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My gas guzzling, CO2 spewing car is the least penalized and taxed option, even with the carbon tax.

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I am looking at last month’s bills and was surprised at a few items.
First did you know that last month the average temperature was 10 degrees cooler than the same time a year earlier?
Looking at my home heating bill, I pay different rates at different times, I used in total, 30 gigajoules of energy (29.92), 10gj (10.1)at 1.99 and 20gj(19.82) at 3.18. For a total of $83.13 in natural gas.
The carbon levy is huge, don’t get me wrong, at $45.39 or 54.6% of the cost of gas, but that is only the beginning.
Administration fees-$7.62, Rider Z-$2.55, Rate Rider-$28.98, Municipal Franchise Fee paid to Red Deer-$27.27, GST-$12.31, Delivery charge- $51.35 for a total of $175.47 in extra fees.
So my $83.13 in natural gas to heat my home during a cold period cost me $258.60 in total.
So for every dollar in natural gas I use it cost an additional $2.11 in fees.
So I pulled out my electricity bill. I used 654 kilowatt hours of electricity or $43.78 in energy.
I do not see a carbon levy on my bill and yet we still burn non-renewable resources like natural gas and coal to provide electricity, do we not?
I do see an Administration Charge- $7.24, Distribution Charge- $20.84, Transmission Charge-$26.03, Balancing Pool Allocation- $2.07, Rate Rider Credit of $3.07, Local access fee paid to Red Deer of $6.22 for a total of $103.11.
So for every dollar in electricity I use it cost an additional $1.36 in fees.
So in one cold month I used $126.91 in electricity and natural gas to run my house which I do believe is a necessity, but it cost $361.71 in total for all the hands in the pie.
My fuel bill for my vehicle, because it was cold and I was lazy came to $169.35 for the same period and of that I think $7.50 was for the carbon tax. $23.70 went to Federal taxes, $34.50 went to Provincial taxes. I am approximating because it isn’t broken down on my bills. So for every dollar in fuel I use in my vehicle it cost an extra $0.53 extra in fees. Throw in the costs of delivery and marketing fees of $0.37 and gas still comes to $1.90 which is less than $2.00.
A dollar worth of natural gas cost $3.11, a dollar worth of electricity cost $2.36 while a dollar worth of fuel cost $1.90.
So the cleaner the fuel the more expensive in fees it is. A car running on natural gas incurs the greatest cost in extra fees, an electric car, would incur less fees than natural gas but more than a car with an internal combustion engine.
So even with the Carbon Tax, my gas guzzling, CO2 spewing car is the least penalized in fees.
What is my incentive to go green? Another 5 cents on a litre of gas?

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

The post-national cult of diversity promotes authoritarian intolerance

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From the Frontier Center for Public Policy

By William Brooks

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. … Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.” — Justin Trudeau, 2015.

Throughout history, populations with sufficient historical, geographic, linguistic, economic, religious, and cultural attachments have flourished within the borders of unified nation-states.

Few modern nation-states fit a uniform definition. In countries such as Canada and the United States, two or more nations, regions, colonies, and tribes learned to prosper together within a negotiated constitutional order.

Not all nations insist on total sovereignty as a condition of their existence. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged this when he put forward a parliamentary motion recognizing that the Québécois form a historical “nation” within the united Dominion of Canada.

In 2006, Members of Parliament overwhelmingly supported Mr. Harper’s motion, but it was notable that Justin Trudeau, a rising star in the Liberal Party of Canada, regarded the recognition of a Quebec nation as an “old idea from the 19th century.” He said it was “based on a smallness of thought.”

After Canada’s 2015 election, Mr. Trudeau decided he had been selected to lead the world’s first “post-national state.” He said Canada had “no mainstream.” The new PM insisted that nationalist sentiments should be replaced by “shared values—openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.” Canada’s doors were to be open to the world.
In March 2016, the Trudeau family received a warm welcome at the Obama White House. Forgetting years of reciprocal visits with the former PM, Mr. Harper, the U.S. president enthused that “Today, we are very proud to welcome the first official visit by a Canadian Prime Minister in nearly 20 years—it’s about time, eh?”

For the cosmopolitan left, the period between November 2015 and November 2016 was a pivotal moment in history. A U.S. president who had rejected the idea of “American exceptionalism” and a Canadian Prime Minister who said his country had “no core identity” were in perfect accord with a growing cabal of international plutocrats who disapproved of nationalism and looked forward to the emergence of a borderless, new world order.

Globalists were convinced that a higher form of humanity could be achieved through a new trifecta of values known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The only people standing in their way were pesky British Brexiters and Donald J. Trump.

