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Canadians Duped: A Victorious Day for Islamic Supremacists

March 25, 2017

Canadians Duped: A Victorious Day for Islamic Supremacists, Jihad Watch, , March 25, 2017

(Please see also, Satire | Jamie Glazov Moment: How Not to Blame Islam for the Jihad in London.– DM)

The controversial Muslim author and speaker Irshad Manji once told Canada’s Globe and Mail that “offending people may be the only way to achieving a pluralistic society.” The best defense against the Islamophobia ploy is the active defense of our constitutionally protected principles of human rights, especially the freedom of speech, even when that speech is offensive, and the encouragement of pluralism within Islam. To criticize or insult Islam — or any religion, for that matter — is neither racist nor incitement to hatred. In fact, the reverse is true: smothering public discourse creates a fertile ground for toxic emotions to fester against Muslims, thereby creating the opposite of what Iqra Khalid says she is trying to do.

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The Canadian House of Commons passed anti-Islamophobia motion (M-103) on Thursday, leaving opponents stunned that protests and tens of thousands of Canadian signatures to petitions calling for rejection of the motion were ignored. M-103 was touted as advancing tolerance, inclusiveness and racial harmony, but instead it bestows a special status to Muslims and is a first step in edging Canada down a dangerous path, eroding the freedom of speech and potentially leading to the censorship of reporting on crimes committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. After the cover-up of the UK’s “grooming gangs” and the eventual revelation that up to “one million white English children” may have been victims of Muslim rape gangs; the sex assaults in Germany which have led to signs in pool areas telling Muslim migrants that it is not appropriate to touch women; Sweden’s rape crisis; and France’s no-go zones, the German Media Council told journalists not to mention the ethnicity or religion of perpetrators on the grounds that it would be discriminatory to do so. This leaves Westerners ignorant and uninformed, and living in a permanent state of unease.

In a Toronto Sun article entitled “I’m a liberal Muslim and I reject M-103,” Farzana Hassan writes:

Internationally, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has moved to curtail “Islamophobia” in the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights. I categorically reject such restriction on free speech, just as I reject M-103, tabled by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, who has refused to remove the term from the motion.

Following the passage of M-103, a reporter in the CBC video here begins by saying: “That woman with the glasses is Liberal Iqra Khalid. It’s hard to tell if she’s happy or just relieved that her motion passed.” Khalid emerged beaming like the proverbial cat that got the canary after her victory in Parliament by a 201-91 vote, courtesy of the majority Liberal government. Most Conservative Members of Parliament voted against the motion, “with leadership candidate Michael Chong and Simcoe North MP Bruce Stanton voting in favour.” Some say that a motion is harmless, but it is not. It guides legislative decisions. Liberal MP Raj Grewal revealed the ominous intentions behind the “anti-Islamophobia” motion during the M-103 parliamentary debate of February 15, 2017, when he stated:

One of the most important things about the motion that Canadians should understand is that it encourages a committee to collect data and to present that data in a contextualized manner so we, as members of Parliament elected to this chamber, can study it and propose laws.

Iqra Khalid now stands as a hero among Islamic supremacists after managing quite cleverly to play the victim herself and on behalf of other Muslims. She spoke to reporters after the motion was passed on Thursday:

“I’m really happy that the vote today has shown positive support for this motion and I’m really looking forward to the committee taking on this study,”

Khalid is referring to the Commons heritage committee, which is now tasked with developing a “government-wide approach for reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination, including Islamophobia.” Following the passage of M-103, Khalid was swamped by the media, and pressed by a reporter on whether she thought she could have allayed the concerns of many Canadians by including a written definition of “Islamophobia.” Instead of addressing the question, Khalid clumsily dodged answering. The reporter continued: “Why won’t you answer my question?,” at which point Khalid rudely turned away from him. Still in full avoidance mode, she turned to another reporter, who embarrassed her further by stating that she, too, was  interested in an answer to the question. Now cornered and looking foolish, Khalid turned back to the original reporter and asked, “What was the question?” The reporter repeated himself but she replied only by hailing the merits of M-103, stating that it involved a collaborative effort and had the support of Canadians, parliamentarians and grassroots organizations, which is a bogus assertion. There was no collaboration, but rather a dictation to all Canadians by the Liberal government and Islamic supremacists.

Khalid refused discussion with community members and groups that did not align with her agenda, including those who stressed the need either to fully define “Islamophobia” or otherwise change the word in the interests of a united Canada. One of those groups was the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), which stated in a declaration that “We believe the term ‘Islamophobia’ should be replaced with a more precise phrase, such as ‘anti-Muslim bigotry,’ which was suggested by, among others, former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler.” Jews and blacks still suffer more hate and racism, by far, than Muslims do, but Iqra Khalid was not interested in them, nor in inclusiveness.

If Khalid’s intentions were as benign as she pretends them to be, she would hardly be so dogmatically resistant to adopted the suggested phrase, “anti-Muslim bigotry,” that was presented to her as an option that would be acceptable to all peace-loving Canadians. Khalid sought to use the specifically branded term of “Islamophobia,” which is a broad and sweeping term intended to intimidate and silence critics of Islam. Iqra Khalid appeared to be well aware of the confusion that resulted from her “Islamophobia” motion as she remained resolute in insisting on that word.

Khalid is well versed in deceit, and has, despite her harmless appearance, a questionable history. She is a former president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Student Association (MSA) at York University. MSA’s are “essentially an arm of the Saudi-funded, Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Muslim World League.” The Muslim Student Associations are also well known for their aggressive Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions drives on campus to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel, and for their intimidation of Jewish students. In January 2016, Khalid received a red carpet welcome from board members of the Palestine House in Mississauga (near Toronto) and a “large number of members of the Palestinian  community,” including Palestinian political activists. Palestine House supports the Palestinian al-Quds Intifada, and its settlement program was defunded by the former Conservative Harper government for allying itself with terrorism.

