Author: Andrew Lawton

First published at True North on April 2, 2020.

There’s “no indication” China’s numbers on coronavirus infections and deaths can’t be trusted, Canadian Health Minister Patty Hajdu said Thursday.

Responding to a question at the government’s daily coronavirus briefing Thursday, Hajdu downplayed concerns that China’s numbers were inaccurate, even going so far as to accuse the reporter who asked about them of “feeding conspiracy theories.”

“There’s no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified any way,” said Hajdu.

“Your question is feeding into conspiracy theories that many people have been perpetuating on the internet and it’s important to remember that there is no way to beat a global pandemic if we’re not willing to work together as a globe.”

In contradiction to Hajdu’s claims, Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne suggested that the government has looked into the accuracy of the data.  

“We are very concerned about this information, I just had a call with NATO allies a few hours ago,” said Champagne. 

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said questions about China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and whether its stats could be trusted, were “questions…for future times.”

This comes on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the U.S. intelligence community found evidence China purposefully hid and falsified their coronavirus case data. 

“Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that,” said US President Donald Trump during a daily coronavirus briefing. 

According to the Daily Mail, advisors to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have also questioned the current case numbers coming out of China and claim that they might be 15 to 40 times worse than reported. 

Reports from China of mass incineration and thousands of cremation urns outside of funeral homes have cast doubt on the Chinese communist government’s numbers, which have fed World Health Organization data.

First published at True North on March 19, 2020.

I’m baffled and disappointed that I even need to write this column, frankly.

If Canada were in the midst of a federal election right now, I have no doubt the campaigns would be suspended given the global public health crisis that COVID-19 is causing.

But for the Conservative Party of Canada, things are supposed to be business as usual.

The eight people seeking the Conservative leadership have until March 25 to pony up $300,000 and 3,000 signatures of active members to the party to secure a spot on the ballot. So far only four – Peter MacKay, Erin O’Toole, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan – have done so. (A fifth, Jim Karahalios, says he has done so but the Conservative party’s official registry doesn’t yet reflect this).

The others were plugging away raising funds and collecting signatures at events across the country but have suspended these activities while public officials recommend – or in some cases order – social distancing.

Retail politics is all about face-to-face interactions, which are, at this point, verboten in Canada. It isn’t just about logistics. People are hurting, and to shift priorities from survival to partisanship is just wrong.

The Conservative’s leadership election organizing committee is unmoved by this.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party of Canada sent out a fundraising email this week derided by the party’s own supporters as tone-deaf and ill-timed.

Going dark is easy for the candidates who have already guaranteed their spots on the ballot. For the others, human decency may be rewarded with elimination from the race.

Leadership candidate Rick Peterson halted fundraising but made phone and social media appeals for nomination signatures. Most campaigns shifted into virtual mode, while some were suspended altogether.

“I still fundamentally believe now is not the time to campaign, virtually or by other means,” said leadership candidate Rudy Husny in a statement Thursday. 

“If the Conservative Party of Canada wants to disqualify me on March 25th for being true to my values and refusing to campaign during this public health emergency, I will leave this race with no regrets as I believe it is the right thing to do and what real leadership is all about.”

Sarnia––Lambton member of parliament and leadership candidate Marilyn Gladu expressed a similar sentiment.

“If the Conservative Party chooses to disqualify me on March 25th because I refuse to impose upon Canadians working to ensure the health and safety of their loved ones, I will accept their decision with resignation and disappointment,” she said.

The Conservative party’s leadership committee deliberately set a high bar for entering the race. Whether the remaining four candidates would have cleared it without COVID-19 throwing a wrench into things is unknown.

Even so, those who would have merely squeaked by have been handicapped by rules that no longer reflect the circumstances of the country.

While there are those who say the lesser-known candidates aren’t relevant in a so-called two-horse race, in a contest decided by ranked ballots a bigger field can have a monumental impact.

We don’t know how long COVID-19 and its quarantines and public gathering limitations will last. It may be that the Conservatives’ planned leadership convention in June will have to be cancelled. It’s possible to crown a leader without a convention given ballots are being mailed to Conservative members. It’s possible to retain the race’s overall timeline while merely extending the ballot deadline by a few weeks.

Alternatively, the party could cancel the June convention and instead combine it with November’s scheduled policy convention. Whatever the solution might be, don’t believe anyone who says there aren’t options.

All of them are better than encouraging candidates to shake loose change out of the pockets of Canadians grappling with the coronavirus’s economic realities.

The party is out of alignment with its members here. As part of True North’s Conservative Leadership Series, I sat down with four of the candidates last week, before the country went into de facto lockdown.

While our audience is seeking COVID-19 coverage, I admit it felt weird to publish these interviews as we’ve been doing since they were recorded.

