Category: Columns

First published at SteynOnline on July 30, 2020.

“Don’t look at me – I’m just the prime minister.”

That about sums up Justin Trudeau’s defense in a Canadian scandal starring grifters, shell corporations, virtue signallers and a federal ethics probe.

The WE-Scam, as it’s come to be known in Canadian circles, is, on its surface, a simple one.

Trudeau’s government created a $912 million government program to pay students to volunteer – formerly known as “working” if memory serves – and outsourced the administration of it to WE Charity, one of those purported international development charities more known for holding glitzy, celebrity-filled parties than digging any wells in Africa.

All style and no substance made it the perfect match for Trudeau.

WE would have netted about $44 million from the program had the government not pulled the plug amid the backlash. The charity would also have had a budget to pay teachers up to $12,000 each to funnel their students into the paid volunteer channels.

The program itself was a boondoggle, but bad policy became a scandal because Trudeau and virtually everyone in his immediate family have personal and financial connections to WE, as do at least two of his cabinet ministers, not to mention his chief of staff – all of whom say their relationships had nothing to do with WE getting the sole-sourced contract.

After weeks of ducking scrutiny from his political opponents, Trudeau made a rare appearance before the parliamentary finance committee Thursday, though his testimony was heavy on the sanctimony and light on the details.

Trudeau didn’t answer the most basic of questions, like how much money his family members have taken from WE. The sums we know from media reports are not insignificant.

Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, and brother, Alexandre, were paid over $300,000 to speak at a variety of WE events. For some reason this lucrative hustle only started after Trudeau became Canada’s prime minister. Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, hosts a WE podcast about “well-being” and serves as an ambassador for the organization, even bringing back a bout of coronavirus from a WE event in London earlier this year.

I would suggest the federal ethics investigator could save the time on the investigation and reach a finding based on the details in that paragraph alone, though Trudeau should be commended for how brazenly he denies there could be a conflict of interest.

“My mother… is proud that she doesn’t have to rely on a husband or a son to support her because she does her own work,” he said. “And I’m proud of the work that she does, but I do not feel that it is my responsibility to peer into the work my mother is doing.”

(Joe Biden could probably tweak that for the next time he has to answer for Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.)

I must admit Trudeau pivoting to feminism to defend against an ethics probe is rich considering his last ethics probe came about when he fired his female attorney general for refusing his overtures to halt the prosecution of a Liberal-connected engineering firm.

Trudeau admitted he probably should have recused himself from the discussions but even then tried to suggest he had very little to do with how his government chose to hand out a billion dollars.

He said the decision was made by bureaucrats and only shared with him on his way into a cabinet meeting at which the plan was supposed to be approved.

“(The public service) said that if we wanted this program to happen, it could only be with WE Charity. The choice was not between providers, it was between going ahead with WE Charity to deliver the program, or not going ahead with the program at all.”

I wish the latter option had been entertained, as there’s something particularly insidious about bureaucracy continuing to grow only to outsource massive programs to murky non-governmental organizations. That this process supposedly happened without anyone elected weighing in, as Trudeau and company contend, adds a layer of incompetence to the corruption.

In many respects this isn’t new. There have been as many federal ethics probes of Trudeau as there have been snapshots of him hanging around in blackface, which is to say three. He was found guilty of the first two, and looks to be on track for the hat trick, to use a term I’m told has something to do with hockey.

Donald Trump couldn’t eat a bowl of borscht without being accused of Russian collusion though Trudeau can bat his eyelashes and implore us to think of the children when he’s busted pushing money to an organization tied to much of his inner circle.

Or organizations, rather.

One of the more confusing aspects of the scandal has been the shell game of figuring out which organization did what. The charity said it never paid any Trudeaus to speak, before it was revealed this was but a technicality as the group’s for-profit wing actually cut the cheques (except for a few that were accidentally paid by the charity and then reimbursed. Are you keeping up?)

There are at least eight separate WE entities that have arisen in these discussions so far, though former WE Charity board chair Michelle Douglas wasn’t confident enough to say how many organizations there are for sure, which always bodes well for transparency.

Speaking of transparency, it’s worth noting that a Toronto Sun reporter caught a snapshot of a guy carrying some bankers’ boxes of documents out of WE’s Toronto headquarters Thursday. One of them was labeled “partnerships,” which is the term used by WE to describe its relationship with the federal government. Nothing to see here, I’m sure.

