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First published at True North on October 5, 2020.

Despite health officials’ calls for Canadians to stay home to save lives, a federal government department is funding an ad campaign encouraging people to book a Niagara Falls getaway with grandma.

In a 50-second Niagara Falls Tourism spot, a man and his grandmother are shown exploring Niagara Falls by playing skee ball in an arcade, dancing under a gazebo and taking a boat tour, noting that quarantine had kept them apart.

“Hey grandma, these last few months, I’ve been thinking. You know, quarantine has kept us apart, but I can’t just blame COVID. Because last time we were really together – just the two of us – was, I don’t even know,” the male narrator says. “But I’m gonna change that. And we don’t need to wait for some moment. Let’s go to Niagara Falls this weekend. What we do is up to you. I just want to be together. And this time, no, it’s not your birthday or a holiday or some special occasion. Because grandma, you are my occasion.”

The commercial is running online and in primetime on television.

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario’s logo appears at the end of the ad, which directs people to the website for Niagara Falls’ tourism bureau.

The economic development agency’s mandate is to “advance and diversify the southern Ontario economy through funding opportunities and business services that support innovation and growth.”

The ad has been running since at least Sept. 28, five days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians that COVID-19’s “second wave is underway.”

“Together we have the power to get the second wave under control,” Trudeau said in an address to the nation last month. “I know we can do it because we’ve already done it once before. In the spring, we all did our part by staying home. And this fall, we have even more tools in the toolbox.”

A spokesperson for Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada did not say whether the federal government discourages domestic tourism, noting only that travel within Canada “should follow provincial and territorial measure (sic) and rules.”

Health Minister Patty Hajdu’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The federal government is still urging Canadians to avoid all non-essential travel abroad. There is no publicly available guidance on domestic travel, though several provinces, notably in Atlantic Canada, have restrictions in place to limit incoming travelers.

The Ontario government is still advising people to “stay home as much as possible – go grocery shopping once a week or less, only visit pharmacies and banks when necessary and place orders over the phone or online.”

This point was stressed Monday by Ontario’s chief medical officer, Dr. David Williams, who said that while there is no official ban on travel within Ontario, people should nonetheless avoid it.

“Not an official (rule), but unofficially, you have to be very judicious about your choice of when to travel and where to travel,” Dr. Williams said. “We have asked people…to decrease travel. Don’t go out of your house if you don’t need to go out. Don’t go moving around, even if in other parts of the province.”

Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said last week that Thanksgiving gatherings this year should ideally be “virtual,” while Toronto’s top doctor is calling for another shutdown of a number of indoor activities, including restaurant dining.

First published at True North on September 18, 2020.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole has tested positive for COVID-19, the Conservative Party of Canada said in a statement late Friday evening.

“This evening, Erin O’Toole received a positive test result for COVID-19,” the statement said. “He is very relieved that his wife and children have tested negative. Mr. O’Toole remains in self-isolation and is feeling well.”

The statement offered no further details, though the party said earlier that O’Toole and his family got tested after learning someone on his staff, with whom he had traveled to Quebec, had tested positive for the virus.

O’Toole and his family initially tried to get tested Wednesday morning at an Ottawa testing centre, only to be turned away after several hours of waiting due to overcapacity.

“While waiting in the COVID-19 testing line up, I was struck by how many families were waiting just like ours,” O’Toole said. “Children are being sent home from school to get tested, and it is hard for moms and dads to keep them calm.”

The O’Tooles ended up using a House of Commons testing service later that day.

O’Toole used the wait to take aim at Justin Trudeau’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Trudeau Liberals have created this mess by refusing to approve other testing methods – despite all our allies having, for months, multiple tests including much faster and less invasive methods,” he said. “I stand with the thousands of Canadian families who are waiting in lines today for tests. It has been seven months, Justin Trudeau must answer for why we do not have access to more of the tests our allies are using.”

O’Toole’s self-isolation means he will not be sitting in the House of Commons next week when Parliament resumes for the Liberal government’s throne speech.

Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet also tested positive for the virus, his office confirmed Tuesday.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and O’Toole spoke earlier Friday about priorities for the return of Parliament. During the call, Trudeau “wished O’Toole and his family well” as they awaited – at the time – their test results.

First published at True North on September 13, 2020.

Canada’s gun owners wanted to be heard, and they were.

Thousands of Canadian gun owners and advocates took to the streets of Ottawa Saturday afternoon to demand accountability from politicians.

The Integrity March was organized by the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) as a “public relations exercise” to show lawmakers, the media and Canadians as a whole that gun owners are a part of the country and should not be vilified by the government under the guise of public safety.

CCFR chief executive officer Rod Giltaca told True North’s Andrew Lawton it was important to push back the Trudeau government’s latest “assault” on law-abiding gun owners — the overnight ban of 1,500 variations of firearms — and defend against this infringement of property rights.

“Over the last couple decades we’ve taken the course of just keeping quiet and minding our own business. That hasn’t worked, obviously. We’re under assault again,” Giltaca said. “I think our goal today is just for gun owners to be proud of Canadian gun culture. We have a very vibrant gun culture; guns are nothing new in Canada.” 

The CCFR estimates 5,000 people participated in the march, which was led around downtown Ottawa and back to Parliament Hill by a band of bagpipers.

True North encountered people from as far away as British Columbia, New Brunswick and the Yukon at the march.

After the event, CCFR vice-president Tracey Wilson told Lawton it’s important to keep up the pressure in the coming days and months.

“What I want everybody to do is to continue to hold Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government – and especially Bill Blair – responsible for their lack of credible work on crime,” Wilson said. “You can take my guns. You can take my knives. You can take everything I own, and you’re not going to save one life, because I’m not a dangerous person. And neither are these people.”

The Liberal government’s massive May reclassification gave owners of the 1,500 affected models two years to surrender them to the government or face prosecution. The ban was initiated through an order-in-council, bypassing the parliamentary process.

The government issued the bans as a response to the mass-shooting that occurred in Nova Scotia in April, despite the fact that the shooter obtained his firearms illegally and did not have a firearms license.

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair didn’t address the march in a Saturday statement, opting to restate his confidence in his government’s gun ban.

“The prohibition limits access to dangerous weapons that have no place in our communities, while also recognizing legal civilian ownership of firearms for hunters, sport shooters and collectors,” Blair said.

“We have reached a sensible position that prioritizes public safety, supports effective police work and community programming while treating everyone in a fair and reasonable manner.”

Giltaca and Wilson declined to say whether they plan to host a second march, but Wilson was clear there’s more work to be done.

“We’re just getting warmed up,” she said.

First published at SteynOnline on July 30, 2020.

“Don’t look at me – I’m just the prime minister.”

That about sums up Justin Trudeau’s defense in a Canadian scandal starring grifters, shell corporations, virtue signallers and a federal ethics probe.

The WE-Scam, as it’s come to be known in Canadian circles, is, on its surface, a simple one.

Trudeau’s government created a $912 million government program to pay students to volunteer – formerly known as “working” if memory serves – and outsourced the administration of it to WE Charity, one of those purported international development charities more known for holding glitzy, celebrity-filled parties than digging any wells in Africa.

All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau.

WE would have netted about $44 million from the program had the government not pulled the plug amid the backlash. The charity would also have had a budget to pay teachers up to $12,000 each to funnel their students into the paid volunteer channels.

The program itself was a boondoggle, but bad policy became a scandal because Trudeau and virtually everyone in his immediate family have personal and financial connections to WE, as do at least two of his cabinet ministers, not to mention his chief of staff – all of whom say their relationships had nothing to do with WE getting the sole-sourced contract.

After weeks of ducking scrutiny from his political opponents, Trudeau made a rare appearance before the parliamentary finance committee Thursday, though his testimony was heavy on the sanctimony and light on the details.

