May 6, 2021 - Loonie Politics

OTTAWA — The top aide to imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny told Canadian MPs on Thursday that the best way to help Navalny is to put sanctions on oligarchs who are allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Leonid Volkov, speaking by video from Lithuania, began by telling the House of Commons foreign affairs committee about the suffering Navalny has gone through, including being poisoned and imprisoned due to his anti-Kremlin stance. (The Russian government denies involvement with the poisoning.)

Navalny’s allies are under constant threat of prosecution by Russian authorities, Volkov said, and his opposition movement is expected to soon be declared illegal by a Russian court.

When asked by Conservative MP Kerry Diotte what Canada can do to help Navalny, Volkov advised focusing on the almighty ruble.

“Putin really cares very much about money,” Volkov said, citing a recent investigation by his team into Putin’s luxury palace on the Black Sea. “So our short answer is to sanction his close friends, his oligarchs, the holders of his assets.”

In March, Canada joined the United States and the European Union in sanctioning nine senior Russian officials over Nalvany’s treatment, including Russia’s top prosecutor, the head of Russia’s prison system, and the head of the FSB, Russia’s main security agency.

But the sanctions did not target businessmen allied with Putin, and Volkov said going after such oligarchs would be the best way to exert pressure. However, he also acknowledged that it would be impossible to cut off Putin’s source of funds.

“The idea is to build leverage against Putin and his friends, because every time Europe or U.S. tries to build bridges, to compromise, to build a dialogue, unfortunately Putin, in his psychology considers it to be just a sign of weakness,” Volkov said.

“(Sanctions) would allow veteran leaders to talk to Putin from a much stronger position than they talk now, because money really matters a lot for him. That’s our idea. Appeasement politics, unfortunately, has failed.”

Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, sympathized with Volkov but also defended Canada’s approach to sanctions so far. Oliphant said Canada has to follow its own laws and work with allies such as the U.S. and U.K. when deciding who to sanction.

“I understand how complicated these processes are, how many legal complications,” Volkov said in response. But he said that when it comes to international partners, Canada should focus on getting the U.K. on board with more sanctions.

“Let me suggest that the key part of the story is the U.K. here,” Volkov said. “If you can kind of push and influence the U.K. informally, it’s the most essential because 80 per cent of those assets in question are being stashed in London.”

“I will just mention that the government is aware of that, and there are conversations,” Oliphant responded.

Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong listed off other names of Russian officials alleged to be complicit in poisoning or imprisoning other dissidents, and asked whether Volkov wants to see Canada impose sanctions on them as well.

Volkov agreed with Chong’s suggestions, but said such sanctions would be largely symbolic. He repeated that the best strategy would be to go after oligarch assets.

This was the foreign affairs committee’s second attempt to speak to Volkov, after a first attempt on April 22 was

foiled by Russian pranksters

who’ve pulled a similar stunt on politicians from other Western democracies.

Volkov told the committee that Navalny has now been imprisoned for 108 days and is currently recovering from a hunger strike.

“The requirement of his hunger strike was to get doctors of his choosing, trusted doctors, to mind him,” Volkov said. He said a compromise was eventually reached and Navalny has been getting better medical treatment now.

“He’s recovering from the hunger strike, but it takes time,” Volkov said. “The hunger strike lasted for 24 days, you need pretty much the same time for a safe recovery.”

The short term outlook for Navalny’s opposition movement looks rough, with

a Moscow court expected to declare the movement illegal later this month

and ban its followers from running in elections.

But Volkov said he still believes the longer term outlook is hopeful.

“There is a generational change,” he said. “In the federal level polls, Putin is still doing very good. But in polling for voters under 30, Navalny is doing better than Putin, even despite all the force of the propaganda machine … So the clock is ticking in our favour. It’s a slow, historical process, but it’s inevitable.”

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

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With an election in the air, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is doubling down on how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s six-year-old government has done next to nothing to combat runaway housing prices.

The

MP for Burnaby South

would follow the B.C. NDP and bring in a national 15-per cent foreign-buyers tax on housing, a Canada-wide tax on underused dwellings and a crackdown on international money laundering.

“There are things putting pressure on housing that need to be stopped,” Singh said in a wide-ranging interview from his apartment in Ottawa. They include the way Canada is used internationally and domestically as “a safe place to drop your money into the housing market, to treat it like a commodity or a stock.”

Money laundering, Singh added, is “directly contributing to the rising cost of housing.” But the Liberals, he said, have failed to properly staff the department that is supposed to crack down on the movement of dirty money. The NDP leader wants Ottawa to subsidize more housing construction. And he’s not opposed to rent controls.

With Singh highly popular among Canadians under age 34, the ones most concerned about housing affordability, he expressed concern that “young people are faced with the reality that they are the first generation in recent memory to have it worse than the previous generation.”

