you dont let mess like this into your main streets, this is litearlly YONGE ST, how could you let it be filled with drugs and homelessness! Invest in mental health hospitals, or shelters, but dont let them on the street! As fucked up as it sounds, they need to help them somewhere thats not the main core of the city. This is so stupid. Its not even the entirety of downtown, fort york, king, bloor are not like this, only yonge is this extreme."

I was the only tourist at a seaside hotel – every other guest was homeless - "The problem arises due to councils having a legal duty to provide shelter to those at risk of homelessness. A lack of affordable rental properties and a dearth of council homes means that most turn to hotels as a stopgap solution... Given the vast sums of money going into private coffers, it seems reasonable to ask whether Whitehall has inadvertently created a “hotel-industrial complex”, in which certain less scrupulous operators prioritise government contracts over providing rooms to tourists and commuters. Unless things change dramatically, what started with a handful of emergency rooms in a Travelodge may prove much closer to the mythical Hotel California: easy enough to check in, but near impossible to leave."

Pictured: Homeless man who battered 'kind' woman, 36, to death with a mallet just days after taking him into her £1.3million flat - "A homeless man who battered a woman to death with a mallet just days after she took him into her £1.3million flat has been pictured for the first time.   Apapale Adoum, 39, is facing a life sentence after he admitted murdering Victoria Adams, 36, at her home in Hammersmith, west London, on February 9... Adoum had met her just three days earlier on February 6 when he was living in a homeless shelter.  She had invited him to stay with her but later wrote a note to ask him to leave."

Labour blasted for 'funding illegal immigrants' instead of 'supporting homeless' as city encampment grows in London's richest borough - "Nearly a dozen tents now line Edgware Road, once a clear and quiet bypass, as homelessness surges in London's wealthiest borough - prompting criticism of Labour for "funding illegal immigrants hotels" while neglecting rough sleepers.

The law protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair. I'm tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. : r/ilovebc - "More addicts on the street means more money given to the 250+ "aid" agencies throughout the area from all three levels of government plus their charitable statuses which means they don't pay taxes.  SRO's and injection sites facilitate drug dealing and property fencing, the area around them becomes visibly worse off within weeks of one opening up, and the people in charge never seem to live anywhere near these places.  If even 200 of the most prolific addicts were put in a facility and/or jail, the crime rate would drop by double digits overnight."

Law protects the rights of most vulnerable to live in filth, despair | Vancouver Sun - "In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The numbers were staggering: Over 100 programs existed just for housing. Thirty provided health care, 30 offered family services and a miscellany of another 100 services — including a food bank for pets — brought the total to 260 social welfare agencies operating solely within the eight square blocks of the DTES. Those 260 programs served just 6,500 clients. Five years earlier, in 2009, Province reporter David Carrigg also did a survey of the programs available in the DTES, and he identified 174 social welfare agencies offering services to about 5,000 clients... in the five years between Carrigg’s survey and Culbert’s and mine, not only had the number of people needing help grown but so had the number of agencies serving them. And the cost to taxpayers? Over $360 million annually.  That astounding figure — almost a million dollars a day — did little to satisfy the DTES’s voracious appetite for tax dollars. More to the point, it did nothing to eradicate the misery and living conditions of the people who lived there.  Quite the opposite. Rather than winning the war on poverty — and what a quaint phrase that seems now — governments engineered a truce, with the unstated understanding that if they couldn’t solve the problem or spend their way out of it, they could contain it. Those 260 social service bureaucracies weren’t solutions to an intractable problem; they were barricades. They ghettoized their impoverished clientele by concentrating the services on which they depended.  And let’s be honest: The public was complicit in this, and content for it to continue as long as the misery stayed confined within the borders of the DTES.  And yet here we are. The squalor spreads. It corrodes a once-vibrant downtown core. It infiltrates the suburbs. Daily acts of random violence and vandalism have become normalized, while a cornucopia of drugs — some decriminalized, some tolerated, many deadly — act as accelerants...  Nothing, absolutely nothing, has worked. Over the decades, the problem has been studied to death — admittedly, a poor choice of words — with consultants and academics and the legions of poverty industry advocates offering up solutions that ultimately fail. They fail because they’re predicated on two simple criteria:
1. Give us more money.
2. Give us more of everything — housing, hospital beds, food banks, drugs, injection sites, counselling or — and this is always implicit — empathy, with a side order of collective guilt...
the author laments that it has been the public’s and governments’ norm “to daily bypass our downtrodden, our homeless, our addicted or mentally ill on the street as though they are either invisible or merely equivalent to lampposts” — to which I have to reply: ‘Are you f—ng kidding me?’  The public and its governments have done exactly the opposite and, short of bathing their feet with Christ-like piety, have directed billions of tax dollars not only to ease the suffering of the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill, but also to make them completely dependent upon those dollars.  Another Sun story — this one again by Culbert — examined the merits of involuntary care through the experiences of three addicts who underwent the process, and while two saw it as beneficial and helped them get clean, the third condemned it as “dehumanizing” and a cause of her PTSD. Though she no longer does drugs, she said that if she relapses she would prefer to take her chances with street drugs that could possibly kill her rather than be readmitted to hospital against her will.  Well, OK, I thought, ‘You’re an adult. Good for you for having the honesty to express that choice, however idiotic I may find it.’  But what I thought was missing in her testimonial was (a) any appreciation of the monumentally expensive efforts governments and the public had tried to make on her behalf, however ill-informed she may have believed those attempts to be, and (b) her failure to recognize the destructive effects that a relapse would have not just on her own health and family, but, more importantly, also on the collective health of the public, who would be asked to offer up yet more money, and deal yet again with her relapse — providing she survives it...  I’m tired of the endless, self-regenerating calls for more studies and more funding when all I see is a colossal waste of money and effort leading to no improvement. I’m tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. I’m tired of civil rights that supersede my own, and treat the right to defecate in the streets with greater regard than my right to be offended by it.  Finally, I’m tired of a social welfare system that not only encourages dependency, but refuses, out of moral timidity, to also admit its complicity in it, and which shies away from asking hard questions about personal responsibility and the consideration of measures more draconian than safe injection sites — measures like a return to complete drug criminalization, a higher threshold of minimum sentences for trafficking, the establishment of rehabilitation centres or work camps exclusively in wilderness areas far from the temptations of cities, the discontinuation of any efforts that facilitate drug use, and yes, the robust expansion of an involuntary care system.  It’s also my opinion that none of these measures, given the current legal climate, will become reality, at least for the foreseeable future. Under our Constitution and the Criminal Code, the law, in its majestic equality, protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair, and, as so often happens, bring about their own deaths.  How enlightened we have become! What progress we have made! We’ve reached that point when now sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing one’s daily bread are no longer evidence of a system’s failure.  They are the system."
Clearly, the problem is they don't spend enough money

