Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the vote later today on the Conservative motion calling for a new study into foreign interference will not be a confidence vote.
“It’s not going to be a confidence motion. Obviously it goes to how important the issue of foreign interference is,” Trudeau said on his way into a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning.
Xi nixed it.
The trickle of information on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in Canadian affairs has turned into a torrent. Current and former intelligence officials are coming out and reporting a pattern of government indifference to CCP interference in domestic affairs that spans back decades. Governments and political leaders have managed to ignore the problem with impunity so far.
Will that finally change with the latest revelations?
OTTAWA — All eyes will be on New Democrats on Tuesday as they decide whether they will support the Conservatives’ motion to compel the prime minister’s chief of staff to testify on alleged Chinese interference in past elections.
OTTAWA – Liberal House leader Mark Holland isn’t ruling out turning a Conservative motion on foreign interference into a confidence vote that could topple the government and would test the strength of the supply-and-confidence deal between the Liberals and the NDP.
The Conservatives tabled the motion in the House of Commons Monday demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, appear at the House ethics committee before the middle of April. They want her, along with more than a dozen other witnesses, to answer questions about allegations that the Chinese government interfered in Canada’s last two federal elections.
Sure they will.
The Conservatives have put forward a motion in the House of Commons which would compel Katie Telford, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, to testify before a House of Commons committee on the Chinese government’s efforts to interfere in Canadian elections.
The motion, moved by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, would order Telford to appear before the standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics no later than April 14, 2023 and to answer questions for three hours.
It says everything about the Liberal Party’s collusion with Communist China that Ms. Telford must be “forced” to spill her guilty guts.
Canada’s close geographical and cultural proximity to the United States has some strange effects on our politics. One of the oddest is pushing the Liberal Party of Canada to wear the woke, anti-racist clothing of its American counterpart, the Democratic party. Yet at its core, the Liberal party exists to serve the interests of the country’s (uniformly white) Laurentian elite of western Quebec and southern Ontario. The party’s commitment to anti-racism is just an act put on for purely political purposes.
The coming 2023 federal budget will “exercise fiscal restraint” while also making “significant” investments in Canada’s health-care system and building a clean economy, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Monday.
In a speech detailing the Liberal government’s priorities ahead of next week’s budget release, Freeland said the budget will include “targeted inflation relief” to help Canadians who are most acutely feeling the pinch as a result of rising prices.
The strong opposition to David Johnston’s appointment as special rapporteur investigating Chinese interference in elections reveals how our times, and our politics, have changed.
In a previous column, I suggested that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should accept Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s choice of Mr. Johnston on the grounds that the former governor-general was appointed to that post by then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, and that he is one of this country’s most trusted, and trustworthy, figures.
Johnston is a suspect “choice” given his own ChiCom links alone.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called Sunday for the development of a national standards system that would allow qualified doctors and nurses to work in any province or territory in the country.
Poilievre proposed what he called a “Blue Seal” standard, modelled after the Red Seal program used in the skilled trades. The standard would apply to the national competency test for a worker’s profession, and if health-care workers pass the test, they would be quickly licensed and able to work anywhere that adopts the new standard.
So long as they are able to screen for fraud and ensure that the institution attended by the physician offered a sound training with standards equivalent to our own.
Mortgage rates, changing psychology, Canada’s vulnerability, large volumes of investors and migration policy are squeezing the country’s housing market.
Spring is in the air. And for some, so is the expectation of a housing rebound.
The real estate industry hopes the spring market, when sales traditionally surge, will turn around housing prices, which have fallen 19 per cent nationally since their peak a year ago.
There are tentative signs some buyers are tiptoeing back into the market, which has been hammered for a year by mortgage rates that have risen to six and seven per cent. That was forced by the Bank of Canada and others around the world realizing they had to beat back inflation caused by government over-spending during the pandemic.
It looks like we finally have one political leader serving in higher office who actually wants to know more rather than less about the allegations of the Beijing Communist regime’s interference in our elections.
British Columbia NDP Premier David Eby says he’s “very troubled” by these allegations. He wants a “thorough and independent investigation” and he’s requested CSIS provide him with a “full briefing.”
Vincent Harris arrived in Haiti earlier this year to heal bodies.
Two weeks ago, the medical adviser for Doctors Without Borders found himself instead in the midst of the country’s war.
“There was a really violent clash between two armed groups,” Harris said this week from Port-au-Prince. “Unfortunately, the front line where those groups met was directly in front of the doors of the hospital.”
How bout we just stay out of it?
Canada’s ambassador to the United States says U.S. President Joe Biden may be less critical of Canada failing to meet its defence spending targets than former President Barack Obama was when the latter addressed Parliament.
When Biden makes his first official state visit to Canada this week, discussions around defence and security, Norad modernization, and how to deal with Russia and China are on the agenda.
The last American president to visit Ottawa — and to address Parliament — was Obama in 2016, when in a 50-minute speech he said: “NATO needs more Canada.”
OTTAWA — The leaked intelligence reports have set off a political firestorm. They describe plans by the government of China and its diplomats in Canada to ensure that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took power in the last two elections, raising troubling questions about the integrity of Canada’s democracy.
But as two prominent Canadian news organizations have published a series of leaks over the past month, Mr. Trudeau has refused calls to launch a public inquiry into the matter, angering political opponents and leading to accusations that he is covering up foreign attempts to undermine his country’s elections.
MONTREAL—If the debate over Chinese interference in Canada’s politics is a test of leadership, both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre are going out of their way to fail it.
That starts with Trudeau, who came peculiarly late to the realization that the issue of the integrity of Canada’s democratic system could not be swept under the carpet. He has been playing catch up — with very relative success — since then.
