A lawyer for Han Dong has served Global News and its parent company Corus Entertainment with a libel notice after the media outlet published an allegation the Toronto MP spoke to a Chinese diplomat about delaying the release of two Canadians.
Lawyer Mark Polley says he is demanding that Global News make a “full apology and retraction” for publishing what he describes as “false, malicious, irresponsible and defamatory statements” about Dong, now an Independent MP for Don Valley North.
Former CSIS officials say the intelligence agency has been warning successive governments about foreign election interference for decades but all failed to act — and measures outlined in this week’s budget are not enough to address the problem.
“Thirty-two years in national security work, every time we’ve had a crisis, every time we’ve had an incident, that’s what the government’s done. We’ll throw money at the RCMP, we’ll say you folks have got to sort that out. And I don’t think that’s really an appropriate response,” Dan Stanton, former executive manager at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told a committee of MPs on Friday.
Ottawa’s carbon tax will result in a “net loss” to most Canadian households even after they receive federal rebates, according to a report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO).
“When both fiscal and economic impacts of the federal fuel charge are considered, we estimate that most households will see a net loss,” said PBO Yves Giroux in a statement on March 30 when announcing the release of the report.
Liberal MP Parm Bains said he won his B.C. riding in the last election “fair and square” after his former opponent told a parliamentary committee foreign interference by Beijing played a role in his victory.
Bains sits on the Commons ethics committee and was sitting across the table when former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu told MPs on the committee Friday he believed Bains was the “beneficiary” of a disinformation campaign he suspects was tied to the Chinese Communist Party during the 2021 election campaign.
The threat from foreign interference, with Beijing as the main culprit, has evolved to become more dangerous to the state than traditional espionage, a former executive with Canada’s spy agency told MPs.
“What we’ve seen, in the last 30 years, is that foreign interference has eclipsed classic espionage as a national security threat, both in terms of its scope and its speed,” said Dan Stanton, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
OTTAWA — The next federal ethics watchdog will have to take a pay cut, as the governing Liberals have decided the next person to oversee their ethical issues should do so for $110,000 less annually than the predecessor.
On March 28, the federal government launched an “open, transparent and merit-based” selection process to find the next Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, whose job is “promoting and safeguarding a critical part of the public sector’s core values and ethics.”
Among the various types of outlandish and sinister responses to the recent revelations about Beijing’s emissaries interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the purpose of re-electing a Liberal government, the conjuring of bogeymen has been especially destructive to any clear public consensus about what’s at stake here, and what’s really going on.
Two former intelligence officials called for a complete transformation of Canada’s security apparatus to counter expanding foreign interference operations that they say have been essentially ignored by Ottawa since the 1990s.
On Friday the House of Commons standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics heard recommendations for a new national and independent office with powers to investigate and prosecute acts of foreign interference, and also rapid adoption of counter-interference laws that have already been implemented by Canadian allies such as Australia.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was ordered by the Commons Speaker to remove part of a video he put out on Twitter on Thursday accusing the Liberals of trying to close down debate on the online streaming bill.
After the Liberals tabled a “closure” motion to curb debate of the bill in the Commons, Mr. Poilievre hurriedly filmed a video, saying there was an “emergency here on Parliament Hill” as the Liberals were “shutting down debate” on Bill C-11.
The Liberals are shutting down debate on Bill C11! This is a bill that gives the govn’t authority to control what we can see, hear and post online. Talk about censorship!
And now the govn’t is shutting down debate.
Censorship upon censorship! #killbillc11 pic.twitter.com/RyP99BxpGl
— Rachael Thomas (@RachaelThomasMP) March 30, 2023
This week’s federal budget spells further disaster for Canadian farmers and the agriculture. While promising money for Ukrainian farmers, the Trudeau government is continuing to insist Canadian farmers reduce their use of fertilizers—only because it is fanatically committed to a climate change crisis scenario that fraudulently insists the nitrogen in fertilizer is hastening that crisis.
Chinese state media outlets should not be granted broadcasting licences in Canada because their content is meant to feed “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda” to overseas Chinese, an expert witness told a House committee on March 30.
The Chinese regime has made it clear it wishes to use overseas Chinese to exert influence abroad, and “this becomes interference instead of simple influence,” said Katherine Leung, policy advisor for the non-governmental organization Hong Kong Watch.
Budgets are always a work of imagination. It is an art form to be “economical with the truth” while appearing to be honest and straightforward.
Often the real story of the budget isn’t found in the voluminous pages of the actual budget itself but in the appendices, this is where crafty governments sneakily try to slip in spending without anyone noticing.
Plus, governments are always creating new ways to creatively raise revenues while being equally creative in studiously avoiding calling them taxes.
Budgets, like Bidens, bore me.
Like another in the fellowship of the great minds of our day, I pay no attention to monetary policy. Or to fiscal policy.
And what is a budget but a massive tool of that latter? Budgets get as much attention from “communications advisers” — the most empty phrase and occupation of our time — as they do from … people who might know something about the economy. Most likely more. Besides, budgetary promises do not stand up in time, at all.
Party ethics critics are arguing that the recently announced appointment of a temporary ethics commissioner, who has family ties to a cabinet minister, raises conflict of interest concerns and may shake the trust Canadians have in their public institutions.
The Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner announced in a Twitter post on March 28 that Martine Richard will serve as the interim ethics commissioner for six months. Richard, who has been employed as general counsel in the ethics office since 2013 and as a senior general counsel since 2015, steps into her interim role following the retirement of former ethics commissioner Mario Dion on Feb. 21.
You won’t believe this! Watch which Liberal family member is the new ethics commissioner. 🍌🍌🍌 pic.twitter.com/0QCDO507zY
— Michael Barrett (@MikeBarrettON) March 29, 2023
A proposed new law would give the government the power to filter what Canadians see in their news feeds, on YouTube and on social media. It also could block the next Justin…
In January 2007, Justin Bieber’s mom, Pattie Mallette, posted a video of her son, then 12, covering R&B star Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” at a kids’ singing competition in a little town near Toronto.
“I told him, ‘Okay, you’ve never sung in front of anybody before, and you’ve never had singing lessons,’” Mallette told me. ‘Let’s adjust our expectations.’ ” Bieber finished third. “One of the judges actually left because she was upset that he didn’t come first,” Mallette said.