Modern Origins of Anti-Nationalism

The post-modern left has always insisted that patriotism is a precursor to fascism. Since the late 1960s, Western intellectuals have deceptively linked nationalism and patriotism with the cultural values of Nazi Germany. For neo-Marxist intellectuals, affirming the merits of one’s nation is symptomatic of an authoritarian personality.

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 20th century, “global integration” became an increasingly popular vision among international policy experts. World Economic Forum patricians proposed a superior morality to be guided by a “Great Reset.”

The left insisted that problems such as climate change, inequality, racism, and poverty called for bold solutions. As a result, a “one-world government” paradigm came to occupy the center of academic thought. Universities in North America and Europe routinely advertised for positions in “global governance,” a term that few would have recognized a decade earlier.

Western literary elites rushed to defend the idea of post-nationalism. Writing in The Guardian in 2017, Canadian novelist Charles Foran said, “First and foremost, post-nationalism is a frame to understand our ongoing experiment in filling a vast yet unified geographic space with the diversity of the world.”

The presumed genius of leaders such as Mr. Trudeau and President Obama promised to usher in a new era of diversity and inclusion that would make our world a kinder and gentler place.

The Old Diversity and the New

Over recent years, several scholars have adopted a more skeptical view of the post-national bromides being passed off as “diversity and inclusion.”

For example, University of Kent emeritus professor of sociology Frank Furedi argues that “diversity” is not “a value in and of itself.” He regards the present-day version of diversity as the foundation for a new form of authoritarianism.

In a January Substack article, Mr. Furedi pointed out that the meaning of diversity has been fundamentally altered.

“In the past the affirmation of difference ran in parallel with the celebration of the organic bonds that tied communities to their ancestors,” he wrote.

This older form of diversity promised that the cultural freedom of local districts, tribes, races, religions, and immigrant communities could be respected within a justly established legal and constitutional order. It was a model that inspired the loyalty of citizens in modern nation-states such as the United States and Canada.

Post-national diversity means something entirely different. Mr. Furedi argues that “the current version of diversity is abstract and often administratively created. It is frequently imposed from above and affirmed through rules and procedure.”

He goes on to assert: “The artificial character of diversity is demonstrated by its reliance on legal and quasi-legal instruments. There is a veritable army of bureaucrats and inspectors who are assigned the role of enforcing diversity related rules. The unnatural and artificial character of diversity is illustrated by the fact that it must be taught.”

Dogmatic Diversity and the Decline of Freedom

Over the past 75 years, the left has promoted diversity as a remedy for discrimination. By the late 1960s, it had acquired a sacred importance. Mr. Furedi contends that “the main driver of this development was the politicisation of identity.”

He quotes the philosopher Christopher Lasch: “In practice, diversity turns out to legitimise a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Furedi writes, “diversity has proved to be an enemy of tolerance.”

Radical proponents of diversity and inclusion reject debate and demand conformity. They have no qualms about limiting fundamental liberties, particularly free speech. The totalitarian temptations within this cult are akin to the impulses of an ancient creed or a communist dictatorship. No one is free to disagree, and there is little kindness in a dogma that has become the foundational value for 21st-century authoritarians.

Ten years ago, post-nationalist politicians such as President Obama and Mr. Trudeau found it easy to sell woke elites the same unfounded assumptions they had already acquired in university.

Today, free-thinking common folks are becoming considerably tired of serving the appetites of false prophets.

William Brooks is a Senior Fellow at Frontier Centre For Public Policy. This commentary was first published in The Epoch Times here.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Canada’s Indigenous burial hoax is still very much alive

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Hymie Rubenstein

The Kamloops “confirmation” – growing more inconclusive all the time – consisted solely of signs of sub-surface soil irregularities: GPR cannot detect human or other organic material, and is only reliable in finding graves in known cemeteries.

History shows that many hoaxes, fake news stories, and conspiracy theories have proven nearly unassailable, even when proven false. So far, it seems a British Columbia burial canard will be added to this list.

The assertion that thousands of Indian Residential School children are buried in unmarked graves across the country, many of them victims of genocide, has been bandied about for decades. Its current promotion skyrocketed in mid-2021 following an Indigenous media release that was heard around the world:

May 27, 2021, Kamloops – It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Although this claim and others like it are slowly being exposed as false, most Canadians still believe them.

This assertion is one of the findings of a February 2024 Macdonald-Laurier Institute research report that found “by a 79 to 21 ratio, respondents believed that ‘215 Indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,’” a story lacking factual or historical evidence “but which most media and virtually all politicians have been reluctant to contradict.”

The Kamloops Burial Hoax

The Kamloops “confirmation” – growing more inconclusive all the time – consisted solely of signs of sub-surface soil irregularities: GPR cannot detect human or other organic material, and is only reliable in finding graves in known cemeteries.