The controversy surrounding Khalid’s motion was first portrayed in the mass media as an issue of right versus left and of white supremacists versus “immigrants.” Even the tragic shooting in January at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City — which killed six people and injured 19 — ended up being used as a political rallying point to shore up support for M-103 and fan the flames of division that were spreading fast, despite the lack of transparency about what really occurred at that mosque and the motive behind the shooting. But Forum Research proved that Canadians still widely rejected M-103. The research group found that only 14% of people supported M-103, and an Angus Reid poll showed that only 12% thought that M-103 was “‘worth passing’ and ‘will help reduce anti-Muslim attitudes and discrimination.’”

Behind Khalid were muscular Muslim Brotherhood lobbies and a global network. Canada’s first anti-Islamophobia motion that passed in October and the second, M-103, were built on petition e-411 by Samer Majzoub, who managed a Muslim Brotherhood-linked Montreal high school, and is a leader of the self-described Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). Majzoub even accused Conservative MPs of “stoking a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment” in opposing M-103.

Petition e-411, which was presented with 70,000 signatures, outlined the contributions of Islam throughout history and declared Islam a religion of peace that had been hijacked by a violent few. The petition was celebrated by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), the former Canadian branch of CAIR (CAIR-CAN). CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history, related to funding Hamas. CAIR was also designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates. The NCCM’s Executive Director, Ihsaan Gardee, said of the first anti-Islamophobia motion that it sent “a strong message to Canadians that discrimination and hatred against Muslims is unacceptable.” Six major Canadian cities also signed an anti-Islamophobia charter last summer, which was initiated by the NCCM.

Those who are pushing the “Islamophobia” agenda have not finished, either in Canada or worldwide. This nefarious scheme can be traced all the way up to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC has many member nations that once subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but which signed on to the Cairo Declaration of Human rights in August 1990. The Cairo declaration affirmed that Sharia is the sole source of determining human rights. Sharia is regarded as divine law, and any insult to Muhammad or Islam is deemed blasphemous.

The passing of this “Islamophobia” motion in Canada represents a low point for freedom and an outstanding achievement for Islamic supremacists. For over 20 years, the OIC has been pressuring the West to restrict tghe free speech in accordance with its charter to “to combat defamation of Islam.” In 2009, an official OIC organization, the International Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Academy, issued fatwas calling for bans on the freedom of speech, legislation to protect Islamic interests, and judicial punishment for public expressions of apostasy. Demands to ban the freedom of speech also came from Egypt’s Salafist Nour party, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hizballah and al-Qaeda-linked groups.

The “Islamophobia” subterfuge is not new in Canada. In November 2012, a video created by a member of the Canadian military that mocked Osama bin Laden was deemed Islamophobic. The video was shown during an event as a satire of the brutalities practiced within Islamic regimes, which freedom-loving Muslims themselves rail against. The head of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Lt.-Gen. Yvan Blondin, was so upset by this video that he issued an apology to those who were offended and stated that the military has “zero tolerance for acts that do not reflect our Canadian values, especially the respect we owe to other cultures and religions.” A full military investigation was also launched, with a promise to follow through with disciplinary action against those involved. CAIR-CAN called it “tragic that an ignorant prank threatens to cast a shadow on our heritage.” The real tragedy, however, was the intimidation and attempt at censorship. And as accusations of “Islamophobia” grow more common in the West, there are bound to be much more intimidation and censorship.

In a special contribution to the Montreal Gazette, Montreal physician Dr. Sherif Emil, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, wrote prior to the passing of M-103:

The demagoguery of Islamophobia is already manifest in the Liberals’ apparent quest to brand all opposed to M-103 as extremists, racists and bigots. All three opposition parties supported an alternative motion that urged the House to condemn “all forms of systemic racism, religious intolerance, and discrimination of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and other religious communities….

No Liberal MP supported the motion; it seems they did not have the guts to defy their prime minister and be — well — liberal.

The controversial Muslim author and speaker Irshad Manji once told Canada’s Globe and Mail that “offending people may be the only way to achieving a pluralistic society.” The best defense against the Islamophobia ploy is the active defense of our constitutionally protected principles of human rights, especially the freedom of speech, even when that speech is offensive, and the encouragement of pluralism within Islam. To criticize or insult Islam — or any religion, for that matter — is neither racist nor incitement to hatred. In fact, the reverse is true: smothering public discourse creates a fertile ground for toxic emotions to fester against Muslims, thereby creating the opposite of what Iqra Khalid says she is trying to do.

Some other recent incidents of Islamic supremacist incursion in Canada: Ontario also unanimously passed an anti-Islamophobia motion, and most disappointing was that Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown “instructed” his caucus to vote for it; the Peel Regional School Board in Mississauga is not only allowing Islamic sermons, but is refusing to monitor the contents of those sermons. Parents are furious. When protests erupted a couple of months ago, Peel police intervened as if they were Sharia police and bullied a female protester outside. New protests have now begun. Last Wednesday, a Peel District School Board meeting about Muslim prayer was cleared by police after some infuriated attendees shouted comments about Sharia and concerns about the Islamic indoctrination of children; pages were torn from a Quran.

Author Bruce Bawer in his book While Europe Slept warns that Europe is being destroyed from within by Islamic incursion, and most Europeans don’t even know it is happening. The same process has begun in Canada, with its suicidal refugee policy of welcoming in unvetted asylum seekers and ramming “anti-Islamophobia” initiatives down the throats of Canadians, along with the persistence of Canadian authorities in unreasonably accommodating Islamic supremacists and even allowing Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and individuals to sway public policy. The only positive aspect of the M-103 “anti-Islamophobia” ordeal was the open and widespread rejection of it by Canadians of every race and religious background.

Categories: Canada and Islamists, Canadian anti-Islamophia law, Canadian politics, Freedom of speech, Islamists in Canada
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Canada moving toward criminalizing “Islamophobia”

January 28, 2017

Canada moving toward criminalizing “Islamophobia”, Jihad Watch, , January 28, 2017

Canada is inching toward a broadly-based law that would codify “Islamophobia” as a hate crime without even defining Islamophobia or demonstrating that it is a phenomenon requiring legal action.

A big question to bear in mind is why the “Islamophobia” motion was “unanimously” agreed upon in Parliament. What happened to the few Conservative members present? And to the interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, and official opposition, Rona Ambrose? Were they, too, intimidated into submission at the expense of Canadians?