Singh, 42, was loquacious and cheerful as he took on a string of tricky issues that impact B.C., Canada and the interconnected planet, which is struggling with a pandemic and what the NDP leader considers the often dubious impact of globalization.

With Angus Reid polling showing the NDP drawing the approval of 19 per cent of voters, with the Liberals at 35 per cent and Conservatives at 31 per cent, here are more things Singh had to say about some of the difficult issues of our era:

B.C.'s three contentious megaprojects

Singh is onside with B.C. Premier John Horgan in opposing the way Trudeau has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into the 1,150-kilometre Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion from Alberta to Burnaby. And, realizing that former B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark deliberately propelled construction of the Site C hydroelectric dam “to the point of no return” he understands why Horgan “is doing the best he can” by completing the $16-billion project.

As a champion of renewable energy, however, Singh showed no enthusiasm for Coastal’s 670-kilometre LNG pipeline to Kitimat, which the B.C. NDP is pressing on with despite blockades by the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en. Singh placed himself on the sidelines of the LNG dispute, saying he’s talked directly with both the Wet’suwet’en’s hereditary and elected chiefs. Even while they angrily disagree with each other, he said the Wet’suwet’en themselves have to resolve the “complicated” conflict.

Ottawa's lack of a "made-in-Canada" vaccine policy

Recognizing the pandemic remains an overriding concern among Canadians, Singh often brought the conversation back to it — including his annoyance at the Liberals slow vaccine rollout.

Unlike Britain, which he said was no further ahead on creating a vaccine than Canada when the pandemic began, Singh suggested the Liberals are so enamoured with globalization that they failed to put effort into developing a “made-in-Canada” vaccine — or anything else.

Along with patting his own party on the back for pressing for increased social-service benefits and paid sick days for people waylaid by COVID-19, Singh is disturbed Ottawa lacks a policy on developing homegrown industry. He was stunned to learn Canada Post doesn’t even manufacture its own community mailboxes in this country:

It farms out their production to Denmark

Canadians who back India's protesting farmers

Singh is a staunch supporter of the

ongoing mass protests

by farmers in India against agricultural reforms attempted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

An orthodox Sikh whose parents immigrated to Ontario from the Punjab, Singh is in the unusual situation of being barred from India because of earlier complaints he made about the government’s treatment of Sikhs. While he ranked Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s emphasis on China’s rising authoritarianism as a “fringe issue,” he was not afraid to ramp up his criticism of India’s leaders.

This spring

Indian newspapers targeted one of Singh's campaign advisers

, Vancouver advertising specialist Mo Dhaliwal, who created Singh’s “love and courage” slogan. The Indian media accused Dhaliwal and other outside agitators of fanning anti-government rage by creating a “tool-kit” that helped farmers further their protests.

Singh, however, said the “tool-kit” is nothing more than an “innocuous” document that helped protesters ask pointed questions. He charged that Modi’s “heavy-handed” and “oppressive” response led to the arrest and torture of journalists and young activists.

How racism in Canada compares

Last year Singh was removed from the House of Commons for refusing to apologize for calling a Bloc MP a “racist,” after the opposing politician declined to support an investigation of “systemic racism” in the RCMP.

A longtime anti-racism activist who emphasizes group identity, Singh was asked whether he defined racism according to the Oxford Dictionary — as “discrimination directed against someone of a different race based on the

belief that one's own race is superior

.”

Singh instead emphasized the concept of “systemic racism,” in which he said a person’s “intention doesn’t matter.” What matters, Singh said, is when “outcomes” for people of colour are “disproportional.” He cited higher arrest rates for Indigenous people and Blacks and the fact some First Nations reserves don’t have safe drinking water.

Canadians are generally polite, Singh said, which he suggested helps explain why the Gallup polling company has found

Canadians are the "most accepting"

in the world toward migrants. Despite such a positive national ranking, Singh said, “visceral” anti-Asian racism is increasing in this country.

Nonetheless, Singh celebrated Statistics Canada data that shows the

children of Chinese and South immigrants have better outcomes

than people of all other ethnicities in regard to obtaining university degrees and high-skilled jobs.

“I would say it’s an example of how immigration is good for Canada,” Singh said. “People from all different countries who come to Canada really want to make the best lives for themselves and their family. They want to contribute. They’re really happy and proud to be Canadian.”

Dtodd@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/@douglastodd

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OTTAWA — A Parliamentary committee on Thursday launched an investigation into how Canada can better defend against offshore tax evasion, with some MPs pressing for details around a high-profile financial fraud in the mid-2000s that robbed many Canadians of their life savings.

Canada has for years struggled to rein in offshore tax avoidance by corporations and wealthy individuals, a shortcoming that has sapped government revenues and damaged its reputation among allies. A 2019 report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the Canadian government is missing out on as much as $25 billion a year in revenues due to an inability to crack down on overseas tax havens.

Members of Parliament on the House of Commons finance committee began studying the broad topic of tax evasion on Thursday, including a specific focus on four offshore tax havens established in the early 2000s that are allegedly tied to one of the biggest financial frauds in Canadian history.

