The arrests that followed a “sensational” gold heist have shed light on the illegal gun trade between the US and Canada.
Thousands of gold bars worth C$20m ($14.5m; £11.6m) were stolen from the Toronto airport in Canada a year ago.
Police have since said the gold was sold for cash to buy guns in the US.
Let’s say you are the vice president of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive (Excellence?), VP EDI, at a Canadian university and you organize an event to have a “courageous conversation” about anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism that ends up being a uniform rant against Israel and Zionism with no equity, no diversity, or inclusion for Jews.
MARKHAM, Ont.—The Toronto-area private school whose name came up prominently during the foreign interference inquiry for busing international students to the Liberal nomination vote of MP Han Dong in 2019 was invited to celebrate the Chinese New Year with the prime minister two years later.
The invitation was issued even as the prime minister and Liberal party organizers had been made aware of “irregularities” at the nomination vote by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 2019. The cited issues included international students being told to support Mr. Dong under “veiled threats” by the Chinese consulate.
On April Fools’ Day, 2015, Daegun Chun’s life changed forever. It was a brisk spring morning in north Toronto, and Chun, a 46-year-old Korean man who had resided in Canada for more than a decade, was expecting a routine visit from his aunt, Byung Hwa Tak. Together, the two of them ran a private high school and career college called Northern Lights, and they had business to discuss. Tak showed up as scheduled. It was the next set of guests Chun never saw coming.
h/t Mauser
“Just prepare for death”
A Japanese person living in Canada is giving people a reality check about moving to the country that’s most known for being friendly and progressive.
X user @ong777777 shared a brutally honest guide earlier this week that was translated into English by Japanese and East Asian historian Nick Kapur.
The federal government’s new budget is largely dedicated to building more homes, faster, so that young workers can afford to own one. The Conservative housing plan claims to do the same, only better.
There is one problem: These plans would further force down Canada’s fertility rate, straining our economy and increasing social tensions.
Canada’s “Fairness For Every Generation” budget was quite clearly designed to promote the perception of fairness, rather than its realization. It’s a marketing document, as federal budgets are, through which a government with a certain degree of gall can claim that “it would be irresponsible and unfair to pass on more debt to the next generations,” while also introducing $52.9-billion in new spending, with the cost to service the national debt ($54.1-billion) now surpassing health transfers to the provinces ($52.1-billion).
After learning that samples of deadly Ebola and Nipah viruses had been sent from Canada’s top-security lab in Winnipeg to China, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said his reaction was similar to that of an MP who expressed incredulity upon learning of the move.
“I’m really concerned about the March 2019 incident where [Winnipeg lab scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng] were implicated in a shipment of live Ebola in Hanipah [Nipah] viruses on a commercial Air Canada flight. How the hell did that happen?” NDP MP Charlie Angus asked during a House of Commons Canada-China committee meeting on April 15.
Among people who immigrated to Canada in the last decade, more think Canada’s latest immigration targets will bring in too many people, a newly released Leger poll suggests, while fewer recent newcomers think the plan will bring in the right amount of people or not enough.
What can be said about Canada’s health care system that hasn’t been said countless times over, as we watch more and more people suffer and die as they wait for baseline standards of care?
Despite our delusions, we don’t have “world-class” health care, as our Prime Minister has said; we don’t even have universal health care. What we have is health care if you’re lucky, or well connected, or if you happen to have a heart attack on a day when your closest ER is merely overcapacity as usual, and not stuffed to the point of incapacitation.
Public spending should support the general public. But in Budget 2024, released Tuesday, the Liberals continued to opt for identity-based programs narrowly targeted to demographics of preference.
On affirmative action, the budget heralded the expansion of the Employment Equity Act, which currently sets employment “targets” for women, visible minorities, Indigenous people and the disabled in the federal public sector. In the fall, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan announced that Black people and LGBT people will each get their own target (quota), so this isn’t new, but we can still expect it coming down the pipeline.
The Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act against the 2022 Freedom Convoy has cost Canadian taxpayers over $73 million thus far.
According to newly released records obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s enactment of the Emergencies Act, the use of which has since been ruled “not justified” by a federal court, to drive out Freedom Convoy protestors from Ottawa in 2022, cost the Department of Public Safety $73,550,568.
Like most Americans, I always tended to believe Canada was our more sensible, if less intense, neighbour. It was a country that respected liberal traditions derived originally from England, embracing values such as free speech and assembly along with tolerance for opposing views.
This is no longer the case. As authoritarian regimes are expanding all around the world, notes Freedom House, Canada and other western nations seem to be tilting in that awful direction. Some Canadians may fear the future of democracy under a new Donald Trump administration in the United States, but they would do well to look closer to home.
h/t DS
Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre claimed that the housing provisions in the 2024 federal budget introduced by the Liberals this week contain much of the same language as their 2015 platform, questioning why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making similar promises after nine years in power.
Ahead of the vote on the 2024 federal budget, Mr. Poilievre addressed the House during Question Period, claiming that the proposed policies on housing were very similar to those made by the Liberals in their first budget tabled in 2015.
The federal government says that it will be providing Canada’s spy agency with hundreds of millions of dollars over the next eight years, including money to enhance its presence in Toronto in the face of mounting global threats.
In the budget announced by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland Tuesday, the government said that the country “continues to be targeted by hostile actors, which threaten our democratic institutions, diaspora communities, and economic prosperity.”
We suffer so much diversity we’re foreigners in our own land.
