Canada has long been a draw for people from India’s Punjab province seeking new opportunities elsewhere. But has the Canadian dream soured?
It’s hard to miss the ardour of Punjab’s migrant ambitions when driving through its fertile rural plains.
Billboards promising easy immigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK jut out through ample mustard fields.
Off the highways, consultancies offer English language coaching to eager youth.
Liberal, Bloc Québécois and NDP MPs suddenly suspended parliamentary hearings related to ArriveCan and contracting misconduct allegations Wednesday after reading what one Liberal described as a “scary” secret preliminary report by a federal investigator.
They say any further hearings could put at risk investigations by the Canada Border Services Agency, which produced the report, and the RCMP.
In the long, strange series of hearings into the ArriveCan app, one of the most peculiar twists is that Conservative MPs have switched sides from prosecution to defence.
In November, when senior civil servant Cameron MacDonald appeared at hearings, Conservative MPs pounced. Now they are his defenders – and attacking investigators for treating him unfairly.
Mr. MacDonald had been a director-general of IT innovation at the Canada Border Services Agency when the ArriveCan project started in 2020.
A law firm hired by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation to investigate donations tied to two wealthy Chinese businessmen said it couldn’t rule out the possibility cash sent to the Montreal charity may have been part of a “influence scheme” targeting the Trudeau government.
The probe concluded the foundation’s handling of tax receipts related to the Chinese donations violated the Income Tax Act, and that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brother, Alexandre, broke internal rules and policies by the accepting the $200,000 donation pledge, which he was not authorized to do.
Two of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s political prisoners were released yesterday after two years in custody. In what is the biggest judicial scandal in recent Canadian history, the Trudeau government arrested four men from Coutts, Alberta, known as the Coutts Four, for participating in the Truckers Freedom Convoy. The men were held without bail on trumped up charges of “conspiracy to murder police officers.” Two of those men, Jerry Morin and Chris Lysak, now walk free, having plead guilty to lesser gun charges. The other two, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, will resume pre-trial hearings on Feb. 20.
Canada’s immigration minister is taking steps to curb the country’s dependence on temporary foreign labor and international students, prompting pushback from business groups that say there aren’t enough domestic workers available to sustain parts of the economy.
Marc Miller introduced a limit on foreign student visas last month, cutting them by 35% for this year. He will announce further changes soon to restrict students’ off-campus work hours and he’s also reviewing the country’s temporary foreign worker program, he told Bloomberg News in an interview.
They said the same thing when the Temporary Foreign Worker program was exposed under Harpe.
It’s even worse under Trudeau. They’ll announce a short term lowering of the numbers and call it problem solved.
It’s all BULLSHIT. The foreign student and temp worker programs along with asylum seekers and family reunification intake are sideshows.
Until they lower the immigration intake of 500K a year it will only get worse.
The Canada Border Services Agency asked the RCMP to investigate criminal charges for fraud and bribery related to the ArriveCan application, according to a confidential federal report obtained by a Conservative MP.
Conservative MP Larry Brock read portions of the confidential document compiled by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) management into the record of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) on Feb. 5. The Epoch Times has not independently verified the information.
I wonder what Justin’s cut was?
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Monday his party’s deal to prop up the minority Liberals will be off if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government doesn’t meet the deadline to introduce long-promised pharmacare legislation.
However, the New Democrat wouldn’t rule out still supporting the government on confidence votes, such as the budget, even if the two parties no longer have a formal deal.
“I don’t want to overemphasize it … but what is burgeoning, what is starting to sort of grow from out of the weeds into a fairly healthy seedling here, is this almost the Trump-esque, ‘Canada First’ mentality,” she said.
Growing number of Conservative voters think Canada gives ‘too much support’ to Ukraine, poll suggests
A survey released Tuesday morning by the Angus Reid Institute says a quarter of Canadians believe Canada is offering “too much support” to Ukraine in its fight, up from 13 per cent who said the same thing in May 2022.
Conservative supporters are a driving force behind that result, according to the poll.
The percentage of Canadians who voted for the Conservative Party in the last election, and who now say Canada is doing too much to assist Ukraine, has more than doubled — from 19 per cent in May 2022 to 43 per cent now — according to the public opinion research group’s findings.
Whole lot of spin goin on. Funny how CBC missed the part about how Liberal and NDP voters must make up the remaining 57% of of the 25% of Canadians who think we give too much to Ukraine. Are we to assume that Liberal and NDP voters do not wish to put Canada 1st?
Updated expense numbers put the cost of the Trudeau Liberals’ three-day affordability-focused cabinet retreat last summer at just under half-a-million dollars, including more than $50,000 on a banquet.
Figures contained within online proactive disclosures and newly released responses to order paper questions put the current cost of the retreat, held in Charlottetown Aug. 21 to 23, at $485,196.
Parliament spent nearly $600,000 on luxury hotel rooms it didn’t use when nearly half of the listed delegates for a conference of European parliamentarians it hosted either didn’t show up or chose less expensive hotels.
Parliament expected 700 delegates to attend the annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly, which took place in Vancouver from June 30 to July 4. The conference is usually held in Europe, where most of its members are based.
Only 365 delegates ended up attending, and not all of them stayed at the hotels the government selected. That left taxpayers on the hook for 1,400 overnight stays worth $596,000 in total — an average of $425 a night.
Couldn’t they have RSVP’d delegates?
The federal government’s “first zero-carbon building” in the National Capital Region, which was built at Rideau Hall and cost Canadian taxpayers over $8 million, had nearly half a million dollars spent on architects’ fees, records indicate.
An Inquiry of Ministry document tabled in Parliament on Jan. 29 showed that 86 separate contracts were issued over 10 years for the construction of the solar-powered warehouse, also known as “the barn,” at the national historic site and the official residence and office of the Governor General.
Canada has reached the “Loot the treasury” phase of its descent into a 3rd World shitbox country.
Long before he was Canada’s natural resources minister, Jonathan Wilkinson was part of the once-thriving constitutional industry in Canada.
As a negotiator for Saskatchewan’s then-premier Roy Romanow, Wilkinson had a front-row seat in the talks that led to the Charlottetown constitutional accord in the early 1990s.
So now, nearly 30 years later, watching the current Government of Saskatchewan talking about opting out of federal measures it doesn’t like — the price on carbon, for instance — Wilkinson is particularly, even personally, taken aback. His constitutional past and his natural resources present are colliding, and not in a way Wilkinson had ever expected.
The Libs have a lot more to worry about than just the premiers.
Last February, while Justin Trudeau pushed back against media investigations into Chinese election interference, citing anti-Asian racism, a brief for Trudeau’s Cabinet confirmed China’s clandestine influence in the 2019 and 2021 federal contests, and that current Members of Parliament were targeted in hostile state activity, and China leverages a “vast range of tools” to undermine “Canadian values, electoral processes, and Charter Rights.”
This definitive confirmation of Ottawa’s awareness of China’s deep attacks in recent Canadian elections comes from a newly released “Canadian Eyes Only” CSIS document called “Briefing to the Minister of Democratic Institutions on Foreign Interference.”
The Conservatives screeched triumphantly through the finish line of 2023, while the Liberals seemed to be dragging their own inert carcasses to the end. This week, everyone returned to the House of Commons after regrouping over a languorous holiday break, and the government tried to regain its footing with a new line of attack for a new year.
Everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on down the roster has been advancing some form of the same argument: They, the governing Liberals, are grown-ups engaged in the heavy work of running a country in difficult times, while the opposition Conservatives are having themselves a time lobbing spitballs from the cheap seats.