Trudeau didn’t answer the most basic of questions, like how much money his family members have taken from WE. The sums we know from media reports are not insignificant.

Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, and brother, Alexandre, were paid over $300,000 to speak at a variety of WE events. For some reason this lucrative hustle only started after Trudeau became Canada’s prime minister. Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, hosts a WE podcast about “well-being” and serves as an ambassador for the organization, even bringing back a bout of coronavirus from a WE event in London earlier this year.

I would suggest the federal ethics investigator could save the time on the investigation and reach a finding based on the details in that paragraph alone, though Trudeau should be commended for how brazenly he denies there could be a conflict of interest.

“My mother… is proud that she doesn’t have to rely on a husband or a son to support her because she does her own work,” he said. “And I’m proud of the work that she does, but I do not feel that it is my responsibility to peer into the work my mother is doing.”

(Joe Biden could probably tweak that for the next time he has to answer for Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.)

I must admit Trudeau pivoting to feminism to defend against an ethics probe is rich considering his last ethics probe came about when he fired his female attorney general for refusing his overtures to halt the prosecution of a Liberal-connected engineering firm.

Trudeau admitted he probably should have recused himself from the discussions but even then tried to suggest he had very little to do with how his government chose to hand out a billion dollars.

He said the decision was made by bureaucrats and only shared with him on his way into a cabinet meeting at which the plan was supposed to be approved.

“(The public service) said that if we wanted this program to happen, it could only be with WE Charity. The choice was not between providers, it was between going ahead with WE Charity to deliver the program, or not going ahead with the program at all.”

I wish the latter option had been entertained, as there’s something particularly insidious about bureaucracy continuing to grow only to outsource massive programs to murky non-governmental organizations. That this process supposedly happened without anyone elected weighing in, as Trudeau and company contend, adds a layer of incompetence to the corruption.

In many respects this isn’t new. There have been as many federal ethics probes of Trudeau as there have been snapshots of him hanging around in blackface, which is to say three. He was found guilty of the first two, and looks to be on track for the hat trick, to use a term I’m told has something to do with hockey.

Donald Trump couldn’t eat a bowl of borscht without being accused of Russian collusion though Trudeau can bat his eyelashes and implore us to think of the children when he’s busted pushing money to an organization tied to much of his inner circle.

Or organizations, rather.

One of the more confusing aspects of the scandal has been the shell game of figuring out which organization did what. The charity said it never paid any Trudeaus to speak, before it was revealed this was but a technicality as the group’s for-profit wing actually cut the cheques (except for a few that were accidentally paid by the charity and then reimbursed. Are you keeping up?)

There are at least eight separate WE entities that have arisen in these discussions so far, though former WE Charity board chair Michelle Douglas wasn’t confident enough to say how many organizations there are for sure, which always bodes well for transparency.

Speaking of transparency, it’s worth noting that a Toronto Sun reporter caught a snapshot of a guy carrying some bankers’ boxes of documents out of WE’s Toronto headquarters Thursday. One of them was labeled “partnerships,” which is the term used by WE to describe its relationship with the federal government. Nothing to see here, I’m sure.

Other groups under the WE umbrella have been accused of simply being real estate holding entities with millions of dollars in downtown Toronto property and not an African schoolhouse in sight.

Trudeau’s platitudes have gotten him through much of his premiership, but he’s on dangerous terrain now.

It’s no wee problem, but certainly is a WE one.

First published at SteynOnline on July 16, 2020.

For a few moments last night, Twitter was, blissfully, free from the musings of the blue check brigade.

If you don’t know what this club is you’re rather fortunate as the blue check brigade is the gaggle of people you’re to believe are more important than you, as evidenced by the small blue checkmarks that appear beside their Twitter handles.

A confession: I am a member of the club insofar as I have a checkmark, as does my gracious host Mark Steyn. Though philosophically I’m relieved to be on the outside of this in-crowd.

