One of Andrew Wilkinson’s BC Liberal candidates left a prominent Vancouver-area conspiracy theorist with a clear impression that he was “supporting” a call to end emergency public health restrictions earlier this year.
John Rustad, the incumbent BC Liberal candidate for Nechako Lakes, was replying to an email sent by Tony Mitra, a self-identified “conspiracy theorist” who has been a familiar face at anti-lockdown and anti-face mask protests in recent months.
Jagmeet Singh will no doubt get a lot of stick in Ottawa for propping up the Trudeau government and avoiding a federal election.
The vast majority of Canadians outside the Parliament Hill bubble, however, will thank the NDP leader for sparing the country weeks of unnecessary campaigning in the midst of the most severe health and economic crisis of modern times.
In mid-September, the Sipekne'katik First Nation launched a moderate livelihood lobster fishery along the coast of southwestern Nova Scotia. Its fishers set out an estimated 250 traps at the time, the equivalent of one commercial boat.
Some, including the commercial fishing sector, worried this new fishery was a threat to maintaining healthy lobster stocks. Commercial fishers have articulated two conservation concerns about the Sipekne'katik fishery: its scale and whether fishing during the summer season — when lobsters molt and their shells are soft — is a problem for the survival of lobsters that are thrown back.
At a time when serious discourse is required, partisanship and populism pollute our environment. The only polluter pay system that works in an election. In one case, a broader public vote is not needed as compromise should be found. In the other setting, an election will happen, but its results may be challenged leading to further civil strife.
“Mr. Speaker, with what the leader of the opposition said this morning, with the motion he put forward in his own name, and even with the question he is just asking, he is demonstrating clearly that he has lost confidence in the government’s ability to manage this pandemic.” Now, he said, all the opposition had left to do was to express its contempt in a vote, and then off we’d go to an election.
On its face, this was an epically thin-skinned response. “You’re covering up” is, after all, as common a greeting in Ottawa as “Good morning,” and normally people don’t hurl themselves off the nearest cliff in response.
Last Tuesday, hundreds of people gathered in Winkler, Manitoba to publicly oppose their school division’s COVID-19 precautions, including mandated mask-wearing for students. This was the latest anti-mask rally in a string of demonstrations across Canada in recent months.
While the rallies themselves aren’t particularly threatening (there have been many and politicians generally denounce them) the messaging being used by demonstrators is concerning because its plucked straight from the lexicon of progressive social justice movements. In Winkler, one young girl held a sign that read, “My body, my choice” and another girl’s sign said, “Freedom to choose.” Another protestor waved a placard with a photo of a person wearing a mask with the writing over top: “We can’t breathe.”
Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I woke up to some good news.
The exit polls from Bolivia’s presidential election are in, and the results are inspiring: the current leader of Evo Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party, Luis Arce, won in the first round with more than 52 per cent of the vote. This means that if the official results are respected, Jeanine Áñez Chavez — who led the far-right, anti-Indigenous interim government that took power through a coup — will step down, and socialism will return to Bolivia.
Saskatchewan’s government quietly assured an oil company that it would intervene if the company lost “confidence” in police responding to a labour dispute involving 750 picketing workers, according to a letter signed by the oil company’s CEO.
The letter, released through Freedom of Information and obtained exclusively by PressProgress, shows Co-op Refinery CEO Scott Banda wrote to Saskatchewan Correction and Policing Minister Christine Tell earlier this year.
Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party held its 2020 annual general meeting over the weekend and several hundred party members gave Kenney a mandate to push for policies that are extreme even by the UCP’s standards.
From healthcare to services to workers’ rights, the policy resolutions ratified at the UCP AGM give Kenney the social license of his party’s membership to pursue an extreme right-wing policy agenda.
"Why do you want to say the N-word so bad?" Black students want to know.