The interim commissioner of the RCMP says he would support additional laws that allow police to further crack down on foreign interference in Canada, as well as ways to further collaborate with intelligence officials on the issue.
But Mike Duheme adds multiple investigations remain underway that he’s confident will lead to criminal charges, though he did not give specifics.
Six Canadian children are set to leave a Syrian prison camp and fly to Canada without their mother, who cannot come with them because federal officials have not completed her security assessment, advocates for the family say.
The federal government gave the Quebec woman until today to decide whether her children would join other Canadians on the repatriation flight, expected to depart any day now, or remain with her in Syria, said Alexandra Bain of the group Families Against Violent Extremism.
“I’m shocked. It doesn’t make any sense,” Bain said Saturday in an interview. “It’s not how I expect Canada to behave.”
BOO FRICKIN HOO ! She’s a Muslim terrorist who forfeited all rights when she signed on for the Mohammedan murder cult’s ISIS branch.
It’s not how I expected Canada to behave either. They should just put a bullet through the terrorists head.
When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland presented the federal budget, the most obvious fact was the size of the deficit. It came in at $40.1 billion, after having been forecast at “only” $30.6 billion in the fall economic update less than six months ago. What caused the deficit to shoot up $9.5 billion in such a short period of time?
Some analysts pointed to supply-and-confidence deal between the Liberals and the NDP, which has led to increases for health and dental care. Others pointed to lower-than-expected tax revenues caused by an unexpected slowdown in the economy. Both lines of analysis are correct, but many things can be true at the same time in the complex world of public finance.
The Royal Canadian Navy is offering a one-year trial period for Canadians to join with “no strings attached” as it faces a major recruitment challenge and unprecedented personnel shortage.
Under the new program launched Friday, Canadian citizens and permanent residents can join the navy on a year-long contract – either full-time or part-time – and then leave if they wish to after that.
Those who decide to stay on will be transferred to a naval trade.
I wonder how this will be received.
Federal departments and agencies have revoked the security clearances of three employees for spying or acting as foreign agents, records show, though their identities and the governments they served were not disclosed.
The details were provided in response to an Inquiry of Ministry. Conservative MP John Barlow, who submitted the inquiry on Feb. 9, wanted to know how many public servants have had their security clearances revoked for cause since 2016, and how many were due to individual spying or otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign government.
Erin O’Toole, the former Conservative party leader, has exited federal politics in mild disagreement with his old boss, Stephen Harper.
While both men agree that the Conservatives are headed back to power, they aren’t exactly in sync on how that will happen.
O’Toole said in his resignation statement on Friday: “The Conservative party is the party of Confederation and I know it will return to government offering the hope and ideas our country so desperately needs.”
As questions continue to swirl around the issue of other countries’ meddling in Canadian affairs, interim RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme says he’s “very, very concerned” about foreign interference, and would like to see the national force be able to use intelligence as evidence in its investigations.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos airing on Sunday, Duheme was asked if, given all that has recently been alleged regarding China interfering in federal elections and the years of warnings from various national security agencies, he thinks a public inquiry is warranted.
Police in Canada have arrested members of a vigilante “pedophile-hunting” group, charging them with distribution of child abuse images, amid frustration over the group’s controversial tactics.
Quebec police announced on Thursday that six people had been arrested as part of an investigation into a group that had drawn complaints from the public.
Five of the suspects, all in their mid-to-late 20s, face charges of distributing the images, with some also charged with criminal harassment, intimidation and forcible confinement.
In a choice forced upon them by the Canadian government, four mothers have made the agonizing decision to forfeit an opportunity to repatriate their children from open air prisons in northeast Syria.
The foreign women have children with Canadian citizens, but their husbands are missing or have been killed in fighting during Syria’s civil war. The government suspects they and their husbands may have traveled to the region to join the Islamic State, but no evidence has been presented in court.
They’re foreign terrorists, nothing was forced on them. They deserve no favour, no mercy.
Statistics Canada has released its new report about the Canadians level of confidence in Canada’s institutions, finding that recent immigrants are more likely to express confidence in the media and parliament.
According to the report, about two-third (67) per cent of Canadians surveyed reported having a high level of confidence in the police, while the level of confidence is lower for justice system and courts (51 per cent), the federal Parliament (36 per cent) and the Canadian media (33 per cent).
Recent immigrants polled by a government agency. Nope no bias here.
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.
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).
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.
