EXPOSING MORE DEMOCRATIC DECEIVERS

    When the Democrats and the media wanted to prove that Russian trolls were everywhere, and supporting Republicans, they turned to Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta.
    They invented the Russian conspiracy, then they faked the crimes.
    And it wasn’t just the 2016 election. Morgan, who made no secret of his loathing for conservatives, claimed that the Russian bots were everywhere and aiding Republicans.

LEFTY'S TEMPER TANTRUM EXTRAORDINAIRE

A video of a vape store clerk going absolutely ballistic when a man wearing a pro-Trump hat walked into the store has gone viral.

Even better is the reaction of the Trump supporter.

[LANGUAGE WARNING]

2018: A DUD YEAR FOR A DUD PM

  Lilley:  As we head into 2019 and the looming federal election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might just be wishing that 2018 never happened. 

   A Forum Research poll shows just 38% of Canadians approve of the job Trudeau is doing; a big drop from the 51% approval that Trudeau had two years ago at the end of his first year in office.
   Some of that drop can simply be attributed to Trudeau being in office for three years. It’s common for voters to be less excited about a politician the longer they are around. But some of this drop has to do with Trudeau bungling his way through 2018, starting with his trip to India.

CHANCELLOR MERKEL, THE ANOINTED ONE

   Chancellor Angela Merkel has closed a difficult year in German politics which has seen political embarrassment at the polls and her own departure from the top job announced but deferred, with an address to the nation pushing key globalist themes.
   Speaking in her annual New Year’s Eve address recorded on Sunday, the architect of Europe’s migrant crisis made oblique swipes at nationalism and called for more cooperation “across borders” to tackle what she identified as the key challenges of 2019, among them terrorism and global warming.
   Inevitably German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s comments on mass migration gathered much attention in the domestic press, with Deutsche Welle reporting her having identified “governance and order of migration” as an issue to be addressed. Dr Merkel said: “We will only master the challenges of our time if we stick together and work together with others across borders.”

NOT TO BE OUTDONE BY THE POPE...

    Asserting that “every person is precious”, the Church of England has urged Britain to welcome the boatloads of illegal migrants crossing the Channel.
    As ministers called on the Home Office to take action against an unprecedented influx of boats carrying migrants from the third world, the bishop of Dover told the Observer it was “crucial that we all remember that we are dealing with human beings here”.

CA's LUDICROUS GOV. JERRY BROWN

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) said climate change was “very much devastating in a similar way” as Nazis were during World War II.

OF PIPELINES & PM DRESSUP

 Gunter: In Alberta, of course, pipelines dominated most people’s lives in 2018 and will do so again in 2019. That’s Story No. 1.
   Whether or not we can get our oil to ports (and from there to overseas markets) is huge for the entire province and especially for the hundreds of thousands of working people and their families who depend on the energy industry – rig workers, engineers, geologists, surveyors, truck drivers, lawyers, accountants, investment specialists, refinery technicians, oilfield service suppliers, welders, plumbers, electricians and on and on and on.
   The second big story of 2018 is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s clown-show tour of India. The fallout from that tour might turn out to have as profound an impact on Canadian politics as any other story this year. Millions of Canadians who admired Trudeau and his “sunny ways” saw him, finally, as the lightweight Mr. Dressup he is.

INNOVATION FUND IS POLITICALLY INFLUENCED

  There was a familiar ring to the announcement made by Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi in Calgary on Dec. 18, when he promised $1.6 billion in funding for the battered oil and gas sector.
   Among the loans and grants on offer was $100 million for “energy and economic diversification-related projects.” The source? The Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), a pool of money set aside by Ottawa in 2017 to “spur innovation for a better Canada,” according to its website. Just a few months earlier, SIF was used to provide as much as $250 million to steel and aluminum companies hammered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
   Other investments under the fund include $110 million for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada to modernize the plants where it manufactures its RAV4 model, and $3.4 million for a numbered company, based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, to convert a Boeing 737 jet into an aircraft used to fight forest fires. So far, the government has spent $845 million on 32 projects, according to a public database.

MURDER & REVENGE SERVED COLD

   For decades, legendary Buffalo, NY, underworld crime boss Stefano “The Undertaker” Maggadino had the final say in southern Ontario.
  The wild card remains newer Calabrian crime clans who are also desperate to dip their toes in the cash-filled rivers of the Golden Horseshoe.
   There will be more odd alliances between Chinese fentanyl pushers and the mob, and Hells Angels and street gangs who will again take their slices of the pie.

AMATEURS TRACKING AIRPLANES & SHIPS

   Without leaving his home near Carp, Steffan Watkins can watch where aircraft carry world leaders and can also track ships on the other side of the world.
   Watkins is one of a loosely knit group of determined hobbyists who track ships and aircraft by their transponders, and share information on who is going where.
   This is presumably how someone shot a photo of Air Force One on a supposedly secret flight this week. An amateur photographer with a long lens caught the distinctive blue-and-white aircraft high over England as it carried U.S. President Donald Trump to visit U.S. troops in Iraq.

BREAD, BOATS, BONES & BACTERIUM

  From the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings and hunter-gatherer caves in South Africa, to the bottom of the Dead Sea, 2018 was a year of oldest finds yet. New technologies have allowed archaeologists to explore several-thousand-year-old food particles, dive deep under water to collect samples for carbon dating, and analyze the human genome for traces of the bacterium that killed millions. And, from studying patterns drawn on rock fragments and food behaviors, experts now have a better understanding of how our ancestors lived.

Here are five of 2018’s top archaeology finds.

NO CREAM FLOATS ATOP A SLURRY PIT

  The cream has yet to rise to the top of Trudeau's government.
  Let’s continue down the list to assess the runners-up in the talentless pool of Trudeau’s cabinet.

WLU PROFS AUTHORS OF THEIR OWN MISFORTUNE

  A year ago, Wilfrid Laurier University made international headlines — none of them good — when two professors and a university human rights bureaucrat hauled then teaching assistant and graduate student Lindsay Shepherd into a bullying disciplinary meeting for leading a classroom discussion on gender identity issues.
  As part of her presentation to facilitate that discussion, she played a video clip showing controversial University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson debating the use of gender-neutral pronouns — to which he objects — with sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, who supported their use.

     Shepherd's faculty advisor, communications studies professor Norman Rambukkana, reprimanded her for even raising the issue of gender identity in her tutorial, comparing Peterson to Hitler.  To no one's surprise, Peterson sued Rambukkana and professor Herbert Pimlott, who also attended the meeting, claiming their comments defamed him.
Now, the professors, who deny defaming Peterson, are suing Shepherd, according to her lawyer, Howard Levitt, for publicly releasing the video of their comments to the media.

