Erin O’Toole voted out as leader by Conservative MPs
The party’s members of Parliament met virtually today to cast secret ballots after about one-third of them signed a notice that triggered a leadership review.
Ontario MP and national caucus chair Scott Reid said in a statement that 73 Conservative MPs voted to replace him while 45 endorsed him.
There are 119 Conservative MPs, including O’Toole. As caucus chair, Reid said he did not vote.
Audits conducted by Canada’s anti-money laundering watchdog plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic, new figures show, a deeply “troubling” sign for authorities tracking dirty money, financial crime experts say.
The data from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) showed money laundering audits in real estate dropped from 146 in 2019-20 to just 53 in 2020-21 – a decrease of 64 per cent. That’s down from nearly 200 audits of real-estate entities in 2018-19.
… The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees’ endorsement on Tuesday of an as-yet theoretical Vancouver bid for the outing in eight years’ time hits all the usual notes. It’ll bring us all together. It’ll convince average yobs to get off the couch and take up the monobob. It’ll solve our historic inequities through the healing power of many, many official statements.
Some of these things might even be true. But what goes unsaid is that what another Games will do most of all is give a few, already important people a chance to feel even more important. It’s the world’s most expensive photo opportunity, paid for by you, but not featuring you. Cool trick.
The Olympics are a scam.
Go incognito.
The “freedom convoy” that has descended on Ottawa began as a revolt against new requirements that unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers returning across the border from the US must quarantine for 10 days. While we can debate the wisdom of the rules in question, what cannot be denied is the truckers’ huge symbolic importance. In a society that has grown much more polarised under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, they have given a voice to groups consistently demonised by the Left-liberal Canadian establishment: namely conservatives and the white working-class.
After three generations of an official culture of political correctness in education and the media, Canada has become a strongly Left-leaning society. Six in 10 voters support the culturally Leftist Liberals and New Democratic Party (NDP) while 4 in 10 back the Tories or populist People’s Party of Canada (PPC). In many other western societies, such as Britain, the balance is far closer to 50-50.
h/t SDMATT
Tucker Carlson accuses the Canadian media of being a mouthpiece for Justin Trudeau and ‘borrowing attack lines’ from the liberal American media to smear ‘Freedom Convoy’ of truckers
Tucker Carlson has accused the Canadian media of being a mouthpiece for Justin Trudeau and says they ‘trotted out some attack lines borrowed from CNN and NBC News’ to smear the truckers protesting the Prime Minister’s vaccine mandates.
On Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday, the Fox News host criticized the Canadian leader for not meeting with the truckers.
‘”So I’ll meet with the people at a rally as long as I agree with their goals, as long as they agree with me, it’s totally fine, like Black Lives Matter,”‘ Tucker said, imitating Trudeau. ‘You get the sense even someone as dim as Justin Trudeau realizes this is not a winning argument. He needed his friends in state media to help.’
The media will not recover from this disgrace.
Conservative MPs will vote today on whether to keep Erin O’Toole as their leader or plunge the party into another leadership race only 18 months after they finished the last one.
MPs opposed to O’Toole’s leadership have collected enough signatures to prompt today’s secret ballot on his future. That vote is expected to take place sometime before noon ET.
A vote by 50 per cent plus one of the 119 sitting Conservative MPs calling on O’Toole to step down would force him to make way for an interim leader immediately.
Sources tell CBC News that O’Toole’s caucus opponents believe they have the necessary votes, with at least 60 MPs agreeing that he has to go.
I hear we should know by noon, but I suspect it will be later. The Sun is live blogging.
Ontario reports 72 more COVID-19 deaths; under 3,000 hospitalizations
Ontario reported 72 more COVID-19 deaths that occurred in the past month and under 3,000 patients in hospital with the virus today as both hospitalizations and ICU capacity continue to gradually decline.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health says 67 of the latest deaths occurred over the past 24 hours, with four deaths occurring on Feb. 1, 18 deaths on Jan. 31, 17 deaths on Jan. 30 and the remaining deaths in the preceding days.