This incursion of Islamic supremacists and their allies and lapdogs peddling their wares into Canadian Parliament is a grave concern. Islamophobia is, has been and will continue to be (in the words of Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former Imam and member of the International institute of Islamic Thought) a “loathsome term”  which is “nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”

Now this “Islamophobia” motion is inching toward law in Canada, the very real first step toward subjugating Canada under the Sharia and a kind of blasphemy law: anyone who articulates the truth about Islam faces legal Sharia penalties, a grave precedent with serious implications for Canada and the West.

After first passing a motion that condemns Islamophobia, last month, Iqra Khalid, a Member of Parliament (MP) from the governing Liberals, tabled Motion M-103 in the House of Commons. The motion demands that Islamophobia be treated as a crime without even bothering to define the offense.

Here is some information about Khalid, previously reported at Jihad Watch:

Last January, Khalid met with board members of Palestine House in Mississauga (near Toronto) and a “large number of members of the Palestinian  community,” including Palestinian political activists. Palestine House supports the Palestinian al-Quds Intifada, and its settlement program was defunded by the former Conservative Harper government  for allying itself with terrorism…..

According to the Canadian Arab newspaper Meshwar, which covered the event at Palestine House in honour of Khalid, “the purpose of the event was to strengthen the relationship between the members of the [Palestinian] community and the Liberal members of Parliament.”

That same newspaper published an article by Jordanian activist Hisham al-Habishan, who stated that the US and the “ Zionist-Masonic movement” were behind the Islamic State, with the intention of weakening the Arab region…

Also at the event for Khalid was Meshwar editor Nazih Khatatba, who once “advised al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of Fatah movement, to change their policy and instead of uttering threats at Israel, to demand from Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and the leader of the PLO and Fatah movement, to re-arm them.”  Khatatba openly calls for armed jihad against the state of Israel, and his position is welcomed and supported by the politics of Palestine House. Yet Iqra Khalid, a member of the Canadian Parliament, was hosted by this jihad-supporting hate organization.

It will behoove America and every Western freedom-loving state to pay attention to the decline of Canada into dhimmitude.

Sharia restricts the freedom of speech; this restriction is paramount to the supremacy of political Islam.

canadian-parliament-passes-anti-islamophobia-motion-1

“Canada Inching Toward ‘Islamophobia’ “, by David Krayden, Daily Caller, January 26, 2017:

Canada is inching toward a broadly-based law that would codify “Islamophobia” as a hate crime without even defining Islamophobia or demonstrating that it is a phenomenon requiring legal action.

After first passing a motion that condemns Islamophobia, last month, Iqra Khalid, a Member of Parliament (MP) from the governing Liberals, tabled Motion M-103 in the House of Commons. The motion demands that Islamophobia be treated as a crime without even bothering to define the offense.

Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the leftist New Democrat Party, read the first motion in the House of Commons:

“Mr. Speaker, in a moment I will be seeking unanimous consent for an important motion based on the e-petition sponsored by the Hon. Member for Pierrefonds–Dollard that asks that we, the House of Commons, condemn all forms of Islamophobia,” Mulcair said.

Though he did not receive the unanimous consent that he craved because some official opposition Conservative MPs shouted, “Nay,” Mulcair’s motion passed. No mainstream media outlet reported this parliamentary activity; some social media blogs and private news websites discussed the motion.

Then last month, Liberal MP Khalid introduced another more comprehensive motion that “the government should recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear… condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination and take note of House of Commons’ petition e-411 and the issues raised by it…and request that the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage undertake a study.”

Khalid recommends that Islamophobia — whatever that is — be treated as a hate crime by the federal government and that it “collect data to contextualize hate crime reports and to conduct needs assessments for impacted communities.”

This motion was tabled for debate. Khalid’s communications assistant, Anas Marwah, told The Daily Caller that they expect the motion to come up for discussion in a couple of weeks. “The motion has technically not been introduced, but just tabled; it may be up for first reading in early February,” he said.

The motion has received virtually no mention in the mainstream media…….

Categories: Canada, Canadian politics, Islamophobia
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A Dumpster of Despicables

December 14, 2016

A Dumpster of Despicables, PJ Media, David Solway, December 13, 2016

hillary_dummies_book_article_grid_5-11-16-2-sized-770x415xc

The situation in Canada, while not as dire as it is or has been in the U.S., is perhaps more dispiriting because we have no Donald Trump or Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani on the political horizon. Instead, we have the pro-Islamic, terrorist-hugging, debt-mongering, UNRWA-subsidizing, university drop-out, gynocentric, Castro-loving Justin Trudeau leading the country toward the proverbial cliff.

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Hillary Clinton’s remark that Trump voters were a “basket of deplorables” has now entered the almanac of infamy, as she herself is in process of doing. I know many such deplorables in the rural Ontario community where I make my home: farmers, cattle breeders, shop keepers, machinists, marina operators, truck drivers, carpenters, house painters, restaurateurs, tradesmen, unpretentious people who vote conservative, who are reliable neighbors, and whose children are not afraid of honest work. (The children of deplorables must be deplorables, too, which renders Hillary’s slur even more unconscionable.) In fact, these kids are an impressive lot, many of them apprentices in their fathers’ businesses and many enrolled in music classes in the local schools or taking private lessons, perhaps to become budding graduates of Toby Keith’s Honky Tonk U.

So all in all, I’m delighted to be living in a hotbed of deplorables, good people who would have voted Trump had they been Americans. They are largely scornful of our preening nonentity PM Justin Trudeau and Ontario’s cadaverous Liberal premier, the stridently feminist, LGBTQ-boosting, pro-abortion, anti-family, cap-and-trade carbon taxer, self-promoting, donor-hungry, economically illiterate social justice warrior, and Hillary mini-me Kathleen Wynne, currently escorting Bill 28 through parliament. The bill redefines the family as a contractual rather than a natural institution, involving up to four adult “parents,” a logical extension of such rulings as the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges landmark case resulting in the legal redefinition of marriage.

Of course, Canada boasts a rapidly expanding doofus brigade, of which the majority of our politicos, our morally defective media, and our urban Liberals are charter members. We seem in this country, and particularly in this province—call it the SRO, the Socialist Republic of Ontario—to be approaching the condition that prevails in many parts of the U.S.

