Thousands of people have taken to the streets in the nation’s capital and other cities across Canada over the last three weeks to protest vaccine mandates, pandemic restrictions and lockdowns.
While many protesters have been carrying the Canadian flag, some have been waving flags that are less recognizable.
But for experts who study extremism in Canada, the symbols on some of these flags are familiar.
Totalitarian ideas are now out in the open
Quick: what do you think when someone tries to convince you of something by prefacing their remarks with the phase “Experts say”?
I think of that rude, two-word imperative of Germanic origin that ends in “You.”
As Laplace said in another context, it is par expériences nombreuses et funestes that I have this almost Pavlovian reaction.
The “experts,” alas, are not expert, i.e, “possessing a high degree of skill in or knowledge of” a certain subject.
One of the self-appointed “experts” cited by the CBC operates out of the Kommunity Kollege Of KKK Knowledge and claims 300 active “white supremacist” groups in Canada – but can’t name them.
I guess we should have expected this to happen. COVID is over. The pandemic is over. The arsenal to combat it or deal with its symptoms is substantial. It’s endemic. Natural immunity is a real thing. It has a 99-plus percent survival rate. It’s time to end ALL the mandates. No more masks. No insane and creepy obsession with penetrating the masses with the COVID vaccine. Enough. The truckers in Canada get it. They were cleared off the Ambassador Bridge during the Super Bowl yesterday, but they’re still honking in Ottawa.
Pundits are attempting to cast the fundamental value as a ‘far-right’ code word, reinventing the notion of liberty itself.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently set out to explain why the word “freedom” has become a “useful rallying cry” for protesters in the trucking convoy. Freedom, it added, “has become common among far-right groups, experts say.”
It’s worth noting here that the addendum “experts say” is perhaps the laziest scam run by contemporary political journalism. It is little more than columnizing by proxy, or what Kyle Smith calls, “opinion laundering.” Journalists scan the websites of think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities to find some credentialed ideologue who will repeat every tedious bit of liberal conventional wisdom the reporter already believes. While we may need experts to explain quantum computing or synthesize complex mathematical data for us, we hardly need them to smear political adversaries. Reporters are already aficionados in that field.
The Canadian-government-funded CBC published a “freedom is fascism” attack on liberty this weekend, quoting “experts” who claim that the word “freedom” has become “flexible” and “common among far-right groups.”
Let’s see who’s really doing the flexing, shall we?
The CBC quotes Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at the Oshawa-based Ontario Tech University, who claims that the problem with “freedom” is that “You can define it and understand it and sort of manipulate it in a way that makes sense to you and is useful to you, depending on your perspective.”
CBC smears Freedom as Nazi just in time for junior to invoke the “Emergencies Act”. How convenient is that?
Canadian ambivalence over Beijing 2022 seems to be playing out in TV viewership for the Games, with CBC posting initial ratings that are down sharply from previous Winter Olympics and even last summer’s Tokyo Games.
Primetime viewership on CBC for the first six days of events in Beijing is down 22 per cent from Tokyo, and off a whopping 48 per cent from the Pyeongchang Winter Games, according to figures provided Friday to The Globe and Mail by CBC.
… One advertising buyer told The Globe the ratings were about 25-per-cent lower than projections the CBC’s sales department had provided to the industry in advance of the Games, raising the possibility the public broadcaster may have to compensate marketers for failing to reach its expected audience.
Go Incognito
Renowned Canadian author and psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson gave a scathing critique of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and its coverage of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.
Peterson made the comments during an episode of his podcast with guest Dr. Julie Ponesse. He said the public broadcaster should no longer receive any public funding due to its “appallingly corrupt” practices.
Yuri Bezmenov defected from the Soviet Union to Canada in the ‘70s, and his warnings about disinformation have made him a posthumous star on social media. Documents obtained by CBC News reveal his toxic relationship with Canada’s intelligence services.
The public broadcaster’s correction Thursday said the claim “should have referenced experts’ concerns that during the current tension over Ukraine, Moscow could use its cyber and disinformation capabilities,” according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
It’s a paradox.
Canadians keep telling public-opinion pollsters they’ve had quite enough of the gruesome Chinese police state and would rather have nothing at all to do with the Beijing Winter Games, which officially kick off this week. With all the national shouting and divisive contentions over COVID-19 containment, inflation and a real estate industry drunk on relentlessly rising housing costs, it’s the one big thing Canadians seem to agree upon.
Critics call for new rules for online fundraisers after protest convoy takes anonymous donations
Critics are calling on the federal government to introduce new rules for online fundraising campaigns after a fundraiser for this weekend’s protest in Ottawa against vaccine mandates raised millions of dollars — in part from anonymous donors and people using fictitious names.
Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May said the GoFundMe fundraiser for the protest convoy raises concerns about whether such campaigns could be used by big businesses or foreign state actors to circumvent Canada’s political financing rules.
“If this isn’t worrying, it certainly exposes a possibility that is very worrying, which is that you can be not a political organization, not registered with Elections Canada but find the right kind of dog whistle and put up a GoFundMe campaign,” she said.
Elizabeth May? A Yankee who along with US NGO funding has worked for decades to undermine Canada’s Oil & Gas industry is worried about “foreign interference”. The gall.
CBC Jumps The Shark … Again
So desperate to smear. pic.twitter.com/x8h6BSmOJh
— Canada Proud (@WeAreCanProud) January 29, 2022
Large number of donations to support convoy came from aliases, unnamed donors
Many donors used satirical aliases, including ‘Justin Trudeau’ and ‘Theresa Tam’
At least a third of the donations to the GoFundMe campaign set up to support the convoy of trucks headed to Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates came from anonymous sources or were attributed to fake names, according to an analysis by CBC News.
While thousands of Canadians and Canadian businesses have dipped into their pockets to fund the cause, thousands of other donors to the campaign are listed simply as “Anonymous.”
Should the CBC run ads? It depends on a number of facts, most of which are not firmly established.
Is topping-up the CBC’s budget so as to free it from the necessity of selling $250 million of ads per year really the best use of public money? It’s hard to believe it is. Making CBC ad-free, as cultural nationalists have long demanded, seems a marginal sort of expenditure whose only saving grace is that many of the other things this government would do with the money are even lesser-value spending. Could we not buy the front end of an ice-breaker instead? Or a few guns for our soldiers? Or cut tax rates by a decimal point or two? Of course, in our system the government gets to decide and if no other party opposes it, and none seems ready to, ad-free will probably go through.
For the first time in a long while, there appears to be broad support, on both sides of the political spectrum, for reforming the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In a long-overdue move, the Liberals have pledged to make the broadcaster “less reliant on private advertising.” But they will do it in a decidedly Liberal way: by increasing its funding, as if the scads of public money the CBC already gets isn’t enough. The CBC has strayed so far from its mandate that the only way to truly modernize it is to privatize most of its assets.
WARNING: This column contains science and risk information as reported by The National, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship news show. Unfiltered consumption of such information from the CBC can be hazardous to the reader’s mental health. Reader caution is advised.