Blue-checked accounts were locked down by Twitter Wednesday night after a mass Twitter hack saw numerous high-profile accounts, including those of presidential candidate Kanye West, former president Barack Obama, and man-who-may-or-may-not-know-he’s-running-for-president Joe Biden, tweet out a bitcoin scam.

Twitter froze these accounts before any more fell victim to the hack, but it wasn’t long after that the antsy Twitteratti started posting from exile on non-checked backup accounts, seemingly unable to go even a couple of hours without the world knowing their thoughts.

In their absence the normally insufferable Twitter was a more authentic place as regular folks, for once, got to set the narrative.

The blue-checkers’ greatest fear was realized – that the world kept spinning in their absence.

While the checkmark may seem – and ultimately is – laughably insignificant, it’s the symptom of a bigger problem and the cause of another.

Twitter’s stated purpose for blue checkmarks is to demonstrate an “account of public interest is authentic.” Those in the media (who comprise the bulk of blue-check holders) tend to view a checkmark not as a symbol of authenticity but rather of ascension to some higher moral or intellectual stratum.

Perhaps the great Blue Check Lockdown of 2020 was a cosmic penance for the collective self-righteousness of the group – we may never know.

Coming in the middle of this year’s unending mass cancelation, it was, I’d say, a welcome episode to see the elites who find perspectives other than their own repugnant forced to sit on their hands, even if only for a short time.

The great irony of Twitter’s response was that in seeking to protect the integrity of high-profile accounts by locking them down, it amplified the voices of people with large audiences that Twitter has, for petty partisan reasons, denied its coveted “verified” status to.

“Be gone blue checks. Your validation is nothing more than an email address from a fake news institution,” one such unverified tweeter, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, wrote. “We are the media now.”

Short-lived as the celebration was, it was nice to break through the echo chamber.

When I first got my blue checkmark I learned of an unadvertised feature on Twitter allowing me to filter my feed to read only tweets from other people with checkmarks. With the click of a button, I could wipe out any conversations emanating from the regular old plebs who are the Twitter version of flyover country.

In doing this, I can concoct and curate a reality in which I only engage with people like me because those are the only people I see.

This feature on one of the world’s largest social media platforms is designed to make ordinary people invisible to those sitting in their virtual ivory towers, perhaps singing that old tune from Camelot.

I know what my people are thinking tonight
As home through the shadows they wander
Everyone smiling in secret delight
They stare at the castle and ponder
Whenever the wind blows this way
You can almost hear everyone say
I wonder what the king is doing tonight?

If you can concoct a reality for yourself wherein ordinary people don’t cross your radar, what incentive is there for you to entertain them, let alone understand them.

And while there are those who deliberately wall off the world around them, there are others unaware there even is a world – or worldview, rather – outside their own.

Columnist Salena Zito tried to break through this by taking her Harvard students on a road trip to a town that while only an hour and a half away was, culturally, on another planet.

After spending time with the police chief, the mayor, small business owners and other townsfolk the students were forced to reckon with the fact that they had just broken bread with – gasp – Trump voters. Most of them had never seen one up close, and certainly hadn’t recognized them as anything other than a caricature.

It’s why the graduates who populate most newsrooms are so woefully unequipped to write about national trends when a majority are from liberal, coastal states and have never seen a farm, fired a gun or stepped foot on a factory floor.

The state broadcaster in my very own deranged dominion of Canada was busted (by me) a few weeks back for broadcasting a children’s “news” segment calling J.K. Rowling “transphobic” for daring to suggest only women are capable of menstruation.

The network later said the segment didn’t meet its journalistic standards (that CBC has standards is, in and of itself, newsworthy.) I don’t doubt that there were producers and writers from downtown Toronto who were genuinely shocked that anyone could possibly believe what Rowling did.

The answer to the divide is dialogue and debate. The answer is to engage with the culture rather than run away from it. The answer is to keep fighting. But in spite of that, I won’t deny that it was nice, for a couple of hours this week, to see the silencers silenced.