Richard Ciano: Tear down the signs in Carney’s little shop of hypocrisy

It takes a special kind of hubris to stand in Davos, surrounded by the global elite, and lecture the world on the virtues of “living in truth.” Yet there was Prime Minister Mark Carney, channelling the dissident spirit of Václav Havel to chastise the international community for clinging to a “rules-based order” that no longer exists. Carney invoked Havel’s famous parable of the greengrocer — the shopkeeper who puts a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World, Unite!”, not because he believes it, but because “it has been done that way for years” and it buys him a quiet life.

Share

DOBBIE: Globe trotting PM needs to show some results

After a year of the Prime Minister whizzing around the world, Canada still has nothing concrete to pin our hopes on for a happier, more prosperous country.

Relationships with the United States are strained with Mr. Carney earning the title of Governor from Mr. Trump for the thinly veiled speech criticizing the President delivered by the Prime Minister to the world at Davos. Then, according to a witness to a phone conversation between the two, the prime minister climbed down from his lofty position. But once again, Mr. Carney has a different story to what the witness heard, telling Canadians that he stood by his word. This is not the first time we have seen conflicting stories from Mr. Carney about what he has said or not said.

Share

Canadians now prioritize trade with China over human rights concerns

A growing majority of Canadians now view economic engagement with China as more important than focusing on the country’s human rights record, a new Angus Reid Institute poll shows.

Three-in-five respondents (59%) said trade and investment opportunities should be Canada’s main priority, marking a sharp shift from recent years when human rights concerns dominated public opinion.

(Incognito)

Share

Indian gangs are terrorising Canada

South Asian communities across Canada are being terrorised by gangs – and city officials in Surrey, BC are calling on the federal government to declare a national state of emergency.

The crimes follow a distinctive pattern. South Asian gangs demand money from members of their own communities. Intimidation, threats and even shootings follow. Gang members drive to someone’s home or business, and video themselves shooting at buildings and vehicles. They then post the recording online or send it to the target, with threats of worse to come if payment is not made.

Share

‘Very high level’: Alberta separatist group won’t say which Trump officials it met with

While an Alberta separatist group confirms it had meetings with U.S. officials over the past year, its leaders won’t say which members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration they have spoken with directly.

“We’re meeting at a very high level,” Alberta Prosperity Project legal counsel Jeffrey Rath said in an interview with CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday.

When asked by host Vassy Kapelos whether those officials would be recognizable to Canadians, Rath said “probably,” but would not confirm whether Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security adviser, was among them.

Share

OLIVER: Playing to Davos and domestic audience, Mark Carney recklessly provoked Donald Trump

Prime Minister Mark Carney recklessly provoked President Donald Trump, with the predictable result of a hyperbolic overreaction — a 100% tariff threatened on all goods and services exported to the United States — which, taken at face value, would have a devastating impact on Canada’s economy.

Although we should not accept his threats at face value (take him seriously, but not literally), it was irresponsible for Carney to have indulged his ego for domestic political purposes.


Maybe Carney is working a con stoking the base for an early election while privately walking back his public comments?

Share

From Sham Marriages to Fake Colleges: Inside Canada’s Battle Against Immigration Fraud

Federal and provincial governments have announced measures to crack down on immigration fraud by toughening regulations and even closing entire programs. But what if these moves are merely scratching the surface of a much larger problem?

This past December, Canada’s immigration department announced a halt on applications for the Start-up Visa (SUV) Program, which had allowed foreign entrepreneurs to move to Canada to start new businesses.

Share

Conrad Black: Trump isn’t our problem — we are

Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the “great powers.” The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!” (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher).

Share

They can’t be serious… Mary Simon To Run Up Tab While Saving Arctic Sovereignty

Arctic sovereignty: Gov. Gen. Mary Simon heading to Norway, Denmark and Greenland

Indian name means “Put it on the tab”

OTTAWA – Gov. Gen. Mary Simon is set to visit Greenland, Denmark and Norway next week.

On Monday, Simon will travel to Norway, where she will take part in the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromso and later meet with Norway’s King Harald in Oslo.

Share

WARMINGTON: Trump’s Bombardier threat latest play in plan to hollow out Canadian business

With one press of a button on a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump sent shockwaves through Canada’s aerospace industry and raised questions about its very future.

It caught many by surprise – but not Unifor National President Lana Payne, who has warned Canadian workers are in the “fight” of their lives.


Related …

Big revenue, trade leverage, and industrial perks: Why Trump’s $264B tariff haul will be hard to give up

WASHINGTON, D.C. — “‘Tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” President Donald Trump liked to say early last year, calling it his favourite word and promising they would help usher in a new “golden age” for America.

He was serious.


Bombardier is what’s wrong with Canada, a corporate welfare parasite like so many others whose main business is robbing the public treasury to enrich the elite.

Mass immigration? The elite engaged in a human trafficking scam on a grand scale to line their pockets without care for the profound harm ordinary Canadians would suffer.

Multiculturalism and diversity? Bludgeons used to beat your very existence into the ground.

The media? A bought and paid for elite megaphone serving up a daily dose of propaganda purposely designed to humiliate.

The China Pivot? A villainous effort to keep Canada the elite’s ATM.

I fear Trump far less than I do our “betters”.

Share

Trump and Ottawa’s take on TACO will determine Canada’s fighter-jet strategy

In Ottawa, various cabinet ministers are praying that TACO – the “Trump always chickens out” theory – is still valid. Or largely so, or at least somewhat so, for they are on the verge of gambling big on the U.S. President’s rage factor.

TACO is high on their minds because Prime Minister Mark Carney and several of his cabinet ministers, including Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, are thought to be embracing the idea of Canada building the Saab Gripen fighter jet and Saab GlobalEye military surveillance plane. They are both Swedish creations whose construction in Canada would create 12,600 jobs, Saab has said.

Share

The Golden Dome is where Canada’s F-35 debate and Trump’s Greenland threat meet

It’s not much of a stretch to say that in terms of Canada-U.S. relations, we are — metaphorically speaking — at the point where we’d prefer to shoot the messenger, rather than listen to the message.

In the view of some experts, the political and economic discourse is so distorted, so angry, so mashed up that important points of strategic and defence policy that would have been mundane — even eye-glazing — less than a decade ago are lighting enormous rhetorical and political fires.

Share