But we still have a ways to go to match the dumpster of despicables that currently flourishes there, including the aforementioned Hillary, the outgoing president and his administration of “old, plump, dull frauds” (to quote Bruce Walker), a media and academic sewer overflowing with cultural Marxist subversives, a student generation who would rewrite the American Constitution if they were able to compose a grammatical sentence, entitled minorities demanding reparations and government grants, left-liberal SocProgs, and a clan of plutocrats financing every seditious organization in sight. These are people who prove the point that you can have everything and have nothing. For if you have no historical awareness, no self-scrutiny, no strength of character, and no moral substance, then indeed you have nothing—except the power to wreak harm and convulse a nation. This is as good a definition of a “despicable” as I can come up with.

I imagine a photo of American despicables posing amiably together say, Hillary, Bill, John Podesta, George Soros, Barack Obama, Michael Moore and Harry Reid, to choose at random as depraved and injurious a group of political trash as one might find in the national dumpster. The dumpster is vast enough to contain a motley crew who adhere to a septicemic ideology that would transform the nation from a bread basket into a basket case by any means available, inculcating hatred of a long and reasonably successful republican tradition, generating contempt for the productive backbone of the country, spreading pervasive disinformation, and fomenting racial discord and acts of outright violence. The dumpster of despicables should be emptied as waste disposal via legislative measures and policy initiatives by an administration representing the real people, aka the basket of deplorables. One way or another, the despicables can no longer be allowed to manipulate the levers of power if the country is ever to get back on track.

The situation in Canada, while not as dire as it is or has been in the U.S., is perhaps more dispiriting because we have no Donald Trump or Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani on the political horizon. Instead, we have the pro-Islamic, terrorist-hugging, debt-mongering, UNRWA-subsidizing, university drop-out, gynocentric, Castro-loving Justin Trudeau leading the country toward the proverbial cliff.

Provincially we are no better off. Over the last several election cycles, featuring four successive Liberal governments under Dalton McGuinty—the Pinocchio of Canadian politics—and the hapless Wynne, Ontario has devolved from the manufacturing center and economic engine of the country into a have-not province, crushed under a gargantuan load of debt, bristling with dysfunctional and exorbitant wind turbines and collapsing under the highest energy bills in Canada—consumers are billed even for not using electricity—funding the costliest kangaroo court in the nation (the so-called Social Justice Tribunal), and dependent upon federal transfer payments to make ends not quite meet—California North. We are observing in our corner of the world what a Hillary presidency would have looked like, completing the devastation that Obama began. It takes a special despicable-type talent to drive a prosperous and stable province, state, or country into the ground.

The point was emphatically made by the just-released Ontario auditor general’s report, revealing the machinations of one of the most corrupt and incompetent provincial administrations in the history of the country. It reads like a Monty Python skit, depicting a government selling dead parrots to the electorate at prohibitive cost. Its tenders and oversight are so demented that a pedestrian bridge was built partly upside-down. Clearly, upside-down is what despicables do best.

There have always been secession movements percolating in Canada, most notably in Quebec, as well as in Alberta—as we also find in Texas. I would suggest it is high time for southern Ontario, where the deplorables flourish, to consider the option, as did many in pre-Trump Texas. If that is the only way to get rid of the dumpster of despicables, I would be all for it. The U.S. still has a chance under Trump. Canada has no chance under Trudeau nor does the SRO under the ridiculous and inept Kathleen Wynne. It’s time to start the clean-up.

Categories: 2016 elections, Canada, Canadian politics, Clinton's despicables, Obama's America, President Elect Trump, Trudeau, Trump's America, Trump's deplorables
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After one year, only half of Syrian adult refugees [in Canada] are working

December 12, 2016

After one year, only half of Syrian adult refugees are working, CIJ News, Ilana Shneider, December 12, 2016

syrian-refugees-arriving-in-toronto-1-photo-screenshot-youtube-citizenship-and-immigration-canada-620x330Syrian refugees arriving in Toronto. Photo: screenshot YouTube Citizenship and Immigration Canada

During a debate on Global News between Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Immigration Arif Virani and Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel, Virani admitted that only 9,000 people, or about half of the adult Syrian refugees who were resettled in Canada in 2015, entered the Canadian labour force.

The numbers contradict Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum’s assertion that the immigration policy of the federal government which welcomes more refugees “will help diversify the Canadian economy and create sustainable growth.” At a press conference on March 8, 2016, McCallum said: “As we continue to show our global leadership, Canada will reunite families, offer a place of refuge to those fleeing persecution, and support Canada’s long-term economic prosperity”.

Speaking to students at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario on October 21, 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his commitment to resettle more refugees in Canada because of the social and economic benefits when he said that “Canada and countries around the world need to do more in welcoming people who are fleeing for their the lives, and that’s why I’m so proud of the fact that Canadians stepped up over the past year and welcomed in Syrian refugees to their communities right across the country, because we know that bringing in people and giving them an opportunity to succeed and build a better life for themselves, it’s good for them but it’s also good for the communities…, it’s good for our economy and it’s good for the world.”

During the Global debate, Rempel said that because the Liberal government was so focused on the numbers, they lacked a plan in terms of looking to the future in order to successfully integrate the refugees. She also told the host that witnessed who appeared in front of Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration complained about a lack of funding for schools and language training.

A report by the Senate Committee on Human Rights released last week found that many refugees are struggling to meet their basic needs because they are not receiving certain benefits in a timely manner, even though the government allocated $900 million towards resettlement of all newcomers, of which $30 million was allocated specifically to Syrian refugees, and which amount was increased by an additional $18 million last month.

When asked whether Virani expected that one year later only half of the Syrian refugees would be working, he said that the number is consistent with other refugee populations, and that it takes a “number of years for refugees to attain the same economic levels as other Canadians who have been here for multiple generations”.

Rempel said she wants the government to put forward a solid plan that’s transparent to the Canadian taxpayers on the true cost of the refugee resettlement programs. “When the government was running on a promise of 25,000 refugees during the campaign, they said in their ‘fully costed campaign document’ that it was only going to cost $250 million. And we now know that it’s going to be well above that”, Rempel told host Tom Clark.