The four tax shelters were based in the Isle of Man, a small tax haven in the middle of the Irish Sea. Each were named after ancient swords, and became known as the “sword companies” in connection with their alleged involvement in several financial frauds, including the CINAR fraud of the mid-2000s, which cost a number of Canadian investors an estimated $120 million.

Canadian accounting giant KPMG has become ensnared in the issue, after CBC reports claimed the company might have been involved in setting the structural templates for the Isle of Man sword companies.

KPMG admits that it set up a tax protection scheme for wealthy Canadian clients in the Isle of Man beginning in the late 1990s, according to reports by the CBC. However it has repeatedly denied any involvement with the four specific shell companies, called Sceax, Shashqua, Spatha, and Katar.

A Parliamentary investigation into CINAR and KPMG was suspended in 2016, after the accounting firm claimed that it would interfere with ongoing court cases related to the scandal. The committee study on Thursday effectively marked a relaunch of that investigation.

Lucia Iacovelli, managing partner at KPMG, appeared before the committee on Thursday, and dismissed what she called “irresponsible and misleading” reporting by the CBC, and sought to distance the company from the establishment of the Isle of Man shell companies.

“Any implication that KPMG had anything to do with the CINAR fraud is false,” Iacovelli said. “Any implication that KPMG was in any way involved with the sword companies is also false.”

Several MPs on Thursday called on KPMG to provide the names of the wealthy individuals behind the tax havens allegedly tied to CINAR and other financial frauds, to which the company did not commit to provide the information.

Questions levelled at KMPG came as many witnesses and members of Parliament said the issue pointed to a deeper struggle in Canada in suppressing offshore tax avoidance.

Senator Percy Downe, who appeared as a witness before the committee, criticized what he called a “two-tiered justice system for tax evasion” in Canada, in which poorer households are hounded by the Canada Revenue Agency while wealthy individuals shelter vast sums of cash and assets overseas.

“Try to cheat on your domestic taxes, and the CRA will likely find you charge you convict you enforce your repayment,” he said. “Hide your money overseas, and you’ll likely never be charged or convicted.”

Worsening matters, Downe said, the federal government still has only a limited grasp of just how much tax evasion is occurring under its watch, as little data exists on the issue.

“The Canadian government doesn’t even know the size of the overseas tax evasion problem,” he said.

Janet Watson, a victim of the Mount Real scheme, another financial crime allegedly tied to the sword companies, appeared before the committee on Thursday to explain the deep wounds left by the fraud.

“Believe me, it is not a victimless crime,” she said, while offering examples of people she had met in the aftermath of the crime that had lost their life savings.

James Cohen, executive director at Transparency International Canada, said the issue of tax evasion is not just a problem involving lost government revenues, but also damages Canada’s international reputation. Those concerns are particularly acute in the context of humanitarian aid provided by Canada to other countries, at the same time that foreign actors funnel money into Canadian-owned assets.

“This all has an impact, and it all should matter to everyday Canadians,” Cohen said.

In June 2016, three former CINAR executives, Ronald Weinberg, Lino Matteo, and John Xanthoudakis, were sentenced to prison in connection with the scandal. Canadian authorities have said they will not be able to trace or reclaim the money lost by investors in the fraud.

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The report of Ontario’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission goes on for more than 300 pages, but it would have been improved immeasurably by the addition of just four more words. The report, released on Friday, should have begun “In a perfect world…,” because that’s the context of its analysis.

The three commissioners acknowledge that the staff shortages, old buildings, overcrowding and lack of training that plague Ontario long-term care were the result of neglect by successive governments over many years. Nevertheless, they are disappointed that the current PC government was unable to fix all those problems immediately during a pandemic.

Having been asked to investigate the tragic situation of mass COVID outbreaks and deaths at Ontario care homes last year, which are popularly attributed to massive incompetence by Premier Doug Ford’s government, the commissioners clearly felt obliged to deliver a report the media could call “scathing.” A report that could be summarized as “they couldn’t have done much better under the circumstances” would have redirected the anger of the government’s many critics at the commission itself.

The commissioners are on familiar ground when they describe all that was wrong with long-term care (LTC) in Ontario when the pandemic hit. No one disputes that the system was a mess and had been for years. The pertinent questions are: what could the Ontario government have done in March 2020, and what is it doing now?

The commissioners say the province “failed to protect its most vulnerable residents during the second wave,” which began in autumn 2020. Then they say “It is clear that problems such as insufficient staff, lack of training and aging home infrastructure were too deeply ingrained to overcome in the period between the first and second waves.” That’s true, and it is even more obvious that Ontario couldn’t have fixed those problems during the first wave.

The commission says Ontario should have had a strong pandemic plan in place. No one would argue with that, but not even the federal government had a good plan. That doesn’t justify Ontario’s lack of preparedness, but it puts it in context.

