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Liberal MP Han Dong is now independent MP Han Dong. The twice-elected MP from Don Valley North made the announcement in the House of Commons late Wednesday night.

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I am taking this extraordinary step because to sit in the government caucus is a privilege and my presence there may be seen by some as a conflict of duty, Dong said.

Ill be sitting as an independent so that the business of government, and indeed the business of Parliament, is not interrupted as I work to clear my name.

Dong was named in a report by Global News on Feb. 25 as one of the MPs helped by an election interference network that intelligence agencies claim was run out of the Chinese Consulate in Toronto during the 2019 election. Since then, Dong has maintained his innocence and as recently as Tuesday spoke with reporters at length while denying he had any assistance from the Chinese government in getting elected.

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That Feb. 25 report stated that CSIS had warned the Trudeau Liberals that the intelligence agency had concerns about Dong weeks before the September 2019 election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau never denied that his team or party had been briefed by CSIS but he still stood by Dong.

It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate to political parties who can or cannot run. Thats a really important principle, Trudeau said in response to the February report.

He stood by his MP and didnt expel him from caucus even as a member of Doug Fords Ontario PC Party caucus stepped down in early March when he was named.

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That all changed late Wednesday when another report from Global, citing unnamed sources, said that Dong had spoken to a Chinese diplomat about the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The claim was that Dong advised the Chinese diplomat in early 2021 that releasing the two Michaels shouldnt happen at that point in time because it would benefit the Conservative Party.

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Dong admitted to Global News that he did have a conversation with Han Tao, Chinas Consul General in Toronto, but that he had pressed for the two Michaels to be released. Asked about the fact that Dong had spoken to the Chinese consulate about the two Michaels, Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus office said they had no knowledge.

Alison Murphy, a spokesperson for Trudeaus office, said that the PMO only became aware that a conversation took place after Mr. Dong told us, following recent media questions.

That statement was the writing on the wall that Trudeau would no longer back Dong in public. A short time later, he announced his departure from the Liberal caucus.

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The Liberals have been dealing with allegations that they specifically benefitted from Chinas interference in Canadas elections in 2019 and 2021 by delaying any investigation into the matter and casting doubt on the allegations. The move to distance themselves from Dong is a sign that may be changing.

So far, Trudeau has called questions about the matter racist, he has called for the CSIS whistleblowers to be investigated and dealt with and he has delayed in calling a public inquiry by appointing David Johnston as a special rapporteur to study the matter.

If Trudeau was hoping this story would fade away, the latest allegations against Dong and his removal from the Liberal caucus has ensured that this story will stay front and centre for some time.

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LILLEY: Liberal MP Dong resigns from party over interference claims - Toronto Sun

Its nonsense, plain and simple, to paint opponents of the Liberal Impact Assessment Act as climate-change laggards and deniers.

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But the epic Supreme Court case that starts Tuesday is the ultimate clash of climate-change virtue signals, with Ottawa on one side and the provinces especially Alberta on the other.

The federal Impact Assessment Act, formerly Bill C-69, has been in force for several years. The federal Liberals will fight to overturn an Alberta Appeal Court ruling that the Act is unconstitutional.

The feds will probably succeed, given the leanings and precedents of the justices, but theyll do it against the wishes of Alberta and seven other provinces.

Quebecers may be Canadas most ardent advocates of climate action. In Vancouver and much of coastal B.C., people would argue theyre just as zealous. The need for action is fiercely pressed in the politically powerful Greater Toronto Area.

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So how is it that the governments of the three biggest provinces are lined up behind Alberta, essentially agreeing the federal law is unconstitutional?

Theyre not doing it because theyre against environmental protection, climate action and careful regulation of projects.

Theyre genuinely fearful that the federal bill goes much too far toward federal control of virtually every kind of resource or agricultural project, effectively imposing a national veto over key areas of the economy.

If the court agrees with the Liberals, the judges will go a long way toward permanently changing the nature of this country, one of the most successful federations on earth.

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Constitutionally, provincial rights are unassailable in project approval and economic development, with one exception.

The Supreme Court has started to use national interest interpreted as a threat to environment and climate to supersede provincial jurisdiction. A federal victory in this case would solidly entrench that position.

The Supreme Courts Hearing 40195 will be held over Tuesday and Wednesday. The lineup is fascinating.

