OTTAWA — Canada is sending another $51-million aid package to Ukraine.
The money, announced Friday by Secretary of State for International Development Randeep Sarai, will go towards humanitarian relief, preparing Ukraine for post-war elections, and support for veterans of the war against the now four-year old Russian invasion.
Randeep who?
If it weren’t for this newspaper you’re reading right now, you wouldn’t know about a lot of absolutely bananas criminal-justice and immigration-related stories in this country. But even Toronto Star readers are getting a window into the madness this week, via its sister paper the Hamilton Spectator. Readers learned that one Erik Kalanyos, who is now 29, has been identified as the suspect in the murder of Daniel Musafiri, who was then 29, outside a Hamilton billiards parlour in December 2023.
Retired Lt. Colonel David Redman, former head of Alberta’s emergency management, has accused federal authorities of the intentional erosion of Canada’s national security apparatus over the past 11 years.
“To go from calling China the largest strategic threat to Canada one year ago and now calling it a very significant strategic partner is a completely intentional act. You can’t say it’s not. And so from my point of view, each of the steps in the degradation of Canada’s 10 elements of national security have been thought through and are intentional.”
(Incognito)
Pastor Derek Reimer is not liberal Canada’s favourite free-speech champion. The Bible-bashing leader of Calgary’s Mission 7 ministry has waged a one-man war on his government’s progressive, LGBTQ-friendly agenda – especially its promotion of transgender rights.
In 2023, he was arrested three times after protesting against “family-friendly” storytime events at Calgary’s public libraries, in which local drag queens read to children. He denounced it all as “pervert grooming sessions”, and told a librarian that if she carried on “corrupting kids”, he would post her details online. He also quoted from Deuteronomy 22:5, which states: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak.”
So far, his protests have earned him a conviction for harassment, more than 100 days in jail, and limited sympathy from the wider public – who, whatever their views on transgender issues, often see his methods as extreme.
Yet in recent months, his name has frequently been cited in a growing row over freedom of speech – centred around a planned new law that would remove the right of religious activists to quote scripture as a defence against hate crime charges.
As gasoline prices keep ticking higher toward $2 a litre and diesel sits near $2.50, there is little relief for Canadian drivers as the global energy crisis grows with no end in sight to the Iran war.
The conflict continues to choke transit through the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil and natural gas supply from international buyers.
Countries around the world are feeling the strain. Governments have ordered staff to work from home, reduced the work week and closed universities to conserve fuel.
A report by an expert in extremist financing and money laundering says the Canada Revenue Agency’s approach to policing terrorist abuse “proved seriously deficient” in the case of a long-running audit of the Muslim Association of Canada.
The report by University of Manitoba professor Michelle Gallant is the latest study to recommend the revenue agency make changes to ensure its audits of charitable organizations are free of bias and discrimination.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says “it’s unacceptable” that Stellantis is reportedly in talks with a Chinese automobile manufacturer about the possibility of building Chinese electric vehicles in Canada at its idled Brampton assembly plant.
A report by Bloomberg News says the alleged talks are with Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology, a Chinese automobile manufacturer with headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
David Hicks has been trying to get rid of his father’s rifle — but hasn’t had much luck telling the federal government that.
“It’s very frustrating,” said the Ottawa man. “If they’re going to do it, they need to do it properly.”
Executor of his father’s estate, Hicks has been trying to declare the semi-automatic firearm he inherited with the Liberal government’s banned gun compensation program. He wants to be in compliance with the law — and get some money for his widowed mother.
Cut taxes and cut waste to bring down the cost of gas. That’s the message from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and it’s really too bad his proposal will fall on Mark Carney’s deaf ears.
As gas prices reach for the stars, this is one of Poilievre’s policies that the prime minister should be stealing.
Once a friend of the former astronaut-turned-viceregal, John Fraser describes how Julie Payette crumbled into “perpetual petulance,” in this excerpt from his new book, The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office.
It should not have ended this way. It should have ended with a national celebration of an amazing, vibrant, and still young woman who managed to surmount all the challenges in a mostly male world; who managed to storm through a mostly male engineering school right up to the day she graduated summa cum laude; who managed to get through mostly male selection and training at the Canadian Space Agency; and ultimately, who managed two trips to outer space with mostly American male crews at NASA. As if all that were not enough, she also managed to crown this extraordinary record by being appointed governor general, the highest and noblest position Canada has to offer its most outstanding citizens.
Based on what Prime Minister Mark Carney, a Liberal cabinet minister, and a Liberal MP said publicly about China’s use of forced labour, the idea they are fiercely criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping about it in private is laughable.
Indeed, watching the performance of Carney, Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson, and former Conservative, now Liberal, MP Michael Ma on the issue over the past week, would have been hilarious if their milquetoast responses weren’t so alarming.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on the government to temporarily pause federal taxes on gas and diesel for the remainder of the year.
Poilievre held a news conference at an Ottawa gas station on Thursday to outline his suggestion, which would temporarily lift the GST and excise tax on diesel and gasoline.
The Auditor General of Canada recently flagged gaps in how student visas are being assessed. In a report tabled in Parliament last week, it said countries with a high risk of fraudulent applications generally saw low approval rates — with “one important exception” in India.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is not oblivious.
He knows, as any reasonable person would, that it looks terrible for one of his MPs to try to undermine an expert witness on forced labour in China during a parliamentary committee meeting.
Last week, Liberal MP Michael Ma grilled Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa, about whether she has personally seen forced labour practices on the ground in
China. “Have you witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang?” Mr. Ma asked Ms. McCuaig-Johnston, as if foreign nationals are invited to privately interview Uyghurs working on factory floors. “Yes or no? So did you get that from hearsay?”
TORONTO — His dark eyebrows bunched in memory of the shocking pain, Sulayman makes a sharp buzzing sound and jabs his inner wrist with a small cup, demonstrating how he was electrocuted by Chinese gangsters in a slave cyber-scam compound in Cambodia. It is a similar expression — pain, disbelief, disgust — that shapes his face when asked to describe to Prime Minister Mark Carney and Liberal Member of Parliament Michael Ma his prior lived experience, and that of his older relatives, and of Uyghurs across Xinjiang, working in forced labor factories and farms under the yoke of China’s police state.
