Ignore advice of big government elites, Conservatives must remain taxpayers’ party 

Conservative MP Jeremy Patzer is the representative for Cypress Hills—Grasslands (Saskatchewan).

We are now entering the second year of living under Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax regime in Canada. The beginning of a new year is a good time for us to step back and reflect on how federal policies are affecting the lives of everyday Canadians. At the same time, we are only a few months away from an annual carbon tax hike coming in April.

While firmly believing that this tax is generally harmful and ineffective, I want to focus on a telling feature of the Liberals’ so-called plan for reducing Canada’s carbon emissions. When the Liberal government first introduced their carbon tax in the last parliament, they reassured Canadians that it would be revenue neutral. Related to this claim, they announced that Canadians would receive a rebate in proportion to the amount collected from each province. According to them, it should acknowledge and adequately offset the costs of the tax on consumers.

Right before the end of 2019, we learned that the government is walking back their previous projections for the rebate a family of four could receive. Coincidentally (or not), the rebate happens to be going down for all the provinces that have not gone along with putting their own carbon tax into place. My home province of Saskatchewan is getting the biggest decrease in rebate money.

While the cost-increasing effects of the carbon tax can hurt many vulnerable members of our society, it is particularly making life harder for families and seniors. I have seen and heard about the damage it is causing my constituents and others living in rural Canada. I come from a riding and a region of the country where, along with making everything more expensive, the carbon tax is delaying economic recovery and draining away our agricultural and resource-based economy.

Of course, this is just another insult added to injury. The Liberals have also said that most households would receive more money back than they are paying under the tax, despite some indications to the contrary. After regularly spending extra for home heating or driving long distances in a part of the country where both are necessary, the full compensation through a rebate is questionable at best. On top of that, there have also been farmers calling attention to paying hundreds of dollars in additional tax for drying their grain after a difficult harvest year, which must be done if they want to make a living. Is there real compensation for them?

Considering all this, it gives us a perfect picture of how Canadians can expect the carbon tax to work in actual practice. As the tax rate and costs are on the rise, there is less support for taxpayers and struggling families. So far, the carbon tax rebate is turning out to be another letdown.

As tax season approaches after the first year of living under this policy, we are left to wonder if this discouraging trend will continue.

The RCMP intercepted 16,503 people illegally crossing into Canada from the U.S.-Canada border in 2019, according to new federal government data.

The number of people entering Canada via the border at unofficial ports of entry declined in 2019, but the total number of people making asylum claims jumped from 55,040 in 2018 to 63,830 according to Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada.

The increase is due to more and more people flying to Canada and then making asylum claims upon arrival at airports across the country.

The Safe Third Country Agreement between America and Canada means asylum seekers are supposed to make refugee claims in the first safe country they enter, but when individuals cross illegally into Canada they are able to bypass the agreement.

The Trudeau government dragged its feet on doing anything significant to address the spike in illegal border crossings, first changing the wording to “irregular border crossings” and accusing critics of stoking xenophobia.

But in the lead-up to the 2019 election, after government internal polling showed the vast majority of Canadians polled didn’t approve of people crossing into Canada illegally, the Liberals promised to change legislation to curb the influx.

The spike in illegal border crossings began around the time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that Canada welcomes those looking to find a new home and when U.S. President Donald Trump was cracking down on illegal immigration in America.

The National Post via an access to information request found that their was a deluge of inquiries across the world to Canadian embassies of people inquiring how to immigrate to Canada after Trudeau’s tweet in early 2017.

According to reports, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen’s briefing notes in December stated their are no formal plans setup with the U.S. to address the loophole to the Safe Third Party Agreement.

Watchdog organization Freedom House released a new report this week warning that several of the nation’s largest news publications—the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal, to name a few—are serving as propaganda outlets for the Chinese government.

The report, titled “Beijing’s Global Megaphone” states that the Chinese Communist Party has employed the use of state-owned news organizations like China Daily to promote the country’s policies through U.S.-based publications through the periodic inclusion of a “paid news-like advertising supplement” from Chinese state proxy, China Daily, called China Watch. It’s called native advertising, and the content is designed to give the reader the false impression that the articles they’re reading local content from these newspapers.

Freedom House reports that similar advertorials have also been published in newspapers elsewhere in the world, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and India. It’s a global effort to make China look good, curtailing perhaps the negative press over its treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. 