SABOTAGING THE CANADIAN OIL INDUSTRY

  The basic strategy was to raise the negatives of the oilsands, raise costs, slow down and stop infrastructure, and enrol key decision-makers in opposition to Canada’s oil industry. Ten years later, all of those things have come to pass.
  The Rockefeller group, based in the United States, laid down five specific tracks to solve what they saw as the Canadian problem. First, they would stop the expansion of pipelines and other infrastructure. Second, they would forcibly cause reforms to the governance of “water, toxics and land.” Third, they would “significantly reduce future demand” for oilsands product. Next, they would leverage the debate to policy victories in both the U.S. and Canada. Finally, they would persuade policymakers that oil wasn’t going to be needed in the future because we’d have electric cars.
   To execute this strategy, Rockefeller commenced a decade-long campaign to taint the world’s image of Canada and turn Canadians against each other. It was a brilliant success.

TRUCKERS TO ROLL; TRUDEAU, GET OUT OF THE WAY

  ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOUSE, Alta. — Speakers at another pro-pipeline rally in Alberta continued their attacks on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday, saying if leaders in Ottawa don't hear their message now, they will when a planned convoy arrives there in 2019.
   Chad Miller with the group Oilfield Dads told the crowd gathered in Rocky Mountain House that the province is suffering its "worst recession turned depression" in a generation due to weakened oil prices, exacerbated by a lack of pipeline capacity. "Even those that put away for the rainy days and then some have had to use their savings, and more, to try to weather this never-ending hard times scenario," Miller said.
   Numerous rallies and truck convoys have been held across Alberta and Saskatchewan in recent weeks to protest against federal actions that critics say will make building pipelines more difficult. Those include Bill C-69 to revamp the National Energy Board and Bill C-48, which would ban oil tanker traffic on British Columbia's northern coast.

YOUR PASSIONATE, OVERLY ENTHUSIASTIC PM

  “Canadians so clearly rejected Stephen Harper’s approach to government, the approach in the 2015 election, and yet on climate, on the economy, on international engagement, on migration issues, on Indigenous issues, they are very much still in the exact same mode that they were pre the 2015 election.”
   “I think that’s sort of something that is worthwhile pointing out to Canadians,” said Trudeau.
   In almost the same breath Trudeau said that in the next election he’s not going to try to “vilify” or “demonize” his opponents. But he suggested that he doesn’t view his comparison of Scheer to Harper as vilifying him.

JOURNALISTS CUT ANCHORS TO OBJECTIVITY

   Rex Murphy: Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a once-popular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances.
  As far as journalists collectively being honoured with the ascription “guardians,” that surely cannot apply in North America or Europe if we take most of their coverage of Donald Trump as the testing ground. Trump journalism will some day earn its place in medical literature, side by side with malarial fever and LSD as engines of hallucination and fitful nightmares.
  Throw in the scandal saga of Der Spiegel, whose star investigative reporter, Claas Relotius, has been proven to be an industrial-scale fraud, a fantasist fictionist, who gulled Der Spiegel and its readers for years, and is now the face for “fake news” worldwide, and ask again how journalists could even be considered the heroes of 2018?

DANFORTH SHOOTING INVESTIGATION SECRECY

   It has now been 172 days, or more than five months, since Faisal Hussain took his lethal walk along the Danforth on a Toronto summer’s evening.
   By the time his rampage ended, two fine young people, 10-year-old Julianna Kozis and 18-year-old Reese Fallon, were dead, and 13 others were injured, some seriously. Hussain himself was also dead, it appears by his own hand, according to Toronto Police documents that were unsealed by court order in September.
  Those documents provided the only hard information about the mass shooting or the shooter — or at least about what the Toronto Police were seeking to search in Hussain’s apartment — that has been released to the public to date.

ALBERTA VOTES, SPRING 2019

  EDMONTON — The year 2019 will decide whether Premier Rachel Notley's NDP gets to finish the job of getting more oil to market or become the first party in provincial history to be one and done.
   "I know that the opposition wants to sort of revel in what they insist on hoping is defeat, but we've made more progress on getting a pipeline to tidewater than any other government has in the last 70 years," Notley told The Canadian Press in a year-end interview.
   Notley will take voters to the polls in the spring after a 2018 that saw her tightly wrapped in the Gordian knot of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. It received a green light two years ago and would triple the amount of oil moving to the B.C. coast and from there overseas where it could fetch a better price.

THE GUIDELINES ARE LARGELY VOLUNTARY

   After a year of high-profile data breaches that have shaken the public’s trust in companies’ collection of personal data, Canada’s privacy watchdog is issuing new guidelines for private-sector companies to obtain “meaningful consent” from their users and customers.
   The guidelines make clear that it’s no longer sufficient for companies to simply provide a legal disclaimer — that most users will never read — to obtain consent to collect, use and monetize users’ personal information.
   “Under privacy laws, organizations are generally required to obtain meaningful consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. However, advances in technology and the use of lengthy, legalistic privacy policies have too often served to make the control — and personal autonomy — that should be enabled by consent nothing more than illusory,” the guidelines, which come into effect Jan. 1, read.

CHINA FAILS AT RULE OF LAW

   BEIJING – For more than 1,200 days, the Chinese government sought to build a case against Wang Quanzhang as it held him incommunicado in secret jails, denying him visits from his family and the lawyers he requested.
   On the day of his trial, Wang struck back: He denied the government a quick verdict.
  A Chinese court in the city of Tianjin said Wednesday that it held a hearing behind closed doors for Wang, one of the country’s prominent civil rights lawyers, but could not immediately reveal the outcome because “state secrets were involved.”

2018 MOST EGREGIOUS FAKE NEWS FROM CNN & NBC

  As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to review the year’s worst cases of media misquotes, misleading narratives, major corrections and straight-up fake news.
  While last year’s fake reporting largely occurred during the media’s relentless pursuit to prove Russian collusion, this year’s list is much more varied. However, some themes emerged: stories about then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the U.S. border were routinely flagged for misinformation.
 Without further ado, here is the list of 2018’s worst examples of fake news

CANADA CAN'T REALLY BUILD ANYTHING

Pipelines? Subways? 24 Sussex? Construction projects across the country have been fiascos.

THOSE GENEROUS CANADIAN TAXPAYERS

  Canadian border agents roused an asylum seeker from his sleep last week, shackled his arms together and placed him on a chartered flight to Guinea.
   The asylum seeker, 23, had resisted a previous attempt at deportation last month, telling the Montreal Gazette he struggled so much the agents beat his legs while trying to force him onto a commercial flight.
   But the pilot refused to take him on and so the Canadian Border Services Agency decided to charter a flight for the 23-year-old on Dec. 18. He was the only passenger on board.

   Since 2016, the CBSA has used chartered flights to deport seven people at a total cost of $821,157. During that span, the agency removed 23,578 people from Canada.

NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN

  In 2000, Ernie Schmidt started filling notebooks with stories from his life — stories written in neat cursive about picking rocks, shooting gophers and thistles.
   He was 64 years old, and for the first time in his life, he had learned how to write. It was almost as though he knew he had a small window of time, and that two years later, a stroke would make it painfully uncomfortable to hold a pen.
  Schmidt, who is now 82, expressed how meaningful this new skill was in a letter he wrote 18 years ago to READ Saskatoon, the organization that helped him learn it. Little did he know the impression he had left on them.