Other groups under the WE umbrella have been accused of simply being real estate holding entities with millions of dollars in downtown Toronto property and not an African schoolhouse in sight.

Trudeau’s platitudes have gotten him through much of his premiership, but he’s on dangerous terrain now.

It’s no wee problem, but certainly is a WE one.

First published at SteynOnline on July 16, 2020.

For a few moments last night, Twitter was, blissfully, free from the musings of the blue check brigade.

If you don’t know what this club is you’re rather fortunate as the blue check brigade is the gaggle of people you’re to believe are more important than you, as evidenced by the small blue checkmarks that appear beside their Twitter handles.

A confession: I am a member of the club insofar as I have a checkmark, as does my gracious host Mark Steyn. Though philosophically I’m relieved to be on the outside of this in-crowd.

Blue-checked accounts were locked down by Twitter Wednesday night after a mass Twitter hack saw numerous high-profile accounts, including those of presidential candidate Kanye West, former president Barack Obama, and man-who-may-or-may-not-know-he’s-running-for-president Joe Biden, tweet out a bitcoin scam.

Twitter froze these accounts before any more fell victim to the hack, but it wasn’t long after that the antsy Twitteratti started posting from exile on non-checked backup accounts, seemingly unable to go even a couple of hours without the world knowing their thoughts.

In their absence the normally insufferable Twitter was a more authentic place as regular folks, for once, got to set the narrative.

The blue-checkers’ greatest fear was realized – that the world kept spinning in their absence.

While the checkmark may seem – and ultimately is – laughably insignificant, it’s the symptom of a bigger problem and the cause of another.

Twitter’s stated purpose for blue checkmarks is to demonstrate an “account of public interest is authentic.” Those in the media (who comprise the bulk of blue-check holders) tend to view a checkmark not as a symbol of authenticity but rather of ascension to some higher moral or intellectual stratum.

Perhaps the great Blue Check Lockdown of 2020 was a cosmic penance for the collective self-righteousness of the group – we may never know.

Coming in the middle of this year’s unending mass cancelation, it was, I’d say, a welcome episode to see the elites who find perspectives other than their own repugnant forced to sit on their hands, even if only for a short time.

The great irony of Twitter’s response was that in seeking to protect the integrity of high-profile accounts by locking them down, it amplified the voices of people with large audiences that Twitter has, for petty partisan reasons, denied its coveted “verified” status to.

“Be gone blue checks. Your validation is nothing more than an email address from a fake news institution,” one such unverified tweeter, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, wrote. “We are the media now.”

Short-lived as the celebration was, it was nice to break through the echo chamber.

When I first got my blue checkmark I learned of an unadvertised feature on Twitter allowing me to filter my feed to read only tweets from other people with checkmarks. With the click of a button, I could wipe out any conversations emanating from the regular old plebs who are the Twitter version of flyover country.

In doing this, I can concoct and curate a reality in which I only engage with people like me because those are the only people I see.

This feature on one of the world’s largest social media platforms is designed to make ordinary people invisible to those sitting in their virtual ivory towers, perhaps singing that old tune from Camelot.

I know what my people are thinking tonight
As home through the shadows they wander
Everyone smiling in secret delight
They stare at the castle and ponder
Whenever the wind blows this way
You can almost hear everyone say
I wonder what the king is doing tonight?

If you can concoct a reality for yourself wherein ordinary people don’t cross your radar, what incentive is there for you to entertain them, let alone understand them.

And while there are those who deliberately wall off the world around them, there are others unaware there even is a world – or worldview, rather – outside their own.

Columnist Salena Zito tried to break through this by taking her Harvard students on a road trip to a town that while only an hour and a half away was, culturally, on another planet.

After spending time with the police chief, the mayor, small business owners and other townsfolk the students were forced to reckon with the fact that they had just broken bread with – gasp – Trump voters. Most of them had never seen one up close, and certainly hadn’t recognized them as anything other than a caricature.

It’s why the graduates who populate most newsrooms are so woefully unequipped to write about national trends when a majority are from liberal, coastal states and have never seen a farm, fired a gun or stepped foot on a factory floor.

The state broadcaster in my very own deranged dominion of Canada was busted (by me) a few weeks back for broadcasting a children’s “news” segment calling J.K. Rowling “transphobic” for daring to suggest only women are capable of menstruation.

