Monday, July 31, 2017

Millions in foreign funds spent in 2015 federal election to defeat Harper government, report alleges

Bloggers note : Should the legitimacy of the Trudeau administration be challenged. I say YES! Absolutely. Hello Mr. GG before the new GG is sworn in ...  


Millions in foreign funds spent in 2015 federal election to defeat Harper government, report alleges


In total, 114 third parties poured $6 million into influencing the election outcome and many of those third parties were funded by the U.S.-based Tides Foundation



Foreign money funnelled towards Canadian political advocacy groups affected the outcome of the 2015 federal election, according to a document filed last week with Elections Canada and obtained in part by the Calgary Herald.
The 36-page report entitled: Elections Canada Complaint Regarding Foreign Influence in the 2015 Canadian Election, alleges third parties worked with each other, which may have bypassed election spending limits — all of which appears to be in contravention of the Canada Elections Act.
The Canada Elections Act states that “a third party shall not circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, a limit set out . . . in any manner, including by splitting itself into two or more third parties for the purpose of circumventing the limit or acting in collusion with another third party so that their combined election advertising expenses exceed the limit.”
“Electoral outcomes were influenced,” alleges the report.
The Canada Elections Act also states: “No person who does not reside in Canada shall, during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate” unless the person is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand

“Yet the outcome of the 2015 election was skewed by money from wealthy foreigners,” alleges the complaint, submitted by Canada Decides, a registered society with three listed directors — including Joan Crockatt, a former Conservative MP for Calgary Centre, who lost her seat to Liberal Kent Hehr, now the MP for the once long-held Tory riding and the Minister of Veterans Affairs. The other two directors include Chad Hallman, a University of Toronto political science student.
The number of third parties registered during the 2015 general election more than doubled, to 114 compared with 55, in the 2011 election.
Americans are rightly concerned about Russia hacking into U.S. government emails. Well, this appears to be much worse
In total, the 114 third parties spent $6 million and many of those third parties were funded by California-and New York-based Tides Foundation — which is known in Canada for holding numerous anti-Canadian oil campaigns.
In 2015, Tides Foundation donated $1.5 million of U.S. money to Canadian third parties in the election year, according to the report.
Crockatt’s seat was one of the 29 targeted by an organization called Leadnow through its “largest ever campaign” called Vote Together. The complaint by Canada Decides alleges that foreign money “spawned” Leadnow and helped fund an elaborate campaign to oust the ruling Conservative Party.

PATRICK BRENNAN / Postmedia News

Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt says Canadians should be concerned about any kind of foreign involvement in our elections.
“The whole concept and idea of foreign influence in an election is an important issue and is something that Canadians should not tolerate,” Bratt said Monday.
Tides Foundation and Leadnow representatives did not return repeated phone calls and emails from the Herald to respond to concerns raised by Canada Decides.
A December 2015 Leadnow report, Defeating Harper, discusses how effective its campaign was in the 2015 general election. “The Conservatives were defeated in 25 out of 29 ridings, and . . . in the seats the Conservatives lost, our recommended candidate was the winner 96 per cent of the time.”
Leadnow’s Defeat Harper report also states: “We selected target ridings with field teams run by paid Leadnow organizers….”
Crockatt lost her Calgary Centre seat by 750 votes.
Conservative MP Lawrence Toet lost his Manitoba seat of Elmwood-Transcona to the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie by just 61 votes.

THE CANADIAN PRESS / Adrian Wyld

Former Conservative Finance Minister Joe Oliver lost his seat to Liberal Marco Mendicino with a margin of 5,800 votes. Only six per cent of voters in that riding voted for the NDP candidate, who complained of Leadnow’s tactics on Twitter.
Leadnow staff members flew around the country on numerous occasions, as Facebook postings and photographs show, to distribute flyers and put up signs. Also, 57 local polls were commissioned across 37 ridings urging citizens to strategically vote for the most winnable, left-of-centre candidate in order to defeat the Conservative candidate.
There is an $8,788 spending limit per riding for the election. NDP candidates and even CUPE complained about Leadnow’s activities being anti-democratic.
“This is not a partisan issue or a case of sour grapes by Conservatives,” insists Hallman, 20.
“This is a Canadian issue. This affects all Canadians whether you’re an NDP, Green, Liberal or Conservative. You should be very concerned about foreign money being spent in Canada during an election campaign.”
Most Canadians would be very alarmed by this. This happened in the 2015 election
Crockatt, who prior to becoming a Member of Parliament was a journalist, including a stint as an editor with the Calgary Herald, said researchers from Fredericton to Nanaimo worked for 18 months gathering information on this issue.
“Foreign money meddled in a big way in our election and that’s not right,” she added. “Americans are rightly concerned about Russia hacking into U.S. government emails. Well, this appears to be much worse — foreign money, in many cases by very wealthy people — was donated and arguably changed the outcome of our Canadian election. It needs to be taken seriously and investigated.”
In the 2015 annual report of the California-based Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN) where Ben Brandzel, one of Leadnow’s founders, currently works, he said: “We ended the year with . . . a Canadian campaign that moved the needle during the national election, contributing greatly to the ousting of the conservative Harper government.”
Just how greatly these foreign organizations and money contributed to interfering in the Canadian election needs to be investigated by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, states Canada Decides.
“The threat to Canadian election sovereignty is real and must be eliminated by the Commissioner as quickly and decisively as possible,” adds the report.

