A few days ago, the Globe and Mail published an effusive tribute to Mr. Trudeau’s 'transformative' tenure of office..For once, I agree with John Ibbotson. After seven years of Liberal government, there remains no doubt that the prime minister and the tight little clique surrounding him intend to fundamentally change the character of Canada, and of Canadians themselves..The difference is that Ibbotson thinks it’s wonderful..I think it’s Cuba on the 49th..It is in fact a woke and submissive Canada that the Trudeau PMO seeks to create, a Canada with no guns, no strong west, no free speech, a controlled media and the government not servant, but master. As for people who look after themselves, their families and their neighbours — self-reliance being considered once an important distinguishing mark of the free citizen — they are now suspect and even considered to be possibly anti-social..After all, we saw the preferred Trudeau model in action when the government used a public health scare to lock down the country and offer $2,000 a month for free, as a replacement for paid employment. People who preferred not to be state-dependent? Probably anti-vaxx as well. Meanwhile in Mr. Trudeau's cosmos — as he reminded us ad nauseam — it was not Canadians who had each others' backs. It was himself..Actually, it was more like he had a lot of Canadians by the ears. This was one of the truly illuminating passages of the last seven years..The other was the Freedom Convoy, led by Canada’s truckers. Bush pilots and cowboys a hundred miles from town excepted, you don’t get much more self-reliant than truckers. And they didn’t like it, so they drove to Ottawa to say so.. Truckers WikiCommonsThe scene on Ottawa's Mackenzie Avenue, February 12th 2022. You can only push free people so far. .We all know how that turned out. The transformative prime minister wouldn’t meet with them, fled town and then from a secure location gave us a quick snapshot of life under Trudeaucracy. Frozen bank accounts, electronic snooping with facial recognition technology, phone monitoring and a rather nasty campaign of calumny against honest Canadians. The trucking heroes of 2020 who famously kept things going when COVID emerged, were now “racists,” “misogynists,” who had “unacceptable opinions.” There were planted Nazi flags and with the cooperation of the mainstream media, stories that attempted to link the Convoy with criminal behaviour..Well may Canadians say, ‘what’s going on?’.While Mr. Trudeau makes it easy to dismiss him as a feckless dolt, there is in fact a well-organised plan. What they do is this..First, to the degree possible, they dispense with Parliament and run everything out of the PMO..What that looks like is that they put capable activists in to staff and direct key ministries. The ministers themselves are an unexceptional lot but make no mistake, the men and women who staff them may be wrong, but some are extremely smart and all are relentlessly dedicated to views and causes that western Canadians — and not a few in the east — find deeply repugnant..Take Environment and Climate Change Canada..During the Harper years, Canada aspired to be and to some extent was an energy superpower. Nearly 10 percent of GDP came from energy. Yet, notwithstanding the enormous contribution to national prosperity this energy development made, Mr. Trudeau wanted it gone. Perhaps it interfered with his pose as a great climate crusader. Was he teased by his friends among the global elite? Anyway, in one of those stumbling moments of truth that he occasionally delivers, he blurted out in January 2017 that the ‘oilsands should be phased out.’.The remark was quickly explained away as ‘mis-speaking.’.But it wasn’t. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) staffers had already made oil hard to move by cancelling pipelines and banning tankers from west coast waters..Then, Natural Resources Canada produced the so-called Clean Fuel Strategy. This has nothing to do with fuel purity. But it did increase energy industry costs..Carbon taxes followed, cutely labelled ‘taxing carbon pollution’ (as though one of the building blocks of life was ‘pollution.’) The present $50 per tonne carbon tax costs drivers 11¢/litre and is scheduled to go up to $65/tonne in 2023. (14¢/litre.).In 2021, the Liberal government mandated that in 2035, only zero-emission vehicles will be sold new, and in 2022 announced the current grail, carbon net-neutral by 2050..It is important to note no sufficient generating or grid improvements have yet been announced to service the extra demand for electricity that must follow the elimination of hydrocarbons for home heating and transportation. Perhaps, as my colleague Cory Morgan argues, the idea is actually to have us drive less. Or, not at all..The freedom to go where you want, when you want and with no need of permission is after all, one of the most fundamental practical expressions of freedom and was among the first things to go in communist countries. Is that part of the Trudeau-esque Canadian dream?.The government of course will say that it is trying to save the planet by reducing carbon emissions. However, as Canada’s carbon emissions are miniscule on the world scale, Canadian politicians delude us and themselves when they say we’re leading the world in a grand crusade. Nobody follows, nobody cares and China