EU ALLOWS FRANCE TO BREAK ITS BUDGET RULES

   While acknowledging that the concessions, which put the French budget deficit on course to hit 3.5 per cent this year, are against EU rules, EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger said Brussels would “tolerate” the 2019 budget “as a one-time exception”, adding: “It is crucial Macron continues his reform agenda, especially in the labor market, and that France continues on the path of growth.”

Oettinger’s greenlighting of the French budget despite its failure to stick within the bloc’s 3 per cent deficit limit is likely to anger the Italian government, whose plans to run a budget with a 2.4 per cent deficit to GDP ratio were rejected by Brussels.

Furthermore a minister within the populist government, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Italian media last month that Macron was the driving force behind EU pressure to punish the Eurosceptic nation.

BRITAIN SEES HUAWEI AS SECURITY THREAT

   Britain’s Defence Secretary has articulated “grave, very deep concerns” about the role of Chinese tech giant Huawei in the forthcoming roll-out of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile data network, because of the leverage and access Huawei’s equipment and software could potentially give to the Chinese government.
   While British foreign spy chief Alex Younger has already raised concerns about Huawei, Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson’s comments mark the first time a senior British political figure has joined the growing debate among Western nations on the security threat posed by Chinese technology.

GIULIANI CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION OF MUELLER

  Special counsel Robert Mueller needs to be investigated for destruction of FBI evidence, President Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said in an interview with Hill.TV's John Solomon and Buck Sexton.
  Referencing recent reports that Mueller's office allowed text messages from former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to be destroyed, Giuliani levied harsh accusations at the special counsel.
  "Mueller should be investigated for destruction of evidence for allowing those text messages from Strzok to be erased, messages that would show the state of mind and tactics of his lead anti-Trump FBI agent at the start of his probe," said Giuliani.

DAM BUILDING IN AN EARTHQUAKE ZONE

Ecuador is scrambling to find a way out of a financial mess, a large green energy dam project built on a raft of alleged Chinese bribe money and unaffordable repayment terms, in the shadow of the unstable Revantador Volcano.

PM TRUDEAU REBUKING THE POPULIST MOVEMENT

   Rex Murphy:  His leader, Justin Trudeau, doesn’t go farther out to sea only because there is no ocean wide enough on which to try that experiment. But when Mr. Trudeau talks of politicians “exploiting” Western sentiment on this issue, a not-so-oblique rebuke of the “populist” mood in the West right now, the tactic is so obvious as to be insulting. There is no need to “stir up” or “exploit” the political mood on the energy file. The collapse of oil prices, the imposition of the absurd so-called carbon tax in the middle of an oil-price depression in Alberta, and pandering to B.C. and Quebec while running past Alberta and Manitoba, offers more than enough explanation for that mood.
   The populism, if that is indeed the term, out West is not demagoguery. It is the inevitable upsurge of citizen emotion when fairness is blatantly abandoned, common sense is outraged by political leaders, and when representatives of the people are so far out of touch that ordinary workers have to organize massive truck rallies just to catch their attention.

WORLD-WIDE PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS

  Christmas is a time of joy and celebration — that is, if you live in North America.
  As we celebrate the season of lights with friends and family, enjoying an array of traditions both religious and secular, Canadians should pause and think about those around the world who would like to celebrate Christmas, but cannot.
  Christians remain the most persecuted religious group on the planet, and heart-breaking stories of violence and hostility occur on a regular basis, across the Middle East but also in places, such as Pakistan, China and even Europe.

REFUGEES TAKE HUGE TOLL ON SHELTER SYSTEM

  Toronto:  This year’s homeless count proves what we’ve been hearing for a year: That the influx of refugees and asylum seekers have taken a huge toll on Toronto’s shelter system.
   The city’s recently released $250,000 Street Needs Assessment (SNA) — conducted the evening of April 26 and the fourth such survey since 2006 — showed that 2,618, or 40%, of the city-administered shelter spaces are occupied by refugees or asylum seekers.
 Sadly, the census makes two issues apparent to me:
1: The huge number of refugees occupying shelter beds have forced some homeless into low-barrier (respite) shelters, which are nothing more than costly warehouses, and 2: The city has been pouring so much money into trying to accommodate refugees and asylum seekers that I fear little is left for mental health, affordable housing and job supports for the rest of the homeless population.

HAMILTON STEEL MAKERS FACE HARD TIMES IN NEW YEAR

Declining steel prices, a slowing overall economy and continued U.S. tariffs are burdens that both Stelco and ArcelorMittal Dofasco face going into 2019.

GERMANY'S MAAS THINKS HE SPEAKS FOR ALL OF EUROPE

  Washington's decision to drop out of the INF has fueled speculation about the return of a full-blown, Cold-War style nuclear arms race, as Russia has reflexively threatened to build up its tactical defenses along Europe's periphery in the face of what's expected to be a buildup of American intermediate-range arms.
   But whatever happens between the two nuclear superpowers, Germany wants no part of it
  German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned this week that the US better not be thinking about stationing its intermediate-range missiles in Germany - or anywhere in Europe, for that matter. For the last 30 years, the treaty has prohibited stationing intermediate-range arms in Europe. Any push to change that would almost certainly be met with "widespread resistance" in Germany, Maas said, so as to avoid a scenario where Europe is put in the middle of a tug-of-war between Russia and the US.

  So, Kartoffelkanone at the ready......

WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST. OR NOT

   Syrian women want their men back from the countries to which they fled.
    The purported "compassion" Angela Merkel insisted on for Syrian refugees is not being appreciated back home in Syria. When civil war came to Syria, most of those who fled the violence were military-age males, and they left their women behind to fend for themselves. “Women and children first,” apparently does not translate smoothly into Arabic. When Angela Merkel led the EU into offering refuge for these young males who abandoned their females, she not only opened the door to a new wave of rapes, thefts, and other crime by men taught to despise the decadence of the infidels, she also abetted a demographic catastrophe for Syria.

THE INVESTIGATION IS THE COVER-UP

  What is the most effective way to hide the truth and protect the deep-state criminals? It’s the never-ending Mueller investigation. Sure, Mueller’s team is still in the business of promoting the Trump-Russia fiction, but the most important role of this ‘investigation’ may be to obstruct any real investigation.
   What we are witnessing here is a carefully planned and orchestrated cover-up of a series of very serious crimes. The deep swamp is pretending to investigate the deep swamp.
    This cover-up would not be possible if the mainstream media were honest and aggressive fact-finders, but they actually function as a branch of the Democratic Party. The cover-up would fail if Republicans were unified in absolutely demanding to see all the evidence that is currently being hidden, but Republican ‘leaders’ do not unify and fight hard for anything. They appear to be comfortable with losing this battle.

LIBERALS TWISTING & TURNING FOR IRVING SHIPBUILDING

  The federal government and Halifax-based Irving Shipbuilding are asking a trade tribunal to throw out a challenge to their handling of a high-stakes competition to design the navy’s new $60-billion fleet of warships.
   Alion was one of three companies, along with U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin and Spanish firm Navantia, vying to design the new warships, which are to be built by Irving and serve as the navy’s backbone for most of this century.
   While Lockheed was selected as the preferred bidder and is negotiating a final design contract with the government and Irving, Alion alleges the company’s design did not meet the navy’s requirements and should have been disqualified.
   Industry insiders had long warned that Lockheed’s selection as the top bidder, combined with numerous changes to the requirements and competition terms after it was launched — including a number of deadline extensions — would spark lawsuits.

