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Taxpayer watchdog says Canadian gov’t needs to use Trump ‘blueprint’ and create efficiency agency

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canadian Taxpayers Federation director Franco Terrazzano cited the ‘crazy research’ citizens are forced to subsidize under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government as justification for a department to ‘slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy.’

One of Canada’s most respected taxpayer watchdogs said the government needs an agency similar to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to “slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy” that under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has funded numerous woke projects.

“This (DOGE) is the blueprint. … All we need now is a prime minister with the guts to pick up the scissors,” Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) federal director Franco Terrazzano wrote in a recent blog.

Terrazzano highlighted what he called the “crazy research Canadian taxpayers are forced to subsidize” thanks to Trudeau’s Liberal government.

Examples of such “crazy” government spending include the government granting a university student $20,000 to study “Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music.”

Canadian taxpayers were also on the hook for $105,000 for “Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool,” as well as $17,500 for “My Paw in Yours: Dead Pets and Transcendence of Species Divides in Experimental Art-Making Practice.”

Incredibly, the Trudeau government also doled out $50,000 in a scholarship award to a student to study “Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games.”

DOGE will be headed by Elon Musk and businessman and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

Terrazzano noted how a Canadian version of DOGE would be welcome in Canada, and “Those marching orders sure would sound good in a prime minister’s mandate letter to a finance minister.”

He also noted how the government has wasted billions a “multibillion dollar gun confiscation that police officers say won’t work, the $25 billion equalization scheme and taxpayer-funded media bailouts, among others.”

“The bad news for taxpayers is we pay too much tax because the government wastes too much money. The list of wasteful spending in this article is far from exhaustive,” he wrote.

“The good news is a champion of taxpayers could make massive cuts and barely anyone outside the Ottawa bubble would notice.”

 

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The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

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Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.

When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”
They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.
The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.
It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.
The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.
None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.
Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.
The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.
The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.
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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.
The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.
Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.
Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.
Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.
The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.
The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.
They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.
Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.
The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.
The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.
The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.
That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.
The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”
That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.
Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.
TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.
The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.
It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.
In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.
And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.
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Loblaws Owes Canadians Up to $500 Million in “Secret” Bread Cash

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