OTTAWA – A senior Conservative campaign official said the government’s system for sharing foreign interference information left him with the impression there were no major issues during the campaign.
Walied Soliman, who was co-chair of the Conservatives 2021 campaign, was also one of the party’s representatives to a special task force of Canada’s intelligence agencies.
Bill Blair took months to approve CSIS surveillance of Liberal powerbroker, national-security source says
… Although lawyers for CSIS and independent counsel from the Justice Department approved the warrant as did the office of CSIS director David Vigneault, the source said Mr. Blair, a former Toronto police chief, did not sign off on it until June.
The four-month delay left little time for CSIS to get the approval of a federal judge and to figure out the best ways to plant bugs in Mr. Chan’s cars, home, office, computers and mobile phones before the election campaign got under way.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau triggered the election in August, 2021, for Sept. 20 – a ballot in which the Liberals returned to power with another minority government.
The LPC is in the bag to China.
Will the public finally be provided some details behind the mysterious firing of Chinese-Canadian scientists who were working at the country’s top biosafety lab?
The Liberal government announced on May 17 that an ad-hoc committee of selected MPs will be able to review documents pertaining to the matter, and a panel of arbiters composed of three former justices will decide what can be released to the public.
Up to now, the government has resisted revealing details about the scientists Qiu Xiangguo and Cheng Keding, who were escorted out of Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab (NML) in 2019 amid a police probe and then fired in January 2021.
A panel of members of Parliament and judges are going to review documents related to the firing of two scientists at Canada’s highest-security laboratory.
On Wednesday, House of Commons leader Mark Holland revealed the names of MPs and judges who will serve as arbiters on an ad hoc committee tasked to examine both redacted and unredacted documents pertaining to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Justin Trudeau’s second carbon tax, set to take effect July 1, will soon be costing Canadian families more than $1,000 per year.
That shock figure comes from an analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) looking at costs across the country and by province between now and 2030.
It was the $43.9-billion question Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland refused to answer.
During her testimony before the Commons finance committee Tuesday about the federal budget that she tabled in Parliament on March 28, Freeland was asked a simple question by Conservative MP Adam Chambers.
Jeep maker Stellantis has threatened to shift a planned battery plant from Canada to the US unless it receives billions more in state subsidies offered to a rival, in the latest manoeuvre by a big manufacturer in the international battle over green incentives.
It comes as the world’s fourth biggest carmaker, which also produces Vauxhall/Opel, Fiat, Citroën, Peugeot, DS, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Abarth vehicles, leads a campaign in Europe for the UK and EU to renegotiate tariff rules in the Brexit deal.
A pox on both their houses.
When U.S. President Joe Biden addressed the Canadian Parliament in March, one phrase caught my attention: “A country,” he said, quoting former president Barack Obama, “is never more optimistic than its president or its leaders.” It was a message that was evidently lost on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Opposition MPs are asking why the Chinese diplomat recently expelled for being involved in threatening an MP’s family wasn’t removed sooner after it emerged that Canada’s intelligence agency knew for several years that he was spying on Falun Gong adherents and Uyghurs in Canada.
As of the time of this writing, there are 177 Chinese diplomats in Canada, including their representatives to the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. This is second only to the United States, Canada’s closest ally and neighbour to the south, with 291 diplomats. The country with the third-highest number of diplomats in Canada is Japan, with 80 diplomats.
OTTAWA — It would be against the law for Saskatchewan to run its coal-fired power plants after 2030 unless the greenhouse-gas emissions from those plants are captured, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Wednesday.
His comment comes as electricity generation becomes the latest jurisdictional battle over climate policy between federal and provincial governments.
OTTAWA – More than two years after controversy first erupted around the firing of two scientists from Canada’s national microbiology lab, the federal government has finally come to an agreement with all opposition parties on a way forward to view the related secret documents.
Mark Holland, the government’s House leader, announced on Wednesday that three former judges would determine which documents related to the firing of Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng in January 2021 could be disclosed without compromising national security.
OTTAWA – Queen’s Park and Ottawa are at a standoff over funding for a multi-billion battery plant in Windsor, Ont., with the 2,500 jobs hanging in the balance as the company threatens to walk away if a deal can’t be reached.
Stellantis and its partner LG announced the battery plant in January 2022, pledging to create 2,500 new jobs in the community with the $5-billion plant. Details were kept secret at the time, but the company appears to have received $1 billion, split between the federal and provincial governments, to build the plant.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has declined to meet with the government’s special rapporteur on foreign interference, citing an inability to find a mutually convenient time, a spokesperson for Poilievre said Wednesday.
Poilievre has mocked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to appoint former governor general David Johnston to look into the matter of foreign interference, calling it nothing more than a delay tactic to avoid calling a public inquiry and describing Johnston as Trudeau’s “neighbour, family friend and ski buddy.”
While testifying before the Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) in April, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said the RCMP have taken “decisive action to shut down the so-called police stations” operating covertly on Canadian soil.
But when asked about that statement during an interview with CTV’s “Question Period” on May 14, the minister backtracked, saying that “the RCMP have taken concrete action to disrupt any foreign interference in relation to those so-called police stations.”
OTTAWA – NATO’s Secretary General is not denying that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau privately told the alliance Canada will never meet a defence spending target of two per cent of GDP.
“I’m talking and I’m consulting and I’m meeting with heads of state and government, prime ministers and presidents, across the lines almost every week,” Jens Stoltenberg said in a Canadian exclusive interview on CTV’s Power Play with Vassy Kapelos Tuesday. “There’s no way I can continue to sit down, discuss, with them if I start to report from each and every of those conversations.”
