Tag: canada

Canada Taps Germany for Naval Demand

Canada has officially selected Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) as the preferred builder for a new fleet of 12 submarines. The program is expected to cost roughly C$60 billion, making it one of the largest military procurements in Canadian history. Prime Minister Mark Carney is making the announcement just before the NATO summit, where member states are once again pledging even higher military spending. This is not simply about replacing aging submarines. It is another step in the global rearmament that I have warned was inevitable once governments abandoned diplomacy in favor of perpetual confrontation.

Canada’s existing Victoria-class submarines are reaching the end of their operational lives, but what stands out is who won the contract. Germany’s Type 212CD submarine was chosen over South Korea’s competing bid. The 212CD was jointly developed with Norway and is specifically designed for NATO operations, utilizing advanced air-independent propulsion, non-magnetic steel to reduce detection, and enhanced capabilities for operations in northern waters. Germany has openly stated that this contract would draw Canada closer to Europe strategically, not merely commercially. That should tell everyone this was as much a geopolitical decision as it was a military one.

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Ottawa’s carbon capture obsession is making Alberta oil more expensive for customers who aren’t asking for it

Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Alberta’s oil industry to spend tens of billions of dollars on carbon capture before Ottawa will fully embrace new pipeline projects. The problem? The evidence suggests customers aren’t demanding “decarbonized” oil in the first place.

A new Fraser Institute study concludes that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) faces enormous technical and economic hurdles. Despite decades of investment, large-scale projects have routinely fallen short of expectations, often capturing less carbon than promised while costing far more than initially projected.

The study also notes that scaling CCUS across the energy sector would require building an entirely new network of pipelines and storage infrastructure comparable to today’s oil and gas system itself.

In other words, politicians are asking Alberta to construct a second energy industry just to support the first.

That wouldn’t matter if customers were demanding it. But there is little evidence they are.

Instead, buyers continue to purchase Canadian crude because it is reliable, competitively priced and comes from one of the world’s most politically stable energy producers.

The Canada Energy Regulator reports Canadian crude exports reached record levels following the Trans Mountain expansion, with Alberta supplying more than 90 per cent of Canada’s exports. New customers in Asia have rapidly increased purchases, not because Canada branded its oil as “decarbonized,” but because they wanted dependable supply from a democratic country.

Reuters has also reported that the Carney government is linking future pipeline approvals to large-scale carbon capture commitments and net-zero requirements, effectively making Alberta producers absorb billions in additional costs before projects can move ahead.

The theory behind this policy is that customers will reward lower-carbon oil. Yet commodity markets have rarely worked that way.

History offers an uncomfortable but revealing example. During its control of territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS financed much of its terrorist operation by selling oil through black-market networks. Buyers still purchased that oil despite knowing where it came from because oil markets are driven overwhelmingly by price, availability and logistics.

No one is comparing Alberta producers to ISIS. The point is the opposite: if even oil produced by one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations found buyers, it demonstrates that commodity markets are driven primarily by economics, not moral branding.

That reality raises an obvious question. Where is the evidence that refiners are willing to pay a significant premium simply because Canadian oil has a lower carbon intensity?

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Carney is considering lawsuits over “misinformation” posts

The federal government’s latest attack on free expression is straight out of 1984.

An Access to Information memo obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter shows the Industry Department is weighing legal action against social media users accused of spreading “false and misleading information.” The heavily redacted 35-page memo offers no details on the proposed legal action.

This contrasts with the Liberal government’s past stance against internet control as a human rights threat.

Four years ago, they said, “the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online.”

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‘Very irresponsible’: National Firearms Association VP blasts mainstream media coverage of Montreal shooter

On Friday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Blair Hagen from the National Firearms Association spoke out against mainstream media outlets using the recent Montreal shooting as a tool to push political narratives.

While the shooter’s manifesto contained a multitude of references to former left-wing dictators like Mao and Stalin — along with lengthy rants filled with explicit antisemitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric, and communist ideology — mainstream media outlets appeared to focus almost exclusively on his hatred of women.

“Very shortly afterwards, and of course the killer’s manifesto became public fairly quickly, mainstream media outlets chose to go with a certain narrative, and it’s one we’re pretty familiar with,” Hagen said.