Rod MacIvor/ Postmedia News files

It appears as though Yves Cote, commissioner of Elections Canada, is considering doing just that.
Cote admitted during an April 13 Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee that an investigation needs to be launched following questions by Conservative Senators Linda Frum and Bob Runciman.
“Issues of significance have been raised . . .” said Cote, during the senate committee hearing, “which in my view deserves Parliament taking the time to looking at the situation, trying to understand what has happened, what is likely to happen and then taking measures . . . to make sure there is compliance.”
Cote added that “the Supreme Court of Canada said the objective of maintaining a level playing field is, for them, a very important objective.”
Senator Frum is planning to introduce a private member’s bill updating the Canada Elections Act to prohibit third parties from accepting foreign funding for domestic political activity.
Canadians can only donate $1,550 to political parties and candidates. Union and corporate donations have been banned completely, and yet in the Senate hearing, Commissioner Cote said that as long as foreign money is donated to a third party six months prior to the election writ being dropped, the amount that can be donated is endless.
Frum made the following observation during the April 13 senate hearing: “I could take a cheque for $10 million from Saudi Arabia, from Iran, from China — I could take any amount of money from a foreign contributor so long as I, a Canadian citizen, am receiving it?”
Cote said as long as funds are received six months before an election “the third party is free to use that money.”
“Most Canadians would be very alarmed by this,” added Frum. “This happened in the 2015 election.”

Monday, July 24, 2017

It’s time for Canada to stand up to China’s censorship crackdown. filed #BabyTrudeau


It’s time for Canada to stand up to China’s censorship crackdown

China just strengthened its Great Propaganda Firewall to limit what its citizens can see and read about the outside world. The Liberals should be outraged.



Chinese President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Wu Hong/Pool
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Wu Hong/Pool
You won’t hear any loud alarms being rung about this from either the starry-eyed or the sinister China trade enthusiasts in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, or Global Affairs Canada, the Canada China Business Council or the Asia Pacific Foundation, but the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing has made it official.

The Communist Party of China has ordered a shutdown of all unauthorized and unmonitored communication between China’s 1.3 billion people and the outside world. In its formal statements, the Ministry announced that it is closing the last digital breaches in the Great Firewall of China—the outer ring of the regime’s vast snooping, censorship and website-blocking superstructure.
MORE: Ottawa’s despicable display in China

Any VPN (virtual private network), proxy server or special cable service operating without Beijing’s approval, under Beijing’s tight controls, are now outlawed.

Chinese citizens require independent VPNs to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Youtube, Tumblr and all the other web applications that allow one-on-one and group discussions with the outside world that the regime has blocked.

The technology research firm GlobalWebIndex reckons that one in three Chinese citizens has used VPNs, which redirect Chinese web traffic through offshore servers, allowing users to access outside-world websites undetected.


The corporate sector needs VPNs too, which is why Beijing has been biding its time. International companies with operations in China will be able to hold onto some perks, at least on paper. Foreign firms will still be permitted to use VPN services—but only to communicate with head office. The VPN must be a Chinese corporation.

 Sensitive company data must now be stored in China. The identities of every employee using a VPN workaround must be given to the ministry.


Without VPNs to traverse the catacombs under the Firewall or to scale circumvention “ladders” to get over it, Chinese citizens cannot access the regime-banned New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the Economist, the Financial Times, or Reuters news services—for starters.

 The CBC has been blocked in China since 2014. According to the results of a URL test attempted Sunday on the freedom-of-information site ‪Greatfire.org, “100 per cent” of CBC’s online presence is off-limits inside China.


The ministry has set a deadline of March 31, 2018 to fully secure the regime’s propaganda wall around China by “urgent regulation and governance” of China’s internet systems, in order to correct what it called the industry’s “disordered development.”

To that end, internal censorship has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, most noticeably to cover up the scandal surrounding the torment and July 13 death of the imprisoned Nobel laureate and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.

