Opinion
Trudeau’s Winnipeg Whitewash – A Masterclass in Diversion and Disconnection
From The Opposition with Dan Knight
As Canada grapples with soaring housing costs and a quality of life crisis, the Prime Minister’s narrative on immigration & multicultural success stories clashes with the lived realities of Canadians
As some of you enjoyed the comfort of Family Day, perhaps some of you noticed Justin Trudeau making the rounds in Winnipeg – (Justin Trudeau Fireside Chat at Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce – February 16, 2024), where he found quite the fan in Loren Remillard of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce. It seems Remillard was all too eager to extend a metaphorical hand, fishing for tax dollars to prop up their projects.
Oh, let’s dissect the masterful art of political deflection and diversion, shall we? Justin Trudeau, spun a narrative so disconnected from the reality Canadians live in, it’s almost an art form. He lauds Toronto and Vancouver as paragons of multicultural success, cities thriving under the weight of their diversity. But here’s the catch folks—the reality on the ground, as reported by Stats Canada, tells a story that’s anything but rosy for the residents of these supposed utopias.
When we turn our gaze to the real impact of his government’s immigration policies on the ground, the picture is starkly different. Toronto and Vancouver, the benchmarks of Trudeau’s immigration success story, are in fact cities where residents report a lower quality of life than their provincial counterparts. Why? Because amidst the fanfare of diversity and inclusion, the basic needs of the citizens—like feeling a sense of belonging, life satisfaction, and mental health—are being sidelined.
Let’s not forget the elephant in the room Trudeau casually mentioned—2 million temporary residents flooding into Canada. This isn’t just a number; it’s a tsunami of demand in addition to the Liberal 500k target per year of permanent resident hitting a housing market already gasping for air, driving rents and shelter costs to astronomical heights. And Trudeau’s response? A shrug of the shoulders and a diversion to talk about measures with Mexico or the plight of international students. While these issues merit attention, they dance around the core issue: a government more obsessed with its global image than the welfare of its citizens.
The audacity to claim that Toronto and Vancouver are thriving under his policies, while Stats Canada directly contradicts this with evidence of declining quality of life, is nothing short of political theater. It’s a sleight of hand designed to distract from the harsh reality—that his government’s approach to immigration and temporary residents is contributing to a crisis of affordability and well-being in our major cities.
But amidst the spectacle, Trudeau touched on a subject that should raise eyebrows across the nation: On how his government is using immigration as a tool to “grow the economy.” Now, let’s pause for a moment to digest that, shall we?
Diving deeper, a fascinating exchange caught my ear during a Finance Committee meeting FINA-124 -February 1, 2024, where Tiff Macklem of the Bank of Canada offered some candid insights. When prodded by Mr. Jasraj Singh Hallan, Macklem conceded that the government’s spending spree and the Bank’s efforts to stabilize our economy were essentially at loggerheads. Here we have the Trudeau administration, pushing fiscal policies that seem to sprint in the opposite direction of monetary sanity.
Macklem went on, outlining that yes, government spending is contributing to growth, but let’s be clear about the kind of growth we’re talking about here. It’s one that barely keeps pace with population increases, teetering on the edge of potential. And with government spending poised to climb even higher, we’re flirting dangerously close to exacerbating inflation, rather than reining it in.
Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers chimed in with a stark reminder of the housing market’s woes. Despite interest rate hikes, which traditionally cool down housing prices, Canada’s chronic housing shortage keeps prices stubbornly high. The result? A housing affordability crisis that’s squeezing Canadians tighter than ever, exacerbated by an immigration policy that is throwing fuel on the fire of demand without addressing the urgent need for supply.
This is the picture Trudeau’s policies paint for Canada: a nation where the cost of living climbs ever higher, where the dream of homeownership slips further away for the average citizen, and where economic growth strategies seem disconnected from the realities on the ground. It’s high time for a reality check, a moment to ask ourselves whether these policies truly serve the best interest of Canadians or merely the political agenda of those in power.
Indeed, the root of the issue is staring us right in the face—supply problems are driving costs through the roof. Yet, it seems as though there’s a conspiracy of silence in the House of Commons; no one dares to utter the truth that unchecked immigration is exacerbating these supply woes, sending shelter costs soaring. Let’s dive into the latest from Stats Canada to unravel the narrative everyone is thriving under Justin Trudeau.