The network later said the segment didn’t meet its journalistic standards (that CBC has standards is, in and of itself, newsworthy.) I don’t doubt that there were producers and writers from downtown Toronto who were genuinely shocked that anyone could possibly believe what Rowling did.

The answer to the divide is dialogue and debate. The answer is to engage with the culture rather than run away from it. The answer is to keep fighting. But in spite of that, I won’t deny that it was nice, for a couple of hours this week, to see the silencers silenced.

First published at True North on July 15, 2020.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper will be speaking at a large conference pushing for regime change in Iran, True North has learned.

Harper will join former Canadian foreign minister John Baird, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former United States senator and vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman among the numerous speakers at this weekend’s Free Iran Global Summit, according to a source connected with the event.

Harper’s participation has not been publicly announced and a request for comment to his spokesperson was not returned.

The Free Iran conference is hosted by the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its activist wing, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

With delegates from 30,000 locations across 102 countries, the NCRI is trumpeting this year’s conference as the “largest virtual gathering,” having been forced online with public health challenges and travel restrictions caused by the novel coronavirus.

Ironically, Iran has been one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic. While official figures show just over 13,000 deaths in Iran, NCRI estimates the real figure exceeds 70,000 according to a report published Monday. The conference will feature a special tribute to Iran’s coronavirus victims.

Harper, who now serves as chairman of the International Democratic Union, spoke at the Free Iran conference at MEK’s headquarters near Tirana, Albania last year.

“There are few causes in this world today more important at this moment than what you are pursuing – the right of the people of Iran to change their government and their right to do it through freedom and the power of the ballot box,” Harper said then. “The need for change in Iran is greater than ever before and the need for the work of this organization on behalf of the Iranian people is greater than ever before.”

Harper has never shied away from tackling the Iran problem. His government – with Baird as foreign affairs minister – severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2012, citing the Iranian regime’s continued expansion of its nuclear program and ongoing threats to Israel, among other factors.

In January, Harper said at a conference in India, after the Iranian government admitted to shooting down a Ukraine International Airlines flight with 57 Canadians aboard, that there needs to be “change in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East.”

NCRI and MEK seek to deliver that change, though the organizations are not without controversy.

The MEK was classified as a terrorist organization in Canada and the United States until 2012, when it was delisted by both countries, then led by Harper and President Barack Obama, respectively.

Several experts say it was lobbying from the Iranian regime itself that put MEK on several terror lists in the first place. The European Union removed MEK from its list of terrorist organizations after a European Court ruling, raising the ire of Iran’s foreign ministry – a component of the regime MEK seeks to upend.

Since then, both MEK and NCRI have worked to establish themselves as voices for a secular and democratic Iran, earning support on both sides of the political aisle in the United States and Canada. Liberal MP Judy Sgro and Conservative MP Candice Bergen both attended last year’s conference, as did Baird.

An open letter signed by over 30 American dignitaries, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz calls the NCRI a “beacon of hope” and the “one organization that has done more than any other entity, including governments, to free Iranian citizens from tyranny and the world from fundamentalist-inspired terrorism.”

This year’s event comes on the heels of a United States House of Representatives resolution – backed by prominent Democrats and Republicans – “condemning Iranian state-sponsored terrorism and expressing support for the Iranian people’s desire for a democratic, secular and non-nuclear republic of Iran.”

The event has historically antagonized the Iranian regime. The 2018 Free Iran conference in Paris was the target of a bomb plot linked by French officials to Iran’s ministry of intelligence, with a senior Iranian diplomat among six people charged.

True North will be covering the conference.

First published at True North on July 8, 2020.

A segment on a CBC children’s news show calling J.K. Rowling “transphobic” didn’t meet the state broadcaster’s journalistic standards, CBC admits.

In response to a complaint to CBC’s ombudsman filed by Toronto lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz, a producer acknowledged the episode’s shortcomings.

“In the end, this segment did not achieve the balance we intended, and did not live up to the standards to which we as a public broadcaster hold ourselves,” says an email from CBC Kids senior producer Lisa Fender.

A CBC spokesperson confirmed to True North the original segment “did not achieve the balance of perspectives we aspire to.”