ON TIME, UNDER BUDGET; NO HOPE FOR OBELIX

  Davie Shipyards delivered its first ship, Asterix, to the government on time and on budget in a deal worth $659 million. It is now offering a second ship at $500 million to entice the Liberals to move ahead with such a purchase. The Asterix sister ship — Obelix — can be ready for missions with the navy within 24 months.
  But industry representatives privately say Davie faces an uphill battle as Asterix is at the heart of the trial of Vice Admiral Mark Norman and any government move to buy a sister ship would signal the actions of that naval officer in supporting the original deal was right.
  When Conservative leader Andrew Scheer questioned the Liberal government Dec. 12 in the Commons why it was not moving ahead with acquiring Obelix, pointing out the navy needed a second ship PM Trudeau accused Scheer of playing “petty politics,” claiming an armed forces assessment showed “They don’t need the Obelix.”

RIP MEDICAL DEBT, AN AMERICAN NON-PROFIT CHARITY

  ALBANY, N.Y. — Philip Sasser had a familiar, sinking feeling when he saw the yellow envelope in his mailbox. He figured it was another past-due medical bill, but it turned out to be quite the opposite.
  “I opened it up and it said these bills had been paid off,” said Sasser, of Milton, Florida. “I didn’t understand. It was out of the blue.”
   Sasser is among the lucky recipients of a letter from RIP Medical Debt, a Rye, New York-based non-profit that uses money from donors to eliminate crushing medical debt that threatens the financial well-being of hundreds of thousands of American families. The charity says it has erased $475 million in debt for more than 250,000 people since it was founded four years ago.

LITTLE POTATO SINKING THE LIBERAL SHIP OF FOOLS

Marin:  A new Angus Reid Institute survey has some sobering news for our flash-in-the-plan PM. Trudeau’s approval rating is net negative 23% (just 35% approve; 58% disapprove).

In his year-end interviews, Trudeau maintained it was all business as usual heading into the October 2019 election, meaning what you see is what you get and will keep getting. It’s a sure recipe for a one-term government, about to become third party once again. You read it here first.

CAVOUKIAN: PRIVACY, SECURITY & BIG DATA

   Toronto Sun Editor-in-Chief Adrienne Batra welcomed Dr. Ann Cavoukian, the head of Privacy By Design Centre of Excellence, recently to find out at how privacy, security and big data interlopers might impact the election.
   “I think one of the issues that they should be concerned about is the fact that when the federal privacy commissioner when to our prime minister, Mr. Trudeau, and said, ‘Political parties should fall under privacy legislation for goodness sake. It’s been a long time coming. Would you bring them under the Privacy Act?’ What did he say? He said no. I find that appalling. These are some of the things I think individuals in this country have to be concerned about and bring this up at election time. There’s no control on the use of your data by political parties.”

  Cavoukian also weighs in on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wanting big banks to provide our personal data to Statistics Canada and the idea of collecting data via a smart city in Toronto.

BREATHALYZE ANY DRIVER, BUT CARDING NOT ALLOWED

  As of Dec. 18, it became possible in Canada for police to demand every driver they stop blow into a breathalyzer, even if there is no “reasonable suspicion of impairment.”
   In effect, the new law presumes you are guilty of driving while impaired by alcohol or weed until you can prove you aren’t.
   This is especially paradoxical coming from the Liberals. They have made a big stink about police “carding” – i.e. demanding ID from individuals just walking down the street – because that practice tends to harass many innocent black and Indigenous citizens.
  Yet, suddenly they’re okay with, say, your local constabulary setting up a Check Stop and making every driver pulled over be breathalyzed.

PURDUE PHARMA'S ROLE IN OPIOID CRISIS

  An updated complaint in Massachusetts’ lawsuit against Purdue Pharma claims members of the family that owns the OxyContin maker are personally responsible for fueling abuse of the deadly painkiller.
  The filing late Friday in Suffolk Superior Court expands on the lawsuit the state filed in June against the drugmaker, 16 current and former executives and members of the Sackler family, which owns the company.
  The state claims that the Sacklers directed the company to hire hundreds more sales representatives to visit doctors “thousands more times,” in a bid to get more doctors to prescribe its painkiller. The Sacklers also directed sales representatives to encourage doctors to prescribe more of the opioids at the highest doses, according to the complaint.

FEDERAL GOV'T PRIVACY BREACHES

   The federal government reported more than 200 significant privacy breaches affecting the personal information of thousands of Canadians and Canadian businesses, a number that Ottawa’s privacy watchdog suggests is the “tip of the iceberg.”
    The Star obtained documents under access to information law detailing every privacy breach reported by federal departments and agencies in 2017. Over 600 pages, government employees describe breaches ranging from misplaced student loan documents to outing confidential RCMP drug informants.
   Of all the departments reporting privacy breaches, Canada Revenue Agency has likely received the most attention. The 2017 documents show that the agency is still grappling with the problem of employees improperly looking up the tax information of friends, family, colleagues and others.
The largest breach reported by the agency in 2017 appears to be a single employee looking up the tax information of 5,935 Canadians.

GATWICK DRONE SUSPECTS RELEASED

   British police on Sunday released a man and a woman who had been arrested in connection with the drone incursions at London’s Gatwick Airport that had disrupted holiday plans for tens of thousands of travellers.
  Sussex police said Sunday the two had cooperated with police and were no longer considered suspects in the case. They had been arrested late Friday. Both live in Crawley, a town that is a five-minute drive from Gatwick, Britain’s second-busiest airport.

 As to the cock-up of a response to the drone incursion;
  It was claimed that Department for Transport bosses were more concerned about protecting aircraft from birds than they were about investing in anti-drone technology.
  A senior Government source said: 'They were warned about these threats and did nothing about it.
  'There was equipment that could have been bought to stop this, but it never was.

FORD GOV'T's FREE SPEECH POLICY

   Call it another promise made, promise kept by the Ford government. Although it’s sad the promise ever had to be made.
  I’m talking about the pledge to have every university and college across the province adopt a free speech policy by Jan. 1, 2019.
   “Colleges and universities should be places where students exchange different ideas and opinions in open and respectful debate,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in August when he gave the schools the deadline.
  Jim Turk, a professor at Ryerson University who heads up the school's Centre for Free Expression, hates the policy, calling it an “unprecedented abuse of university autonomy” and says Ford manufactured a crisis in claiming free speech is threatened on campus.

SCAPEGOATING TORONTO POLICE

  What Ontario Chief Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane describes as the distrust of Toronto’s black community for the city’s police service isn’t going to improve by demanding the impossible of the police.
   But increasingly, that’s what we’re doing — politicians are experts at it — making police the scapegoats for societal problems the police cannot solve.