While some of the content is paid for, others are provided free of charge to their media partners from Chinese state news agencies like Xinhua and China News Service, operating with a model similar to Reuters and the Associated Press—but with news biased in favour of the Chinese regime. According to the report, which borrows from a November 2018 investigation by the Financial Times, the news provided by these agencies is nominally reprinted for the Chinese diaspora in at least 200 supposedly independent Chinese-language publications. Readers are given the impression that the content is native to nominally independent publications but is repackaged propaganda by the Chinese government.

The nation has, for a long time, “sought to influence public debate and media coverage about China outside the country, particularly among Chinese-speaking communities.” Freedom House states that the complexity of the tactics used by the Chinese are new, and combines the country’s official diplomatic efforts with subversive activities that undermine not only the sovereignty of the nations they target, but severely affect independent media. After all, no one wants to buy fake news. 

Curiously, the report found that “Russian-style social media disinformation campaigns,” which were blown out of proportion by the Democrats following the 2016 election, have been attributed to China-based perpetrators. The perpetrators of these campaigns are referred to as the “50 Cent Army” by Hong Kong protesters and pro-democracy activists who deal with fake pro-China social media accounts. 

The impact of China’s attempt to manipulate the narrative through social media and news publications cannot be understated. Beijing’s control of the free press effectively cedes the information infrastructure of targeted countries to the Chinese with little to no pushback. Other arms of the Chinese government—notably their tech giants like Huawei—are working in tandem with their propagandists to acquire contracts to build 5G networks and other telecoms infrastructure in countries as far as the Faroe Islands. 

Furthermore, China’s propaganda extends well beyond promoting China as a tourist destination or simply downplaying the horrors in Xinjiang. According to Freedom House’s findings, the propaganda also presents China as a model for other countries. “[T]hey are taking concrete steps to encourage emulation through trainings for foreign personnel and technology transfers to foreign state-owned media outlets.”

All these efforts allow China to heavily influence local politics to its benefit, earning both government contracts and control over the local infrastructure as well as allowing Beijing to meddle directly in internal political debates and even elections. 

Should democracy hope to survive the 21^st century, much needs to be done to curtail China’s influence not just in North America, but worldwide, where other sovereign nations remain vulnerable to the Chinese hegemony. If left unchecked, China will—sooner or later—take over the world, and the next time you’ll hear from us is through a letter written on toilet paper in a Chinese prison cell. 

The Democratic debates took that place in Iowa saw a heavy moderator bias against Bernie Sanders, prompting many Democrat voters to trend #CNNisTrash and #NeverWarren.

A few days ago, “sources” told CNN that Bernie expressed doubt to Elizabeth Warren on whether a woman can win the Presidency.

Bernie Sanders called the allegations “ludicrous,” saying “it’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened.”

He added, “Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.”

But Warren’s campaign refused to respond.

Elizabeth Warren later said confirmed that Bernie had told her this, but refused to go into details.

This spar between a socialist and a seemingly-progressive candidate was weaponized by CNN when during the debates on January 14th.

Moderators asked Bernie whether he said a woman couldn’t win. He, again, denied it and added that, in fact, he had asked Elizabeth Warren to run against Hillary Clinton and he only ran because Warren refused.

The moderators, then, asked him the same question again. He denied these allegations again.

However, then the moderators went on to asked Elizabeth Warren if she “agrees with Bernie’s claim that a woman can’t win”, to which Bernie and the audience laughed.

Elizabeth Warren responded with, “I disagree” and changed the topic.

But that wasn’t all. CNN also spent a major portion of the debate on whether US troops should stay in the Middle-East. Bernie Sanders was the only one who said they should be pulled out.

However, when it came to the question of healthcare, the moderators kept asking Bernie “how he was going to pay for it.”

If the bias against Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more clear, CNN framed questions and headlines with an explicit anti-Bernie tone.

Many on the left and right were furious at the utter lack of objectivity from CNN, causing a spike in the hashtag #CNNisTrash.

At the end of the debate, Bernie reached out to Elizabeth Warren for a handshake, which she explicitly refused. Hence, Bernie supporters also began trending the #NeverWarren hashtag.

On Google, CNN promoted explicitly promoted Warren to undermine Bernie.

Many in other mainstream media outlets such as MSNBC and the Hill, were also confused by this explicit anti-Bernie bias by CNN.