Ahead of Friday testimony from his chief of staff on foreign election interference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he and Katie Telford have talked about the issue “many” times over the years.
“The conversations I have with my chief of staff, and with my entire government, and with our defence and security experts, are ongoing,” Trudeau told reporters on Thursday. “We have been talking about foreign interference for years.”
A businessman whose reported donations to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation led to the resignation of its CEO is the president of a Chinese cultural organization that says it operates under the authority of the communist government.
Probably some of our readers are chuckling this week at the chaos that has broken out on Twitter over the correct verification labels for various public broadcasters. A couple of days ago, Elon Musk, the owner and CEO of the social media site, made an appearance on BBC television and was challenged on Twitter’s decision to give the BBC’s main account a “government-funded media” label. The “government-funded” tag isn’t meant to be purely a criticism or warning: in Twitter’s scheme of tags, a media company or news agency that is directly government-controlled and used to promote a country’s foreign policy would attract a different “state-affiliated” label.
Canadian polls show young adults are drifting away from the federal Liberal party. It seems they’re slowly figuring out that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, despite his sympathetic rhetoric, is working against their dream of buying a first home.
While it’s taken a while for young and old to realize it, top bankers, retired civil servants, housing analysts, former property developers and housing activists are now declaring the Liberals are directly causing house-price inflation.
The retired head of B.C.’s civil service, Don Wright, recently wrote a piece titled, “Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?”
It explained how B.C.’s effort to reduce housing prices and build affordable dwellings “will be largely hostage to the federal government’s immigration policy.”
Wright, an economist, said Trudeau’s government routinely raises the “almost entirely fallacious” argument that Canada has a labour shortage to justify welcoming a record 438,000 new permanent residents in 2022, while adding another 680,000 non-permanent residents, including foreign students and other guest workers.
Surely, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau now realizes that his self-appointed “special rapporteur” and life-long friend, David Johnston, isn’t going to solve his problems when Johnston advises him by May 23 whether he should hold a public inquiry into alleged interference by Beijing in the last two federal elections.
The Trudeau Liberals are as committed as ever to the shameless argument that the scandal is not Chinese interference into Canadian affairs, but the fact that China’s meddling was revealed to the public. It is a tactic that can’t withstand anyone looking too closely, or facts getting in the way, as was the case with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation this week.
The charity said Wednesday that it would conduct an investigation into a $200,000 donation allegedly made on behalf of the Chinese government in an apparent attempt at influencing Justin Trudeau. That announcement came after the CEO and the entire board of directors of the foundation resigned, and after the Liberals tried to blame “Conservative” attacks for the upheaval.
The strange death and rebirth of the Liberal Party under Trudeau
The 2011 federal election seemed to have fundamentally changed Canadian politics. And maybe it did. Just not quite in the way it was imagined.
In theory, that vote heralded the arrival of a new political era. The Liberal Party’s day was done — the broadly centrist institution that dominated Canadian politics in the 20th century was no longer fit for purpose. Canada would finally become more like its sister democracies, with a clear contest between a distinct party of the political right and a distinct party of the left. The future seemed to belong to the Conservatives and the NDP.
CBC lays it on thick to support their scandal plagued Boss.
h/t Mauser
On Sept. 29, 1972, a story appeared on the front page of The Washington Post that began as follows: “John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.”
Not “allegedly.” Not “reputedly.” The story flat out accuses the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government of running a political espionage operation on the side, with the obvious implication that this might have included the Watergate break-in.
Within the next month, Katie Telford will gain a new distinction — she will be the longest serving chief of staff to any Canadian prime minister since the position was created in the late 1970s.
It might not be how Telford would have predicted things would turn out when she first met Justin Trudeau almost 17 years ago in Toronto, but much about their working relationship has hinged on what wasn’t exactly expected.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is criticizing former governor general David Johnston for his previous membership with the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, which has received funding from the Chinese regime in the past.
Johnston was recently appointed “independent special rapporteur” by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to investigate Chinese interference in Canada’s elections.
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation says it will be launching an independent review of the organization’s acceptance of a donation “with a potential connection to the Chinese government.”
The foundation’s board reached this unanimous decision prior to dissolution, according to board chair Edward Johnson.
“This review will be conducted by an accounting firm instructed by a law firm, neither of which were previously involved with the Foundation,” Johnson said in a statement to CTV News.
The taxpayer-backed Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation was plunged into crisis in March, several weeks after the Globe and Mail reported that a major 2016 donation ultimately came from the Chinese state rather than a Beijing billionaire, according to an internal document obtained by La Presse.
Shortly after the Globe story broke, the foundation publicly announced it would return $140,000 to the Chinese benefactor.
Newly released documents show that a federal government department asked Facebook and Twitter to delete a newspaper article that it felt contained errors — but both social-media giants denied the request.
The request to remove social-media posts that linked to an unspecified Toronto Sun article came from a director of communications at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Sept. 27, 2021.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and three western premiers are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to disassociate his government from comments made by his justice minister — who promised last week to “look at” a decades-old law that gives control over natural resources to the four western provinces.
“The federal government cannot unilaterally change the Constitution,” the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba said in a joint statement Tuesday. “It should not even be considering stripping resource rights away from the three Prairie provinces.
This government needs to be gone.
Justin Trudeau insisted to reporters on Tuesday that he has “absolutely no intersection” with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the non-profit organization that funds humanities research.
But the foundation has found that Mr. Trudeau’s politics keep intersecting with it. Over and over.
Trudeau is an habitual liar, dishonest to his core.
Trudeau addresses the resignation of the Board of Directors of the Trudeau Foundation. https://t.co/Jl61yVHAeK pic.twitter.com/RkN7iuwOrg
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) April 11, 2023
Roh Roh!
More emerging on the upheaval at Trudeau Foundation. La Presse citing sources alleging conflict of interest and lack of transparency from Foundation members that accepted massive PRC-linked cheque, now turns out name on it doesn’t look legitimate. https://t.co/h75ACjCkyB
— Sam Cooper (@scoopercooper) April 12, 2023