I would have loved to keep them banked until the worst of this crisis was behind us, though with the party maintaining its Mar. 25 cutoff, it would be unfair to the candidates to deny them access to our audience, even if the country’s attention is elsewhere.

Some things matter more than politics. Everyone except for the Conservative Party of Canada realizes COVID-19 is one of these things.

First published at True North on March 17, 2020.

The Canada Border Services Agency has paused deportations while Canada deals with the spread of coronavirus, the agency confirmed to True North.

“During this time-period while the openness of international borders and availability of international flights is rapidly changing, there has been a significant impact on removal operations,” said a CBSA spokesperson.

“In light of the current circumstances and in the best interest of officers and clientele, the Government of Canada, in conjunction with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), has decided to stop carrying out removals at the current time.”

The spokesperson added that some removals may still take place with “serious criminal cases,” but these will be “via exception only.”

The directive includes the cancellation of previously scheduled deportations. The CBSA will be notifying those impacted by the cancellations in these cases.

CBSA didn’t confirm how long the pause will be in effect, though two immigration lawyers indicated they’ve heard it will last three weeks.

This comes just one day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a shutdown of the Canadian border to those who aren’t Canadian citizens or permanent residents. The federal government has also ordered many international flights to redirect to the Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto airports to better control the flow of entry into Canada.

CBSA is using what it calls a “risk-based approach” to assess even Canadian citizens returning to Canada. Officers have been directed to remind people who enter the country that they must self-isolate for 14 days. The CBSA is also asking anyone with symptoms to disclose them to a screening officer.

On Sunday, a CBSA employee at Pearson airport in Toronto tested positive for COVID-19, though the agency didn’t know where or when the employee, who is currently in self-isolation, contracted the virus.

First published at True North on March 7, 2020.

If the dictatorial regime in Iran were as invested in dealing with the spread of coronavirus as it is with curbing the spread of information about it, the country would be faring far better than it is.

Iran’s Covid-19 mortality rate is the highest in the world, and the country appears to have the fastest spread of the virus based even on the grossly understated official figures.

The World Health Organization’s Mar. 7 situation report lists 124 deaths out of 4747 confirmed cases of the virus in Iran, though even these official numbers were outdated within minutes of publication.

The more significant – and more elusive – number is the disparity between the truth and what the Iranian regime acknowledges.

Citing hospital sources, BBC Persia reported the death toll at 210 in a Feb. 28 story while the Iranian government said only 34 had died from the virus.

The Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) pegged the death toll at over 2000 – nearly 14 times the official tally – on Saturday, noting cases in 74 cities in all of Iran’s 31 provinces.

“The scale of the virus spread and death rate in Iran is dramatically more extensive and catastrophic, to the extent that if not contained, hundreds of thousands of Iranians would be vulnerable to infection and death as a result of the regime’s incompetence, lack of sufficient resources to confront the virus and a corrupt ruling elite,” MEK said in a report.

MEK pointed out that unlike other countries, which were transparent about their detection and monitoring of the virus from the outset, Iran only first acknowledged it when there were already two deaths.

Iran’s deputy health minister, Iraj Harirchi, embodied the state’s duplicity while sweating and coughing from Covid-19 during a news conference in which he downplayed the virus’ spread.

At this point, at least two dozen Iranian lawmakers have been infected, some of whom – most recently a female member of parliament – have died.

Even if we were to accept Iran’s data, we’d see the number of confirmed cases having jumped by over 20% in just 24 hours.

A couple of members of parliament have been rebuked for pointing out the inconsistencies in the regime’s figures.

“The numbers are much higher than what is being said,” MP Gholamali Jafarzadeh Imenabadi said to Al-Arabiya. “It is not as if we can hide the cemeteries.”

While Iranians are being turned away from overcrowded hospitals, Iran has nevertheless found the resources to ensure anyone “spreading rumours” about the virus will be flogged and sentenced to as many as three years in prison.

“Rumours” would appear to be regime-speak for the truth, as one person was arrested for sharing footage from inside a crowded morgue, and a university head from Qom said the government had banned the dissemination of outbreak figures.

Apologists for the regime – including some in western media reports – have said the issues with the official figures are as innocent as “data collection” inefficiencies.

It would be easy to chalk this all up to gross political incompetence were there not so many bodies piling up – and were it not part of a pattern with Iran.

That all of this comes less than two months after the Iranian military shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 is no coincidence. The Iranian government apologized for its “unforgivable mistake” and vowed to cooperate with investigative efforts – though subsequently changed its mind.

In Iran’s first major transparency test since, the country is failing once again.

And once again, Iran’s hubris is proving fatal.