First off, let’s talk about renters. According to this report, if you’re renting, your quality of life isn’t just on the lower rung; it’s plummeting. Renters are staggering under the weight of financial pressures unheard of for homeowners, feeling the pinch of record-low vacancy rates and rent hikes that would make your head spin. Over 15 percentage points more likely to struggle financially and over 11 points less likely to experience life satisfaction.
But the plot thickens when we look at the younger Canadians, those aged 15 to 54. They’re caught in a vise, with life satisfaction and mental health scores that trail behind their older counterparts. The dream of home ownership? A mirage for many, as they navigate a landscape where the very idea of paying off a mortgage seems like a relic of a bygone era. And let’s not even get started on the economic tightrope walked by residents of Toronto and Vancouver, cities where the cost of living soars as high as the skyscrapers dotting their skylines.
Now, Trudeau’s government might have you believe that policies are in place to bridge these divides, to bolster the quality of life for all Canadians. But let’s be real—the evidence suggests otherwise. With renters and younger generations buckling under financial strains and cities like Toronto and Vancouver becoming enclaves of the unaffordable, the narrative being spun by the current administration seems more fiction than fact.
Consider the financial strain laid bare by these statistics: a significant portion of Canadians are finding it increasingly difficult to meet their financial needs, with shelter costs consuming a lion’s share of their income.
In a landscape marked by disparities in quality of life we’re left with a pressing question: where does the path forward lie?
Let’s cut to the chase, folks. The latest 338 polling data isn’t just a blip on the political radar; it’s a resounding bell tolling for the end of the Liberals’ reign, inching closer to losing their official party status. Why, you might ask? It’s simple: Justin Trudeau’s legacy is one of profound ineptitude, a legacy that has systematically failed Canadians at every turn. When Trudeau touts his housing policies, claiming to increase rentals, remember the cold, hard facts from Stats Canada—he’s not building homes; he’s crafting a nation with a diminished quality of life. That’s the Trudeau vision for Canada.
And let’s not overlook the audacity of his actions—jetting off to Jamaica with a hefty $162,000 bill footed by you, the taxpayer. It seems Trudeau’s concern for your quality of life evaporates faster than a Liberal MP can devour lobster in Malaysia. Meanwhile, ordinary Canadians are left to scrounge at food banks. But hey, as long as the political elite get their fill, right?
SNC-Lavalin was just the beginning, the canary in the coal mine signaling the avalanche of corruption set to spill out from Trudeau’s government. WE Charity, the Trudeau Foundation, Chinese interference, ArriveScam… the list of scandals under Trudeau’s watch is as long as it is disgraceful. These aren’t mere footnotes in history; they’re the defining features of his tenure.
Remember the uproar over a $16 orange juice under Harper? That was considered the height of scandal, a benchmark of accountability. Fast forward to today, and this government can’t even spell ‘ethics,’ let alone practice it.
So, my fellow Canadians, as we look ahead to the next election, we’re presented with a golden opportunity—a chance to reset the narrative and send a clear message to the liberal elites that we’ve had enough of their disdain for the average citizen. I, for one, will be cheering on the red wedding of Canadian politics because the liberal standard is not just detrimental to your well-being; it’s an affront to all of Canada. It’s time to say enough is enough and reclaim the Canada we know and love—a Canada of integrity, accountability, and true north strong and free.
Opinion
Hell freezes over, CTV’s fabrication of fake news and our 2026 forecast is still searching for sunshine
Plus! Politico warns that the far right’s stealing Christmas, a CBC content analysis ruffles feathers and more! Happy New Year
Last week, according to the people who produce the nation’s most popular newscast, the hell that is Gaza froze over.
That’s right. According to CTV News, “freezing” rain flooded Gaza camps, leaving “displaced Palestinians in dire conditions.” This, as was pointed out by social media critics (including the National Post’s Chris Selley) was an absolutely false statement. It was, to be clear, a lie.
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Winter rains had indeed fallen and made life unpleasant for people in Gaza. But the Associated Press (AP) report for which some eager beaver wrote the headline (one is tempted to suspect either a social justice warrior posing as a journalist or a bumbling incompetent produced by J-school) made no mention of anything “freezing.” Of course it didn’t, because on the day the story was published the high temperature in Gaza was 17C with a low of 13C.
Now, as one who has visited Disneyland in January, I am aware that temperatures can be relative. When it’s 14C in southern California, people from Saskatoon and Winnipeg are jumping into the local hotel pools while “cast members” at Disneyland are wearing toques and mittens. So AP was entirely within its rights to refer to conditions as chilly.
