Tag: canada

A judge decides that property owners in Wainfleet, Ont. deserve to be fined MILLIONS for renting their properties!

Government overreach has once again reared its ugly head in the Township of Wainfleet, Ont. (pop. approximately 7,000). And at least one Ontario judge is OK with this.

Here’s the skinny: Wainfleet council has effectively declared war on landowners who make their properties available for short-term rentals. And the township is fining these residents at least $10,000 per owner per dwelling per day!

Translation: as these daily fines mount, few can afford to pay these enormous sums. And that ultimately means “violators” risk having their properties seized by the township.

This seems like banana republic stuff to say the least.

Meanwhile, one dare not say anything negative about this council on social media. That’s because this council is trying to silence citizens via a lawsuit based on… copyright violation? Indeed, the township claims videos online depict the township’s crest and corporate log, emblems that are being used without consent or approval. Seriously.

It would appear that the Township of Wainfleet likes to carry out its shakedowns away from the public eye and will pursue censorship to ensure that goal if need be. All of which has many residents in the township pondering if Wainfleet is situated in the Dominion of Canada – or the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.

Rebel News interviewed Scott Wilson and Laural Duquette more than a year ago. They head up the Wainfleet Association of Responsible Short-Term Rentals (STR).

Wilson says he is facing a total fine threshold that now totals $175 million. As such, his family risks having their property confiscated by the township given that they are unable to pay those fines.

The township’s heavy-handed tactics are beyond the pale. Granted, Canadians do not enjoy private property rights under the constitution. But the questions arise: what is driving this short-term rental vendetta? What is the harm in a homeowner renting out his or her property? Those are key questions – and questions that deserve answers – except that nobody at the township will come on the record to comment.

And another query arises: what indeed is the unspoken strategy behind the short-term rental jihad? Is this all about Wainfleet councilors embracing a NIMBY initiative when it comes to short-term rentals in their township?

Recently, Wilson and his fellow renters had their day in court fighting these massive fines. It did not go well. Justice James Ramsay in the Superior Court of Justice in Welland ruled in favour of the township. Here are some excerpts from his decision:

  • “There is no evidence of bad faith [by the Township of Wainfleet].”
  • “The penalties are coercive, as opposed to punitive. They are not disproportionate.”
  • “The by-law is not discriminatory. Requiring the owner to own the property for two years before applying for a licence promotes stability of ownership and makes absenteeism by landlords less desirable. Operators who live in the community have a stake in the liveability [sic] of the neighbourhood.”

Justice Ramsay dismissed the application and awarded the Township of Wainfleet partial legal costs totaling $5,000. Then again, given that Wilson is already on the hook for $175 million, five grand amounts to chump change…

Check out our most recent interview with Wilson. While he and his fellow renters may be down, they are not out given they are appealing the decision.

That appeal is scheduled for next January. This story is far from over. Stay tuned.

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Canada Was A Liberal Paradise… Until The Liberals Took Over

There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

  • two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
  • five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

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Mysterious pay-for-play antisemitism attacks now targeting Canada. Who benefits?

A wave of strange property attacks targeting Jewish sites in Canada is attributed to apolitical youth paid in crypto. The violence follows the same playbook seen in Australia and the UK. While Iran and Palestine solidarity campaigners are blamed, Israel exploits the tension.

Canada is the latest in a string of nations to attribute a wave of high-profile but mostly low-consequence attacks to a mysterious online “gun-for-hire” plot. If Canada follows the pattern set in Australia, Europe and the UK, the “foreign entity” its government is already blaming for orchestrating the petty violence will be identified as Iran. 

According to the Toronto Star, “Police believe that several young people have been hired to carry out shootings throughout the city and the wider GTA, including the U.S. consulate shooting, shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, as well as shootings targeting the waste management company GFL Environmental.”

But there’s another nation with a history of hiring locals to perpetrate crimes, employing low-level violence to poison third-party bilateral relationships, fanning anti-semitism to justify its own carnage, and using local Jewish populations as pawns. 

It is Israel, which happens to be the only nation to have extracted any political benefit for the growing wave of pay-for-play attacks on Jewish targets in the West.

Canadian police say consulate, synagogue shootings are linked to shooter-for-hire network

Canadian police recently announced that they believe many of the recent attacks on synagogues and other apparently unrelated targets are actually the work of paid criminal elements. 