Virani told Clark that Canadians want to see “more refugees, not less”, which echoed a claim made by Minister of Immigration John McCallum, who last September said “I have been hearing a lot of input, and all the hundreds of people I’ve spoken to across the country, most of them, almost all of them, have advocated [for] more immigrants, whether for demographic reasons or for job-shortage reasons”. However, both Virani and McCallum’s assertions are inconsistent with the findings of a recent Globe and Mail/Nanos survey which revealed that only 16% of Canadians think Canada should accept the same or more immigrants, while 39% think Canada should accept fewer and 37% think Canada should accept the same number of immigrants in 2017.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, fewer than 50 percent of all Syrian refugees who were resettled in Canada have completed high school, fewer than 10 percent have a university degree and the vast majority don’t speak either official language. The probability of finding employment without education and language skills is very low, which means those who relied on federal assistance for one year will now become the responsibility of the provinces where they reside.

On October 12, 2016, McCallum told reporters that the federal government had no idea that the Syrian refugees have many children, and this is why the provinces are still facing challenges related to finding proper housing and teachers for language training classes.

A recent study released by HungerCount – the only comprehensive annual national report on hunger and food bank use in Canada – found that almost 13% of all people helped by food banks in 2016 were immigrants and refugees.

In 2015-2016, a report released by the federal government revealed that in 2015-2016, the government spent $384.7 million on the Syrian resettlement initiative.

Categories: Canada, Canadian politics, Employment, Employment related skills, Syrian refugees
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Are Canada’s Islamists Calling the Shots?

October 27, 2016

Are Canada’s Islamists Calling the Shots? Gatestone Institute, Thomas Quiggin, October 27, 2016

The discourse of “Islamophobia,” and this petition, are nothing more than a continuation of the efforts of Islamists to silence their critics as they advance their own political agenda.

The Liberal Party of Canada appears to have been infiltrated by a variety of individuals who are supporters of Islamist extremism. This is beginning to look like a classic case of political entryism.

In 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau chose not to observe any official 9/11 memorial ceremony to honour the Canadians who died that day. However, the very next day, he attended the Ottawa Main Mosque which has multiple links to extremism. This despite recent stories in Canada about extremism in mosques and schools in Canada.

It was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Banna, who stated that “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Samer Majzoub from Quebec has initiated an official Government of Canada petition to the House of Commons. The sponsor of the petition is Liberal Member of Parliament Frank Baylis. The petition calls upon the government to condemn all forms of Islamophobia.

Samer Majzoub self identifies as being part of multiple Islamist (extremist) organization in Quebec, including the (in)famous Al-Rawdaw Mosque[1] and the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). MAC itself states that they follow the teachings of Hassan Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood. ­­ If there was any doubt, a senior member of MAC, Dr. El-Tantawi Attia, made it clear when he stated: “Here we follow the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Muslim Brotherhood is listed as a terrorist group in many countries in the Middle East, while a recent UK government report states that the Muslim Brotherhood

“have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. Both as an ideology and as a network it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism.”

The Muslim Association of Canada itself has been identified in Canadian Senate testimony as being a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

Accusations of racism and “Islamophobia” are the sword and shield of extremist Islam in the West. It makes excellent use of the concept of perpetual victimhood. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The term “Islamophobia” was popularized by the mullahs in Iran after the 1979 Revolution. Women who would not willingly wear the veil were attacked by the government and accused of being “Islamophobic” for not submitting to the will of the (male) mullahs. Richard Stone was one of the authors of a letter to The Guardian in 1994 that used the term; he was also on the Runnymede Trust, which put the term into broad circulation in 1996. Trevor Phillips, of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), who commissioned the Runmymede Report, has now admitted, in a damning new report on integration, segregation, and how the followers of Islam are creating “nations within nations” in the West, that he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration.

It is not unusual for a Liberal Member of Parliament to support efforts by extremists. Canada’s Parliamentary Secretary for Global Affairs (Junior Foreign Minister) is an open supporter of Islamic sharia law. Several other Liberal Party members have close links to extremism as well. Additionally, in 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau chose not to observe any official 9/11 memorial ceremony to honour the Canadians who died that day. However, the very next day, he attended the Ottawa Main Mosque, which has multiple links to extremism. This despite recent stories in Canada about extremism in mosques and schools in Canada.

1998In 2016 Prime Minister Trudeau chose not to observe any official 9/11 memorial ceremony to honour the Canadians who died that day. However, the very next day, he attended the Ottawa Main Mosque which has multiple links to extremism. (Image source: Rebel.media screenshot)

Canada’s Minister of Democratic Reform, Maryam Monsef, is another Liberal Party member creating waves around her place of birth and Islamist belief system. She campaigned on a narrative of how she, as an Afghan refugee, could do great things in Canada — until it became clear she was born in Iran. She was reported to have tried to return to Afghanistan to take a job there in 2014, but now it seems she spent the time in Iran instead. More notably, she claims to find sharia law “fascinating.”

It was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Banna, who stated that “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The discourse of “Islamophobia,” and this petition, are nothing more than a continuation of the efforts of Islamist to silence their critics as they advance their own political agenda.

[1] The mosque is also a part of the Muslim Association of Canada. Among many other problems, the mosque held a lecture in which the very concept of martial rape was mocked.

Categories: Canada, Canadian politics, Islamists in Canada, Muslim Brotherhood
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No Canada

June 12, 2016

No Canada, PJ Media, David Solway, June 11, 2016

(Europe? Obama’s America? Leading or following into the abyss? –DM)

burning_toronto_canada_police_car_banner_6-6-16-1.sized-770x415xcToronto police car torched during the G20 protest on June 26, 2010. Photo by arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com.

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber  may have been tactless when he spoke of the “stupidity of the American voter,” but I suspect he might have trotted out the same insult had he surveyed the West in general or the Canadian electoral scene in particular. After all, Canada, a comparatively peaceable country that regards itself as an “honest broker” in international affairs and a beacon of cultural—and multicultural—enlightenment, is fundamentally no different from other Western countries marching down the Hayek Highway. I have written before of the collective foolishness of a presumably educated nation installing a majority Liberal government to manage its affairs despite the readily available evidence of the social and economic malaise that left/liberal politics have inflicted on Western democracies. A cursory reconnaissance of the U.S., the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries and others should have sounded a clear warning to Canadians, or at any rate to anyone still capable of cerebral functioning.