BC NDP finally admits to problems in supportive housing - "The New Democrats finally acknowledged this week that B.C.’s supportive housing projects have become havens for violence, weapons, fires, and drug use, confirming what critics have been saying for months and, in some cases, years.  They also conceded that the government had made the problems worse by amending the Residential Tenancy Act to make it harder to evict the worst-case abusers from supportive housing.  But they continued to delay fixing the problems they themselves had compounded. Rather they appointed a working group to come up with remedies, perhaps including repeal of the NDP-authored changes to the Act. As recently as May, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon had rebuffed pleas for regulatory and legislative relief from the mostly non-profit providers of supportive housing for homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction.  “I believe people are safe,” Kahlon said at the time. “And I believe they are much safer than if they were in encampments or sleeping in parks. It is safer not only for the public, but it is also safer for individuals.”  Yet there was Kahlon on Monday, presiding over a news conference where he pretty much conceded that the critics were right all along.  Yes, there was a growing problem of drug-taking in supportive housing.  “We’re seeing a greater shift toward smoking fentanyl instead of injecting, many of our supportive housing sites — in fact, most — have policies in place saying no smoking in your room. We also have concerns that we had supportive housing projects that had higher levels of fentanyl in the air.” Yes, there were chronic rule breakers.  “When you have individuals that consistently break the rules, that have a difficult time functioning in our supportive housing sites. … We have some individuals that have been offered housing, but they can’t find a way to stay in that housing because they can’t follow simple rules.”  Yes, there were some genuinely bad actors.  “What I also see is some people trying to prey on vulnerable people at supportive housing, and that’s unacceptable. And we are open to whatever measures are needed to keep everyone safe — workers, people living there in the community.” Yes, the government’s legislative changes had made it harder to catch the worst offenders and harder still to evict them.  “We have heard from providers that they need more authority to take action and keep people safe, and we will be working with our partners to find a path forward that ensures people can live in a safe, inclusive and supportive environment.”  And there was growing evidence of trouble, ranging from the death of one person in a project in Victoria to the chaos surrounding three hotels turned into rooming houses on Granville Street in Vancouver... as Kahlon now concedes, the main victims of predatory rule breakers are the very people that the New Democrats sought to protect...  Amazing it took him and his colleagues this long to figure it out... Still, this is not exactly a rush job — the alarm bells began ringing a long time ago on the problems with supportive housing.  The grudging response is entirely in keeping with the NDP’s response to earlier criticism of its policies regarding decriminalization, open drug use, safer supply and repeat violent offenders.  First came the claim that all was well. Then the attacks on anyone daring to challenge the NDP narrative. Kahlon last year accused supportive housing critics of “punching down to score political points” on drug addicts, homelessness, the mentally ill and other vulnerable people.  Then, after all the denials and recriminations, they concede the critics have a point and announce a plan to fix things.  It’s the Eby government method: It starts doing the right thing only after it has exhausted all the other options."
Weird. We're told that Housing First is the way to go

After repeated denials, B.C. NDP admits to problems inside supportive housing. But despite a rising tide of concerns, the NDP is taking a go-slow approach to making changes. : r/ilovebc - "Half of them should be in a mental institution and half of them should be in prison. Give them free money and housing, this is the result."
"Yeah many of these people simply cannot be integrated in to modern society. It’s pointless trying anymore. It would be great if it could happen, like turning water into gold. But that doesn’t mean we should continue to try failed methods."
"And taxpayer funded narcotics."

Meme - Man to park bench with bars in the middle: "WHERE CAN THE HOMELESS SLEEP WITH THIS HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE?"
Homeless person on floor with bumps: "I TRIED YOUR APARTMENT BUT SOME JERK LOCKED THE FRONT DOOR."

Homeless man kills Good Samaritan after she asks him to move out - "A homeless man, invited into a Good Samaritan’s home, bludgeoned her to death with a mallet days later after she had asked him to move out.  Victoria Adams, 37, met Apapale Adoum, 39, at a homeless shelter on Feb 6 and invited him to stay at her flat in Hammersmith, west London. Adoum attacked the mother of four with severe force on Feb 9.  Prosecutors told the Old Bailey that the homeless man “attacked and killed her because she asked him to move out of her home”... the defendant had a history of violence and was carrying two knives and a screwdriver when he was arrested at the scene... doum had a history of violence against women and had been released from prison in July 2024.  In 2018, he broke a woman’s jaw and gave her a black eye, and in 2024 he attacked two female prison officers, punching one of them in the face, knocking her out.  In an outburst in the dock, Adoum denied being a woman beater, saying: “I’m just violent. That’s my problem. I’m a bad man for that, don’t make me out to be a coward.”"

Why are animals allowed at RBC? : r/rbc - "Banker here. It’s most definitely drugged out homeless people. I’ve had to walk around them, passed out covered in needles, just to get to my office in the morning."
"How about you lazy pricks just clean up your spaces?"
The homeless lobby think the whole of society has a duty to serve the homeless, who can do no wrong, because they have been wronged by society

Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness - "These findings are based on exploratory analyses in a modestly sized sample that represents a high-functioning subset (e.g., 31% screen-in rate) of the total homeless population in Vancouver. Thus, our results may not extend to people who are chronically homeless or experience higher severity of substance use, alcohol use, or psychiatric symptoms"
This doesn't stop left wingers sharing memes misrepresenting the experiment to try to expand the homeless-industrial complex

Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic - "A hotel repurposed to house homeless people in the Cowichan Valley during the COVID-19 pandemic is suing BC Housing, alleging its unhoused tenants left behind ‘extensive’ damages when they moved out.  Funded by the province through the Rapid Relief Fund and BC Housing, in 2020 the Ramada in Duncan began to offer a stable place to live for nearly half of the Cowichan Valley’s homeless population.  Two years later, as tenants moved out in the spring of 2022, a fight over who should coordinate and pay for repairs as a result of the unhoused tenants ensued.  “Effectively, the hotel had been trashed,” Nick Both, the Ramada Duncan manager testified in court Tuesday.  Both says the hotel needed “a full gut” before it was operable and fit for human habitation."

Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Have you seen the mess they leave around their tents? Who would have thought they would damage their free rooms."
Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Who could imagine the homeless wouldn't take care of their free housing?"
"I frequently have to do visits to these units in my town. They're full of garbage, rotting food, fire hazards, and stolen property. One of the complexes had 3 units permanently condemned within the first year."

Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Fun fact: BC Housing used a lot of hotels across the lower mainland during the pandemic and many of those hotels still took regular guests. You can look-up reviews and it's absolutely hilarious. It's best when they include photos. For example, check the lowest ratings for "Travelodge by Wyndham Langley":
   "Would rate 0 if I could, clear signs of drug use in my room. 7 separate occasions the RCMP were called to the premises. Constant racket, would not ever stay here again."
&
   "The room was really smelly we couldn’t stand the smell the beds where very weak very uncomfortable we couldn’t sleep the whole night worst experience of our life I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone there where drug addictis smoking outside our room horrible"
&
   "Warning do not stay at this Travelodge location, hotel is full of drug addicts and low lives. Discusting place. Not a place for family's or single professionals, only drug addicts. They will also not refund your money if you cut your stay shorter. Super scam! I Will be contacting Travelodge main office. Travelodge is a good well respected hotel but not this location!""

Obstruction of the Justices: Why We Need the Notwithstanding Clause More than Ever

From 2023:

Obstruction of the Justices: Why We Need the Notwithstanding Clause More than Ever
When Ontario Premier Doug Ford invoked the Charter’s “notwithstanding” clause in back-to-work legislation last fall, he became just the latest political leader to be pilloried for using it. Loudly condemned as an instrument of oppression, the notwithstanding clause has been under attack for decades as a political expedient that should never be used. But as Gordon Lee argues, the clause was a carefully considered addition to the Charter intended to safeguard democratic legislatures from the whims of activist judges. And with a Supreme Court that continues to invent rights and expand its power, we are going to need it more and more.  

Few issues today arouse more anger and fear-mongering in Canada than the “notwithstanding” clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many among our governing elites, academia and well-funded activist groups have declared the clause nothing less than a grave danger to Canadian society. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, for example, has said the clause is “dangerous to every person regardless of their political beliefs,” while Nathalie Des Rosiers, a former law school dean and the current Principal of Massey College at the University of Toronto, declared its use “lethal to the protection of all rights.” Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden has called the clause undemocratic despite the fact that, when it’s invoked, it is done by elected representatives to override a decision made by unelected judges.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been equally strident, saying “all Canadians” should “be very concerned about” the use of the notwithstanding clause, while NDP MP Matthew Green described Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s use of the clause to keep schools open as “the trampling of constitutional rights,” seemingly unaware that the notwithstanding clause is itself a constitutional right given to Parliament and provincial legislatures, enshrined in Section 33 of the Charter.

Prominent among the arguments advanced – and seemingly persuasive – is that the use of the notwithstanding clause runs contrary to the intent of those who drafted and signed the Charter in 1982. A group of law professors argued in 2018, for example, that the infrequent use of the clause was “precisely what the framers of the Constitution had hoped and predicted.” Many critics believe it was merely a regrettable political expediency adopted to assure passage of the Charter – which had been subject to long and contentious negotiations – but only to be used in truly rare and exceptional cases.

There are, however, several problems with this argument. First, as constitutional law scholar Geoff Sigalet has argued, several framers did not hold such expectations. Many of those involved have been clear that the clause was meant precisely to give elected officials the final say on legislation and was seen as a necessary addition. Even then, the notwithstanding clause has been used very rarely. Over more than 40 years, it’s been used just 21 times by the federal government and all provinces combined. Given the thousands of laws and regulations passed in that period, this should hardly raise alarm bells. Finally, those who appeal to the framers’ alleged intent ignore the other side of the story: that the Supreme Court of Canada has in several key decisions involving the Charter chosen to ignore or even denigrate the framers’ intent.

There are many examples of judicial activism where judges have gone beyond what the Constitution clearly states – inventing rights unknown or unimagined by those who drafted and signed the document. Judges becoming de-facto legislators would seem to pose a danger to Canada’s form of democracy. With no other way to redirect Canada’s top court and its unelected judges, the notwithstanding clause has become necessary to protect Canadians from the Court’s increasingly policy-driven if not downright arbitrary decisions.

The Court Invents the Right to Strike

One recent example of judicial activism is the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 2(d) of the Charter, which states that everyone has the freedom of association. In 1987, the court ruled that s. 2(d) did not give unions a constitutional right to collective bargaining or to strike. This understanding stood for many years.

In 2007, however, the Court suddenly changed its mind and invented a right under s. 2(d) to engage in collective bargaining. Eight years later, the Court went much further. At the time, Saskatchewan was suffering through a lengthy and debilitating strike by essential workers. Nurses, snow-plow operators and prison workers walked off the job. The strike meant surgeries cancelled, those near death denied admission to palliative care, and children’s health care services significantly reduced. To ensure this would never happen again, the provincial government passed a law to prevent essential workers from striking.

A group of unions challenged the law, and despite the strike’s effects and its own prior rulings to the contrary, in its 2015 Saskatchewan Federation of Labour decision the Supreme Court struck down the law by invoking a newly-invented constitutional right to strike. Justice Rosalie Abella, whom one prominent scholar has called “Canada’s foremost activist judge,” wrote the opinion, declaring confidently that “[i]t seems to me to be the time to give this conclusion constitutional benediction.” While undoubtedly self-assured in tone, Abella’s use of the word “benediction” – a religious term referring to a pastor delivering God’s blessing upon grateful congregants – presents a disturbing view of how Canada’s most powerful judges see their relationship to the nation’s citizens.

The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour decision has given immense power to unions, particularly those in the public sector. When education workers in Ontario planned to walk off the job last fall, which would have closed thousands of schools indefinitely, they did so with the Supreme Court’s blessing. When Ontario’s government invoked the notwithstanding clause in back-to-work legislation (later revoked), it was pilloried in the media for doing so. Of course, there would be no need for the clause if the Court had not suddenly invented a constitutional right to strike, which the Charter’s framers never envisioned.

Ignore the Original Meaning

Section 2(d) is not the only Charter provision whose original meaning the Supreme Court has ignored. The most glaring example is the Court’s interpretation of s. 7, which states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

According to several key drafters of the Charter, s. 7 applied only to procedural rights and did not give courts authority to invent new substantive rights. Procedural rights refer to basic rights like a fair hearing or trial – rights based on the legal process, in other words. Substantive rights are much broader and more amorphous. They are essentially practices to which a court has decided to extend constitutional protection. Assisted suicide is one prominent example, a practice which has nothing to do with ensuring a fair procedure before a court or tribunal, but which the Supreme Court declared was a substantive right under s. 7 in its 2015 Carter decision.