The segment was from a June 12 episode of the CBC Kids News show Recap, in which the young co-hosts take aim at Rowling over a tweet indicating only women are capable of menstruation. In the segment, the hosts tell Rowling to “read the room” and say she’s been “accused of transphobic stuff in the past,” referring to Rowling’s support of a woman fired for believing people cannot change their biological sex. 

While the tweet triggered a firestorm of both backlash and support for Rowling, who later expanded on her views in a lengthy essay about womanhood, the CBC segment itself was one-sided.

In his complaint, Shahrooz was clear to neither defend nor attack Rowling’s views.

“My sole concern is with the lack of balance in this coverage of this issue on a program aimed at children, a segment of the population most likely to take the pronouncements heard on television at face value,” he wrote, noting debate around gender identity is a “live issue with two sides.”

Fender says CBC Kids News decided to cover the controversy “when we heard that it was a topic that kids were hearing about from their peers, through social media and in the news,” adding CBC Kids News aims to “provide a trusted service” for coverage of issues that kids are hearing about.

“While popularized through social media, we knew that this was a complex and layered debate that presented many nuances, some which might be too complex for us to fully tackle in one story,” Fender writes. “We knew that we wanted to lay out how kids felt about what they were hearing and decided that we could…give the show’s kid commentators an opportunity to present the debate in a balanced, yet digestible way.”

Recognizing the segment did not do that, Fender says the network has “taken steps to correct this,” including a follow-up episode “which provides perspectives missing in the June 12th segment.”

In the follow-up episode, Recap host Myah Elliott acknowledges “conversations about gender can be confusing and layered” and quotes Rowling’s own words as well as a tweet from a Rowling defender. Elliott also shares that “there are a lot of people that stand with J.K. Rowling and her views on being female.”

Shahrooz, a self-described CBC supporter, says he was “satisfied with (CBC’s) response.”

First published at True North on June 24, 2020.

Canada’s state broadcaster has announced a number of steps to deal with what it says is “systemic racism” within its ranks.

CBC said in a statement Tuesday it would be working to “accelerate progress” on its Diversity and Inclusion Plan, citing “troubling” stories from employees who have reported being affected by racism both personally and professionally while working at CBC.

The directive sets out a hiring quota for senior positions as well as a target to retain and promote more minorities and people with disabilities.

According to CBC’s statement, by 2021-2022:

• Half of all new hires for executive and senior management positions will be Indigenous people, visible minorities, or people with disabilities; and
• Retention and promotion rates for people from these three groups will be doubled.

The policy also makes unconscious bias training mandatory for people in senior management and leadership rules, and available upon request to any employee in the organization.

CBC says these changes have come about through the broadcaster’s Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, a task force established in December with a mandate to “accelerate change in the areas of representation and workplace culture.”

CBC staff members have been breaking rank with the broadcaster in recent weeks to criticize the workplace racial environment. A Canadaland podcast reported employees have spoken of being referred to as “tokens” or feeling “invisible” at CBC.

Long-time CBC personality Wendy Mesley was suspended from hosting duties for using a “word that should never be used” in a staff meeting while quoting a potential panelist for a story on the Black Lives Matter protests and racial inequality.

CBC’s president and CEO Catherine Tait said unequivocally Tuesday that systemic racism exists is widespread across Canada, and CBC is no exception.

“We recognize that systemic racism exists in Canada and within many of its institutions, including its national public broadcaster,” Tait said. “We are committed to combating racism in all its forms, to removing structural barriers and practices that result in discrimination at CBC/Radio-Canada, and to improving our workplace culture in tangible, concrete ways.”

Tait said CBC will “intensify the transformation of our organization” in light of recent events.

The crown corporation will utilize a diversity and inclusion fund to provide internship and development opportunities to “employment equity-seeking groups.”

The plan will not just influence hiring and promotions, but also content, the broadcaster said. This will be achieved in part by a commitment to ensure a “person from a diverse background” is in a decision-making creative role on every scripted and factual program, even those commissioned from other production companies, within the next five years.

Training in unconscious, or implicit, bias has been widely panned – even by proponents of workplace diversity – as ineffective.

A 2009 review of nearly 1,000 prejudice reduction studies found no evidence that unconscious bias training has any effect at mitigating racism. In fact, several studies have shown that it can have a negative effect.

“Instructions to suppress negative stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with,” wrote University College London and Columbia University professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in Bloomberg.