But no. We fell for the media hatefest against the Conservative party and its leader Stephen Harper, while subscribing to our own version of “hope and change” as represented by the jejune and deceptive Justin Trudeau and his troupe of trendy mediocrities strutting on the national stage. How could we have travelled this route? As David Mamet points out in The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, we “reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this ‘Change,’ by referring to ‘Hope’.” Unfortunately, hope is not a policy or a platform, and it is certainly not an expression of a practicable future. It should come as no surprise, then, that electoral promises have been duly and rapidly broken in favor of vanity projects and that a host of destructive policies have been legislated, or are about to be legislated. To take a number of examples:

  • By introducing Bill C-14, the Liberals have reified their advocacy for physician-assisted dying, depriving doctors and health professionals of moral choice on the issue. Claiming a “deep respect” for Parliament, they have nevertheless imposed substantial limits on debating time.
  • Trudeau is eager to engineer a change to our “first past the post” electoral system, replacing it with one of a wide variety of possible reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation and online voting. The proposed reforms, based on vote transferability and leftist coalitions, would both introduce an element of needless complexity into the electoral process and, in Canada’s multiparty system, which leans collectively to the left, virtually ensure a permanent Liberal majority. A transformation this vast should require a national referendum, but Trudeau’s minister of Democratic Institutions—a label straight out of Orwell—cites a Twitter hashtag #electoralreform as sufficient reason to sidestep a plebiscite. The 30-year-old, out-of-her-depth, Afghan-born, newly created Minister Maryam Monsef is hostile to referenda because they supposedly exclude the “marginalized.” As National Postcolumnist Rex Murphy comments, “Evidently, women, people of color, the disabled—build your own list—are allergic to voting in a referendum.” But she is merely doing the bidding of her leader, who intends to strike a committee, in which Canada’s one conservative party will be outnumbered 9 to 3 by left-oriented parties, to determine the best way to implement what is nothing less than a political coup. The Liberals have recently shown signs of relenting on the referendum issue, but the situation reveals their arrogant disregard of the people they presumably answer to.
  • The Liberals deny that they inherited a balanced budget from the previous Conservative government and have now projected a $30 billion debt, sure to increase in the future, that will serve not only as a fiscal drain on the present but as an economic drogue on generations to come.
  • Trudeau eliminated selective income splitting for families, a measure ostensibly intended to deprivilege the “wealthy” and thus burnish the party’s popular image, but obviously designed to work against the traditional family structure by making it more costly to sustain the stay-at-home wife/mother arrangement. Cost, however, is not a personal consideration for Trudeau, as it happens, heir to a multi-million dollar trust fund. The nannies looking after his children will soak the Canadian taxpayer $100,000 per annum. Indeed, when he visited Washington to confer with Obama, he was accompanied by a 44-member entourage consisting of celebrities, fundraisers, in-laws and, of course, the nannies, at taxpayers’ expense.
  • Trudeau has enthusiastically endorsed the feminist agenda and established a gender-balanced cabinet, irrespective of merit or competence. The embarrassing spectacle that Chrystia Freeland, minister of International Trade, made of herself o Bill Maher’s show is no accident. We can expect more of such sophomoric ineptitude in the years ahead. A government that eschews proven or demonstrable talent in favor of gender parity, much like our current universities, and hires or appoints on the basis of sex is monstrously irresponsible.
  • To strengthen their “social justice” credentials as the party for the times, the Liberals, who long ago jumped on the same-sex marriage bandwagon, have, additionally, projected Bill C-16 providing for an up to two-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of fomenting “hate propaganda” against transgenders. The word “hate” clearly furnishes enormous latitude for interpretation and renders critical discourse problematic and even dangerous, now that the Criminal Code is about to be amended. It seems that freedom of expression contracts with every new piece of social legislation, by no means astonishing in a country whose left/liberal Supreme Court has already pronounced that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given to marginalized groups or individuals.
  • No less damaging, Trudeau’s well-documented sympathy for Islam has resulted in the importation of many thousands of so-called “Syrian” refugees, all improperly vetted, who will swell the welfare rolls, glut an already grossly dysfunctional single-payer medical network, further disrupt a progressively concessionary educational system, and create more social havoc in the form of Sharia ghettoes and eruptions of Muslim-inspired violence. Bet on it. As Muslim reformer Tarek Fatah reports in the Toronto Sun, Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell accused him of lying and of Islamophobia (!) when Fatah testified to the Senate about Canadian mosques that feature seditious preaching against secular democracy, about Israel as “useless garbage,” and about the necessity of spilling blood. “While this was unfolding,” he continues, the Trudeau government “had authorized a $200,000 grant to a southern Ontario mosque with links to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In moving decisively to the left and bringing in programs that will inevitably fray the economic fabric of the country while diluting its traditional substance, Trudeau boasts that “Canada is back”—a slogan, Murphy writes, “that’s saccharine and weirdly jingoistic at the same time,” as if his election were “a victory, not for [the] party—which it was—but for the country itself.” Such hubris is both typical and unforgivable.

Perhaps what is no less troubling is that the cultural sycophancy practiced by the Liberals has now infected the Conservative party, which, despite its objection to Liberal spending and dubious policy initiatives, has, under interim leader Rona Ambrose, slotted the same-sex marriage plank into its party platform. “I think our party got a little more Canadian today,’ Calgary MP Michelle Rempel said after the convention vote. Indeed it did, and that’s a real shame. The Conservatives didn’t stop there. Ambrose has suddenly discovered that she too is a fan of legislation to prohibit criticism of transgenderism; “who you love, how you identify,” she pontificates, “should never be cause for fear or anxiety.” Interestingly, when the Daily Caller asked if she would then support or approve of pedophilia, no reply was forthcoming. By striving to emulate the Liberals as a matter of crass and misguided expedience—as if the Liberal base comprising the general run of leftists, Muslims, aboriginals, journalists, talking heads, environmentalists and global warmists, colonies of indoctrinated students and the entitlement crowd will gratefully change their voting habits—the Conservative party has betrayed its principles and its core constituency.