Three people who played key roles in drafting the Charter all testified that s. 7 did not give courts the power to invent new substantive rights: Jean Chrétien, the then federal minister of justice; Barry Strayer, assistant deputy minister; and Roger Tassé, deputy minister. But in 1985, the Court dismissed this testimony by simply declaring that the drafters’ statements about the Charter’s meaning deserved only “minimal weight.” The premiers who actually signed the Charter, which was not even four years old at the time, were all still alive and presumably could have been consulted. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1985 BC Motor Vehicle Reference that s. 7 entitled courts to invent new substantive rights.

The Court also declared it would ignore s. 7’s original meaning because the justices personally believed the Charter should be interpreted as a “living tree.” Living tree constitutionalism essentially allows judges to ignore the ordinary meaning of words and insert their own beliefs into their country’s Constitution. Multiple scholars have pointed out serious issues with the coherence of living tree constitutionalism as a matter of legal interpretation, but the Supreme Court has ignored the growing criticism as it continues to cite the analogy, most recently in June 2022.

The Court has used its newfound power under s. 7 to overrule Parliament on several highly contentious moral and political issues: abortion, prostitution, supervised taxpayer-funded sites to consume dangerous drugs, and euthanasia. In so doing, it has silenced the voice of Canadians and imposed its own views on the country through judicial fiat.

Math Tests are Racist

A third Charter provision whose original meaning the Supreme Court has discarded is s. 15(1), which bars discrimination by governments on a number of grounds such as race and sex. For decades, s. 15(1) was targeted at intentional discrimination. Three years ago the Supreme Court simply ditched that important concept in Fraser v. Attorney General (Canada), a case which challenged an unequal distribution of pension benefits as discriminatory.

In Fraser, the Court ruled that if a law or program results in different outcomes between demographic groups then it is discriminatory and unconstitutional, even without wrongful intent and even if disparities in outcome can be traced to non-discriminatory explanations, such as merit. In other words, Fraser basically deemed any law or program which results in anything but rigidly equal outcomes for every single demographic group presumptively illegal.

By 2021 Fraser’s illogical reasoning was on full display when an Ontario court struck down the province’s requirement that elementary and high school math teachers pass a grade-level math test. The court concluded that because there were differences in passing rates among teachers of different races, requiring math teachers to pass a math test was racist and unconstitutional.

By attributing differences in academic performance to discrimination, when these differences can be explained by other factors, the Court arrived at a legally and philosophically poor decision that threatens to do untold damage to individuals and society. Having teachers who cannot understand the concepts they are being paid to teach students bodes poorly for Canada’s youth. It also undermines if not effectively outlaws the concept of rewarding individual hard work and merit – a necessary element of any successful society.

As Kerry Sun and Yuan Yi Zhu wrote about this case, “[W]hen the courts insist on undoing such judgments on the basis of a flawed interpretation of a Charter right, the legislature may be duty-bound to invoke the notwithstanding clause.” When courts are outlawing standardized math tests, which have been used by human civilization since ancient times, things have clearly gone off the rails.

The “Human Dignity” of Mass Murderers

As shocking as it may be, banning math tests is not Canada’s most egregious example of judicial activism. That distinction belongs to the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on s. 12, which states that “everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.” The Court has taken that to mean that dangerous criminals should be entitled to more lenient sentences. Despite a growing number of Canadians wanting stronger sentencing laws, and Parliament responding, the Supreme Court has struck down a number of such laws and encouraged lower courts to follow in their footsteps.

The most recent of these decisions came just two months ago, in the case of R v. Hills, when the Court struck down a mandatory minimum sentence for intentionally discharging a firearm in a populated area. The justices acknowledged that the mandatory minimum sentence would not be grossly disproportionate for the individual in the case, who had fired at a passing car. It could have stopped there, but instead the Court decided to strike down the entire law on the basis of a fictional individual whom it imagined could be similarly charged and sentenced for firing a paintball gun at a shed, complaining that, “[I]t would outrage Canadians to learn that an offender can receive four years of imprisonment for firing a paintball gun at a home.”

The Court called its use of fictional, imaginary scenarios to strike down mandatory minimum sentences “reasonable hypotheticals” – despite being unable to point to a single instance in which anyone had actually been arrested, let alone convicted, for shooting a paintball gun at a shed. In her dissent in Hills, Justice Suzanne Côté wrote that the “hypothetical is ‘more imaginary than real’ and is not a sound basis on which to nullify Parliament’s considered response to a serious and complex issue.”

The court has nevertheless continued to use fictional scenarios in other cases to strike down mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug-related offences. The Court has called the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which like the Charter’s s. 12 prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “highly relevant” to understanding s. 12. But, as Justice Thomas Wakeling of the Alberta Court of Appeal correctly noted in 2020, “[T]he United States Supreme Court bases its decisions on real-world scenarios – not hypotheticals so unlikely to occur that no one should make important decisions in reliance on them.” Instead of duly evaluating Wakeling’s concerns, the Supreme Court of Canada in Hills refused to engage with the substance of his criticism and haughtily waved off Wakeling’s contention as “lack[ing] merit.”

Emboldened by the Supreme Court, there have been over 100 decisions by lower courts over the last eight years striking down mandatory minimum jail sentences, often using similarly fanciful scenarios. Striking laws based on imaginary scenarios is judicial activism of a particularly dangerous kind, as it may involve putting serious criminals back on the streets.

The Court is also rapidly moving outside the Canadian moral mainstream. In last June’s Bissonnette decision, it sided with Alexandre Bissonnette, the mass murderer who had opened fire in a crowded mosque prayer room, killing six innocent worshippers. The Court decreed that every mass murderer be given “a realistic possibility of applying for parole” because prohibiting it would be “degrading in nature and thus incompatible with human dignity.” The decision devoted much more attention to the supposed dignity of the criminal than to his victims, who received passing mention.

Henceforth every Canadian mass murderer, a category which includes serial killers like Robert Pickton and Paul Bernardo, will be able to apply for parole after just 25 years behind bars, the same sentence they would have received had they killed one person, essentially providing a grotesque sentencing “discount” for each additional murder committed.

