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Trudeau appoints a member of the Trudeau Foundation to investigate donations to the Trudeau Foundation – PPC leader Maxime Bernier

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While opposition parties form positions on the Prime Minister’s appointment of former Governor General David Johnston as his Special Rapporteur, PPC Leader Maxime Bernier is expressing extreme outrage.

In this newsletter Bernier is using to both spread the news, and to raise money, Bernier points out just how closely tied the Trudeau family is to the former Governor General.


Another day, another example of Liberal corruption in Trudeau’s government.

To address increasing concerns around Chinese interference in our elections, Justin Trudeau said earlier this week that he would appoint a “special rapporteur”—whatever that means—to conduct an investigation.

Yesterday he announced he would be appointing former Governor General, David Johnston, to this position.

Trudeau is describing Johnston as a “Harper appointee” to try and make it seem like an impartial appointment when in reality it is anything but.

Johnston is a standing member of the Trudeau Foundation, the charity that accepted a $200,000 donation from the Chinese Communist Party laundered through a Chinese Canadian businessman.

Is this for real? Trudeau appoints a member of the Trudeau Foundation to investigate interference which involved donations to the Trudeau Foundation?!

It’s a clear conflict of interest!

To make things even more suspect, on multiple occasions, Trudeau has lovingly described Johnston as a “family friend,” having grown up alongside Johnston’s children.

Don’t believe me? Listen to Trudeau describe their relationship!

More recently, Johnston has been the Commissioner of the Leaders’ Debates Commission since it was established in 2018.

An organization whose mandate is to interfere with our elections!

As Commissioner, Johnston was responsible for trying to exclude dissident media organizations, like Rebel Media and True North, from covering the debates and holding the party leaders to account.

He was responsible for the absurd debate formats designed to protect the establishment narrative.

He was also responsible for wrongly excluding me from the debate stage during the 2021 election!

This was at the height of the covid craziness, when having me on national television would have completely destroyed the mainstream narrative.

This is the man who’s supposed to investigate interference in our election?

It’s absurd, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Canada under Trudeau has quickly become a corrupt banana republic.

We saw the exact same playbook with the Freedom Convoy Inquiry.

  1. Trudeau appoints a compromised individual to oversee things.
  2. They delay and push things back to allow public pressure to fall.
  3. Trudeau’s bought and paid for media runs cover for the establishment narrative.
  4. The commissioner/special rapporteur finds nothing is wrong and the conflict is swept under the rug.

This is absolutely unacceptable behaviour on Trudeau’s part! He continues to make a mockery of our democratic institutions.

The level of corruption and incompetence we’ve seen from this government is unprecedented.

Duane, we need to clean the house. We need to vote out every one of these corrupt, career politicians and fill the House of Commons with honest PPC MPs who will put the interests of Canadians first.

Help me accomplish this mission with a $10 donation today!

Thank you so much for your support,
-Max

P.S.: If you have trouble finding where you can donate, you can just click this link! https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/donate

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Crime

The Left Thinks Drug Criminalization Is Racist. Minorities Disagree

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[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]

By Adam Zivo

A Canadian poll finds that racial minorities don’t believe drug enforcement is bigoted.

Is drug prohibition racist? Many left-wing institutions seem to think so. But their argument is historically illiterate—and it contradicts recent polling data, too, which show that minorities overwhelmingly reject that view.

Policies and laws are tools to establish order. Like any tool, they can be abused. The first drug laws in North America, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguably fixated on opium as a legal pretext to harass Asian immigrants, for example. But no reasonable person would argue that laws against home invasion, murder, or theft are “racist” because they have been misapplied in past cases. Absent supporting evidence, leaping from “this tool is sometimes used in racist ways” to “this tool is essentially racist” is kindergarten-level reasoning.