TIME TO STOP FUNDING MEANINGLESS STUDIES

   A new study from McMaster University purports to show that where you live in Canada may affect your ability to make healthy choices. In a sense, the study is more informative on the topic of how the public-health world has perfected the art of minimizing individual agency, while simultaneously educating people on the obvious. 
   So, here we have researchers discovering, for example, that rural areas have more limited varieties of fruits and vegetables available in their grocery stores, as well as more limited access to public transit. And we have researchers concluding from these less-than-shocking results that, hey, that’s probably why people in rural areas aren’t as healthy as their urban counterparts. They’re victims of their postal codes!
  Study lead author Russell de Souza explained in a press release, “We believe that this information shows there are factors outside of a person’s control that influence the individual’s health, and these factors likely differ depending on where they live.” In an interview with CBC, de Souza said the study “sort of gets at taking some of the burden off the individuals and understanding that we live in communities which may or may not support healthy decisions.”

THE WAR ON FREE SPEECH

   Mark Steyn:  Right now Tucker Carlson is facing a sustained campaign to destroy him and his show because he thinks (in contrast to many prominent figures on the American right) that a free society should be free to discuss immigration as a matter of public policy rather than mere mawkish sob-sister virtue-signaling.
    And so Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, having just about survived the state's efforts to destroy him for refusing to bake a gay wedding cake, has now been dragged back into court by the goons of the Colorado "Civil Rights" Commission for declining to custom-build a gender-transitioning cake. His tormentor is Autumn Scarpina, a "trans attorney".
   Speaking of which, late last week there was a stir of movement in the constipated bowels of DC justice. As many of you know, Mann vs Steyn et al is now in its seventh year - over a 270-word blog post about Michael Mann's joke climate-change "hockey stick", which in the decade immediately after its appearance at the end of the last century was the most influential scientific graph on earth.

AUSTRIA SMASHING HUMAN TRAFFICKERS BUSINESS MODEL

   Austria has announced plans to automatically block asylum for migrants who arrive with the help of smugglers, with Chancellor Sebastian Kurz stressing the importance of “smashing the business model of human traffickers”.
   Asylum policy in Austria “must head in this direction” in order to make the system fairer, stated interior minister Herbert Kickl this week, telling Kronen Zeitung that the “existing system” in which migrants who pay criminal smuggling gangs have a significant advantage in reaching Europe “is the most unjust and inhumane one possible”.
   Appearing on Austrian public broadcaster ORF to speak on the issue of third world migrants taking boats to Europe, Chancellor Kurz struck a similar tone, telling the channel’s Report programme: “It is not the poorest who flee, but the ones who can afford to pay [people-smugglers].”

RESTORATIVE TALKING CIRCLES NOT WORKING FOR YA?

  The Trump administration has revoked an Obama-era policy that urged public schools to employ more lenient forms of discipline for students of color and of other minority groups.
   On Friday, the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice rescinded the Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” that a federal school safety commission said “may have paradoxically contributed to making schools less safe.”
   The Obama-era Departments of Education and Justice, under Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder, issued school guidelines that claimed students of color are “disproportionately impacted” by suspensions and expulsions, a situation they said led to a “school-to-prison pipeline” that discriminates against minority and low-income students.

WITHDRAWING AMERICAN TROOPS FROM SYRIA

President Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of the 2,000 remaining U.S. troops in Syria, prompting the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and arousing the ire of CNN – both excellent indications that the President is on the right track.

CNN, the 24/7 Hate Trump Network, headlined its story on the withdrawal “Trump orders rapid withdrawal from Syria in apparent reversal,” giving the impression that an erratic Trump was changing course, only to admit in the article itself that the President “has long signaled his desire to get out of Syria.”

Meanwhile, in his self-righteous and condescending resignation letter, which is being heralded by all the usual establishment suspects today as a positively Confucian outpouring of wisdom, even Mattis admits that he agrees with Trump on the salient issue at play in Syria: “Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world.”

DARKNESS FALLS IN WINDSOR, ONTARIO

“Sara Anne Widholm, 76, died at Windsor Regional Hospital on Saturday, Dec. 15,” the Windsor Star reports, but this was not a mere obituary. On October 8, 2017, while out for a walk on the Ganatchio Trail in Windsor, Widholm was the victim of a “vicious” and “unprovoked” attack by Habibullah Ahmadi, 21.

He was originally charged with assault, later upgraded to attempted murder and now second-degree murder with the death of his victim. Little has emerged about Habibullah Ahmadi and his motive in the attack, which was “not just another assault,” according to neurosurgeon Dr. Balraj Jhawar.

“The worst skull fractures I’ve seen in my 12 years here in Windsor,” Jhawar told reporters. “This is among the most brutal things I’ve seen in my career.” The victim’s multiple brain hemorrhages and fractured skull and vertebrae required eight hours of surgery. Hospital officials did not indicate whether Widholm emerged from a coma before she finally passed away.

STRONG WINDS WREAKING HAVOC IN BC

 Tens of thousands of people remained without power on Saturday as strong wind gusts continued to ravage southwestern British Columbia, days after a powerful windstorm swept across the region.

BC Hydro said the task of restoring power continues to be challenging and requires individual repairs in many cases, including re-stringing hundreds of spans of power lines and replacing power poles and transformers.

“More than 800 field personnel are working around the clock to repair the extensive damage to BC Hydro’s infrastructure after one of the most severe windstorms it has experienced in 20 years,” the utility said in a statement Saturday.

THE HEARTLAND GREENPEACE BUSINESS REPORT

Greenpeace’s annual income has more than doubled over the past 20 years from less than US$150 million to over US$350 million. Greenpeace is a Dutch company with assets in excess of US$277 million (all dollar amounts in this post are in US$), of which 64% is in cash and cash equivalents. Greenpeace is a nonprofit company and presents itself as a selfless soldier protecting the environment, but their actions suggest that their prime motivation is to collect the most money possible. The report notes that Greenpeace shut down their Irish branch because they were not generating enough income (Irish Times, January 13, 1997). According to Luxon and Wong, 2017 the Greenpeace structure is highly centralized. It requires local (that is, national) organizations to prioritize the Greenpeace global agenda.

2018 GENEROSITY INDEX

The Fraser Institute:  Generosity in Canada and the United States: The 2018 Generosity Index finds that the amount of money Canadians donate to registered charities—as a share of their income—has plummeted 32.2 per cent since 2006, and Canadians remain far less generous than Americans. According to the index, Utah remains the most generous of all 64 jurisdictions in North America, and Manitoba is again the most generous Canadian province or territory, but still only ranks 42nd out of 64. Of the bottom-15 least generous jurisdictions in North America, 12 are Canadian.

TWO ARRESTED FOR DRONE CHAOS AT GATWICK AIRPORT

  London’s Gatwick Airport took strides toward running a full schedule Saturday as police questioned a man and a woman in connection with the drone intrusions that caused mayhem for tens of thousands of holiday travellers.
   Police said Saturday the suspects are a 47-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman from Crawley, which is roughly five miles (eight kilometres) from the airport. They were arrested on suspicion of disrupting civil aviation in a way likely to endanger people or operations.
   The airport’s arrival and departure boards showed the busy airport inching towards normal but still showing an unusual number of delayed takeoffs and landings.