The real problem, however, is not the political party or the leader in question, but the intellectual laxity of the electorate. Canadians, who have always preened themselves on their moral and intellectual superiority to Americans, in reality merely ape the customs and usages of their neighbors to the south, generally a decade or so later. Mutatis mutandis, we would have flocked to the polling stations to vote for an Obama, a Hillary or a Bernie. The Donald would have been anathema.

Admittedly, there is a rather more modest Trump-like figure on the conservative scene who seems interested in running for the leadership of the party with a view to the 2019 federal election, namely, successful businessman and TV personality Kevin O’Leary. (See CBC’s Dragons’ Den and ABC’s Shark Tank.) Responding to questions about a potential leadership bid, O’Leary said he was not prepared to sit in perpetual Opposition, preferring to wait until he sees whether the party is willing to jettison the political hacks who led it to defeat. “I’m proud of the country,” he continued, but “I’m depressed that it’s not competitive and I see so much incompetence, mediocrity and stupidity when it comes to managing it and I’m just tired of it.” Like Trump, O’Leary is nothing if not confident. “One way or another,” he says, “I’m going to figure out how to fix it.” But in the present narcoleptic milieu his prospects are probably slight.

Ten years hence the country may wake up, as innumerable U.S. citizens appear to be doing today. This is assuming we still have a country that is anything like the country we used to have. Given an oppressive direct and indirect tax structure, the proliferation of “hate speech” laws, the discursive ravages of political correctness, the faux “social justice” agenda, the malignant influence of feminism on business, government, the courts and the academy, the ongoing inroads of Islam into the body politic and the culture at large, the faddish convictions of the intellectual and artistic communities swimming with the brackish tides, and the flaccid surrender of the public to these toxic developments—including the reluctance to seek out and process reliable information, as Mamet intimated—the issue is alarmingly moot.

To arrive at reasonably dependable insights for one’s political thinking, one needs to distrust any single media outlet and take the time to review multiple sources in order to factor out feasible assumptions in making political choices. It takes work, civic dedication and the willingness to pay attention. Laziness is not an option. A rudimentary knowledge of history is also essential. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a January 6, 1816 letter to Colonel Charles Yancey: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.” This is true not only of the American republic but of any democratic nation, and Canada is no exception. Lacking a vigilant and enlightened citizenry, there can only be worse to come.

Decree by government decree, the ship of state is listing ever further portside, abetted by the shifting weight to the left of a lumpen public. This is how a once-proud nation must eventually founder. Captivated by a liberal/socialist media consortium and unwilling to do our homework, we have become increasingly sanctimonious and uninformed, denizens of Gruberland. Even hockey may not save us.

Categories: Canada, Canadian politics, Clash of civilizations, Cultural correctness, Democracy, Fantasy, Islamic immigration, Leftists, Socialism
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Vote the Platform, Not the Man(ner)

April 13, 2016

Vote the Platform, Not the Man(ner), PJ Media, David Solway, April 12, 2016

trump_reading_dora_manners_book_article_banner_4-8-16-1.sized-770x415xc

Recently, I’ve been corresponding with a friend on the ever-contentious subject of Donald Trump, a man whom my interlocutor finds objectionable on both political and personal grounds. Political positions can be discussed and debated even if they do not produce agreement or compromise, but a personal animadversion cannot be met with argument. My correspondent considers Trump an unreconstructed vulgarian, loud, ill-mannered and abrasive, all of which apparently render him unfit for office. He simply cannot vote for a man he dislikes.

Personal liking is one of the least reliable criteria for voting. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency is surely proof positive that affection for a political figure—the love affair with Obama was a national phenomenon—can result in unmitigated disaster. The same is true of personal dislike, which may often lead to the rejection of the best, or least worst, candidates for political office.

In Canada’s recent federal election, former PM Stephen Harper was vilified in the press and held in contempt by the majority of the electorate as a dangerous and unsavory character. He was rumoured to harbor a “secret agenda,” though nobody could say what it was. He was denounced as a brooding egotist and a control freak. He was viewed as unsympathetic to the marginalized and disadvantaged, stingy with entitlements, unimpressed by the claims of the arts community for ever greater government largesse, and generally hostile to Canada’s growing and increasingly clamorous Islamic community.

The fact that he steered the country safely through the market crash of 2008, signed lucrative international trade deals, kept taxes down, reduced the GST (Goods and Services Tax) and provided the country with a balanced budget plainly counted for nothing. His emendation of citizenship protocols in an effort to check the spread of culturally barbaric practices, chiefly associated with Islam, counted against him. At the end of the day, he was simply unlikeable, he was “Harperman,” and he had to go.

Instead, Canadians fell in love with Justin Trudeau, easily the most unqualified prime ministerial candidate since Confederation (there have been many duds, eccentrics and charlatans, but Trudeau is in a category of his own). He was young, personable, wavy-haired, utterly innocuous and adroit at spouting platitudes. Women found him attractive, millennials recognized one of their own, and he embraced all the feel-good big-spending fads and sophistries of welfare socialism. In short, people found him immensely likeable, the polar opposite of the straitlaced, parsimonious Harper.

The consequences were not long in coming. Trudeau has been in office for half a year, more than enough time to engineer the rapid deterioration of a once-prosperous and relatively secure nation. He has brought in 25,000 “Syrians” and is aiming for many thousands more, all living off the public dole and no doubted salted with aspiring jihadists. He intends to build mosques (which he calls “religious centers”) on military bases and is re-accrediting Muslim terror-affiliated organizations that Harper defunded. He inherited Harper’s balanced budget and in just a few short months was busy at work racking up a $29.4 billion deficit. Not to worry, since Trudeau is on record saying that budgets balance themselves. Magic is afoot. All one need do is continue believing in the Ministry of Silly Walks and the nation will stride ever forward.