Just weeks after the Bissonnette decision, two mass murderers received such sentencing discounts. Alek Minassian, the man who sped a rented van down a busy Toronto sidewalk and murdered ten women in 2018, received the same sentence he would have received if he only killed one person, as did an Oshawa man who murdered his ex-girlfriend and her two children. Although the Crown had asked that this murderer be ineligible for parole for 75 years, to reflect the three people he murdered, and despite his taunting of his victims’ families in court, the sentencing judge stated that because of the Supreme Court’s Bissonnette ruling, “a consecutive period of parole ineligibility cannot be imposed.” In recent months, numerous mass murderers have become eligible for lesser sentences, which means that some of the most violent criminals in Canadian society could be back out on the streets earlier than previously thought.

By comparison, last month a New York judge sentenced Payton Gendron, who murdered ten black Americans and livestreamed his slaughter in a racially-motivated attack, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In New Zealand, a judge sentenced Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 in two Christchurch mosques and who also live-streamed his slaughter, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to Canada’s Supreme Court, however, these sentences are “degrading” and “incompatible with human dignity.” It would seem more reasonable to call the Supreme Court’s position incompatible with justice.

What “Notwithstanding” was Supposed to Mean

In light of all this, it is important to recall that the notwithstanding clause was intended specifically to push back against unreasonable court decisions. In 1981, then-Justice Minister Chrétien stated clearly that the clause would allow legislatures to quickly “correct absurd situations” resulting from court decisions.

It was Peter Lougheed, then the Alberta premier, who suggested the clause in the final negotiations on the Constitution in 1981. Lougheed was backed by Allan Blakeney and Sterling Lyon, the premiers of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, respectively. Lougheed pointed out in a 1991 lecture that such a clause was hardly unusual; the Alberta Bill of Rights, the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and, for that matter, the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights all had similar provisions. “We needed to have the supremacy of the legislature over the courts,” Lougheed explained. “We did not [want] to be in a position where public policy was being dictated or determined by non-elected people.”

Despite later protests over its use, Chrétien used similar language to explain its inclusion. It would, he said in 1981, “ensure that legislatures rather than judges would have the final say on important matters of public policy.” Then-Saskatchewan Premier Allan Blakeney saw the clause as necessary to ensure that the state could, for economic or social reasons, or because other rights were found in the circumstances to be more important, choose to override a Charter-protected right.

Lougheed made it clear that not only was the clause necessary, his government would be perfectly willing to use it. In 1983 he warned that Alberta would invoke the clause if the Supreme Court interpreted s. 2(d) to include a right to strike (which it refrained from doing for over 20 years). That was far from the most notable instance of such a vow. Pierre Trudeau, who spearheaded the Charter’s development, promised to use the notwithstanding clause if the courts ever interpreted the Charter to find a constitutional right to abortion. In a 1981 letter to Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter, Archbishop of Toronto, Trudeau wrote: “Should a court decide at some future date that sections 7 or 15 do establish a right to abortion on demand, Parliament will continue to legislate on the matter by overriding the court’s decision.”

Brian Peckford, then the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, was another key figure in the Constitutional negotiations and is the last living premier to have signed the Charter. In an email exchange with C2C Journal, Peckford asserted that using the clause is a proper response to judicial activism and called the modern assertion that it was a matter of political expediency meant to be used only rarely simply “invalid.” Peckford does not agree with “living tree” exponents, either. In a blog post last year, he wrote that for judges to change the plain meaning of the Constitution “isn’t democracy – this is rule by the unelected, which is the antithesis of parliamentary democracy. It’s time Canadians stood up and opposed such judicial interference.”

Thankfully, there has been a growing recognition in recent years of that need to push back. In the recent Conservative Party of Canada leadership race, multiple candidates including winner Pierre Poilievre promised to use the notwithstanding clause to keep mass murderers behind bars. Similarly, Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s Minister of Justice, has asked Ottawa to use the clause to reverse the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down mandatory registration of convicted sex offenders, a decision which has benefitted rapists, domestic abusers and pedophiles.

Ultimately, those who appeal to the framers’ intent to argue against using the notwithstanding clause ignore that the courts themselves have interpreted the Constitution far beyond anything imagined by the framers. Lougheed, for one, certainly saw it occurring. In a 2002 interview he recalled expressing concern that the Charter would “let the courts take the place of elected parliamentarians. My God, that’s what’s happened.” Restoring a proper balance of powers will require elected governments to confront judicial activism. Invoking the notwithstanding clause is not only constitutional and democratic, but increasingly necessary to protect Canadians from the Supreme Court’s harmful decisions.

Selective Protection

Some Canadians worry that the notwithstanding clause could shield blatant violations of personal freedoms, as Quebec has been widely criticized for doing with Bill 21, which bars civil servants from wearing visible religious symbols at work. They should take some comfort in the clause’s built-in safeguard of a five-year time limit, however, requiring it then to be reinvoked by the legislature. Of course, voters still have the final say with their democratic right to oust any government that uses the clause to infringe on widely supported rights.

And while Bill 21 clearly infringes upon the right to religious freedom, there is no guarantee that judges would protect such rights any more than a provincial government. When several provincial law societies refused to accredit Trinity Western University because the law societies did not like the school’s faith-based code of conduct, for example, the Supreme Court sided with the law societies, even though the Court itself acknowledged that the law societies’ actions had infringed religious freedom rights. As well, retired Supreme Court Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, a hero of the left, was an outspoken supporter of banning civil servants from wearing visible religious symbols.

Courts have also repeatedly upheld violations of constitutional rights, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic when judges across the country upheld severe restrictions on liberty, speech, religion and conscience. Even in the last few months, courts have upheld Covid-19 vaccine mandates at colleges and universities, and even ordered that a woman whose survival depended on receiving an organ transplant remain ineligible to receive one unless she got vaccinated. On other issues, such as assisted suicide, Ontario’s highest court upheld a policy forcing doctors who do not support euthanasia to provide effective referrals, or else face punishment and the loss of their licence and livelihood.

In essence, the fear that the notwithstanding clause will prevent courts from protecting fundamental rights is misplaced, because courts are not doing a good job of protecting fundamental rights in the first place. Instead, they tend to expand protections for certain constituencies, generally those beloved by the progressive left, such as violent criminals, with no democratic accountability or check on their power.

Despite repeated assurances that Canada’s judiciary is not political, since gaining office in 2015 the Justin Trudeau government has appointed dozens of Liberal Party donors and failed candidates to the bench. Similarly, its “Independent Advisory Board” tasked with appointing Supreme Court justices is deeply partisan. Under Trudeau, this committee has been chaired by defeated Liberal politician Wade MacLauchlan and former prime minister Kim Campbell, who has repeatedly criticized Conservative Party leaders over many years, while several Board members have prominently advocated for left-leaning causes.