CTV Evening News, historically, has been one of Canada’s most watched regularly scheduled programs. It has boasted in the past about being the nation’s “most trusted” newscast.
So it was bad enough that CTV posted a barefaced falsehood. What was worse, although it did soften its internal headline to refer to “winter” rains, was that it did not take down its “freezing” posts or offer any hint of regret – at least none I could find – that it had ever posted information that amounted to the antithesis of journalism’s first obligation – The Truth.
While CTV’s owner, Bell, continues to lobby for its newsrooms to qualify for government subsidies such as the Journalism Labour Tax Credit and campaign in Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hearings for newsroom funding, it does not appear super interested in investing in good journalism or even maintaining public trust in it.
Which is a shame, because last week its presentation of fake news did significant harm to trust in the craft and was inconsistent with its published standards.
Peter Stockland did a fine job the other day in addressing the fuss raised in media concerning CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s decision to pull back a story regarding US deportees because, she said, it wasn’t complete enough for airing on 60 Minutes. Others viewed it more suspiciously.
If you haven’t read it yet, please do. We’ll see how it all turns out but what caught my eye was the manner in which the Globe and Mail’s U.S. correspondent, Adrian Morrow, chose to describe Weiss. He portrayed her only as “an anti-woke media personality” – a term of which his editors apparently approved. Given that Weiss was the Opinion Editor of the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, this seems a little, shall we say, catty? A childishly nasty manner in which to refer to Weiss, I thought, considering she also launched an online publication – The Free Press – that, because she was good at being an editor, used talented journalists and paid them well, recently sold to Paramount Skydance for more than $200 million.
Most of all, though, I found the reference entirely unnecessary and self-indulgent, as if the piece was written for the approval of peers and not for the benefit of readers.
Unsubstantiated references to the “far right” continue to be in prolific use as we begin a New Year, still searching for reasons to be optimistic about the state of journalism. References to the “far left,” meanwhile, continue to defy Newton’s Third Law of Motion concerning equal and opposite actions.
The European edition of Politico used no less an occasion that the birth of the previous millenium’s most influential figure to weigh in with its report on “How the far right stole Christmas.”
“U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have “brought back” the phrase “Merry Christmas” in the United States,” Politico declared, “framing it as defiance against political correctness. Now, European far-right parties more usually focused on immigration or law-and-order concerns have adopted similar language, recasting Christmas as the latest battleground in a broader struggle over culture.”
Whew. Politico, focusing on Italian leader Giorgia Meloni, went so far as to quote attendees at a Christmas celebration who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being associated with a “far right” event.
Me? I thought it was Karl Marx, father of the far left, who labeled religion the “opium of the masses” and a human creation designed to keep the working classes oppressed. And weren’t the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and other Communist states the ones that did and do their level best to “steal” Christmas and other festivities founded in faith? Times have clearly changed, even if some newsroom instincts have not.
Speaking of disconnected media, prolific numbers man David Clinton has ruffled a few feathers with an extensive analysis in his Substack platform, The Audit, of CBC content. Here’s his summary of what he found:
“Of the 300 stories covered by my data, around 30 per cent – month after month – focused on Donald Trump and U.S.- Canada relations. Another 12-15 percent related to Gaza and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Domestic politics – including election coverage – took up another 12 percent, Indigenous issues attracted 9 percent, climate and the environment grabbed 8 percent, and gender identity, health-care worker assaults, immigrant suffering, and crime attracted around 4 percent each.”
Clinton provides a list of topics that were not “meaningfully represented in my sample of CBC’s Top Stories.” It includes housing affordability, immigration levels, crime rate, private sector investment success stories, the oil and gas sector, Chinese interference, etc. You can read his full analysis here.
You can also look for my New Year’s predictions on media that (spoiler alert) states that seeing as there has been no evidence of reform in CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard’s first year at the helm of the Mother Corp, you can expect more of the same nothing in 2026. That piece is expected to appear in The Hub this week.
Western Standard announced before Christmas that it’s heading East and hiring a reporter to cover news emanating from Queen’s Park, Ontario’s provincial legislature.
The most notable media-on-media smackdown that came to my attention over the festive season goes to the reliably rambunctious Ezra Levant of Rebel News.
Seizing on a year-end column by the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin that hailed 2025 “as one of Canada’s great nation-building years” under Prime Minister Mark Carney, Levant had this to say:
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And that, for this week, is that. Welcome to 2026.
