Our fraying constitutional order

In a recent podcast interview, my American host asked me to comment on whether Canada constituted a nation, in the substantive sense. Beyond platitudes such as a shared commitment to multiculturalism, general good government, and a thin conception of liberty, there is not much there there, I reflected. No, there isn’t really a singular Canadian nation, I answered.

But I was oversimplifying: the fact is that Canada is a nation that contains many nations. The compromises of federalism as set out in the Constitution were specifically designed to accommodate the vast regional and cultural differences across our equally vast land and, for the most part, have held up well.

However, proposals in Alberta and Quebec are starting to nip at the fabric of our constitutional order. Both provinces are, as one academic recently put it, apparently treating the Constitution as a “buffet that one can pick and choose from”, rather than a blueprint for how power flows in a state.

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Trudeau doubles down on tin-pot tyranny – defends vax mandates, Emergencies Act decision, in interview

 

Justin Trudeau says people who chose not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 must accept the consequences of those decisions, including lost employment and restricted access to transportation and other services.

“It was their choice and nobody ever was going to force anyone into doing something they don’t want to do,” the prime minister said in an interview with CBC Radio’s The House airing on Saturday.

“But there are consequences when you don’t. You cannot choose to put at risk your co-workers. You cannot choose to put at risk the people sitting beside you on an airplane,” Trudeau said before leaving for international summits in Africa and Europe.

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Looks like travel restrictions were political all along

The federal government announced on Tuesday June 14 that COVID-related travel restrictions in place since Oct. 30, 2021 will be ending. Specifically, the government is ending the requirement to show proof of vaccination for domestic travel on planes and trains, for outbound international travel, and ending the vaccine mandate for transport workers and federal government employees.

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Los Angeles may ban new gas stations to help combat climate emergency

Los Angeles could become the largest city to prohibit the construction of new gas stations, joining a movement that seeks to limit fossil fuels at the local level as part of efforts to combat the climate crisis.

Officials in America’s second largest city, along with Bethlehem, New York, and Comox valley regional district, British Columbia, said on Wednesday morning that they were working on policies to stop the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

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CRTC Chair Ian Scott Confirms Bill C-11 Can Be Used To Pressure Internet Platforms to Manipulate Algorithms

The Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications held an exceptionally important hearing as part of its Bill C-11 pre-study (which is about to change into a Bill C-11 study) last night featuring Canadian Heritage officials and CRTC Chair Ian Scott. I will have a second post on the officials, who struggled to provide clear answers to basic questions on everything from how to identify what counts as Cancon for user content (Youtube’s Content ID was suggested) to the absence of thresholds for what is covered by the bill (there are no thresholds and the government wants the ability to also target small streamers). But the key moment of the day came in questioning Scott about the discoverability and the potential for algorithmic manipulation.

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Germany could ration gas this winter as Russia cuts supply

Germany says that its citizens may have to ration the use of natural gas this winter as the country faces an energy “crisis” due to Russia reducing its supplies last week.

Berlin’s top financial official announced on Thursday that Europe’s largest economy was activating the second phase of its three-step emergency plan for natural gas consumption.

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Continental Breakfast

Breakfast Bruschetta

Canada Should “Wake Up To Trudeau Dictatorship” Says American Radio Host

A roundtable discussion on Fox News delivers the perspective. Host Ben Ferguson, who at 13-years of age became the youngest radio show host in the United States, dishes the dirt along with four female guests.

In simple terms, they are laughing in our faces. Yet, away from public mocking is found a serious message. It’s one thing for PM Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Cabinet to transfer Canada to a dictatorship. It’s quite another when Canadians sit back and let it occur.

Democracy Under Threat

If you happened to see a story describing the head of a national police force in some third-world country exploiting a tragedy to advance the agenda of the ruling party, you probably wouldn’t be surprised.

After all, that’s the kind of corruption that is widely seen in poorly-managed, impoverished nations.

Further, if you heard that a ruling party was able to avoid accountability because another party was propping them up while pretending to be an ‘opposition’ party, you still wouldn’t be surprised. Having extra parties prop up the ruling party is a staple of nations where the appearance of democracy is maintained even as it is hollowed out from within.

Seven Times Justin Trudeau Politicized Tragedies

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a long track record of deliberately politicizing tragedies throughout his time in office.

Trudeau has indiscriminately used mass shootings, wars, and refugee crises for political gain. Often, he has opportunistically pushed policies in the immediate aftermath of these events.