At the Supreme Court itself, Chief Justice Richard Wagner has actually boasted that he is “very proud” to call his court “the most progressive [court] in the world.” In 2022, Wagner described the Freedom Convoy as “deplorable” and accused convoy protestors of “tak[ing] other citizens hostage.” While Wagner has no problem using incendiary language to describe Canadians he disagrees with, he did not condemn the burning of dozens of churches in 2021, the deliberate destruction of statues and monuments across Canada, or the targeting of critical infrastructure and energy workers in western Canada.

Wagner is not alone in wading into politics. His predecessor, Beverley McLachlin, infamously compared Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a pet dog and has been involved in other dubious situations, while retired Justice Louise Arbour sharply attacked the Harper government’s foreign policy. Last year, now-retired Justice Abella likened the pro-life legal movement and the United States Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision to upholding white supremacy and racial segregation. In doing so, Abella effectively accused Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and a man who grew up in the shackles of racial segregation, of endorsing a reading of the Constitution that could bring back this odious practice.

The oft–repeated myth that Canadian judges are apolitical is clearly false. When judges strike down laws passed by Parliament and instead impose their personal views onto the country, they make decisions that are profoundly political in nature.

The way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Charter – by disregarding its original intended meaning, inventing new rights, and expanding its power to strike down legislation – has made it the most powerful political institution in Canada today. Nine unelected lawyers can nullify a unanimous vote in Parliament, as the Court did when it restored the ability of mass murderers to apply for parole. Even as they churn out decision after decision that is couched in the language of rights and professes the best of intentions, Canada’s judges and courts are proving to be ever-less reliable guardians of Canadians’ constitutional rights.

Without the notwithstanding clause, victims of crime and ordinary Canadians have no way to protect themselves from harmful court decisions. Ultimately, if one believes that judges should always have the final say on every single issue of importance to Canadians, there is no need for the notwithstanding clause. On the other hand, if one believes that judges can make bad and harmful decisions and that Canadians have the right to a voice in shaping the laws that they are governed by, then the notwithstanding clause is essential to preserving Canadian democracy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links - 16th April 2026 (1 - Migrants: US)

. on X - "Awful: Stephen Miller is privately floating the idea of restricting funding for the public education of undocumented kids. This has long been a right-wing dream: They want to get SCOTUS to reverse Plyler v Doe and further chip away at 14th Amendment. New:"
Syd Steyerhart on X - "The idea that a criminal can bypass border security and then the US taxpayer is on the hook to pay $40,000 per year for eighteen years to educate their children is simply insane. It never should have been allowed to happen."
If the Equal Protection clause means that you can't treat illegal immigrants differently from legal immigrants, that's basically endorsing open borders. In 1982, no less.

Chicago Dem slammed for suggesting Loyola student caused her own murder - "A progressive Chicago Democrat is taking a ton of heat for suggesting that a Loyola University Chicago student who was allegedly executed by an illegal migrant caused her own murder — and that she was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden was speaking after Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old from Yorktown, New York, was shot dead...   “They might have unintentionally startled this person at the end of the pier,” she added. “We don’t believe there is cause for broader community concern.”  An illegal Venezuelan migrant, 25-year-old Jose Medina-Medina, was arrested and charged with the killing. Hadden’s comments come despite police reports that Gorman’s killer stalked her from behind for some time before shooting her at point-blank range and fleeing. Hadden was accused of having “pretty much blamed Sheridan Gorman for her own murder”...   Another X user accused Hadden of “downplaying the murder of an American citizen in defense of a Venezuelan gangbanging invader.”  “Blaming the victim for startling the armed illegal invader? You, Maria Hadden, are garbage,” wrote a third."
It would only have been victim blaming if she had been raped, of course

Chicago Dem slammed for suggesting Loyola student caused her own murder by an illegal migrant : r/NewsWorthPayingFor - "On the one hand, she downplays the murder:
Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden was speaking after Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old from Yorktown, New York, was shot dead Thursday morning while she walked with friends along the city’s lakefront near campus. Hadden said the deadly shooting appeared to be a case of Gorman being “in the wrong place at the wrong time, running into a person who had a gun,” in an interview with Fox 32 Chicago.
On the other hand, she's happy to demonize the people who are working to remove illegal gangbangers from America.
   In January, she drew parallels between the Holocaust and ICE immigration raids in Chicago during a city council meeting.
If I didn't know better, I'd say she's prioritizing the safety of violent illegals over that of peaceful Americans."

ABC News on X - "The Trump administration is moving forward with its plan to swiftly remove Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia as soon as a court allows."
Lomez on X - "An illegal immigrant El Salvadoran gang member in Maryland getting deported to El Salvador then repatriated back to the United States then, after being indicted in Tennessee for human trafficking and subsequently released back to Maryland, now awaiting deportation to Liberia of all places is just about the perfect microcosm of the immigration problem.   Let in 10s of millions of illegals just by refusing to enforce border laws but to get just 1 of them out you need to spend millions of dollars and months or even years of legal wrangling just to dump them halfway around the world.   Entropy v order. Order is extremely difficult and costly. Stop breaking things!"

Heather Knight on X - "NEW: A viral video showed ICE agents detaining a woman at SFO on Sunday night. Documents obtained by the @nytimes show TSA officials scanning passenger lists tipped off ICE she was planning to fly to Miami. The woman has no criminal history. Always great to team with @Haleaziz."
Erick Erickson on X - "This is the bureau chief for the NY Times. She never mentions a judge ordered the woman deported. She also claims the woman has no criminal history, but she does. It is a crime to illegally enter the United States. The reporter made a choice to not give you the full story."

Kristi Noem spent £15k on horses for promotional advert - "Kristi Noem spent $20,000 (£15,000) on horses and thousands more on her hair and make-up for an advertising campaign that led Donald Trump to sack her.  The former homeland security secretary remains under investigation over $220m (£164m) billed to taxpayers in contracts tied to the controversial ads."
Weird. Left wingers claim that she was fired for mismanaging ICE

Meme - Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital: "TRUMP: I'm sorry Zohran, but we can't make exceptions for illegal immigration.
MAMDANI: *shows picture"
TRUMP: She can stay."
New York Post @nypost: "Columbia student detained by ICE will be released after Mamdani meeting with President Trump, mayor says *hot woman Elaina Aghayeva*"

Russian-born Harvard researcher describes detention at ICE facility and deportation fears - "Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by ICE since February. She was arrested as she returned to Boston with frog embryo samples. The government says she knowingly failed to declare them. Petrova's visa was revoked and she is flagged for deportation."
Weird. Left wingers tell us ICE only goes after brown and black people

Libs of TikTok on X - "WOW. A student at @TorreyPinesHS was suspended for putting up a poster at school which said "We❤️ICE. From real Americans." The school claims putting up these posters "incites pupils to create a clear and present danger" and produces a "hostile learning environment." This same school held an anti-ICE walkout last month. How many students were suspended for that @TorreyPinesHS ?  You can contact the principal here: robert.coppo@sduhsd.net"
Youth activism is only good when it pushes the left wing agenda

Wall Street Apes on X - "Democrats constructed a giant ‘Prosecute ICE’ sign made out of ice at the Minnesota State Capitol Jake Lang came and destroyed it “I’m currently being arrested” So only Democrats are allowed to destroy property in protest and burn down entire cities??"