Ontario LTC homes suffered from longstanding weaknesses, none of which could be quickly fixed, no matter how soon the government reacted. One was the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), especially masks. By 2017, most of Ontario’s PPE stockpile, amassed after the SARS outbreak in 2002–03, had passed its expiration date and was scrapped. Governments spent three years pondering procurement plans for replacements, but didn’t do anything. The commission says masks should have been made mandatory in long-term care sooner, but there were no masks, a point the commission does concede.

The federal government was in the same boat. Its own PPE stockpiles were low and it couldn’t help. The problem was made worse by Ottawa’s decision to donate 16 tons of PPE to China at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020.

Ontario’s LTC homes had been short staffed for years, and in some homes staffing collapsed when the COVID-19 pandemic started because workers were either sick or too scared to come in. The commission says the province should have had “a surge” of workers ready to replace them. Where would those extra workers have come from? The entire health sector is short of workers.

Ontario LTC homes were particularly vulnerable to infection because many of them are older facilities and have a lot of three- and four-person rooms, with shared bathrooms. It’s no mystery why so many Ontario LTC homes are outdated and supply is so inadequate. As the commission notes, from 2011 to 2018 the population of people older than 75 in Ontario increased by 20 per cent, but there was only a 0.8 per cent increase in the supply of long-term care beds over the same period.

Despite acknowledging that the fundamental problems that led to LTC residents’ deaths couldn’t be overcome in the short term, the commissioners still say things would have gone better if Ontario had acted swiftly — before the federal government or most other jurisdictions in the world.

On March 7, 2020, Canada’s first long-term home outbreak was reported in B.C. The World Health Organization declared a worldwide pandemic March 11, 2020. Five days later, on March 16, Ontario limited access to LTC homes to essential visitors and the provincial government imposed a state of emergency the following day.

The commission recommends a major rebuild and expansion of the LTC sector, more staff and better training. In fact, the provincial government has a $9.6-billion program to build and renovate homes, improve training, increase hours of care and provide more staff. The commission acknowledges all of this, but says it should happen faster.

In effect, the LTC commission argues that if everything had gone perfectly for the last 15 years, Ontario’s long-term care residents would have been better off. No doubt. But in the real world of March 2020, the pandemic-driven collapse of long-term care was inevitable. The government should have responded to the small percentage of homes in great distress more quickly, but that was an opportunity for triage, not prevention.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

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I found this old photograph of the five of us buried in a drawer.

Your dark brown hair is styled in its usual pixie cut, though your curls refused to be tamed. You're the only person I know who has worn their hair the same way for more than 40 years. Other than your unruly strands, you're barely recognizable. You were a different person back then; one who wore bracelets and shorts and wasn't embarrassed by your legs covered in scars.

Squinting at the hazy picture, I can see it now: the sadness you always wore.

Your life has been shaped by tragedy, raised by a strict, ornery father and a mother with undiagnosed mental health issues. Later you would learn she had bipolar disorder; "manic depression" they called it back then. She abandoned you long before she physically left you to run the householdâ€”to cook and clean and do the laundry and look after your siblings when you were still a child yourself.

When you met Dad at a church dance he was a welcome distraction from your unhappy home life, until, at just 17, you became pregnant and ended up trapped again. Four children in 10 years tethered you to him and despite his philandering ways, you stayed.

Though money was tight, you made sure we didn't go without. The smell of rising bread still reminds me of time spent at your elbow watching you knead bread. Eventually you would give me a turn. Watching my little hands struggle with that big mound of dough, you would laugh and tussle my hair. Though you never said it, somehow, I always knew you loved me.

But one cold December day, when I was not quite 10, everything changed.

You didn't stand a chance against the car that lost control on the ice that fateful morning. You were standing on the corner waiting for your drive as it came barreling down the hill; hurling you in the air before crashing into the gas pump behind you.

You turned 38 the next day connected to machines. Weeks after the accident, you left the hospital, but the battered and broken woman who came home was never the same.

"Don't expect too much," the doctors cautioned, "She's suffered a lot of damage to her brain."

You showed them. With relentless hours of physio and rehab, you learned how to walk and talk again, though some words still elude you. I watched you piece yourself back together, yet I never understood just how hard you fought to liveâ€”not because you loved your life, but because you loved us.

I was that teenager; the one with the snarky attitude and exaggerated eye rolls. When you tried to give me advice, I shook my head thinking: How could you know what it was like to be me? You'd barely even been to high school and things were different back then.

"I am nothing like you," I said to myself. I was determined to make something of my life. I would never drop out of school to have kids. I refused to be trapped, bitter and angry, in a loveless marriage in this same small town.

I graduated at the top of my high school class. In university I excelled, though my honours psychology degree did little to help me untangle the twisted knots of our family's history. Three months after graduation, I married for love; a dashing young army officer who promised to show me the world. I moved away and I didn't look back.