First up is the federal government, supported by 12 interveners, all of them environmental or Indigenous groups, including Albertas Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

They have every right to make their case. But its noteworthy that not a single provincial or civic government will argue on Ottawas side.

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On Day 2, Alberta will have 17 supporters, including the governments of Ontario, Quebec, B.C., Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan.

As youd expect, business groups, including oil and gas, also back Alberta. So does government-owned Hydro-Quebec. The Woodland Cree First Nation is in support.

There is nuance in the approaches. B.C. for instance, argues that C-69 can be constitutional but only if it doesnt override clear provincial authority.

The federal bill is a slippery thing. It claims to operate in federal lands but then refers to projects in Canada. It also assumes power over projects with environment effects outside Canada. It promises co-ordination with provinces, but no province is reassured.

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People protest against Bill C-69 in Calgary on March 25, 2019. Gavin Young/Postmedia/File

The world has just had a new warning of looming climate catastrophe. Every Canadian province is deeply worried about this and has plans to act.

A serious federal government would encourage them all to develop their own plans, in co-ordination with commonly agreed national goals. Thats the way the government of a federation behaves. Canada isnt a unitary state yet.

Alberta political rhetoric around this is almost always confrontational. Premier Danielle Smith rarely mentions climate change. In the recent budget speech theres no mention of climate, and the word environment only appears once in a pledge to create a strong business environment.

But at the level of government, the province fully accepts the reality of the climate crisis and pledges action.

There will always be debate over how we react and what the plans are. But there is no cause to alter the basic nature of the country.

Thats a goal driven solely by Liberal hubris and overreach.

Don Braids column appears regularly in the Herald

Continued here:
Braid: Liberals are striving to change Canada's very nature. The future rests with Supreme Court - Calgary Herald

Ottawa

Posted: March 21, 2023 Last Updated: March 21, 2023

The Liberal government is spending $1.4 billion to upgrade facilities for the Canadian military's counter terrorism response unit at its current Dwyer Hill Training Centre in Ottawa.

The federal governmenthad previouslyplanned to move Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) to a new facility at the Canadian Forces Base (CFB)Trenton,but after expropriating land for that purpose, it will instead upgrade theexisting facilityin Ottawa over the next decade.

The construction project is designed to meet the "long-term growth, training, and high-readiness operational" needs of JTF2, Defence Minister Anita Anand said in a news release Tuesday.

The Dwyer Hill Training Centre is located at the intersection of Dwyer Hill Road and FranktownRoad in Ottawa, about 50 kilometres from the city's downtown.

The project will replace 89 existing structures with 23 new facilities, according to the release. Those buildings will include offices, a shooting range and medical and training facilities.

Anandestimated about 2,000 jobs will be created over the life of the project, spread across more than 150 subcontracts designed to encourage bids from smaller contractors.

JTF2 is a special operations unit of the Canadian Armed Forces tasked with combatting international and domestic terrorism. The unit was created in 1993 and expanded shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

In January 2007, thefederal government under Prime Minister Stephen Harperannounced the JTF2 was to be relocated to CFB Trenton,while the Dwyer Hill property would be evacuated by 2010.

To expand the Trenton base, the government took possession of nearby land, including 90 hectares in August 2012 from neighbouring farmer Frank Meyers.

The expropriation of Meyers' land prompted widespread support for the farmer and protests on his behalf.

Despite the expropriation, JTF2 was never relocated and the Liberal government confirmed to reporters in 2020 thoseplanshad been scrapped.

Now, the existing facility will be upgraded.

The 2014 shootings at the National War Memorial and inside Centre Block on Parliament Hillprompted a review of the decision to move JTF2 to CFB Trenton, to see whether it was "still in line with Canada's counterterrorism needs,"Anand told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morningon Tuesday.

The review found keeping JTF2 in the National Capital Region better meets operational requirements, "and it's in line with our allies' approach, so that we keep counterterrorism sources close to our seat of government to be able to respond to possible threats," she said.

"We need to be near the capital and that's why Dwyer Hill is being retained as the site."

Construction is set to begin thisMay.

LISTEN | Anand's full interview with Ottawa Morning:

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Liberals announce $1.4B investment in Ottawa's Dwyer Hill Training Centre - CBC.ca

If the Coalition government falls in the upcoming NSW state election, there will not be one Liberal in state or federal power on mainland Australia, says Sky News host Chris Kenny.