SENATE ADVANCES SPENDING BILL

   The Senate advanced the House-passed spending bill that contains $5.7 billion in wall funding on Friday.
   The Senate passed a motion to proceed on the House-passed continuing resolution (CR), 48-47, that includes $5.7 billion in border wall funding, which will put the spending bill to a full floor vote soon. Vice President Mike Pence broke the tie on the motion to proceed, which will allow the Senate to vote on the legislation.

STATSCAN's NEW QUESTIONS IN PILOT CENSUS

"Many of the content changes proposed for 2021 affect smaller population groups (transgender, non-binary, same-sex couples; language rights-holders; ethnic groups; residents with work or student visas; Indigenous populations, etc.)," he wrote.

"Gender refers to the gender that a person internally feels … and/or the gender a person publicly expresses … in their daily life, including at work, while shopping or accessing other services, in their housing environment or in the broader community," says the standard for gender of person.

"Sex and gender refer to two different concepts. Caution should be exercised when comparing counts for sex with those for gender. For example, female sex is not the same as female gender."

EXXON WITHDRAWS APPLICATION FOR $25B LNG FACILITY

   Exxon Mobil Corp. has withdrawn its environmental assessment application for a $25-billion LNG export facility on the B.C. coast it proposed in 2015.
  The apparent shelving of the WCC LNG project is the latest blow to the West Coast liquefied natural gas export industry which at one time featured about 20 proposals, but has resulted in only one firm commitment to build.
  Exxon Mobil and Imperial continuously evaluate their portfolios to identify opportunities to invest, restructure or divest assets to strengthen their competitive position and provide the highest return to shareholders, said company spokeswoman Julie King
   She didn’t say why the application was withdrawn.

NO HARDSHIP IMPOSED; BAIL CONDITIONS STAND

Thankfully, the judiciary is separate from the government. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might have gone along with Khadr’s request, he wasn’t the one calling the shots here. Edmonton Justice June Ross was – and she made the right call.

Khadr was seeking easier travel throughout Canada, a Canadian passport to travel to Saudi Arabia for a pilgrimage to Mecca and unsupervised conversations with his sister, Zaynab Khadr.

Justice Ross denied him all of that on the grounds the restrictions he faces are not needlessly onerous and there’s no evidence they impose hardship on him.

NEED INDEPENDENT INQUIRY OF DND

Pugliese:  The Canadian Forces says it is looking into whether a general alleged to have boasted about purposely hiding records needed in the defense of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman acted in bad faith.

But past investigations and documents show the Canadian Forces and Department of National Defense have a track record of over the years destroying, hiding or delaying the release of potentially embarrassing records requested under the Access to Information law.

THE STATE IS A THREE-HEADED BEAST

Blatchford:  I refer to the prosecution of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, the former vice-chief of the defense staff, where a third-party records application brought by defense lawyers is now on hiatus until January.
   The hearing ran for two days in Ottawa this week and was so replete with news — first, an email from former prime minister Stephen Harper, waiving cabinet confidence on documents dating from his era and then two surprise witnesses, public servants called by the defense, the sum of whose evidence was that the current government may be very well trying to bury records in the case — that one aspect got lost.
   Here, the state pretends it is horrified and offended at allegations it is being less than co-operative and dragging its big feet, while still, inevitably, being unco-operative and dragging its big feet.

YOUR BLAMELESS PM

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it’s not his controversial #WelcomeToCanada tweet driving the thousands of migrants “fleeing” the United States.

Instead, it is the current political situation south of the border that’s to blame.

"And certainly, if people are fleeing the United States right now and are choosing to leave the United States right now, it’s not something I said. It is perhaps domestic realities within the political context in the United States that is driving people to move or to make those certain decisions.”

CONSERVATION AUTHORITY GETS SCHOOLED

   The pluckiest little Christmas protest in Canada began on Dec. 1 with a single decorated tree alongside a dirt trail in Heber Down, a conservation area north of Whitby, Ont., where the bedroom communities east of Toronto finally give over to farmland
   It was not to last. Fearing the litter that will be left in January, and having not received any official request for permission, the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority (CLOCA) ordered staff to clear it all away. It decided the decorations “severely impacted” the balance they aim to strike between environmental priorities and public use.  “Our staff are removing them now to reduce the hazard and remind people that any type of activity of this nature requires communication and permission,” said a CLOCA spokesperson.
    Today, if you drive to where Country Lane dead ends at a locked gate, walk down the road as it changes from asphalt to dirt, then take the Devil’s Den trail up into the trees, you will come to a hilltop clearing. There you will see fully 14 trees decorated for the season, lining the path as far as you can see, like a jolly Yuletide array of evergreen middle fingers to the Grinch.

CHINESE HACKERS TARGET CANADIAN & USA COMPANIES

   Companies in Canada were among the targets of two Chinese citizens charged with waging an extensive hacking campaign to steal valuable data over many years, U.S. authorities say.
    In an indictment unsealed Thursday, prosecutors say Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong were acting on behalf of China's main intelligence agency to pilfer information from several countries.
   Beginning about four years ago, Zhu and Zhang waged an intrusion campaign to gain access to computers and networks of "managed service providers" for businesses and governments around the world, the indictment says.
   Such providers are private firms that manage clients' information by furnishing servers, storage, networking, consulting and information-technology support. Breaking into one such computer system can provide a route into multiple customers' data; the hackers breached the computers of enterprises involved in activities ranging from banking and telecommunications to mining and health care, say the papers filed in U.S. District Court.

CANADIAN TAXPAYERS SUBSIDIZING MILLIONAIRES

   A newspaper lobby group, the Canadian News Media Association, has received nearly $385,000 in federal grants – the equivalent of more than half its annual budget – to encourage people to buy newspapers, according to Access To Information records. The funding was never announced. Costs include having $160-an hour publicists encourage celebrities to pose for Instagram photos reading a newspaper.
   Subsidies include payments to News Media staff billed at $75 an hour, according to accounts, and $160 an hour for the Association’s publicist, Craft Public Relations of Toronto. The Association also proposed to spend $75,000 on Facebook ads, though publishers in their grant submission complained American social media like Facebook get too much advertising.
   Postmedia is a member of the board of the News Media Association. Postmedia this year paid its CEO $5.04 million in salary and bonuses, according to a Management Circular obtained November 28 by the online Halifax Examiner. Other executive pay included $2.2 million to Postmedia’s chief operation officer, and $1.2 million to its chief financial officer.

THE GENEROSITY OF STRANGERS

  Peter Shankman travels for a living, giving speeches around the country. The last thing he wants to do in his free time is travel from his home in New York.
  So for the fifth year in a row, Shankman is donating hundreds of thousands of miles to people in need – those who can’t afford a flight but want to be with sick loved ones during the holidays, or a parent who wants to see a faraway child.
   Shankman posts his contest on the social media site Imgur, and other Imgur users vote for winners of Shankman’s miles. After the initial year of the giveaway, other travelers started seeing Shankman’s posts on Imgur and began donating their miles to his contest, multiplying the gift.