On June 16, police in Toronto said at least 27 shootings in the Greater Toronto Area appeared to be the work of a gun-for-hire network, in which mostly young men were recruited over encrypted messaging apps like Whatsapp to commit disparate acts of violence for which they’d be paid $1,000 in cryptocurrency. The gunmen film themselves committing the crimes as proof for their paymasters, they say. 

Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw declared, “What we know is that bad actors are using criminal elements in our city to carry out these dangerous incidents” and that “it is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including in the Jewish community.” 

According to Demkiw, the identity of the person or group behind the attack was still a matter under investigation. However, Canadian Secretary of State for Combating Crime Ruby Sahota seems to have narrowed it down somewhat. She said on June 17 that “the shooters were paid and hired by a foreign entity.”

This is not the first time a foreign entity has been accused of orchestrating small scale attacks in a Commonwealth nation.  

Tip from Israel leads Australian authorities to blame Iran for 2024 fire bombings

Last year, Australia came to the conclusion that a foreign entity was behind two fire bombings that occurred in late 2024, one at a kosher restaurant in Sydney and one at Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – one of the few non-Zionist congregations in the country. The attacks generated outrage and were immediately attributed to antisemitism. 

However, Australian authorities soon determined that “overseas actors” were instigating the attacks, and that the perpetrators were not antisemites, but paid dupes.

Two men were arrested last summer in connection with the attacks, and a third on June 19. 

In August 2025, the Australian government declared that Iran had been behind the attacks, with the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization investigation saying a “painstaking investigation” had “uncovered and unpicked the links between the alleged crimes and the commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.”

This was difficult, as ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said Iran had used a “complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in both antisemitic attacks.

Only later did it emerge that Israel had provided a tip that pointed Australian investigators in Tehran’s direction. The Australian intelligence service insists they arrived at their conclusions independently, but have so far been unwilling to present any hard evidence to back that assertion up.

The young men allegedly hired to commit the crime probably won’t be much help with the international side of the investigation, as Australian police say the actual perpetrators of the crime might not be aware of who had ordered it. So far, though the men are being charged by the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team, none have been charged with terrorism. At least one was released on bail, which prosecutors argued against because of what they called an extensive criminal history, including armed robberies and violent assaults.  

A third man was charged with arson on Friday in connection with the synagogue attack. He was already in jail for other offences the police so far won’t comment on. 

If these men are anything like the pair arrested in connection with a caravan packed with explosives and a list of synagogues, they’ll turn out to be criminal ne’er-do-wells with debts and perhaps disabilities, who “wouldn’t have the brains” to plan an attack on their own – hardly a dangerous, organic surge of anti-semitism. 

That hasn’t stopped the Australian government from using the bombings as justification for expelling Iran’s ambassador and declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization, paving the way for the US-Israeli assault on Iran this February 28.

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Inside Ottawa’s mansion spending spree

On Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra sat down with Franco Terrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to dig into what Terrazzano calls the “dumbest piece of prevailing wisdom in Ottawa”: the idea that politicians are too cheap to renovate their own mansions.

According to Terrazzano, the National Capital Commission spent $135 million over 16 years maintaining and renovating official residences, or roughly $8.5 million annually. Despite this, the agency has requested an additional $175 million over 10 years, plus $26 million every year ongoing, to restore all six properties.

Terrazzano pointed to a string of expenditures he described as wasteful, including $8 million for a barn at Rideau Hall, $140,000 spent designing a staircase that was never built, and more than $700,000 renovating a kitchen at Harrington Lake.

The conversation also touched on the ongoing Centre Block renovation on Parliament Hill, which the NCC now estimates will cost between $4.5 billion and $5 billion.

Ezra and Terrazzano discussed how some journalists appear to advocate for lavish spending on behalf of the prime minister, from private jet upgrades to the multi-million dollar renovation of 24 Sussex Drive, while taxpayers are left footing the bill.

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Time To Shed Light on Canadian Military Mission to Congo

Canadian media and politicians have all but ignored Congo’s recent World Court case against Rwanda. It’s unsurprising since Canada has enabled three decades of aggression, including by leading a bizarre, little known, UN mission to the region on behalf of Washington.

On Friday the Democratic Republic of Congo filed a case to the International Court of Justice against Rwanda for repeated invasions and support for armed groups on its territory since 1996. Congolese Justice Minister Guillaume Andali said his country is seeking redress for Rwanda’s breaches of conventions covering genocide prevention, racial discrimination, women’s rights and torture.