Years passed. I had children of my own, a boy and two girls. I took them to the park for picnics, read them nightly bedtime stories before tucking them in and told them I loved them every day.

"I am nothing like you," I thought to myself.

The world I carefully constructed fell apart on a sunny day in May. My husband was crushed underneath an armoured vehicle during Exercise Maple Resolve in Wainwright, Alta. Dan had been my world for 25 years; now he was everywhere and nowhere. I functioned on autopilot for weeks, not knowing how I could possibly live without him. But I knew I didn't have a choice. My children needed me. So, I picked myself up and painstakingly rebuilt my life.

"I don't know where you get the strength," so many people remark.

But I do. Everything I know about courage, strength and resiliency, I learned from you.

For so long, I resented the mother you became, never seeing that perhaps you were the mother I needed you to be.

I am who you could have been, if only you'd had a mother who refused to give up, even when every fibre of her being wanted to run away. A mother who gave up all of her own hopes and dreams to ensure you could always follow yours. I am who I am because you were that mother to me.

The post Dear Mom, ‘I am nothing like you,’ I once thought to myself appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Maybe you know someone recently fired for his political views. Perhaps he was foolish enough to state out loud his opposition to COVID lockdowns, belief in two sexes, or admiration for Donald Trump. Should companies be prohibited from discriminating on the grounds of political belief? In principle, the answer should be No. In the woke cancel culture that has gripped North America, the answer is clearly Yes.

Ask anyone and she will tell you confidently that discrimination is wrong. Yet people discriminate all the time. They choose to be friends with some people and not with others. They treat their spouses differently than other men and women. Employers hire better qualified candidates over those less qualified. To discriminate means to tell apart and treat differently. Statutes prohibit discrimination only on specified grounds in certain circumstances. You can invite only Irish friends to your dinner party, but you cannot advertise for a male associate. You can hire only beautiful people to work in your restaurant, but you cannot refuse to perform surgery on Catholics. You can insist that customers cover their feet, but you cannot insist that they show their faces. Anti-discrimination laws are selective and incoherent.

The proposition that discrimination is wrong originates in the excellent idea that the law should not be arbitrary. The same rules should apply to everyone without distinctions that are irrelevant to the purpose of the rule. A law that incarcerates murderers discriminates between murderers and law-abiding citizens, but it is not arbitrary. It penalizes people for actions, not immutable characteristics. All murderers should be subject to the same penalties whether they are white or black, male or female, rich or poor, gay or straight.

The law should not be arbitrary, but people should be able to be. If you are a female aesthetician, may you not refuse to wax male genitalia? Indeed, is there any reason â€” wrong sex, wrong colour, too old, too young, too hairy, too fat, too skinny, smells funny, looks creepy â€” an aesthetician should not be allowed to refuse a customer? If aestheticians can discriminate, then surely hair stylists can too. If hair stylists can, then so can doctors, bakers, and real estate agents.

Human rights laws say otherwise. Their purpose is to outlaw personal preferences. Operate a bakery and consider gay marriage to be sacrilegious? Too bad, says the law, you must bake the wedding cake. Human rights originally protected citizens from state power by prohibiting arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture, but now compel private businesses and persons to embrace causes and identities of the left. The baker must serve the transgender woman because his private shop is a quasi-public space, but he can ban the guy in the MAGA hat and Twitter can censor right-wing speech because, after all, private businesses are private.

No government of any political stripe has the courage to repeal human rights codes. The only way to even approach political neutrality is to have them protect political beliefs. Big business, financial institutions, universities, big tech, mainstream media, and our political class have become woke. For believing and saying the wrong things, people are being cancelled left and right â€” but mostly right.

Last year, when Former Opposition leader Stockwell Day said that Canada was not a systemically racist country, he was forced to leave two corporate boards and his commentator role on CBC television. When Jonathan Bradley, a student and part-time reporter with The Eyeopener, a newspaper at Ryerson University, wrote on social media about his Catholic beliefs on sexuality, the paper's editor fired him for creating an unsafe space.

When Burlington bakers Kelly Childs and Erinn Weatherbie posted black squares and quoted Martin Luther King Jr on Instagram last June to support "Blackout Tuesday", a social media mob descended to accuse them of "performance allyship" and prejudice against black people. Penguin Random House terminated their contract for their second cookbook.

It is impossible to know how often people are fired, disciplined, rejected, had contracts cancelled, not been hired, been turned down for promotion, or otherwise been punished for failing to sing from the woke songbook, but as Steven Pinker observed last year, "the sheer number of cancellations (though not small) misses the point: it's the regime of intimidation that silences many more and warps our knowledge."