Still, immediately following the Kamloops announcement, there were angry vigils, public displays of grief and shame, solidarity speeches, promises to revolutionize society, and the burning down of dozens of predominantly Roman Catholic churches.

The furore attending the Kamloops discovery accelerated as later findings were announced in other provinces, with the number of purportedly identified graves soon exceeding 2,000. Frequently heard among activists was the cry that these announcements were proof of a hidden “Holocaust” or “Final Solution” perpetrated against Aboriginal students by Canadians working in residential schools. The Kamloops school was alleged to have been a “concentration camp” and the 2021 “burials” evidence that there had been a horrific crime.

Evidence Challenging the Hoax

Entrenched public opinion on what increasingly looks like a burial hoax was damaged on August 18, 2023, when the 14 closely spaced soil disturbances detected using GPR in the basement of the Roman Catholic church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School were found to contain animal bones and debris, not human remains.

These findings were preceded by several other inconclusive discoveries.

In August 2021, a team of researchers in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, conducted an excavation at the former Shubenacadie Residential School in search of clandestine burials, but to no avail. Two months later, a search was conducted for unmarked graves on the site of the former Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. The facility treated Indigenous people, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis, and some Indigenous leaders claimed that the dig would uncover patients that had been buried there, but no such evidence was discovered.

One discovery still making headlines is the unearthing of child-sized skeletons in a reputed “mass grave,” most likely the result of repeated accidental excavation and haphazard reburial by community grave diggers in the community cemetery on Alberta’s Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve. Without a shred of evidence, community members have attributed the death of some of these children to murder at the hands of a school official that was never reported to the police.

That there are no missing or secretly buried students who attended the reserve’s Indian Residential School is proven by the absence of relatives in the past or present searching for loved ones who never returned home. By comparison, in all of Canada, only two distant relatives have been identified as looking for their ancestors. In both cases, the children’s death certificates were found “buried” in the provincial archives whose records showed they were buried correctly on their home reserves.

Two easily located students’ records are surely vastly different from the “15,000 to 25,000 … maybe even more” children Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, has claimed may be missing.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kamloops claim, and the many copycat allegations it fomented, are fallacious. More commentators are awaking to the “mass grave” propaganda, even though the Canadian mainstream media barely responded to the Pine Creek discovery of presumptive graves containing no human remains, an important reason this hoax is still very much alive.

Indigenous Elites Support the Hoax

Among the most prominent of many Indigenous perpetrators of these inflammatory claims of murder, mass graves, and even genocide has been RoseAnne Archibald, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s largest and best-known Indigenous lobbying group.

At a July 15, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band public presentation, Archibald maintained that the Kamloops case told the world “how 215 innocent children died and were buried in unmarked graves” and that this “crime against humanity” constituted “genocide.”

Completely ignoring the caution of all the known researchers conducting these band-sponsored GPR searches, Archibald added that “this ground penetrating technology is revealing evidence, undisputable proof, that crimes were committed.”

In an interview broadcast by the BBC on August 4, 2021, Archibald charged that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were “designed to kill” Indigenous children. “And we are seeing proof of that,” she said. “1,600 children, innocent children, have been recovered so far…. We are going to be in the thousands upon tens of thousands of children found. I am not sure how you can say that the recovery of that many little children does not signify what it is – genocide.”

Chief Archibald failed to mention that not a single child’s body “has been recovered so far” or that three years later, no bodies have been exhumed.

A lack of verified evidence of children buried in unmarked graves, some supposedly after priests murdered them, has done nothing to deter the federal government from funding several lavish programmes meant to continue this effort. One of these initiatives was the August 10, 2021, announcement of the allocation of $321 million to help Indigenous communities search burial sites at former residential schools and to support survivors and their communities.

Such programmes have doubtless hardened the public opinion expressed in the Macdonald-Laurier Institute poll. Allied beliefs discovered by the study are also at work: 54 percent of all respondents consider the legacy of Indigenous colonialization to be a problem today; 55 percent vs. 45 percent believe that Indigenous peoples should have a unique status because they were here first; by 48 percent for to 41 percent against, Canadians believe the harm from Indigenous residential schools will continue rather than be resolved; and 19 percent of Canadians think children at residential schools were “purposefully killed” with another 39 percent saying that children also died of neglect.

But the most critical determinant of the exceptionally high belief in the “killing field” at the Kamloops residential school lies in “political culture in Canada,” according to the study: “Much seems to come down to the culturally left-liberal political culture in Canada. That is, the elite norms that hold sway in the media and among mainstream politicians are predominantly culturally leftist.”