and India are building coal-fired generators of the kind we’re breaking up. And in Germany, starved of gas by the Ukraine war, the government is reactivating the ones they have, wisely taking the view that keeping people warm now, matters more than a putative two-inch sea-level rise in 100 years..On this file, we lead nothing: We are but going for a walk..Meanwhile, over at the Public Safety silo they’re focussed on their own assignment, to control handgun crime in Toronto by outlawing more than 1,500 different makes and models of rifle used by hundreds of thousands of law-abiding hunters in rural areas that unlike Toronto’s handguns, are legally acquired and held..As this obviously isn’t going to work, one has to ask: What’s the real objective here? Is it that a Liberal government doesn’t like an armed population?. HuntingHunting is threatened by gun grabs. Will there also be fewer places to hunt, thanks to Canada's support of the UN Convention on BioDiversity? .If not, why not?.Of course, when another ECCC initiative comes through for the Liberals, there’ll be fewer places to hunt, anyway. To meet their commitments to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the Liberals are pledged by 2030 to sequester 30% of Canada’s land and coastal areas in some form of protected and conserved area. They have already achieved 17% by 2020..Most of these areas are ultimately to be administered by indigenous governments, funded of course by the federal government. They will be placed under the Canadian Wildlife Act, which on lands designated under the act, entirely forbids hunting, fishing and industrial development. Even picking flowers is illegal on designated lands. Good luck with a hydro project. .Then there’s the Ministry of Propaganda — officially known as Heritage Canada. Through MinProp the Liberals, having paid $600 million to buy the selective blindness of the mainstream media are doing their best to also censor what Canadians see on the Internet. .Who decides what is ‘good’ information? Why, MinProp..And by the way, watch what happens to new media like the Western Standard under Bill C-18. The likely outcome of the Liberal plan to force Facebook to pay Canada’s mainstream media for content, is that Facebook will simply stop carrying it, or do what it did in Australia and cut one exclusive deal with a major media company. As Facebook is like a paper boy to the Western Standard, this would be enormously damaging for us and our new media competitors, and would likely remove from the public square the only critics of Ottawa that have no financial inducement to pull their punches..Sadly, we’re also now a country which with the encouragement of the federal government, is walking away from the concept of merit-based hiring and instead in the name of the absurdly named equity, inclusion and diversity, increasingly hires upon the basis of race, sexual preference and gender..Yes, this is transformative, alright. It is of course in the family tradition to win power on one set of promises, then quietly set about priorities they did not run on or worse, denied they would do. Like father, like son. But, if Mr. Trudeau dreams of being remembered as a great man with his face on a stamp and an airport named after him like his father and an icebreaker too, these will be his proofpoints..Thus, campaign on supporting the middle class, quietly kill Alberta’s energy industry. Take a public knee for Black Lives Matter, but undermine free expression on the Internet… Promise day-care but disarm legitimate gun-owners..Obviously, this is no longer the Canada of 2015.. Trudeau on drag showPrime Minister Justin Trudeau, seen here with with performer Brooke Lynn Hytes when he visited the set of RuPaul's Drag Race, says sexual minorities face 'a rising tide of hate.' Yet, says writer Jonathan Van Maren, the sexual minority movement has actually "conquered every aspect of the culture." .Change is inevitable, of course. After nearly 10 years of Conservative government, the Canada of 2015 was not the Canada of 2006, either. (Thank goodness.) The thing is, the Conservatives campaigned honestly on their intended changes, then did their best in office to follow through..The Liberals didn’t and having won power, followed the undeclared agenda described above, a strategy to diminish Canada, undermine freedom, elevate victimhood and make Canadians wards of state..And here’s what really hurts. Instead of doing great things, or even doing the promised good for the middle class, the Liberal-led national achievement is nothing but the ‘politics of less.’ .The Chinese, so much admired by the prime minister, are sending astronauts to the moon. They’re developing a military to challenge western supremacy..In Canada? This government cares about gender fluidity, drag queens, free mastectomies for susceptible teenage girls and unisex uniforms in the Canadian Armed Forces. And the things WE and the Kielburger brothers care about..Makes you proud, doesn’t it? And it makes MAiD look good. (But don’t do it. Making it easier for more people to kill themselves is another Liberal policy.). PoilievrePierre Poilievre .Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre calls it a ‘broken’ country..You bet. Mr. Trudeau has turned the middle class into the lower middle class and appears to want a controlled and dependent society of techno-serfs, with himself controlling it..So, how should people of goodwill respond?.Luckily, somewhere between manning the barricades and meekly accepting the suppression of freedoms that have demonstrated their worth to Canada for a couple of hundred years, there are other options..The first thing is to realize that Canada itself has good bones. All that’s wrong with it is the mentality of the Liberal leadership. And that’s more than the prime minister. Tempting as it is to focus on him, it wouldn’t be any better under any of the others. Trudeau must go, but so must all of them..The second thing is to understand that if you don’t tick any of the boxes, the Liberals are not interested in you.. Danielle Smith AGM 22 Oct 2022Danielle Smith, pictured at the United Conservative Party annual general meeting, October 22, 2022. .Third, when we next go to an election, we support principled men and women who will not so much ‘build back better,’ but better put things back together..This will now look revolutionary and as Danielle Smith is finding, there’s a fear factor..But those of us who desire a better country must first say 'no' to Liberal overreach, then get behind and elect leaders who were authentic enough to say what was right, while it was still unpopular..The first may come at a cost: I salute my many friends who quit their jobs, rather than accept mandatory injection of a substance into their bodies, and those truckers who went to Ottawa to tell the government it had gone too far. That was in the spirit of freedom upon which this country was built. Yes, they paid a price. But I also think this government will think twice before trying again something like that.. Scott Moe Oct 27 2022Scott Moe .As for the second, my considered opinion of Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and Scott Moe is that these are people who — like Harper — entered politics not to be something, but to do something. No hidden agenda with these people. Support them..And it’s time to peacefully resist. Not to resist the idea of Canada, which remains the best place in the world. But the Liberals despise the values of the people who made Canada great. They are unworthy of office and need to be kicked out of it..Happily, I do believe it is possible..Everything we've seen in 2022 tells me people have had enough. There is a growing mood of defiance across the land and at last — at last — a realization that the values the Liberals are trying to take away, are worth defending..We have a lot to do. But, I have not felt more optimistic since Stephen Harper re-entered politics 20 years ago..A Happy New Year to all Western Standard readers. It actually could be.
A few days ago, the Globe and Mail published an effusive tribute to Mr. Trudeau’s 'transformative' tenure of office..For once, I agree with John Ibbotson. After seven years of Liberal government, there remains no doubt that the prime minister and the tight little clique surrounding him intend to fundamentally change the character of Canada, and of Canadians themselves..The difference is that Ibbotson thinks it’s wonderful..I think it’s Cuba on the 49th..It is in fact a woke and submissive Canada that the Trudeau PMO seeks to create, a Canada with no guns, no strong west, no free speech, a controlled media and the government not servant, but master. As for people who look after themselves, their families and their neighbours — self-reliance being considered once an important distinguishing mark of the free citizen — they are now suspect and even considered to be possibly anti-social..After all, we saw the preferred Trudeau model in action when the government used a public health scare to lock down the country and offer $2,000 a month for free, as a replacement for paid employment. People who preferred not to be state-dependent? Probably anti-vaxx as well. Meanwhile in Mr. Trudeau's cosmos — as he reminded us ad nauseam — it was not Canadians who had each others' backs. It was himself..Actually, it was more like he had a lot of Canadians by the ears. This was one of the truly illuminating passages of the last seven years..The other was the Freedom Convoy, led by Canada’s truckers. Bush pilots and cowboys a hundred miles from town excepted, you don’t get much more self-reliant than truckers. And they didn’t like it, so they drove to Ottawa to say so.. Truckers WikiCommonsThe scene on Ottawa's Mackenzie Avenue, February 12th 2022. You can only push free people so far. .We all know how that turned out. The transformative prime minister wouldn’t meet with them, fled town and then from a secure location gave us a quick snapshot of life under Trudeaucracy. Frozen bank accounts, electronic snooping with facial recognition technology, phone monitoring and a rather nasty campaign of calumny against honest Canadians. The trucking heroes of 2020 who famously kept things going when COVID emerged, were now “racists,” “misogynists,” who had “unacceptable opinions.” There were planted Nazi flags and with the cooperation of the mainstream media, stories that attempted to link the Convoy with criminal behaviour..Well may Canadians say, ‘what’s going on?’