Kali Fontanilla on X - "Just saw a video of a white liberal woman saying the new American Dream is leaving the country. 🙄 She is pushing a stroller through some beautiful scenery and using the hashtag #Switzerland.  A country that is 93% white and has stricter immigration laws than the United States. They even have train checkpoints where you must show citizenship papers. If you are caught in Switzerland illegally, you are immediately placed in detention centers, which the left would absolutely call “concentration camps”🤦🏽‍♀️  So she moved to a majority white country with strict immigration laws to get away from “racist Trump” and protect her peace.  The irony is completely lost on these morons. Oh well. Good riddance.  Maybe we should send 30,000 Haitians to her cute little white town in Switzerland to remind her why America should be just as strict as Switzerland."
Thread by @SydneyLWatson on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is actually ridiculously common among small, white, female content creators who talk about leaving the US for a better life.  I've seen them posting about moving to Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Japan etc. And, when people in the comments ask them what they like about the new country, these women ALWAYS say shit about how safe it is, how they can walk anywhere, any time of day, and not worry about being harassed.  Yeah, bitch. You moved to an ethnically homogeneous place that aggressively enforces immigration laws.  You moved to a country that aggressively enforces laws generally.  You moved to a CONSERVATIVE COUNTRY.  The insane irony for me is that these women actually can't see that the dumbass leftist policies they vote for in the US don't exist in the places they've moved to.  And, as a result, they are living a way happier, better life? lol?????
One of my oldest friends moved to Japan for a girl. He told me recently he could never live in a "diverse" country again.  And I just find it so funny. He's never been liberal, by any stretch. But, we used to get into some real heated arguments about immigration, and here he is, all these years later, telling me how terrific it is to live in a place with one people and one universal culture. 😂"

Everybody is Insane on X - "The New York Times ran a piece on their homepage about a guy getting deported even though he had lived in the US since a teenager and had been here for 20 years, and waited until the end of the article to mention that 19 of those years were spent in prison for murder."
MattieJohns on X - "Funny. It's also funny that the NYT thinks that the fact this guy was here illegally for 20 years is somehow a reason he should be allowed to stay. If you stole someone's car, and managed to avoid capture for 20 years, should you be allowed to just keep it?"
Trump Administration Deports Jamaican Man to African Prison Years After U.S. Sentence - The New York Times

Anti Woke Memes on X - "Rep. Jayapal (D): "This country was built by Somalis, Indians, Latinos, Africans." Is she Wrong or Retarded?"
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "I am so tired of third world foreigners who do not belong in my country not only getting elected to Congress, but then using that platform to lie about how other third-world foreigners built my country. None of you people built anything, much less America. You couldn't even build your own nations, which is part of the reason you continue to flood into mine."
JovanHuttonPulitzer™ אני לא סובל אידיוטים! on X - "ANOTHER INCONVIENT FACT: Chinese and Irish workers were crucial to the transcontinental railroad, and many later industries were built with immigrant labor. But the Census Bureau’s historical data show that the huge foreign-born waves in the 1800s and early 1900s were mostly European, not primarily Somali, Indian, or Latino. From 1850 to 1930, the foreign-born population rose from 2.2 million to 14.2 million, reflecting large-scale immigration that was predominantly European in those decades."

TRUMPGIRL on X - "Celebrities are bashing ICE on the Oscars red carpet while being protected by massive security. At the Oscars you’ll find:
• car sweeps
• K9 units
• helicopters overhead
• SWAT teams
• entire streets locked down
The message from Hollywood: security for us, but not for you!"

E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. on X - "During Trump's 1st year in office (Jan '25 to Jan '26), native-born employment rose 840k while the number of foreign-born workers employed fell 97k:"
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. on X - "The average American's weekly paycheck, adjusted for inflation, shrunk 4.0% under Biden, but is now estimated to have surged 2.0% during Trump's first year back at the helm - this is how you address the affordability crisis left by the last administration:"
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. on X - "Job growth in Jan came almost entirely from full-time jobs w/ only about 5% of the monthly increase in employment coming from part-time work; it's very positive to see people getting good paying full-time jobs w/ benefits and not just gig work:"
Weird. Left wingers keep claiming deporting illegal immigrants doesn't improve Americans' lives, and that Trump has done nothing to make Americans better off

The Latest Jobs Report Proves Trump's Theory of the Economy: Tariffs and Deportations Put Money in the Pockets of Working-Class Americans
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Turns out, when you deport 500,000 people and 2 million more voluntarily go home, Americans line up for the jobs they were doing—and companies have to pay them more! How Trump repudiated the Democrats' addiction to cheap labor:"
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "When Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was hauled before the Senate, he routinely bemoaned the lack of cheap labor plaguing poor, desperate American corporations. He of course denied the border was open, but Mayorkas would also almost always say the quiet part out loud: American corporations need more cheap labor.  Trump was elected to reverse all that—not just the chaos of the open border and the dangers presented by illegal criminals, but to reverse the Democrats whole economic paradigm in which you ship good jobs to China and import people enslaved to cartels to do the jobs remaining here.  Trump’s theory of the case was that if we deport the illegals and impose tariffs, American corporations would have to hire Americans and build stuff here."