Many jurisdictions already include some protection for political belief in their legislation, but it tends to be narrow and weak. For instance, New York protects employees' political activities, like belonging to the wrong political party or campaigning on behalf of the wrong candidate; in British Columbia, "political belief" is protected but interpreted narrowly; Connecticut protects employee speech from reprisal but only if the value of the speech outweighs the impact on the employer's business; and Ontario lists "creed" as a protected ground but that term has been interpreted to mean religious, not political, conviction. This patchwork does not robustly protect employees, job applicants, customers, contractors, and users of social media from discrimination for wrongthink.

Are human rights meant to protect just immutable characteristics like race and sex, rather than beliefs? The answer is no. If a man says he is a woman, that belief is protected. If a woman worships a Lutheran god, that belief is protected. But if I believe in liberty and free markets, that belief should not be protected? I can no more make myself believe in socialism than I can change the colour of my skin.

If modern human rights restrict freedom, then surely adding the ground of political belief would make things worse. Employers would be even more limited in their ability to hire and fire whom they wish. Hordes of job applicants and employees could conceivably claim that they were rejected or fired for their political leanings. Human rights regimes could become so unwieldy that they collapse under their own weight â€” which would be a good thing. In the meantime, the additional burdens would fall disproportionately upon major employers, universities, institutions, and especially governments, who are enthusiastically undertaking the agenda of the woke.

The conservative right instinctively seeks to preserve what exists. It has yet to learn the lesson that the left has applied for decades: institutions that stand in the way of your goals should be disrupted and made anew. Progressive ideology is embedded in modern human rights legislation, and the right's reluctance to intervene protects a hostile status quo.

If you believe in free markets, individual liberties, free speech, property rights, and limited government, and you have doubts that political beliefs should be protected from discrimination, take a good look at the legal landscape in your country. You are losing. If modern human rights regimes cannot be abolished, then they should be extended. It is time for rules that run in both directions.

Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen's University. This essay is based upon remarks for a debate held at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference on April 10, 2019.

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The ongoing dispute between a Mi’kmaq community and non-Indigenous lobster fishers in Nova Scotia seems like a throwback to a darker and more racist time. After all it has been 20 years since the Supreme Court decided in favour of the Mi’kmaq, granting them the right to carry on an out-of-season fishery. This decision was based on Section 35 of Canada’s 1982 constitution, which enshrined “existing Aboriginal and treaty rights.”

We were supposed to have come a long way since that time. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission broke new ground and offered a road map to change which many organizations have been insisting must be followed; the federal government apologized (and offered compensation) for the horrendous treatment towards Indigenous peoples at residential schools; and Justin Trudeau got elected promising a nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous peoples and a radically more sympathetic approach.

So it might seem like this fishery dispute is a throwback — a sign of how far we still have to go in order to truly end racism towards Indigenous peoples and protect their rights in Canada.

But unfortunately this dispute isn’t a throwback; it’s probably a look-ahead. As we move into the 21st century and as, hopefully, the glaring social inequalities faced by many Indigenous communities are addressed, disputes like this are likely to grow more common.

This is because the Canadian approach to equality and Indigenous rights — an approach that is baked into our difficult-to-change Constitution and which has been taken up with gusto by the Supreme Court — is based on two opposing views of rights.

The most commonly understood idea of rights in the Charter enshrines equal treatment. The Charter has been used to fight against discrimination in everything from same-sex rights to equal pay for women. These equality provisions are about “catching up,” or at least ensuring that no one, for any particular part of their identity — their race, gender or sexuality — will be treated in an inferior way. A good deal of the sympathy for Indigenous peoples in Canada today rests squarely on this notion of fairness and equality. It feeds a general public anger that many First Nations reserves don’t have access to clean drinking water or the idea that missing and murdered Indigenous women would be treated worse simply for being Indigenous. Such unequal treatment is an affront to basic equality principles enshrined in the Charter and held dear by most Canadians. So long as Indigenous peoples continue to suffer unequal treatment, public sympathy for their rights is likely to be very high, and rightly so.

But the Charter also enshrines in Canadian politics another idea of rights — collective rights — and these are the ones at stake in Nova Scotia. This isn’t a question of equal treatment or eliminating discrimination; quite the opposite. Rather it has to do with allowing differences based on historic treaties — in this case, the right to carry on a fishery at a time when other Canadians cannot do so. This right is very much guaranteed in our Constitution. But it also sometimes (as in this case) directly conflicts with the other main idea of rights in our Constitution — the commitment to equality.

A good deal of the sympathy amongst non-Indigenous Canadians for Aboriginal rights stems from the first kind of rights — the idea of “catching up” or ending inequality. It stems from a much-justified sense of past and sometimes ongoing mistreatment that needs to end.

The trick is, though, that even if (or hopefully when) this legacy of inequality ends, the kind of dispute that we see in Nova Scotia will still be there. The idea of having special treaties and rights that exist in perpetuity, separating one group of Canadians from another, is intrinsic to this idea of collective rights.