Its the utter folly of the Liberals endless drift to the left, Mr Kenny said.

Driven by their own left faction the so-called moderates and by a nave desperation to win plaudits from social media and much of the mainstream media, the Liberals have continually learnt the wrong lessons.

Instead of reasserting their values of small government, low taxes, personal responsibility and economic strength theyve chased political fashion, the stuff of the Left.

So instead of favouring affordable and reliable energy, theyve destroyed our electricity grid and pretended theyre saving the planet.

The Liberals have surrendered their product differentiation voters have been left to choose between Green Left, Labor Left, Teals Left and Liberal Left.

Without core values the Liberals are nothing.

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'Utter folly': The Liberal party's 'drift to the Left' is their downfall - Sky News Australia

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama predicted that the human species had reached the end of history. Throughout the world, elites had recognized that liberalism, characterized by political democracy and free markets, was the only ideology capable of addressing humanitys problems. To Fukuyama, this suggested that eventually, whether it took a year, a decade, or a century, at some point in the future, all of humankind would embrace technocratic liberalism.

It was unclear, though, what the end of history would mean for US foreign policy. Since liberalisms advent in the era of the French Revolution, the ideology was connected with empire. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberalism served as a primary justification of empire, as states from the British to the French to the American insisted that it was right and good to promote liberal values at the barrel of a gun. The word liberal itself was spread across Europe by Ur-liberal imperialist Napoleon Bonaparte.

The modern American empire was part of this proud tradition. During the Cold War, the United States became the global hegemon, and like previous hegemons, it constantly undertook military interventions abroad. To justify their nations wars, US elites claimed that they were defending liberalism against communists who wanted to destroy it.

But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the imperialists faced a problem: as the Cold War wound down and the Soviets, per Fukuyama, began to accept liberal capitalist principles, the US empire started to lose its raison dtre. If the United States no longer faced an existential communist enemy, there was no justification for a globe-spanning empire. What were the imperialists who were still bent on maintaining that empire to do?

The answer: go on the offensive. Instead of waiting for history to end abroad, the United States would force its end with missiles and troops, if necessary.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was part of this postCold War liberal project. (While the term neoconservative has the word conservative in it, neocons are basically just Cold War liberals with a different name. Moreover, in a technical sense, both Democrats and Republicans embody different species of liberalism.) The military-industrial complexs profit-seeking motives and the never-ending US thirst for oil were key causes of the invasion, but leftists should be careful not to downplay its ideological origins. Not every imperialist is as nakedly and unabashedly power-hungry as Dick Cheney; some need to imagine that they are good people carrying out a noble cause. They are able to do so by persuading themselves that their efforts are righteous and necessary for human progress.

The war and occupation that followed the March 2003 invasion, though, failed to realize imperialist dreams. It turned out that democracy could not be exported with weapons and that the promises of liberal imperialism were a fantasy. The Iraq War put the kibosh on the idea that democracy promotion was a viable political project. Today, one rarely hears it invoked by those trawling the corridors of power.

From the perspective of 2023, the Iraq War fiasco was the first of many events that suggested that the end of history might be less stable than Fukuyama imagined. Since Iraq, weve witnessed the Federal Emergency Management Agencys inability to save a drowning New Orleans; experienced a Great Recession from which many in the United States never fully recovered; a humanitarian mission in Libya that wound up destroying the state and reviving that nations slave trade; and the repeated collapse of seemingly legitimate businesses, from Theranos to FTX to Silicon Valley Bank. End-of-history liberal hegemony, it seems, might not have been all it was cracked up to be.

But this leads to a question: Why havent these manifold disasters engendered a coherent and broad-based ideological response to such liberalism? Though weve seen the reemergence of reactionary populism on the Right and democratic socialism on the Left, neither has proven capable of seriously challenging Fukuyaman liberalism. For all his bluster, Donald Trump was a one-termer who basically governed like a typical Republican, while Bernie Sanders was unable to defeat Joe Biden. Tragically, liberalisms continued dominance suggests we remain at historys end.

This is the problem that socialists must confront on the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War, a war that killed and deracinated millions of innocents. Why has this blundering and imperialist liberalism proved so resilient? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Link:
Twenty Years After Invading Iraq, American Liberalism Is Discredited ... - Jacobin magazine