As the report says: “It is well established that the media and politicians can cue the issues they want voters to focus on, making decisions to elevate some questions and ignore others.”

This obvious assertion allowed the Macdonald-Laurier Institute report to argue that:

Canadians’ relatively high trust in institutions and cultural elites grants considerable latitude to them to frame the issues that people talk about while neglecting other questions…. There is no better illustration of this than the Kamloops mass graves question, where the code of silence practiced by the media and mainstream political parties has resulted in a clear majority of the public believing this false account.

On the Indigenous side, the Kamloops discovery, and its promise of lots of money, quickly unleashed a flood of similar GPR searches across Canada. To date, the unmarked graves are presumed to hold the remains of mainly unknown and unaccounted for individuals, primarily children, at 26 sites that have been identified since 1974[RC1] .

The allocation of funds to search for graves was followed in June 2022 by appointing an investigator to work with Indigenous communities and the government to propose changes in federal laws, policies, and practices related to unmarked graves at residential schools.

Kimberly Murray, former Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, was given a two-year appointment as Canada’s “independent special interlocutor for missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites associated with the Indian Residential Schools.”

Murray’s appointment was simply one part of a campaign, whether deliberately organized or not, to label Canada as a genocidal country long engaged in the systematic murder of Indigenous children whose remains were dumped into mass graves.

Attempts to Stop Hoax Challengers

On June 16, 2023, Murray released an interim report arguing “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat what activists have termed “residential school denialism.”

Unsurprisingly, her “opening words” in the report stated:

… my role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective – it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and Spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.

This attack on the fundamental precepts of objective search for truth based on reason, logic, and scientific evidence rooted in a scientific paradigm that clashes with Indigenous ways of knowing gave her leave to label genocide denial as an “attack” on her version of the truth whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves.

Moral certainty based on Indigenous ways of knowing, not objective evidence based on science, allowed Kimberly Murray to state that the Canadian government has a role in combatting “denialism,” an inflammatory distortion of what is simply scientific scrutiny, by giving “urgent consideration” to the legal tools that already exist to address the problem, including civil and criminal sanctions.

“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered on the Cowessess Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan on June 16, 2023.

But there is no photographic evidence of children buried beside the shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School nor at any of the other former Indigenous schools in Canada.

The only photographic evidence shows typical church burials and thousands of schoolchildren engaged in everyday activities. As for the records, they reveal that the few residential school children who died at the schools were buried in school cemeteries beside school staff members or the nearest reserve cemetery. But most deceased children were interred on their home reserves. All of them received a proper Christian burial after they died, most succumbing to contagious diseases like tuberculosis over which Indigenous people had little natural immunity.

Several of those labelled denialists have argued that there are few missing students, only missing records about their school attendance and death. On March 21, 2023, Murray inadvertently confirmed this assertion in her testimony before the federal government’s Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples when she said:

The family doesn’t know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told … that they died. I can get the name of that [missing] individual, I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to Ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on Ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won’t just provide those records?

And then those records will lead you to where they’re buried, hundreds of miles away from their home community. We are now seeing families going to cemeteries. I get this a lot. The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that, and we know that they’re going to have a little bit of closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that’s what keeps us going. [emphasis added].

Even though there is little evidence that thousands of children’s deaths were not reported to their parents, and lots of evidence that this is not true, including the refusal of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to remove the names of children whose cause of death and place of burial have been found, from its Memorial Register, a list now totalling over 4,100 named and unnamed “children who never returned home from residential schools.”

Murray’s statement contradicts the established public narrative about missing children. None of these facts have ever been communicated to the public by the mainstream media.

The latest anti-denial effort emanated from the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples, which released a 30-page report on July 19, 2023, titled “Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation.” The study recommends “that the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

According to lawyer John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms:

The use of state resources to promote one opinion on a scientific or historical matter is nakedly totalitarian. Apart from that, the senators’ aggressive language calling on government to “take every action necessary” suggests that it would be okay for the government to punish the likes of Michelle Stirling, Mark DeWolf, and others who dare to disagree with the dominant narrative.

The report fails to define “denialism” yet claims it “serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials, and unmarked graves.” This omission suggests that “denialism” means disagreeing with the dominant narrative that Indian Residential Schools were houses of horror marked by racism and genocide.

Decades of an Aboriginal blood libel assertions hang over all these claims, with an army of activists and their supporters acting as its eager propagandists. It is long past time to find the underlying cause of this fake news by exhuming the reputed unmarked graves and identifying any remains they might contain. If that never happens, Canadians will be paying vast amounts forever to keep this hoax about missing and murdered Indigenous children alive.

Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.

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