(Here’s the silly walks video. I was unable to restrain myself. — DM)

According to a March 18, 2016 Ipsos poll, 66 per cent of Canadians approve of his performance. A boilerplate article by Jake Horowitz for Policy.Mic represents the general attitude of appreciation. In his meeting with Barack Obama, Horowitz writes, “it was Trudeau’s tone of optimism, and his embrace of a style of politics marked by positivity, inclusion and equality, that truly shined [sic] through. Practically everything about his values comes in stark contrast to what we’ve heard from Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has dominated the 2016 election cycle with divisiveness, anger and fear-mongering.”

Often commentators will seek to buttress their personal liking or disliking on the basis of presumed intellectual substance. Despite his success in business, his knowledge of practical economics and international finance, and his instinctive recognition of what is needed in a country beset by astronomical deficits, trade imbalances and catastrophic immigration problems, Trump is frequently dismissed as an ignoramus. “Trump doesn’t read,” says David Goldman. “He brags about his own ignorance. Journalist Michael d’Antonio interviewed Trump at his New York home and told a German newspaper: ‘What I noticed immediately in my first visit was that there were no books… huge palace and not a single book.’”

On the other hand, we are told that Justin Trudeau reads. According to Jonathan Kay, formerly letters editor at The National Post and currently editor of The Walrus, who assisted Trudeau in writing the Canadian Prime Minister’s memoir Common Ground, “I can report that Trudeau is very much an un-boob. Several of our interviews took place in his home study, which is lined with thousands of books…We spoke at length about the Greek classics his father had foisted upon him as a child…and the policy-oriented fare he now reads as part of his life in politics…Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know.”

Kay never mentions that this intellectual giant failed to complete the two university degrees for which he had enrolled, earned his chops as a substitute instructor at the high school level, and inherited a formidable financial estate from his famous father, former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. He has done nothing with his life except preen and posture for the public—a “shiny pony,” as journalist Ezra Levant has dubbed him. Trump on the other hand received an inheritance and turned it into one of the world’s major fortunes. As New English Review editor Rebecca Bynum points out, “the businessman from Queens understands the American working people better than the Harvard man from Texas or the mailman’s son from Ohio. He speaks in plain English to describe the incompetence, and yes, the stupidity of those currently in power, who could not have harmed our country any more if they had had outright malicious intent.”

The Harper case was anomalous. He was an evidently accomplished man, trained in economics (unlike Trudeau, he completed his university program), a stalwart Canadian who wrote a book on our national sport, A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs & the Rise of Professional Hockey, (unlike Trudeau’s memoir, there was no Kay-like ectoplasm to assist in its composition) and was deeply interested in the Franklin Expedition and the lore of the Canadian North. And he was a reader. Nevertheless, Canadian novelist Yann Martel mocked Harper in a series of letters collected into a book, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, condescendingly lecturing Harper on what he should read, with the implication (sometimes explicit) that Harper saw nothing but the financial bottom line and was a man without imagination, heart or a vision for the country larger than trade deals and tax policy. (Martel is evidently a prehensile reader, having discovered an obscure novella by the Argentine writer Moacyr Scliar, Max and the Cats, which arguably formed the plagiarized occasion for his own Life of Pi. Not the man to instruct the PM.) In any event, under a relentless media barrage the public came to see Harper as a rigid martinet. In the 2015 election, he never had a chance.

Harper was regarded by the press and a plurality of Canadians pretty much as Trump is currently viewed by establishment Republicans, sanctimonious conservatives and a partisan media, for whom The Donald has become politically non grata, a “reptile” in Andrew Klavan’s distemperate rhetoric. Trump’s dilemma is that he has refused to be housebroken. He is certainly a flawed human being, but I have never known one who wasn’t.

So let us now compare. Trump has pledged to set the U.S. on a sound economic footing, prevent the flow of illegal migrants across the southwestern border, limit Islamic immigration into the country, and restore America’s diminished prestige and might on the international stage. But he is, we are told, a boor, a plebeian, a crass opportunist, a know-nothing who doesn’t read. “Donald Trump may not be perfect,”  Bynum agrees, “but at least he will clean house.” All the more reason, it appears, for the virulence and disparagement with which he has been met. The bien pensants dislike him with a vehemence that does them little honor.

On the other hand, Trudeau, as we’ve seen, has plunged his country into deficit, has imported thousands of Muslims who will swell the welfare rolls and generate social unrest, as is inevitable wherever Muslims begin to multiply, withdrawn Canadian forces from the campaign against ISIS, and filled his cabinet with highly questionable personnel—women simply because they are women, such as the lamentably dense Chrystia Freeland, Minister of International Trade (who disgraced herself on the Bill Maher show), and doddering retreads like Immigration Minister John McCallum. But Trudeau is suave, telegenic, blandly inoffensive—and he reads. People like him with a passion that also does them little honor.

Would any sane person choose a Trudeau-type figure over a Harper or a Trump to lead their country into a problematic future? The larger issue is whether any reasonable person should predicate his voting preference on personal liking or disliking. Trudeau is intellectually vapid, has the wrong instincts, and is unlearnable. But he is liked. As for Trump, I am not suggesting that he would be a better choice than Cruz may be or Rubio may have been, though I suspect he might. He still has much to learn about the intricacies and priorities of governing and about looking “presidential.” What matters is that a candidate for political office is smart, has the right instincts, and is willing to learn. I believe Trump qualifies in these respects. Disliking him is beside the point.

Writing for The Federalist, Timm Amundson acknowledges that Trump can be rude, arrogant and reckless, and asks: “How can a principled, pragmatic, deliberate conservative be drawn to such a candidate?” And answers: “It is because I believe conservatism doesn’t stand a chance in this country without first delivering a very heavy dose of populism,” that is, “a platform built largely on the principle of economic nationalism…focus[ing] on three primary policy areas: trade, defense, and immigration.” This is Trump’s bailiwick.

To approve or disapprove of a candidate on the basis of his or her social and economic platform is wholly legitimate, is at least theoretically open to debate and constitutes a sensible basis for choice. If you believe, as Amundson does, that the core populist platform is the surest way “for America to begin rebuilding her neglected middle class and restoring her sovereignty,” then cast your ballot appropriately. The Overton Window is closing fast.

Categories: Canadian politics, Donald Trump, Republicans, Vulgarians
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