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Yet this is precisely what institutions and activist groups throughout the Western world have done. The Drug Policy Alliance, a U.S.-based organization, suggests that drug prohibition is rooted in “racism and fear.” Harm Reduction International, a British NGO, argues for legalization on the grounds that drug prohibition entrenches “racialized hierarchies, which were established under colonial control and continue to dominate today.” In Canada, where I live, the top public health official in British Columbia, our most drug-permissive province, released a pro-legalization report last summer claiming that prohibition is “based on a history of racism, white supremacy, paternalism, colonialism, classism and human rights violations.”

These claims ignore how drug prohibition has been and remains popular in many non-European societies. Sharia law has banned the use of mind-altering substances since the seventh century. When Indigenous leaders negotiated treaties with Canadian colonists in the late 1800s, they asked for  “the exclusion of fire water (whiskey)” from their communities. That same century, China’s Qing Empire banned opium amid a national addiction crisis. “Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality,” the Daoguang emperor wrote in an 1810 edict.

Today, Asian and Muslim jurisdictions impose much stiffer penalties on drug offenders than do Western nations. In countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Singapore, and Thailand, addicts and traffickers are given lengthy prison sentences or executed. Meantime, in Canada and the United States, de facto decriminalization has left urban cores littered with syringes and shrouded in clouds of meth.

The anti-drug backlash building in North America appears to be spearheaded by racial minorities. When Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, was recalled in 2022, support for his ouster was highest among Asian voters. Last fall, 73 percent of Latinos backed California’s Proposition 36, which heightened penalties for drug crimes, while only 58 percent of white respondents did.

In Canada, the first signs of a parallel trend emerged during Vancouver’s 2022 municipal election, where an apparent surge in Chinese Canadian support helped install a slate of pro-police candidates. Then, in British Columbia’s provincial election last autumn, nonwhite voters strongly preferred the BC Conservatives, who campaigned on stricter drug laws. And in last month’s federal election, within both Vancouver and Toronto’s metropolitan areas, tough-on-crime conservatives received considerable support from South Asian communities.

These are all strong indicators that racial minorities do not, in fact, universally favor drug legalization. But their small population share means there is relatively little polling data to measure their preferences. Since only 7.6 percent of Americans are Asian, for example, a poll of 1,000 randomly selected people will yield an average of only 76 Asian respondents—too small a sample from which to draw meaningful conclusions. You can overcome this barrier by commissioning very large polls, but that’s expensive.

Nonetheless, last autumn, the Centre for Responsible Drug Policy (a nonprofit I founded and operate) did just that. In partnership with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we contracted Mainstreet Research to ask over 12,000 British Columbians: “Do you agree or disagree that criminalizing drugs is racist?”

The results undermine progressives’ assumptions. Only 26 percent of nonwhite respondents agreed (either strongly or weakly) that drug criminalization is racist, while over twice as many (56 percent) disagreed. The share of nonwhite respondents who strongly disagreed was three times larger than the share that strongly agreed (43.2 percent versus 14.3 percent). These results are fairly conclusive for this jurisdiction, given the poll’s sample size of 2,233 nonwhite respondents and a margin of error of 2 percent.

Notably, Indigenous respondents seemed to be the most anti-drug ethnic group: only 20 percent agreed (weakly or strongly) with the “criminalization is racist” narrative, while 61 percent disagreed. Once again, those who disagreed were much more vehement than those who agreed. With a sample size of 399 respondents, the margin of error here (5 percent) is too small to confound these dramatic results.

We saw similar outcomes for other minority groups, such as South Asians, Southeast Asians, Latinos, and blacks. While Middle Eastern respondents also seemed to follow this trend, the poll included too few of them to draw definitive conclusions. Only East Asians were divided on the issue, though a clear majority still disagreed that criminalization is racist.

As this poll was limited to British Columbian respondents, our findings cannot necessarily be assumed to hold throughout Canada and the United States. But since the province is arguably the most drug-permissive jurisdiction within the two countries, these results could represent the ceiling of pro-drug, anti-criminalization attitudes among minority communities.

Legalization proponents and their progressive allies take pride in being “anti-racist.” Our polling, however, suggests that they are not listening to the communities they profess to care about.