In 1996 Rwandan forces marched 1,500 km to topple the regime in Kinshasa and then re-invaded after the Congolese government it installed expelled Rwandan troops. This led to an eight-country war between 1998 and 2003, which left millions dead. Since that time Rwanda and its proxies have repeatedly invaded eastern Congo and continue to occupy the east of the country. Some six million remain displaced.

The Rwanda government in Kigali justified its 1996 intervention into the Congo as an effort to protect the Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsi) living in eastern Congo from the Hutus who fled the country when the RPF took power after the 1994 genocide.

The US military increased its assistance to Rwanda in the months leading up to its fall 1996 invasion of Zaire. In The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006 Filip Reyntjens explains: “The United States was aware of the intentions of Kagame to attack the refugee camps and probably assisted him in doing so. In addition, they deliberately lied about the number and fate of the refugees remaining in Zaire, in order to avoid the deployment of an international humanitarian force, which could have saved tens of thousands of human lives, but which was resented by Kigali and AFDL [a Rwandan backed rebel force led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila].”

In the just released Rwanda’s 30-Year Assault on Congo: The Crimes, the Criminals, and the Cover-Up (Baraka Books) Judi Rever documents Washington’s central role in a war to topple aging kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, who lost his use after the end of the Cold War. According to a review, Rever documents how “the US provided satellite tracking data to locate Hutu refugees in the jungle. It deployed AC-130 gunships, P-3 Orion surveillance planes, and a national intelligence support team drawing on the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. It sent Special Forces from Fort Bragg to train Rwandan troops in counter-insurgency.”

Ottawa played an important, if somewhat bizarre, part in this sordid affair. In late 1996, Canada led a short-lived UN force into eastern Zaire, meant to bring food and protection to Hutu refugees. The official story is that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien organized a humanitarian mission into eastern Zaire after his wife saw images of exiled Rwandan refugees on CNN. In fact, Washington proposed that Ottawa, with many French speakers at its disposal, lead the UN mission. The US didn’t want pro-Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko France to gain control of the UN force.

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UNHINGED VIDEO: Transgender Former Prostitute Running for Mayor in Canada Uses Sock Puppet During Campaign Speech

A transgender biological male former prostitute is running for mayor of Hamilton, Ontario, and if that wasn’t crazy enough, recent campaign footage shows him giving his speeches using a sock puppet with googly eyes.

“Scarlett Gillespie,” who previously went by the name “Jelena Vermilion,” currently serves as the executive director of the Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton and has long advocated for sex workers’ rights, housing issues, and trans-related causes.

Gillespie received the YWCA Hamilton Women of Distinction Award in 2024 for his work.

He announced his candidacy for mayor earlier this year and is registered for the municipal election scheduled for October 26.

Gillespie’s campaign platform focuses on affordable housing, tenant protections, climate justice, greater transparency at City Hall, community-led safety initiatives, and strengthening the local arts sector, according to his website.

The candidate has described himself as a “community organizer” and “activist with lived experience” working directly with “marginalized groups.”

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Minister strips parental access to children’s health records

Newfoundland parents just got the memo: Once your kid turns 12, the government says you’re no longer automatically entitled to know what’s in their medical records.

A June 19 letter from NL Health Services quietly ended automatic parental access to children’s health information. From age 12 to 15, parents now need the child’s permission to see the records. At 16, the teenager takes full control.

Sarah James Furlong, a concerned parent, took to social media in a bid to raise awareness of the apparent government assault on parental rights. Furlong is calling on parents to contact the Minister of Health, Lela Evans, to reverse the decision.

“I respect children’s rights and understand the importance of privacy,” Furlong said in a Facebook post. “However, I believe parents have a fundamental responsibility to protect, support, and advocate for their children—and that responsibility doesn’t end when a child turns 12.”

The move fits a pattern. Newfoundland and Labrador already lets students in Grade 7 and up change their names and pronouns at school without parental consent. Now the same province is extending that logic into medical records.

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Government’s latest attempt to censor online discourse is grave threat to free speech

The government’s latest censorship Bill C-34 is framed as legislation necessary to protect children. However, it incorporates some of the worst elements of Bill C-63 – the government’s previous “Online Harms Act” that failed to pass – and adds new censorship powers.