“That was the elements of misogyny, the hatred of women, that were part of that manifesto. But it was very, very stark that they were obviously ignoring the other parts. That manifesto was a toxic soup of really harmful ideologies and attitudes, and the fact that mainstream media and certain special interest groups would choose to ignore that to advance their own narratives certainly struck us as very, very irresponsible and something we wanted to speak out on,” he continued.

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Uncovering The ‘Billionaire Coup Against Democracy’

For more than a decade, the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Global Rights Index has documented the deterioration of workers’ rights around the world. Each year brings new records for attacks on unions, restrictions on collective bargaining and governments willing to intervene on behalf of employers. 

The ITUC’s 2026 report shows those trends are not slowing: they are accelerating. The report describes what it calls a “billionaire coup against democracy,” arguing that governments are increasingly reshaping labour law to favour corporate power while restricting the ability of workers to organize and strike. 

For Canadian workers, the report arrives at an especially important moment. Just weeks after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a landmark opinion affirming that the right to strike is protected under international law, the federal government is exploring new ways to limit that same right at home. 

The contradiction is stark. As international institutions reaffirm that striking is a fundamental democratic freedom, governments around the world — including Canada’s — are searching for ways to undermine it. 

Workers’ Rights Are Under Attacks

The ITUC’s report paints a bleak picture. In no part of the world are workers’ rights being adequately protected. 

Violations of the right to strike were documented in 87 per cent of countries surveyed. Eighty per cent of countries restricted collective bargaining. Three-quarters denied or impeded workers’ ability to form or join unions. Half of all countries arrested or detained workers for exercising their rights — a record high. Attacks on freedom of speech and assembly also reached their highest level since the index began. 

These are not isolated abuses occurring only under authoritarian governments. The report argues that democratic governments are increasingly adopting legal restrictions that weaken organized labour while expanding employer power. North America is not immune. 

The United States continues to receive one of the poorest ratings among advanced industrial economies. The Donald Trump administration has accelerated this trend. While union organizing has increased in recent years, and the National Labor Relations Board was more worker-friendly during the Biden era, workers continue to face aggressive anti-union campaigns, widespread employer retaliation, permanent replacement of strikers in many jurisdictions, and weak labour law enforcement.  

Although Canada performs considerably better than the U.S., the report still assigns the country a rating indicating “regular violations of rights.” The ITUC index points to continued government intervention in collective bargaining, restrictions on strikes in federally regulated sectors and recurring use of back-to-work legislation and other interference as evidence that fundamental labour rights remain vulnerable in Canada. 

The pattern extends across Europe as well. 

Although Northern Europe continues to rank among the strongest performers globally when it comes to the protection of workers’ rights, the report notes growing attacks elsewhere on the continent. Governments have imposed emergency restrictions on strikes, weakened collective bargaining institutions and introduced legislation limiting industrial action in sectors deemed economically or politically sensitive. Even countries with long traditions of “social dialogue” have experienced growing pressure to curb workers’ bargaining power. 

The overall picture is one of gradual democratic backsliding. Rather than openly banning unions, many governments are narrowing the circumstances under which workers can effectively exercise their rights. Collective bargaining formally remains legal, and even encouraged, but employers are given far more opportunities to avoid or circumvent it. The right to strike in most cases exists on paper, but governments disregard it whenever workers wield sufficient leverage to disrupt business as usual. 

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B.C.’s oil tanker ban exposed: Why U.S. oil gets a pass but Alberta doesn’t

B.C.’s oil tanker ban is once again under scrutiny as questions mount over why it restricts Alberta crude while allowing foreign oil shipments to pass through the province’s coast.

Drea Humphrey argued that Premier David Eby has emerged as the biggest winner from the latest pipeline discussions between Alberta and Ottawa. “He’s getting exactly what he wanted,” she said, pointing to billions in promised infrastructure spending while any potential pipeline benefits remain years away.

Humphrey also questioned the province’s opposition to transporting Alberta oil by tanker, noting that large foreign vessels already travel the same waters. “How is that any less of a risk to the North Coast?” she asked.

Sheila Gunn Reid argued the federal approach ignores what she sees as an obvious alternative. She noted that American tankers from Alaska are permitted to use the same coastal route, saying, “The tanker ban only applies to Alberta oil. It doesn’t apply to American oil.”

Rather than reviving the cancelled Northern Gateway route to Kitimat, Gunn Reid said the proposed pipeline would head south to Vancouver, making it “infinitely more expensive and inconvenient.”

“I refuse to see this as the win everybody is touting it as,” she added. “It’s likely never going to get built.”

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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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