.While Mr. Trudeau makes it easy to dismiss him as a feckless dolt, there is in fact a well-organised plan. What they do is this..First, to the degree possible, they dispense with Parliament and run everything out of the PMO..What that looks like is that they put capable activists in to staff and direct key ministries. The ministers themselves are an unexceptional lot but make no mistake, the men and women who staff them may be wrong, but some are extremely smart and all are relentlessly dedicated to views and causes that western Canadians — and not a few in the east — find deeply repugnant..Take Environment and Climate Change Canada..During the Harper years, Canada aspired to be and to some extent was an energy superpower. Nearly 10 percent of GDP came from energy. Yet, notwithstanding the enormous contribution to national prosperity this energy development made, Mr. Trudeau wanted it gone. Perhaps it interfered with his pose as a great climate crusader. Was he teased by his friends among the global elite? Anyway, in one of those stumbling moments of truth that he occasionally delivers, he blurted out in January 2017 that the ‘oilsands should be phased out.’.The remark was quickly explained away as ‘mis-speaking.’.But it wasn’t. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) staffers had already made oil hard to move by cancelling pipelines and banning tankers from west coast waters..Then, Natural Resources Canada produced the so-called Clean Fuel Strategy. This has nothing to do with fuel purity. But it did increase energy industry costs..Carbon taxes followed, cutely labelled ‘taxing carbon pollution’ (as though one of the building blocks of life was ‘pollution.’) The present $50 per tonne carbon tax costs drivers 11¢/litre and is scheduled to go up to $65/tonne in 2023. (14¢/litre.).In 2021, the Liberal government mandated that in 2035, only zero-emission vehicles will be sold new, and in 2022 announced the current grail, carbon net-neutral by 2050..It is important to note no sufficient generating or grid improvements have yet been announced to service the extra demand for electricity that must follow the elimination of hydrocarbons for home heating and transportation. Perhaps, as my colleague Cory Morgan argues, the idea is actually to have us drive less. Or, not at all..The freedom to go where you want, when you want and with no need of permission is after all, one of the most fundamental practical expressions of freedom and was among the first things to go in communist countries. Is that part of the Trudeau-esque Canadian dream?.The government of course will say that it is trying to save the planet by reducing carbon emissions. However, as Canada’s carbon emissions are miniscule on the world scale, Canadian politicians delude us and themselves when they say we’re leading the world in a grand crusade. Nobody follows, nobody cares and China and India are building coal-fired generators of the kind we’re breaking up. And in Germany, starved of gas by the Ukraine war, the government is reactivating the ones they have, wisely taking the view that keeping people warm now, matters more than a putative two-inch sea-level rise in 100 years..On this file, we lead nothing: We are but going for a walk..Meanwhile, over at the Public Safety silo they’re focussed on their own assignment, to control handgun crime in Toronto by outlawing more than 1,500 different makes and models of rifle used by hundreds of thousands of law-abiding hunters in rural areas that unlike Toronto’s handguns, are legally acquired and held..As this obviously isn’t going to work, one has to ask: What’s the real objective here? Is it that a Liberal government doesn’t like an armed population?. HuntingHunting is threatened by gun grabs. Will there also be fewer places to hunt, thanks to Canada's support of the UN Convention on BioDiversity? .If not, why not?.Of course, when another ECCC initiative comes through for the Liberals, there’ll be fewer places to hunt, anyway. To meet their commitments to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the Liberals are pledged by 2030 to sequester 30% of Canada’s land and coastal areas in some form of protected and conserved area. They have already achieved 17% by 2020..Most of these areas are ultimately to be administered by indigenous governments, funded of course by the federal government. They will be placed under the Canadian Wildlife Act, which on lands designated under the act, entirely forbids hunting, fishing and industrial development. Even picking flowers is illegal on designated lands. Good luck with a hydro project. .Then there’s the Ministry of Propaganda — officially known as Heritage Canada. Through MinProp the Liberals, having paid $600 million to buy the selective blindness of the mainstream media are doing their best to also censor what Canadians see on the Internet. .Who decides what is ‘good’ information? Why, MinProp..And by the way, watch what happens to new media like the Western Standard under Bill C-18. The likely outcome of the Liberal plan to force Facebook to pay Canada’s mainstream media for content, is that Facebook will simply stop carrying it, or do what it did in Australia and cut one exclusive deal with a major media company. As Facebook is like a paper boy to the Western Standard, this would be enormously damaging for us and our new media competitors, and would likely remove from the public square the only critics of Ottawa that have no financial inducement to pull their punches..Sadly, we’re also now a country which with the encouragement