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C2C Journal

Canada Desperately Needs a Baby Bump

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By Michael Bonner

The 21 st century is going to be overshadowed by a crisis that human beings have never faced before. I don’t mean war, pestilence, famine or climate change. Those are perennial troubles. Yes, even climate change, despite the hype, is nothing new as anyone who’s heard of the Roman Warm Period, the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age will know. Climate change and the others are certainly problems, but they aren’t new.

But the crisis that’s coming is new.

The global decline in fertility rates has grown so severe that some demographers now talk about “peak humanity” – a looming maximum from which the world’s population will begin to rapidly decline. Though the doomsayers who preach the dangers of overpopulation may think that’s a good development, it is in fact a grave concern.

In the Canadian context, it is doubly worrisome. Our birth rates have been falling steadily since 1959. It was shortly after that in the 1960s when we began to build a massive welfare state, and we did so despite a shrinking domestically-born population and the prospect of an ever-smaller pool of taxable workers to pay for the expanding social programs.

Immigration came to the rescue, and we became adept at recruiting a surplus population of young, skilled, economically focused migrants seeking their fortune abroad. The many newcomers meant a growing population and with it a larger tax base.

But what would happen if Canada could no longer depend on a steady influx of newcomers? The short answer is that our population would shrink, and our welfare state would come under intolerable strain. The long answer is that Canadian businesses, which have become addicted to abundant, cheap foreign labour through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, would be obliged to invest in hiring, training and retaining Canadian workers.
Provincial and federal governments would scramble to keep older Canadians in the workforce for longer. And governments would be torn between demands to cut the welfare state or privatize large parts of it while raising taxes to help pay for it.

No matter what, the status quo won’t continue. And – even though Canada is right now taking in record numbers of new immigrants and temporary workers – we are going to discover this soon. The main cause is the “peak humanity” that I mentioned before. Fertility rates are falling rapidly nearly everywhere. In the industrialized West, births have fallen further in some places than in others, but all countries are now below replacement levels
(except Israel, which was at 2.9 in 2020).

Deaths have long been outpacing births in China, Japan and some Western countries like Italy. A recent study in The Lancet expects that by 2100, 97 percent of countries will be shrinking. Only Western and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa will have birth rates above replacement levels, though births will be falling in those regions also.

In a world of sub-replacement fertility, there will still be well-educated, highly skilled people abroad. But there will not be a surplus of them. Some may still be ready and willing to put down roots in Canada, but the number will soon be both small and dwindling. And it seems likely that countries which have produced Canada’s immigrants in recent years will try hard to retain domestic talent as their own populations decline. In contrast, the population of sub-Saharan Africa will be growing for a little longer. But unless education and skills-training change drastically in that region, countries there will not produce the kind of skilled immigrants that Canada has come to rely on.

And so the moment is rapidly approaching when immigration will no longer be able to make up for falling Canadian fertility. Governments will have to confront the problem directly—not years or decades hence, but now.

While many will cite keeping the welfare state solvent as the driving force, in my view this is not the reason to do it. The reason to do it is that it is in Canada’s national interest to make it easier for families to have the number of children that they want. A 2023 study by the think-tank Cardus found that nearly half of Canadian women at the end of their reproductive years had fewer children than they had wanted. This amounted to an average
of 0.5 fewer children per woman – a shortfall that would lift Canada close to replacement level.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) has noticed the same challenge on a global scale. Neither Cardus nor the UNPF prescribes any specific solutions, but their analysis points to the same thing: public policy should focus on identifying and removing barriers families face to having the number of children they want.

Every future government should be vigilant against impediments to family-formation and raising a desired number of children. Making housing more abundant and affordable would surely be a good beginning. Better planning must go into making livable communities (not merely atomized dwellings) with infrastructure favouring families and designed to ease commuting. But more fundamentally, policy-makers will need to ask and answer an uncomfortable question: why did we allow barriers to fertility to arise in the first place?

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Michael Bonner is a political consultant with Atlas Strategic Advisors, LLC, contributing editor to the Dorchester Review, and author of In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.

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