A number of commentators are describing the actions of the non-Indigenous fishers as racist. And it might be that there are individual racists among them. Yet there is a much more logical claim to see the situation in reverse — that the Mi’kmaq fishery is based on special rights that come because of what community you are born into. Indigenous rights activists insist that these special treaty rights aren’t race-based. They are instead about national and collective survival. Yet on the ground this must seem like a matter of semantics. The anger at the Mi’kmaq fishery stems from the way it so blatantly contradicts the core idea of equality enshrined in the Charter — the notion of equal treatment.

It’s true that the Constitution and the courts are likely on the Mi’kmaq side in upholding their treaty rights. And it might be that future Canadians will understand the desire of Indigenous peoples to “earn a moderate livelihood” — as the Supreme Court ruling put it in this case — even if this means having the right to catch lobster at more times during the year than their non-Indigenous neighbours.

But when you have two groups living side by side, neither of whom could be called “privileged,” simply trying to make a living, and one of those groups has special rights by virtue of their birth, it’s entirely possible, indeed likely, that conflict will erupt.

Christopher Dummitt is a professor of Canadian history at Trent University.

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In this episode of “Basement Tapes,” the National Post’s Matt Gurney discusses the latest controversy over advice given by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization on vaccine shopping.

Watch the full episode below and subscribe to the Post's YouTube channel here.

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It's one thing when a political opponent calls the provincial premier a coward. It's a whole different thing when that premier receives a death threat.

Politics in Alberta is descending into a chaos of recriminations, pleas, overheated rhetoric and fear mongering over the government's handling of Covid. The question now is whether Premier Jason Kenney can get a grip on the body politic and throttle it into obeying his latest rules to stop the pandemic.

After months of pussy-footing around his "lives and livelihoods" campaign to find a middle ground between public health and the economy, Kenney has switched gears and changed his mantra to "stop the spike".

But it may be too late to get Albertans on the path to saving their own healthcare system. And it appears to be too late to salvage Kenney's popularity. Fringe elements, including the idiot with a social media account who threatened both Kenney and his mother, will continue to rally, protest and parade around maskless no matter the latest restrictions.

As of this week, school's out til after Victoria Day. Restaurant patios are closed; recreation halted; outdoor gatherings of more than five people banned.

A cafe in the tiny town of Mirror notorious for flouting Covid regulations was shut down Wednesday morning.

The new public health orders and tougher enforcement are aimed at halting the ever escalating Covid case numbers as the province blasts to the top infection rate in Canada and the U.S.

The last straw may have been the No Lockdowns rodeo near Red Deer last weekend. It shook the premier enough for him to call out the Covid deniers. He's now using phrases like "tinfoil hat" people and conspiracy theorists.

At a Wednesday press conference he, for once, did not mention the federal government as the ultimate culprit in the province's woes.

During a Facebook livestream on Tuesday the premier said he had two messages after imposing the latest restrictions saying: "You will be executed for your crimes against humanity" and "We know where your mother lives."

While the doctors and members of the general public who have been calling for more restrictions are grudgingly praising the lockdown, they are still grumbling about the lack of consistency the premier and his caucus displayed over the last 14 months.

Last week Kenney suspended the legislature sitting saying it was too dangerous for MLAs to gather in Edmonton. At that point elementary schools were still in session, prompting teachers to call out the premier for a double standard in terms of who in the province is most at risk from Covid.

NDP Leader Rachel Notley accused Kenney of cowardice for refusing to face the music in the legislature over Covid numbers topping 2,000 new cases per day.

Some pundits are speculating that the real reason to suspend the sitting is to prevent a split in the UCP caucus from erupting under the eye of the legislature press gallery.

More than a dozen UCP backbenchers have been on record decrying Covid restrictions. The ringleader, Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes, has been particularly vocal. His Twitter and Facebook feed has been eerily silent for the last two days.

Most of the caucus malcontents are from rural areas. Several rural regions have been exempted from the toughest provisions of the Covid crackdown, supposedly because they have lower spread rates than neighbouring towns.

Ironically the only bright spot on the horizon for Kenney comes from the federal government. A step up in vaccine supply allowed the premier to announce the opening of vaccination appointments to every Albertan over 12 years of age.

The premier has at last delivered simple and strongly worded directions on how to defeat the spread of Covid. Whether Albertans, worn down and confused by months of his vacillation will be willing to follow the rules remains in question.

Photo Credit: CTV News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Mike Moffatt is an assistant professor at the Ivey Business School at Western University and senior director at the Smart Prosperity Institute. John McNally is a senior clean growth researcher at Smart Prosperity.

Canada's level of climate ambition targeted this decade keeps climbing ever upwards. We went from having no clear plan to reach a 30 per cent emissions reduction target to now having a 40-45 per cent emissions reduction targetâ€”and a plan to reach almost all of it in less than two years. This is great for Canada. Targets and policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions fight climate change and create jobs in communities across the country.