555 people are in ICU with #COVID19. 83% of patients admitted to the ICU were admitted for COVID-19 and 17% were admitted for other reasons but have tested positive for COVID-19.
There are 3,909 new cases of COVID-19.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) February 2, 2022
Experts hopeful about Omicron’s end but wary about what lies ahead
VANCOUVER — The Omicron wave appears to be cresting across the country, but it’s difficult to predict what’s next for the pandemic, experts say.
Prof. Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University, said the development of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 gives clues as to what might come.
Omicron evolved to evade pre-existing immunity and reproduce at a much faster rate, he said.
Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from ABC’s “The View” Tuesday evening after she claimed the Holocaust was “not about race.”
“Effective immediately, I am suspending Whoopi Goldberg for her wrong and hurtful comments,” ABC News President Kim Godwin tweeted.
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments.”
OTTAWA — For days, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole loyalists have been working the phone, calling members of caucus and the party in the hopes of him surviving the latest — and greatest — threat to his leadership.
But multiple sources within the Conservative party say O’Toole has encountered more closed doors than expected, as previously staunch allies seem to be turning their backs on the leader on the eve of a crucial vote on Wednesday morning.
Embattled Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole told MPs Tuesday he was open to changing his party’s policies should he survive a caucus vote on his leadership, two sources told Global News.
O’Toole faces what he called a “reckoning” with the Conservative caucus Wednesday after 35 MPs signed a petition to force a vote on his leadership over the weekend.
Premier Jason Kenney is calling for calm following an incident he said involved “people allied with the protesters” at the Coutts, Alta., border crossing, describing it as an attempt to “ram members of the RCMP.”
“This kind of conduct is totally unacceptable,” Kenney said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “Assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply doing their job to maintain public safety and the rule of law is completely unacceptable.”
The incident reportedly led to a collision with a civilian vehicle, Kenney said. He also called for people to stay away from the area while the RCMP carry out their action against the blockade.
… The crowd has also reportedly continued to thin out from the thousands of protesters seen over the weekend to about 250 people, including 50 on Parliament Hill.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he “won’t give in” to the protesters’ demands, which range from ending all COVID-19 restrictions to Trudeau’s resignation.
Aafia Siddiqui’s name may not be known to most people, but to some she has been notorious for thirty years
Many people in the West will not have known the name Aafia Siddiqui until the terrible incident at a Texas synagogue earlier this month, when the British terrorist Malik Faisal Akram asked to speak to his “sister” Aafia and demanded her release, before being shot dead by US police.
But I, along with thousands of my generation, have known Aafia’s name for 30 years. During the early to mid-1990s, I was on an international Muslim students’ email list, dominated by Islamists, with Aafia Siddiqui, then a student at MIT. A close British friend of mine was also studying for his PhD at MIT at the same time and knew her personally. His recollections of her, he once told me, were that she was very active in da’wah (proselytising for Islam), handing out free Qur’an translations on campus. My own recollections of her via electronic media are that of a student activist, who posted many times per week to an audience of thousands.
KABUL, Afghanistan—The Taliban, officially termed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, went from an insurgency to a self-declared state in a matter of moments when they entered the abandoned presidential palace five months ago.
The leadership immediately professed to have changed from their brutal rule of the 1990s in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition and foreign aid. However, it is clear that some unsettling elements are unlikely to change.
MARVIN KALB, WHO LATER WORKED FOR CBS AND NBC, tells a story about being tailed when he first arrived in Moscow in 1956, to work at the US Embassy.
He decided to take a walk around Red Square on his first full day in the Russian capital. He soon noticed that he was being followed by a man in a black overcoat—undoubtedly a KGB agent.
The two ended up in the department store GUM, just off Red Square. As Kalb explained in his memoir The Year I Was Peter the Great, he bought two ice cream cones there. He held one out behind him, without looking. The agent took it without a word, and the two went on, one following the other.