of the federal government, is walking away from the concept of merit-based hiring and instead in the name of the absurdly named equity, inclusion and diversity, increasingly hires upon the basis of race, sexual preference and gender..Yes, this is transformative, alright. It is of course in the family tradition to win power on one set of promises, then quietly set about priorities they did not run on or worse, denied they would do. Like father, like son. But, if Mr. Trudeau dreams of being remembered as a great man with his face on a stamp and an airport named after him like his father and an icebreaker too, these will be his proofpoints..Thus, campaign on supporting the middle class, quietly kill Alberta’s energy industry. Take a public knee for Black Lives Matter, but undermine free expression on the Internet… Promise day-care but disarm legitimate gun-owners..Obviously, this is no longer the Canada of 2015.. Trudeau on drag showPrime Minister Justin Trudeau, seen here with with performer Brooke Lynn Hytes when he visited the set of RuPaul's Drag Race, says sexual minorities face 'a rising tide of hate.' Yet, says writer Jonathan Van Maren, the sexual minority movement has actually "conquered every aspect of the culture." .Change is inevitable, of course. After nearly 10 years of Conservative government, the Canada of 2015 was not the Canada of 2006, either. (Thank goodness.) The thing is, the Conservatives campaigned honestly on their intended changes, then did their best in office to follow through..The Liberals didn’t and having won power, followed the undeclared agenda described above, a strategy to diminish Canada, undermine freedom, elevate victimhood and make Canadians wards of state..And here’s what really hurts. Instead of doing great things, or even doing the promised good for the middle class, the Liberal-led national achievement is nothing but the ‘politics of less.’ .The Chinese, so much admired by the prime minister, are sending astronauts to the moon. They’re developing a military to challenge western supremacy..In Canada? This government cares about gender fluidity, drag queens, free mastectomies for susceptible teenage girls and unisex uniforms in the Canadian Armed Forces. And the things WE and the Kielburger brothers care about..Makes you proud, doesn’t it? And it makes MAiD look good. (But don’t do it. Making it easier for more people to kill themselves is another Liberal policy.). PoilievrePierre Poilievre .Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre calls it a ‘broken’ country..You bet. Mr. Trudeau has turned the middle class into the lower middle class and appears to want a controlled and dependent society of techno-serfs, with himself controlling it..So, how should people of goodwill respond?.Luckily, somewhere between manning the barricades and meekly accepting the suppression of freedoms that have demonstrated their worth to Canada for a couple of hundred years, there are other options..The first thing is to realize that Canada itself has good bones. All that’s wrong with it is the mentality of the Liberal leadership. And that’s more than the prime minister. Tempting as it is to focus on him, it wouldn’t be any better under any of the others. Trudeau must go, but so must all of them..The second thing is to understand that if you don’t tick any of the boxes, the Liberals are not interested in you.. Danielle Smith AGM 22 Oct 2022Danielle Smith, pictured at the United Conservative Party annual general meeting, October 22, 2022. .Third, when we next go to an election, we support principled men and women who will not so much ‘build back better,’ but better put things back together..This will now look revolutionary and as Danielle Smith is finding, there’s a fear factor..But those of us who desire a better country must first say 'no' to Liberal overreach, then get behind and elect leaders who were authentic enough to say what was right, while it was still unpopular..The first may come at a cost: I salute my many friends who quit their jobs, rather than accept mandatory injection of a substance into their bodies, and those truckers who went to Ottawa to tell the government it had gone too far. That was in the spirit of freedom upon which this country was built. Yes, they paid a price. But I also think this government will think twice before trying again something like that.. Scott Moe Oct 27 2022Scott Moe .As for the second, my considered opinion of Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and Scott Moe is that these are people who — like Harper — entered politics not to be something, but to do something. No hidden agenda with these people. Support them..And it’s time to peacefully resist. Not to resist the idea of Canada, which remains the best place in the world. But the Liberals despise the values of the people who made Canada great. They are unworthy of office and need to be kicked out of it..Happily, I do believe it is possible..Everything we've seen in 2022 tells me people have had enough. There is a growing mood of defiance across the land and at last — at last — a realization that the values the Liberals are trying to take away, are worth defending..We have a lot to do. But, I have not felt more optimistic since Stephen Harper re-entered politics 20 years ago..A Happy New Year to all Western Standard readers. It actually could be.