Meme - Tombstone: "RIP 1713 AMERICAN CITIZENS K*LLED BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS"
Tombstone: "RIP 5 AMERICAN CITIZENS K*LLED BY ICE"
*Crying Democratic donkey at the second, ignoring the first*

Estefany Rodriguez: A reporter in Nashville covering ICE arrests in her community has been detained - "Nashville journalist Estefany Rodriguez frequently reports on Immigration and Customs Enforcement action, becoming familiar with the sudden arrests that have become hallmarks of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown...  Rodriguez also has a pending political asylum claim and a valid work permit, according to court documents. A spokesperson for ICE told CNN in a statement Rodriguez “currently has no lawful immigration status.”  “A pending green card application and work authorization does NOT give someone legal status to be in our country,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN... She came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2021, according to court documents. Before it expired, she applied for political asylum, it said.  However, according to ICE, “she failed to depart the country and is in violation of the conditions of her visa and currently has no lawful immigration status...   While Coxander said Friday he asked the court to let him amend his initial petition to release Rodriguez to “specifically address that this is a First Amendment violation and retaliation” for her coverage of ICE activities, the agents said they were detaining her because she had failed to show up for two immigration appointments."
Journalists are above the law and if you arrest them, it's a violation of the First Amendment

Ben Dreyfuss on X - "i still dont understand why these maga whackos are mad about people from india specifically."
Matthew Yglesias on X - "Indian immigration to the United States is legal, skilled, not associated with any crime problems, Indian-Americans are very successful, etc so the final boss of nativism is to convince people it’s bad based on random memes."
Project for Immigration Reform on X - "From the @nytimes :   “India is one of the top sources of illegal immigration to the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. As of 2022, more than 700,000 undocumented Indians were living in the United States, the center estimates, making them the third-largest group, behind Mexicans and Salvadorans.”"

Project for Immigration Reform on X - "Before “MAGA whackos”, there was liberal American journalist Joel Stein, who wrote about why he soured on Indian immigration to the United States, based on his experience growing up in a town that changed demographically almost overnight."
My Own Private India | TIME - "when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T;, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor. Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture... sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy."

Chief_Engineer on X - "They moved the goalposts again.  Now the claim is that caste discrimination is a First Amendment “religious right.” Not a civil rights violation, but a protected practice.  And as usual… the story gets mass-reported and scrubbed from Reddit.  If 1.4 billion people gain control of America’s hiring pipelines and bring caste with them, this isn’t a conspiracy. It’s our future unless we stop it."

Tim Young on X - "Nancy Mace eviscerates Tim Walz on Minnesota’s fraudulent autism program spending and lists the numbers. He tries to play dumb… “Did you not prepare for this hearing today?!?!”"
Marilia De Benedictis on X - "“What is a woman? If You cannot define that, you cannot define What is a Fraud”, Rep Nancy Mace hearing Tim Walz. #minessotaFraud"
Amazingly, I still see left wingers denying that there's fraud in Minnesota

Mike Netter on X - "And just like that... State Rep. Kristin Robbins showed the world the "webs of fraud" in Minnesota:  "Her child care center was shut down on Feb. 10 of 2026, just a couple weeks ago. She was caught at the airport fleeing the country. That's how they arrested her.    "The next day, Feb. 11, a new child care center -- hers was called Future Leaders Early Learning Center -- opened on the same site called Leaders Childcare Center, and it is operating right now, getting paid by our taxpayers.""

Matt Wolking on X - "An illegal alien in California, Eduardo Domingo Renoj-Matul, pleaded guilty to smuggling 20,000 illegals into the U.S.  He took payments of $18,000 to smuggle people from Guatemala through Mexico using a network of drivers and safe houses.  In one case when the fee wasn’t paid, Renoj-Matul called the immigrant’s mother and warned her that her daughter “would come home in a box” if the money wasn’t sent. The daughter was held hostage at a house in California for two months.  Renoj-Matul’s co-conspirator José Paxtor Oxlaj was a driver involved in a crash in Oklahoma that killed seven people, including a four year old.  These are the people Democrats are trying to protect."

CWBChicago on X - "A migrant is accused of waiting outside a day care to shoot his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend as the couple arrived to drop off a child."
Migrant shot ex’s new boyfriend during day care drop off: prosecutors - "Jose Montilla Carreno was ordered detained by Judge Antara Rivera on charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery"
Illinois is broke and corrupt on X - "This story has so many takeaways. The illegal alien shooter has 2 kids since arrival. He shot his ex’s new boyfriend while they dropped off a kid He stole the gun. They used a license plate tracker to find him. The same tracker is illegal to find illegals if ICE uses it"

Prosecutor: 'Minnesota Has Become a Magnet' for Welfare Fraud - "Half of $18 billion in federal welfare funds, which supports 14 Minnesota-run programs since 2018, has been lost to fraud, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said... People come from all over the world to steal millions from U.S. government Medicaid, housing, and other programs, he added. “Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” Thompson said. “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”  Thompson explained that “traditional Medicare and Medicaid fraud is that people overbill,” but said the fraud in Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s Minnesota has been unique in that thieves are not providing any services, just creating fake companies and filing wholly fake bills to the state. Thompson revealed that charges have been filed against Anthony Waddell Jefferson, Lester Brown, Hassan Ahmed Hussein, Ahmed Abdirashid Mohamed, Kaamil Omar Sallah, and Asha Farhan Hassan, who collectively filed more than eleven million dollars in fake bills for non-existent people with disabilities and autism, which included housing procurement services, wire fraud, and other fraudulent activities. The fraud cases have already resulted in many prosecutions and convictions. A dozen people have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future scam, in which members of Minnesota’s Somali community filed fake bills to the state supposedly for feeding needy children, but the services were never performed and the money was stolen with some of it even sent to Africa to fund terrorist groups in Somalia.  Republican State Rep. Elliot Engen, who is running for the Minnesota State Auditor’s office, posted a video to his social media lamenting that “fraud has been legalized” by leaders neglecting to verify the legitimacy of the companies with contracts being paid by the state."
This won't stop left wingers claiming there was no fraud

Meme - Sarah Stock @sarahcstock: "Which implies that raping 12 year olds is Somali culture"
End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "Qalinle lbrahm abducted a 12 year old in Minnesota and r*ped her. St. Paul Islamic Center wrote a letter of community support, saying he has not "assimilated into non-Somali culture""

NizNellie3 on X - "🚨  Wanna puke?  Qatar-owned Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri, a NON-CITIZEN from India, was arrested by ICE for alleged ties to Hamas and promoting their propaganda after Oct 7.  He was released by a Biden judge. Khan Suri’s wife is the daughter of a Hamas official.  Since his release, he’s spoken at numerous events, trashing America, Israel, and telling abhorrent lies about ICE.  He’s now been deemed deportable by a new federal judge, yet he’s still here, still employed by Georgetown, and now a guest of Zohran Mamdani’s cabinet at an event discussing “Islamophobia.”  We have won nothing in 2024 if the result is a citizen from India is permitted to foment terrorism, hatred of America, and receive a federally-funded paycheck."