Canada

A decision on whether or not media outlets can obtain and publish information in a redacted version of four Coutts, Alta., blockade search warrants is scheduled for Aug. 26.

Thirteen people were arrested and charged with various weapons and mischief offences after an RCMP raid revealed a cache of weapons, ammunition and body armour near the Coutts border blockade site on Feb. 14. Christopher Lysak, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Mitchell Morin and Chris Carbert are also each charged with conspiracy to commit murder against RCMP officers.

… Concern for climate change goes right out the window when gas prices are high

Climate change also ranked pretty high as a national threat. Although the issue failed to chart among Conservative and PPC voters, it scored a number one spot among Liberals, and NDP and Bloc Québécois voters. But concern over a warming climate seems to magically disappear when that same poll respondent is gassing up their SUV. Voters for every single party lent majority support to the idea that “Canada should use its natural resources to reduce energy costs for Canadians” — basically, that we should pump as much oil as possible to bring down fuel costs. The “keep it in the ground” camp, meanwhile, only managed 35 per cent support.

A new poll from a prominent British pollster sketches the outline of a steady civic peace in Canada and debunks more familiar worries about expanding ideological divides.

Rather than the polarized society on display in America and Europe, the poll of 10,000 Canadians describes a nation that is proud and hopeful “in a modest Canadian kind of way, if you’ll allow me to say that,” said Michael Ashcroft, a pollster and former deputy chairman of the U.K. Conservative Party.

Support for immigration is wide and deep? I’m not buying that. This poll seems more a propaganda exercise.

Benjamin Dichter, the free-thinking, radical nonconformist at the heart of Canada’s trucker protests, continues a long history of Jewish social activism

For two weeks this past February, Benjamin Dichter was thrust into the absurdist spotlight of modern political celebrity. A trucker-led convoy opposed to Canada’s digital COVID vaccine passport system had paralyzed downtown Ottawa, inspired the wildcat occupation and shutdown of several U.S.-Canadian border crossings, and provoked a quasi-authoritarian response from the Canadian government, which forcibly dispersed the protesters’ encampment, jailed the movement’s leaders, summarily froze their bank accounts, and seized, blocked, or escrowed nearly all of the estimated $20 million in non-bitcoin-based funds they’d raised. As chief media spokesman for the so-called Freedom Convoy, Dichter was the public face of one side of a shocking Canadian civic crackup. Depending on your point of view, the Freedom Convoy was either the unexpected culmination of the developed world’s COVID-era class war and a dark vision of the technocratic liberal state’s oppressive game plan, or an event that showed how easily marching hordes of ignorant and hateful populists could rise from the fringes to hijack a modern democracy. Dichter became the face of the former camp; the latter belonged to Justin Trudeau, dreamboat liberal champion and head of government of a country of 38 million people.

If the goal is to make Canada more inclusive, how is that achieved by cancelling Canada Day?

At the Forks in Winnipeg, there will be no Canada Day this year. Instead, there will be a new day called, unimaginatively enough, New Day.