V-A NORMAN HEARING; OBFUSCATION & GAMEMANSHIP OF THE CROWN

   The witness, whose name is protected by a publication ban because of fears of professional reprisal for coming forward, testified that his superior at the Department of National Defense told him Norman’s name was deliberately not used in internal files — meaning any search for records about Norman would come up empty.
    The witness said he was processing an access-to-information request in 2017 that returned no results. When he sought clarification, the witness testified, his superior smiled and told him: “Don’t worry, this isn’t our first rodeo. We made sure we never used his name. Send back the nil return.”
    “He seemed proud to provide that response,” the witness said.

PM's YOUTH COUNCIL MEMBER, A CONSTRUCTION WORKER, RESIGNS

   EDMONTON — Sara Wheale is one of those people Justin Trudeau spoke about in Argentina. One of the people who have “social impacts” when they arrive in rural areas to work on construction sites.
   “There are gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area,” Trudeau told a panel at the G20. “There are social impacts because they’re mostly male construction workers. How are you adjusting and adapting to those? That’s what the gender lens in GBA-plus budgeting is all about.”
   The prime minister’s comments kicked off a controversy among workers in Alberta’s oil industry and, on Tuesday, Wheale announced on Facebook that she had decided to resign from his youth council.

VIRTUE-SIGNALLING PM CAN NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT

  The Saudi government was short $1.8 billion in payments to the end of September for light-armoured vehicles assembled at General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS) in London, according to financial statements from the Canadian Commercial Corp., the federal Crown corporation overseeing the controversial contract.
   Trudeau, whose government inherited the deal from former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, said publicly this week for the first time that the Liberals are trying to find a way to stop the sale involving hundreds of light-armoured military vehicles built by the Canadian division of American defence giant General Dynamics.
   It also makes even less sense that Ottawa should want out of the deal now, added David Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute think-tank. Not only would the federal government incur billions of dollars in penalties, according to GDLS Canada, but the Saudis aren’t likely to pay the balance owed.

WHEN THE WORLD KNOWS YOUR LEADER IS A FOOL

 CBC " analysis" as to why the nation seemed to end 2018 with fewer friends than ever.

 It's increasingly evident, as 2018 limps to a close, that Canada is more isolated on the world stage now than it has been in decades — thanks in large part to an indifferent neighbour to the south and the rise of isolationist and populist leaders in other parts of the world.
   The challenges facing Justin Trudeau's government are many and complex.
   One setback to Canada's international reputation — Trudeau's much-maligned trip to India early in the year — was self-inflicted. But most of the foreign policy challenges Ottawa faces now are the result of what the University of Manitoba's Andrea Charron calls a "massive shift" in the geopolitical landscape.

I'VE SEEN MORE SUPPORT FROM A BROKEN CRUTCH

  Concerning western alienation over the ongoing dispute of Trans Mountain PM Trudeau said,“ I know that Canadians right across the country understand that we need to be there for each other if we’re going to succeed — that when folks are facing a tough time, whether it’s in Alberta or elsewhere, we need to support them.”
   He also ruled out reviving Energy East or any other running east-west pipeline unless the private sector puts forward an idea. “It’s not up to the federal government to revive a pipeline project that, for market-based reasons, the company decided to withdraw,” he said, noting as well that on the Trans Mountain project, “we’re getting closer than we ever have before but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
   Concerning Alberta Premier Rachel Notley's demand that the federal government step in with cash for rail cars to help the province transport its glut of oil to international markets PM Trudeau raises questions about why the federal government should pay for rail cars to help that industry but not pay for them for others, like farmers who are also dealing with problems getting grain and agricultural products to market.

RUSSIA COMPLETES REARMING CRIMEA

   Russia has completed rearming air defense forces in Crimea with its advanced S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems, Russian officials confirmed at an annual Defense Ministry year end review meeting on Tuesday.
   “This year, we have completed rearming air defense units stationed in Crimea with the S-400 Triumph systems. Today they are on combat duty, reliably protecting the airspace over the entire Crimean Peninsula,” the Commander of the Southern Military District, Colonel-General Alexander Dvornikov said, according to TASS. Russian commanders have touted the S-400 missiles' capabilities of engaging targets at a distance of 400km and at an altitude of up to 30km (though western analysts say the numbers are lower), and have lately widely publicized the new Crimean missile deployments following the Nov. 25 Kerch Strait incident. 

  Russia's military has called it a "combat" deployment toward "neutralizing possible threats", according to a statement by Commander Dvornikov.

NEW YORK MOM KICKS CAR-JACKER'S ASS

A mother driving her son to school in New York City took down a would-be carjacker after she discovered an intruder in the driver’s seat of her vehicle.

A video of the incident showed the woman open to the door to her car, yank the suspect out of the driver’s seat, and slam him to the ground to subdue him before authorities arrived.

“He’s lucky I didn’t kill him,” Tihisha Jones told NBC 4 New York. “That’s the thing. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

AMBASSADOR NIKKI HALEY: UN HOPELESSLY BIASED

  In her final address to a regular UN Security Council briefing on the Middle East, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed the United Nations' "obsession" with condemning Israel while adding that "given my record, some may mistakenly conclude that I am unsympathetic to the Palestinian people -- nothing could be further from the truth."

  "The problems of the Middle East are numerous, and yet we spend vastly disproportionate amount of time on just one of them," she said. "And the UN has shown itself to be hopelessly biased, as we witnessed again just two weeks ago when the General Assembly failed to condemn Hamas’s terrorist activity against Israel."

BUILD THE WALL

   Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) says President Trump will not win re-election in 2020 if his central campaign promise of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is not honored.
   “If we don’t [build the wall], I don’t see President Trump winning in two years,” Gohmert said. “I don’t see the Senate keeping the majority. And I think this country, this little experiment of self-government may be done.”

      A Rasmussen Reports nationwide poll shows that one in three Republicans would be willing to pitch in to pay for a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico if Congress fails to give President Donald Trump the $5 billion he has asked Congress to approve for it.

$1.6BILLION BAND-AID DOES NOT FIX THE PROBLEM

  Ottawa said it is setting aside $1 billion in financial support from Export Development Canada for companies to make capital investments and buy new technology, another $500 million in new loans over the next three years from the Business Development Bank of Canada, $100 million for energy and economic diversification projects, and $50 million for an unnamed oil and gas project.
   “We’ve got a revenue problem. We need to have more revenue coming in the door,” Mah said, adding that Canada needs “many” new pipelines built and a better, faster process for pipeline approvals.
   “They’re not listening. There’s a disconnect. It just seems to be like, ‘here’s a Band Aid’,” Mah said of the loan announcements.

  Lorne Gunter:   Did Sohi and Carr promise the feds would not impose their carbon tax on Jan. 1 after all? Did they announce Bills C-69 and C-48 would be scrapped – the pair of Liberal bills currently before the Senate that are designed to make future pipelines next to impossible?

STATSCAN EXPOSES WORTHLESS GREEN INDUSTRIES

   The vocal and well-financed green lobby regularly lectures Canadians that there is no contradiction between a strict environmental agenda and economic growth. In fact, green advocates trumpet that the two are positively related, since clean energy is supposed to be the foundation of our economy in the future. So Statistics Canada’s release this week of the first estimates of its Environmental and Clean Technology Accounts will make for sober reading for low-carbon lobbyists and their supporters.