Iranian lives aren’t the only ones at risk here. Iran is facing backlash from all over the Middle East as the virus seems to have spread directly from Iran in many cases.

Iran’s negligence has directly put Canadians at risk as well.

While the early Covid-19 cases in Canada were in people who had come from China, the bulk of Canada’s recent coronavirus patients picked it up in Iran.

Even with this week’s confirmation of Canada’s first local transmission of the virus, the majority of infections have thus far been imported. Despite this, the federal government has not imposed any travel restrictions, effectively ignoring the continued importation risk.

“This is a virus that knows no borders and that is growing,” said Canadian health minister Patty Hajdu when asked about shutting down or restricting ports of entry to Canada.

Without travel restrictions, Canadians assume vulnerability because of other countries’ failings.

First published at True North on February 17, 2020.

To Tabitha Speer, Omar Khadr is her husband’s killer.

To Layne Morris, Omar Khadr is the cause of his partial blindness.

To Roméo Dallaire, Omar Khadr is a “magnificent gentleman.”

That undeserved characterization was surely a gut punch to the veterans outside a theatre at Dalhousie University last week, where Khadr was held up as a beacon of “courage” before a crowd that gave him a standing ovation.

The stars of the evening: a convicted terrorist, a sycophantic moderator, and an audience of fawning fans who don’t just see Khadr as a victim, but inexplicably as a hero.

The moderator, Shelly Whitman, promised “hard questions” that may be “challenging” and even “triggering,” though no such questions were posed. Unless, that is, you count Khadr being asked about the weather, or about a happy childhood memory.

Far from being an open dialogue, Whitman told the audience at the outset that questions about “the incident that happened in Afghanistan” were off-limits, as well as questions about Khadr’s $10.5 million payout from the federal government.

It takes a miraculous about of chutzpah for a convicted terrorist to get credit for ‘speaking out’ without actually addressing the terrorism bit.

That “incident” was the firefight that killed Speer and wounded Morris. Khadr confessed to and was convicted of throwing the fatal grenade, though he’s since amended this position to one of uncertainty.

Morris’ name was never mentioned at the forum. The moderator made only a passing reference to Speer as she alluded to his death “allegedly” being at Khadr’s hands.

The parodic forum revealed how successful Khadr’s rehabilitative public relations efforts have been.

While Khadr found some outright support from the fringes of the Canadian left when he was repatriated to Canada in 2012, much of the sympathy towards him was focused not on downplaying his past, but taking aim at his treatment by the American and Canadian governments.

Some people were uncomfortable viewing him in black-and-white as a hardened terrorist, and resigned to accept that there were shades of grey in his story.

This has dramatically shifted to the point where those formerly fringe voices have succeeding in casting a narrative Khadr is an example to which we should all strive. Activists now condemn as racist any view of Khadr that isn’t explicitly laudatory.

Those of us in the audience at Dalhousie last week were told to accept Khadr as being “magnificent” and “courageous,” though it was never explained why that is.

Even if we view Khadr as a victim, that hardly justifies extoling such positive attributes. Especially when no one is prepared to explore the glaring discrepancies in the victim narrative and Khadr’s own actions since being released from custody.

If Khadr was a victim, it was not of the Canadian state but rather his own family. He was just a young and innocent bystander to their radicalism, the story goes.

The Khadrs got the nickname as being Canada’s “first family of terror” for a reason. Khadr’s father, Ahmed, was an al-Qaeda financier and confidante of Osama bin Laden. Khadr’s sister and mother notoriously expressed support for bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and even Speer’s murder.

Yet Khadr, in a 2015 Toronto Star interview said he doesn’t believe his father was in al-Qaeda.

This would come as a shock to Khadr’s brother, Abdulrahman, who said in a CBC documentary, “We are an al-Qaeda family.”

Omar Khadr also downplayed his mother’s and sister’s comments, saying he has “a million other influences” so people shouldn’t be worried.

Khadr’s supporters blame the Khadr family for putting him on the battlefield, but Khadr himself defends and downplays his family’s extremism.

Shining the light on the Khadr family exposes the biggest liability to the Khadr-as-a-victim narrative: if his family was so complicit, why has he not renounced them?

After his release, Khadr successfully went to court on numerous occasions to ease the restrictions on communicating with his family. He fought to have unsupervised contact, and eventually to get a passport to visit his sister in Saudi Arabia.

It’s a question Khadr has never answered – and to my knowledge one he’s never been asked.

I’ve never sought to deny Khadr the right to speak. Though as someone who’s written about the free speech fight I must admit it’s an interesting test of where the lines of acceptable campus discourse are drawn. Misgendering someone gets you banned from speaking on campuses but murdering an American soldier fills the house and gets you a standing ovation.