A Warning About the Coming Shortages of Diesel Fuel, Diesel Exhaust Fluid and Diesel Engine Oil

What I am about to share with you is a developing situation, and I hope to share more once the facts become clearer. It appears that a very serious diesel crisis is coming in the months ahead, and that will have a dramatic impact on our economy. As you will see below, we are being warned that there will be shortages of diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil. Most diesel vehicles require all three in order to run, and so a serious shortage of any of them would be a major disaster. Needless to say, simultaneous shortages of all three could potentially be catastrophic. Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about diesel, but without it our supply chains collapse and we don’t have a functioning economy. In a recent Time Magazine article discussing the coming diesel fuel shortage, we are told that “the U.S. economy runs on diesel.”

China Finds New Ways To Infiltrate American Universities As Confucius Institutes Close

Some 64 colleges and universities have either reopened a Confucius Institute-like program under a different name or maintained close relationships with the Chinese entities that cosponsored Confucius Institutes, according to the report.

Drag Queen Story Hour Returns To Castro Valley After Earlier Proud Boys Disruption

No disruptions were reported Tuesday as King Art Babe — bedazzled in a blue dress and rainbow mascara — held a group of preschoolers and kindergarteners in rapt attention, flipping through several books about Pride parades and dressing in drag. Often, the performer stopped to remark on the characters’ lavish outfits.

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Girl Rescued After Being Kidnapped at 8, Sold in Mohammedan Death Cult Slave Markets

The nightmarish ordeal of a Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS terrorists in 2014 when she was 8 years old and repeatedly sold between families as a slave has ended after she managed to contact a family member on social media from a refugee camp.

Rosita Haji Baju, now 16, had been terrified that if she revealed her past, she would suffer further abuse and instead sought help on social media, desperately hoping to find a relative she could alert to her ordeal.

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Why the Left Will Cut Biden Loose

Republican pundits and conservative activists are debating whether they can win in 2024 with the successful Trump agenda, but without the controversial Donald Trump as their nominee.

The Democrats have a similar, but far more serious dilemma with Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024.

Unlike the Trump Administration’s successful four years, Biden’s tenure has been an utter disaster. There are no policy offsets to the personal liabilities and unpopularity of Biden himself.

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Westerners, too, are waging a ‘War on the West’

Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Xi Jinping’s China. Ali Khamenei’s Iran. Al-Qaeda. Islamic State. These and other actors are waging a war on the West, a war against Western power and values. Some Westerners are mounting a vigorous defense. Others are arguing—vehemently and incessantly—that the West is morally inferior to the rest of the world and therefore indefensible.

Douglas Murray’s new book, The War on the West, looks at the Westerners who denigrate the West. No greater threat exists, he writes, “than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies piece by piece.”

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The Fertility Crisis Started in Japan, But It Won’t Stay There

A declining population and plummeting fertility rate isn’t a unique Japanese phenomenon. All rich countries will contend with this crisis.

The world has an obsession with Japan’s shrinking population. Each year, news that the country is a little bit smaller can reliably be called upon for column inches, which tend to examine it as a Japanese mystery — one of those inherently Oriental concepts that foreigners could not possibly penetrate, like wabi-sabi or the bushido code of samurai warriors.

The New York Times asked in 2012, “Without babies, can Japan survive?” The Atlantic wrote about “the mystery of why Japanese people are having so few babies.” To be fair, Japan talks about the population crisis as much as anyone, with one paper recently calling for the declaration of a “declining birth-rate state of emergency.”

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A school is no place for a drag queen

It’s time to close the book on Drag Queen Story Hour.

Remember when a drag queen called FlowJob was invited to talk to very young kids in a primary school in Scotland? I know this sounds like something from the fever dream of a hardcore Christian who is convinced that society is going to hell in a handcart, but it really did happen. In 2020, an adult performer whose stage name is a spin on the slang term for fellatio, and who has posted sexually explicit images of himself being gagged and dry-humped on Twitter, was asked by a primary school in Paisley to read a story to little kids for LGBT history month. You do not have to be a pearl-clutching moaner about the sins of the sexual revolution to think that this kind of thing is morally wrong, and maybe plain crazy.

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Nigerian politician and wife charged with trafficking child to harvest organs

Monsters.

A senior Nigerian politician and his wife have appeared in court accused of plotting to ferry a child to the UK for the purpose of organ harvesting.

Ike Ekweremadu, 60, a former deputy president of the Nigerian senate, and his wife are charged with conspiracy to arrange and/or facilitate travel of another person with a view to exploitation.

Ekweremadu, a district senator and lawyer, and Beatrice Nwanneka Ekweremadu, 55, live in a £3.2 million house in Queen’s Park, northwest London, it is understood.

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‘This is Africa‘: Mob Sexually Assault Girls, Cause Havoc in Italian Towns

A mob of an estimated two thousand or so young men, mostly from migrant backgrounds according to reports, terrorised towns along with Lake Garda in northern Italy, with reports of women being sexually assaulted, shop windows smashed and police attacked.

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