   StatCan’s green-economy accounts include everything from hydro and nuclear power to services such as waste management to manufacturing clean-energy goods such as wind turbines. StatCan does not yet document the subsidies supporting these various activities. Environmental and clean-technology industries accounted for a puny 3.1 per cent of Canada’s GDP in 2017. More importantly, StatCan noted that this ratio has remained relatively stable since 2007 when the data began. The green economy’s share of GDP stagnated for 10 of the biggest years for pro-green policies and hefty government support, and against historically slow growth in the rest of the economy. If the green economy cannot flourish in these circumstances, it is doubtful it ever will.

ECO-ZEALOTS WILL NEVER BE APPEASED

  Last week, Premier Rachel Notley said her Quebec counterpart, newly elected Premier Francois Legault “needs to get off his high horse.” Of course, Legault had earned the ire of Notley and most Albertans by sneering there was “no social acceptability” in his province for a pipeline with “dirty oil” in it from Alberta.
   It was Notley who established the whole “social acceptability” standard in the first place. Her theory was that if we Albertans just taxed ourselves enough and piled up environmental regulations high enough, we would earn “social license” from politicians such as Legault to get pipelines constructed.

TRUDEAU INCREASING THE ODDS OF POPULIST BACKLASH

Furey:  That’s the counter-intuitive thing about populism. The election of an elitist doesn’t just mean it’s not over. It may even increase the odds of a populist backlash.
  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s rhetoric has become increasingly divisive and dismissive over the past year. He seems more than pleased at the prospect of fighting the next election over the national carbon tax and immigration, which aren’t exactly the most unifying of issues.
   And when Trudeau speaks about them, he doesn’t use positive messaging. It’s all about hectoring those who aren’t on board with him as peddling misinformation and vilifying the Conservatives as a bunch of meanies.

LIBERALS "INVESTING" IN USED JETS

  Trudeau's Liberal government first sought to purchase 18 new Super Hornet jets built by American manufacturer Boeing, before canning that plan about a year ago as trade tensions between the countries boiled over. An announcement followed that Canada was buying 18 used F-18s from Australia to supplement its existing CF-18 fleet, which dates from the early 1980s, and was due for replacement after about 20 years.
  Over the summer, the government announced it would buy seven jets from Australia for parts. The Liberals had set aside $500 million for this purchase, but the final cost is still unclear.
  Since the announcement to purchase Australia’s old planes, Sajjan has faced harsh criticism from opposition members who call the plan unacceptable, especially after a damning report from the auditor general of Canada less than a month ago.
  Yet when asked if the purchase could be stopped, Sajjan replied, “Why would you want to stop it?”

GEERT WILDERS: DEFENDING OUR WAY OF LIFE

For our civilization is based on the legacy of Jerusalem, of Athens and Rome, and it's the best civilization on earth.  It gave us democracy, freedom, equality before the law, the separation of church and state and the notion of sovereign states to protect it all and the remedy to all this misery and terror is clear.  We have to reassert what we are. Only then, only then we will be able to ensure a future for our children. The Europe today as I said the problems indeed are existential, not economics, Islamization, terrorism, mass immigration are our main problems today because it determines who we are, what we are and if we will still exist as free people in the future. We have to support one another, and for that reason I believe that we should always, always also support our friends of the Jewish State of Israel for Israel. Israel is one of us. It's the only democracy in the Middle East.  It's a beacon of freedom in a very dark and unfree region. It is forced to defend itself against the dark forces of Sunni and Shia Islam and it is our duty to support Israel.  It's a vital outpost of our western civilization.  It's the canary in the coal mine. If Islam would conquer Israel, my friends we will be next. Let us never forget that.  Samuel Huntington was wrong. There is no clash, and the Israeli Arab conflict is the best example that Huntington was wrong. There is no clash of civilization. There is a clash between a civilization and barbarity. That is the truth.

Grab a coffee.

FACT's WORST ETHICS VIOLATORS OF 2018

   The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has released its list of Worst Ethics Violators of 2018, which includes 2020 presidential hopefuls Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
  Both Harris and Warren used their opposition of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court as an opportunity to fundraise, according to FACT. The two Democratic Senators sent out emails claiming that the donation played a vital role in battling his confirmation. Shortly thereafter, FACT filed an ethics complaint against both senators.

600 TRUCK CONVOY IN GRANDE PRAIRIE PROTEST GOV'T REGULATIONS

  This weekend, hundreds of truckers came out on Sunday, December 17, in Grande Prairie, Alberta to convoy against government regulations that they say would stifle the gas and oil industries.

  The goal of the convoy was to let government officials know that that Canadian families depend on the oil and gas industries to survive as lawmakers mull over Bill C-69. Those who oppose the bill say that if it passes, it would seriously hinder Alberta’s oil and gas industries and would disrupt several large pipeline projects.

NO EVIDENCE OF SUCCESS OF GUN BANS

Murder rates have increased even when all guns or all handguns are banned in entire countries, even entire island nations. Murder rates more than tripled after Ireland’s 1972 ban. In Jamaica, they went up six-fold after a 1975 ban.

The reason is simple. When guns are banned, it is law-abiding citizens rather than criminals who turn in their firearms. And criminals can continue buying arms from drug gangs. If governments can’t enforce drug bans, there’s no reason to think that they can enforce gun bans.

Australia is a favourite example of gun control advocates, but guns weren’t banned there. The country’s buyback program caused more than 700,000 firearms to be handed in and destroyed, reducing the number of legally owned guns from 3.2 to 2.5 million between 1996 and 1997. But since then, the increase in privately-owned guns has outpaced population growth by a factor of three. The number now stands at 5.8 million.

CANADA'S YELLOW VEST PROTESTS

 Trying to get the attention of PM Trudeau and the Liberal cabal, thousands of Canadians from British Columbia to Nova Scotia  are joining protests against illegal immigration, the carbon tax,  the state of Canada's oil industry, and other concerns.

SUPPORT FOR ALBERTA'S ENERGY INDUSTRY

3000 show up at rally in Calgary to support Alberta's oil industry.

$10MILLION BRIBE FROM SNC-LAVALIN EXECUTIVES

  Arthur Porter‘s former right-hand man, Yanaï Elbaz, will not have to pay damages for having received a $10-million bribe when the contract for the McGill University Health Centre’s so-called superhospital was awarded to SNC-Lavalin.
   Quebec Court Judge Claude Leblond made his decision on the damages Monday morning. He ruled that a civil court, and not criminal court, is the more appropriate forum for such a matter. Elbaz, 49, is currently named in two significant lawsuits related to how the contract was tainted by his and Porter’s decision to accept bribes.
  At the end of the hearing on Monday, Lalonde-Tardif informed the court that the Crown plans to confiscate money held in bank accounts (frozen in Switzerland) and a piece of real estate from Elbaz at a future court date. The confiscations are expected to total $6 million, which means the Crown has yet to trace roughly $4 million of the money Elbaz pocketed from the bribe.