(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)
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Business
Virtue-signalling devotion to reconciliation will not end well
From the Fraser Institute
By Bruce Pardy
In September, the British Columbia Supreme Court threw private property into turmoil. Aboriginal title in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, is “prior and senior” to fee simple interests, the court said. That means it trumps the property you have in your house, farm or factory. If the decision holds up on appeal, it would mean private property is not secure anywhere a claim for Aboriginal title is made out.
If you thought things couldn’t get worse, you thought wrong. On Dec. 5, the B.C. Court of Appeal delivered a different kind of upheaval. Gitxaala and Ehattesaht First Nations claimed that B.C.’s mining regime was unlawful because it allowed miners to register claims on Crown land without consulting with them. In a 2-to-1 split decision, the court agreed. The mining permitting regime is inconsistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). And B.C. legislation, the court said, has made UNDRIP the law of B.C.
UNDRIP is a declaration of the United Nations General Assembly. It consists of pages and pages of Indigenous rights and entitlements. If UNDRIP is the law in B.C., then Indigenous peoples are entitled to everything—and to have other people pay for it. If you suspect that is an exaggeration, take a spin through UNDRIP for yourself.
Indigenous peoples, it says, “have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired… to own, use, develop and control, as well as the right to “redress” for these lands, through either “restitution” or “just, fair and equitable compensation.” It says that states “shall consult and cooperate in good faith” in order to “obtain free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources,” and that they have the right to “autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.”
The General Assembly adopted UNDRIP in 2007. At the time, Canada sensibly voted “no,” along with New Zealand, the United States and Australia. Eleven countries abstained. But in 2016, the newly elected Trudeau government reversed Canada’s objection.
UN General Assembly resolutions are not binding in international law. Nor are they enforceable in Canadian courts. But in 2019, NDP Premier John Horgan and his Attorney General David Eby, now the Premier, introduced Bill 41, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). DRIPA proposed to require the B.C. government to “take all measures necessary to ensure the laws of British Columbia are consistent with the Declaration.” The B.C. Legislature unanimously passed the bill. (The Canadian Parliament passed a similar bill in 2021.)
Two years later, the legislature passed an amendment to the B.C. Interpretation Act. Eby, still B.C.’s Attorney General, sponsored the bill. The amendment read, “Every Act and regulation must be construed as being consistent with the Declaration.”
Eby has expressed dismay about the Court of Appeal decision. It “invites further and endless litigation,” he said. “It looked at the clear statements of intent in the legislature and the law, and yet reached dramatically different conclusions about what legislators did when we voted unanimously across party lines” to pass DRIPA. He has promised to amend the legislation.
These are crocodile tears. The majority judgment from the Court of Appeal is not a rogue decision from activist judges making things up and ignoring the law. Not this time, anyway. The court said that B.C. law must be construed as being consistent with UNDRIP—which is what Eby’s 2021 amendment to the Interpretation Act says.
In fact, Eby’s government has been doing everything in its power to champion Aboriginal interests. DRIPA is its mandate. It’s been making covert agreements with specific Aboriginal groups over specific territories. These agreements promise Aboriginal title and/or grant Aboriginal management rights over land use. In April 2024, an agreement with the Haida Council recognized Haida title and jurisdiction over Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the B.C. coast formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. Eby has said that the agreement is a template for what’s possible “in other places in British Columbia, and also in Canada.” He is putting title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.
But it’s not just David Eby. The Richmond decision from the B.C. Supreme Court had nothing to do with B.C. legislation. It was a predictable result of years of Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) jurisprudence under Section 35 of the Constitution. That section guarantees “existing” Aboriginal and treaty rights as of 1982. But the SCC has since championed, evolved and enlarged those rights. Legislatures can fix their own statutes, but they cannot amend Section 35 or override judicial interpretation, even using the “notwithstanding clause.”
Meanwhile, on yet another track, Aboriginal rights are expanding under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the same day as the B.C. Court of Appeal decision on UNDRIP, the Federal Court released two judgments. The federal government has an actionable duty to Aboriginal groups to provide housing and drinking water, the court declared. Taxpayer funded, of course.
One week later, at the other end of the country, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal weighed in. In a claim made by Wolastoqey First Nation for the western half of the province, the court said that Aboriginal title should not displace fee simple title of private owners. Yet it confirmed that a successful claim would require compensation in lieu of land. Private property owners or taxpayers, take your pick.
Like the proverb says, make yourself into a doormat and someone will walk all over you. Obsequious devotion to reconciliation has become a pathology of Canadian character. It won’t end well.
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