The bill proposes regulating social media, online services, and AI chatbots through the creation of a Digital Safety Commission. The Commission will have broad discretionary power to force compliance from online services and compel the removal of any harmful or “hateful” material.

Controversially, the bill weakens the legal definition of hatred presently used by the courts, reducing the requirement from both vilification and detestation to only one of either vilification OR detestation. The result will be increased censorship and a substantial chill on controversial speech.

Importantly, existing laws capture almost all of the conduct outlined in the bill. This includes cyberbullying and non-consensual distribution of intimate images, terroristic or violent threats, hate speech under the Criminal Code, counselling self-harm (Criminal Code s.241), and possession and distribution of CSAM material.

The bill requires online service providers to create an age verification system. Though the bill doesn’t specify age verification methods, it will undoubtedly require service providers to collect biometric and/or behavioural information from both adults and children, engaging privacy rights and raising fears of security breaches. The effect will be to create a database of personal identifying information and to destroy online anonymity 

Digital services that fail to comply with directives of the Digital Safety Commission will face substantial fines based on a percentage of global revenue.

“Laws protecting children from online harm and abuse are vital. However, for the most part, they already exist. All digital services like YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok have reporting and takedown policies and mechanisms for illegal or egregiously harmful material. Criminal charges for hateful or threatening posts are already commonplace. Of course, laws should be enacted to address any gaps, but online age verification for children will require age verification for everyone. So while the government frames the bill as a law to protect children, its effect will be to control digital access, comprehensively surveil and punish adults for online dissent. Together with Bill C-22, it establishes an online surveillance architecture that will negatively impact every Canadian’s right to free expression. Parliament should pursue targeted child-protection measures without undermining privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.”

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Liberals’ 10% tariff on canned vegetables will hurt low-income Canadians: Kris Sims

On this week’s episode of The Gunn Show, Kris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation discussed the Liberal government’s recent imposition of a 10% tariff on certain imported canned vegetables.

Sims slammed the move as another tax on food that will hit low-income families the hardest, noting canned vegetables are a pantry staple for many Canadians trying to stretch their budgets, especially as grocery prices continue to climb.

The tariff, announced June 19 and effective immediately, applies to imports from most countries but conveniently exempts the United States, Mexico, and several others.

“Canned tomatoes, a big chunk of them come from Italy, because those folks are really good at working with tomatoes,” Sims explained.

“And what’s super upsetting about this is that anyone whose ever pinched a penny knows that canned tomatoes are you’re go-to staple in your pantry if you’re trying to stretch your dollar, if you’re making chili, you’re making spaghetti sauce, food banks just really count on stuff like this,” she continued.

“And [the government] is making it more expensive on purpose,” Sims added.

The tariff was described by the federal government as a provisional safeguard measure that can last up to 200 days while the Canadian International Trade Tribunal completes its inquiry into surging imports. Imports of canned vegetables have risen sharply in recent years, with notable increases from countries like Thailand, Turkey, and Peru.

The government says the tariff is needed to protect Canadian processors facing “immediate challenges,” but critics point out it comes from the same Liberals who repeatedly promised to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

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Politicians Never Spend Their Own Money

The Canadian government has quietly expanded the clothing allowances available to the Governor General, and the timing could not be more tone-deaf. While Canadians struggle with inflation, housing costs, and rising taxes, Ottawa has decided that the person already living in Rideau Hall requires even more taxpayer-funded support for wardrobes and official appearances. The Governor General currently earns a salary of roughly C$378,000 per year, lives in an official residence maintained at public expense, travels at taxpayer expense, receives staff support, security, transportation, and a lengthy list of other publicly funded benefits. Yet somehow that was not enough.

According to the revised guidelines, the annual clothing allowance for the Governor General has increased from C$100,000 to C$130,000. The maximum amount that can be spent on ceremonial attire has also increased substantially, while clothing purchased with public funds remains government property. Think about that for a moment. The average Canadian household is trying to figure out how to pay for groceries, rent, mortgages, insurance, and utility bills while government officials are debating whether C$100,000 a year is enough for clothing. The political class truly lives in a different universe.

What makes this even more absurd is that the Governor General’s office already receives millions of dollars annually to operate. Rideau Hall employs dozens of staff members, maintains extensive grounds, hosts official events, and receives funding for travel and hospitality.

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