OTTAWA — For days, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole loyalists have been working the phone, calling members of caucus and the party in the hopes of him surviving the latest — and greatest — threat to his leadership.
But multiple sources within the Conservative party say O’Toole has encountered more closed doors than expected, as previously staunch allies seem to be turning their backs on the leader on the eve of a crucial vote on Wednesday morning.
Embattled Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole told MPs Tuesday he was open to changing his party’s policies should he survive a caucus vote on his leadership, two sources told Global News.
O’Toole faces what he called a “reckoning” with the Conservative caucus Wednesday after 35 MPs signed a petition to force a vote on his leadership over the weekend.
Premier Jason Kenney is calling for calm following an incident he said involved “people allied with the protesters” at the Coutts, Alta., border crossing, describing it as an attempt to “ram members of the RCMP.”
“This kind of conduct is totally unacceptable,” Kenney said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “Assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply doing their job to maintain public safety and the rule of law is completely unacceptable.”
The incident reportedly led to a collision with a civilian vehicle, Kenney said. He also called for people to stay away from the area while the RCMP carry out their action against the blockade.
… The crowd has also reportedly continued to thin out from the thousands of protesters seen over the weekend to about 250 people, including 50 on Parliament Hill.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he “won’t give in” to the protesters’ demands, which range from ending all COVID-19 restrictions to Trudeau’s resignation.
Aafia Siddiqui’s name may not be known to most people, but to some she has been notorious for thirty years
Many people in the West will not have known the name Aafia Siddiqui until the terrible incident at a Texas synagogue earlier this month, when the British terrorist Malik Faisal Akram asked to speak to his “sister” Aafia and demanded her release, before being shot dead by US police.
But I, along with thousands of my generation, have known Aafia’s name for 30 years. During the early to mid-1990s, I was on an international Muslim students’ email list, dominated by Islamists, with Aafia Siddiqui, then a student at MIT. A close British friend of mine was also studying for his PhD at MIT at the same time and knew her personally. His recollections of her, he once told me, were that she was very active in da’wah (proselytising for Islam), handing out free Qur’an translations on campus. My own recollections of her via electronic media are that of a student activist, who posted many times per week to an audience of thousands.
KABUL, Afghanistan—The Taliban, officially termed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, went from an insurgency to a self-declared state in a matter of moments when they entered the abandoned presidential palace five months ago.
The leadership immediately professed to have changed from their brutal rule of the 1990s in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition and foreign aid. However, it is clear that some unsettling elements are unlikely to change.
MARVIN KALB, WHO LATER WORKED FOR CBS AND NBC, tells a story about being tailed when he first arrived in Moscow in 1956, to work at the US Embassy.
He decided to take a walk around Red Square on his first full day in the Russian capital. He soon noticed that he was being followed by a man in a black overcoat—undoubtedly a KGB agent.
The two ended up in the department store GUM, just off Red Square. As Kalb explained in his memoir The Year I Was Peter the Great, he bought two ice cream cones there. He held one out behind him, without looking. The agent took it without a word, and the two went on, one following the other.
Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that “everybody gets to choose their own gender” and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics” as part of this week’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles.” Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is “free from patriarchal practices,” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”
For anyone who doesn’t watch the mainstream media, what’s happening in Canada has been one of the most exciting things in the two years since COVID left China and turned most of the world’s Western politicians into tyrants. Across Canada, outside the despotic confines of Justin Trudeau’s brain and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, people are galvanized by the 45-mile-long truckers’ convoy that drove into Ottawa in pursuit of liberty. The Canadian opposition, however, although given a golden political opportunity, had nothing to say for a week, only stirring itself on Monday to a few weak pieties. Jordan Peterson gave them a solid scolding for their dismal performance.
It’s past time for the continent to step up and take charge of its own defense
While American and Russian officials are yelling at one another in the UN Security Council chamber, another international actor has found itself at the little kid’s table: Europe.
It’s possible the phrase “little kid’s table” is too harsh. To be fair, French President Emmanuel Macron is at least in direct communication with Russian President Vladimir Putin and urging his European colleagues to formulate a joint European negotiating position on the Ukraine question. France is also a chief mediator of the Normandy Format, which seeks to resolve the eight-year conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
After reading several articles on PJM in which I expressed my disenchantment with Canada as a dismally governed and increasingly repressive country, and my intention to emigrate once—or if—permitted to travel again should Covid vaccine restrictions be lifted, a friend asked me what it would take to change my mind. There are, admittedly, hopeful signs: the Great Trucker Convoy that has galvanized international attention; a cowardly prime minister who has gone into hiding, thus showing his true colors; and a new majority approving of dissent against a coercive administration. As the Toronto Sun reports, “The latest poll, taken Jan. 27-28, found 54% want restrictions to be lifted compared to just 39% who wanted restrictions lifted when the same question was asked two weeks earlier.”
The snow clearing by Truck protesters could have been much more violent warned Ottawa's Mayor – "It was very aggressive shoveling that has unnerved Ottawa bureaucrats not used to seeing actual work" A formal police complaint is being considered. https://t.co/efm5v6pqm0
— Fancypants Maloney (@fancypants_s) February 2, 2022
The European energy crisis is poised to go from very bad to unimaginably worse. While all eyes are on Ukraine and Russia, Europe’s energy woes are largely self-made, not due to outside forces.
Europe has made its own bed, disassembling dispatchable fuel diversity by closing well-operating coal and nuclear power plants. In doing so it has deepened its already troubling reliance on an insecure and volatile natural gas market dominated by Vladimir Putin. Europe is, in fact, more dependent on Russian gas today than it was when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Coming soon – Canada’s self-made energy crisis.
There’s an old sixteenth century proverb that goes, “Never mention rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.” When it comes to the current state of Erin O’Toole’s shaky relationship with his Conservative caucus, it appears that everything but the hangman’s rope has been accounted for.
Days of protests against pandemic policies and a deep rift within Canada’s conservative movement have highlighted the growing power of rightwing populist movements in the country.
On Tuesday, retail stores and vaccine clinics in Ottawa remained closed as protesters, who had travelled to the nation’s capital under the guise of protesting vaccine mandates for truckers, refused to leave.
“There’s a million people that live in Ottawa. I hear you. I hear the protesters, the province hears the protesters, the country hears the protesters,” said the Ontario premier, Doug Ford. “Now it’s time to let the people in Ottawa get back to their lives.”
The left are deeply afraid of normal people.