In fact, our aspirations are so great that we have a new problem. This level of climate action is going to create too many jobs. Two big bottlenecks stand in the way of Canada's climate ambition: a shortage of skilled labour and a shortage of housing. If we do not immediately address these, we will fail to hit our environmental targets and miss an opportunity for sustained economic growth.

Creating too many jobs is a problem because Canada does not currently have the available workforce to build these projects where they will occur. Even if it could get those workers, house prices are so high in those communities that it is unclear where they would be able to afford to live. If Canada wants to grow the economy, it needs to make sure it has the labour force and housing supply it will need to meet its climate targets.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but the idea that ambitious climate action creates jobs is pretty straightforward. Every zero-emissions technology we will adopt has to be designed, and then each part built, assembled, installed and maintained. That process creates jobs in manufacturing, construction, logistics and resource production, as well as other industries. Many of these jobs can be created directly in Canada, and some will need to be based in Canada, since we cannot import a building retrofit. But whether Canada can take full advantage of the growth opportunities offered by this level of climate action depends on a few factors.

The bulk of Canadian manufacturing takes place along the Highway 401-Autoroute 20 corridor that stretches from Windsor to Quebec City, and this is unlikely to change. Companies need to be in a place where they have access to key suppliers, access to labour, and the necessary infrastructure to get their products to key global markets like the northeastern U.S. However, this corridor is currently experiencing skyrocketing real-estate prices, which will limit the growth prospects of manufacturers in the region.

READ MORE: Canada’s cleantech innovators keep heading south. Let’s reverse the trend.

Let's use an example to show why: Say an electric vehicle assembly plant in Oakville wants to supply more made-in-Canada EVs to the Canadian market to help meet climate targets. The company knows that in order to meet new demand, it will need to double its production capacity or it risks losing market share to competitors. The company begins to look at expansion, and immediately asks a question: Does this community have a specialized workforce big enough for us to double production capacity without facing labour shortages? Electric car manufacturing requires a specialized skill set, and the company needs to know those workersâ€”or believe they will be there once production comes onlineâ€”for companies to feel comfortable investing in new production capacity. Given the chronic skills gap, and a 2020 Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters survey highlighting eight of 10 manufacturers were already facing immediate labour shortages, this problem looks like it’ll only worsen as Canada tries to capture some of the jobs decarbonization will bring.

Firms can, and will, poach these workers from other manufacturers, raising wages in the process (which is a good thing). However, the sector will need an increased pool of labour to grow as a whole. Attracting a substantial number of workers from other parts of Canada feels an unlikely solution here, or at least not a cost-effective one. Companies will ask themselves, "How much would we have to pay to get workers here?"

A decision to expand production in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area will need to offer compensation levels commensurate with the cost of living in the region. Data from the Canadian Real Estate Association shows that median house prices in the GTHA have increased by 128 per cent in the last ten years. The National Bank of Canada's Affordability Index identifies that an annual household income above $170,000 is now required to afford a representative GTHA home. An EV manufacturer therefore needs to make a decision whether they could offer salaries high enough to attract skilled labour to move from other parts of Canada into the region. If not, it will have greater trouble attracting the skilled workforce it needs.

RELATED: When in doubt, make electric vehicles cheaper for Canadians

This is not an issue isolated to Toronto. Home prices are growing even faster in smaller communities in southern Ontario. In the last five years, the price of a single-family home has more than doubled in almost every manufacturing community in the region. Brantford is up 113 per cent, Tillsonburg 142 per cent, and Woodstock 147 per cent. The hottest housing market in Canada since 2016 hasn't been Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal, but rather London-St. Thomas, which has experienced 149 per cent price growth in just 60 months. How is a manufacturer in London going to convince talent from other parts of Canada to take a job and move to the community? And how will they retain young graduates from Fanshawe College and Western University, rather than watch them take a lower-paid job in a different communityâ€”say, south of the border in Houstonâ€”where real estate prices remain affordable?

If these two issues are not addressed, these jobs might not get created in Canada. Companies will decide they can hire a skilled workforce for cheaper elsewhere. That would be a tragedy, and an ironic one at that: For all of the concerns about how the recent federal budget did not tell a cohesive story about how the country intends to grow its economy, this argument highlights that Canada's economy is about to undergo so much growth that it is literally going to run out of workers and have to start exporting jobs. Even if all the manufacturing jobs go overseas, and all the country has to do is install technologies built elsewhere, the construction industry is still facing national labour shortages in the hundreds of thousands.

These targets pose a real barrier to climate action, since projects only reduce emissions if they are built and used, which requires workers at every stage of the process. Workers also need places to live, potentially making Canada's housing affordability crisis a barrier to both growth and meeting climate targets if it limits our ability to attract and retain the talented workers needed to build, install and maintain needed clean technologies.

Canada's climate targets tell a feel-good story about combating climate change, and an undoubtedly and unbelievably positive story about growth. All signs show this will be more growth than the country can handle. Policymakers need to start taking this problem seriously, or we risk falling off track because we had too much of a good thing.

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