READ MORE: As the U.S. retreats on trade, China is quietly picking up the pieces

A further tightening of the regime’s paranoid censorship of public discussion was already in the works, besides, owing to the upcoming national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at which President Xi Jinping is expected to further consolidate his stranglehold on the Chinese state. Unless he rewrites the rules, Xi and Premier Li Keqiang are expected to be the only members of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee who won’t be shuffled out.


The one glimmer of hope is that Beijing’s efforts at an across-the-board VPN clampdown may not even be possible. Fast-moving offshore operators usually pick up a lot of the slack when Chinese VPNs get shut down.


Within three years of the regime’s banning of the online edition of the New York Times in 2012, the newspaper had regained its pre-censorship readership through VPNs.

Now, however, it’s not clear how Chinese citizens will find out how to access offshore VPNs, or whether they will risk attempts to go over or under the Firewall. On WeChat and Weibo, two of China’s most widely used (though intermittently non-functioning) discussion platforms, Beijing’s censors have now added “VPN” to the list of keywords that trigger eavesdropping, blacklisting and blackouts.


Last month, the Ministry of Public Security’s Network Security Squad was already issuing orders to internet service providers, warning them to expunge all software that circumvent the Firewall.

China’s state-owned telecommunications giants, among them China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, were instructed to bring themselves in line with President Xi’s draconian “internet sovereignty” push. The popular Hong Kong Chinese proxy-service provider GreenVPN told its customers it was being shut down by the authorities in Beijing. Last week, Guangzhou Huoyun Information Technology Ltd. told Reuters that the company had received a directive to begin blocking VPN services. Similarly leaked and off-the-record accounts have been coming fast and thick in recent weeks.
READ MORE: China is no friend to Canada
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology communiques don’t just make it official that a digital Iron Curtain is shutting China off from the rest of the world. The ministry is putting the lie to any further claims by Canada’s China trade lobby and its many friends in the Liberal government that “free trade” talks are about bringing Canadians and Chinese people closer together. That is not what is happening here. We are being driven further apart.


Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948, could not be more plain in this matter: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”


This is not just about the rights of Chinese citizens, to speak freely with one another, without fear, through any media, across frontiers. It is about the rights of Canadians to do the same. It is an inalienable human right that is being trampled upon here, openly and brazenly, and the Liberal government has only one choice in this: to carry on in its disgrace, serving the Chinese slave state as a collaborator and an accomplice, or to stand up for once and fight.


MORE ABOUT CHINA:

Monday, July 3, 2017

If You’re Conservative, Here’s Why Elite Liberals Hate Your Guts John Hawkins


If You’re Conservative, Here’s Why Elite Liberals Hate Your Guts

John Hawkins
|
Posted: Jul 01, 2017 12:01 AM


If You’re Conservative, Here’s Why Elite Liberals Hate Your Guts



In the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” era, elite liberals seemed to genuinely believe that people who didn’t vote for them were just poor, deluded saps who didn’t understand what was in their own best interest. 

Is that condescending? Sure, but at least it’s not hateful. At least it assumes that liberals still need to work to bring these people on board.

Does that attitude still exist? Sure, to a degree. In fact, just this week, James O’Keefe caught a CNN producer on camera saying he thinks that the American voters are “stupid as sh*t.” 

This sort of thinking comes from the fact that liberalism is shot through with narcissism. Narcissists believe they’re better than everyone else just by virtue of being who they are. 

So do liberals. Liberals also believe they’re smarter, more compassionate and more caring just because they’re on the Left. Whether you’re talking about a liberal or a narcissist, this leads to high, but unstable self-esteem. 

If you genuinely have high self-esteem, you can easily brush off challenges to your competence. When you have high, but unstable self-esteem, you become much more upset when your self-image is challenged. 

This can lead to anxiety, anger and lashing out as part of an effort to keep those doubts at bay.

 It can also lead to unchecked hatred of anyone who makes you question your value. 

This tendency is amplified by the circular reasoning of liberals. Are you a better, smarter, more caring person by virtue of being liberal? Yes. Will other liberals challenge them on this? No. 

Will they pay attention to non-liberals who tell them that they’re not better, smarter and more caring than other people? No. 

 So, this leads to an ironclad feedback loop. OBVIOUSLY, liberals are sensitive, wonderful and know it all and no one who matters will even question this thinking while anyone who does isn’t worth listening to in the slightest. 


So, what happens when their views are REJECTED wholesale across the heartland of the country to such an extent that you can drive coast to coast without ever crossing a district run by Democrats? 

What happens when people point out that most of the policies they champion don’t work? 

What happens when people reject the idea that liberals know what’s best for them? 

We got a taste of that right after Trump won and liberals were finally angry enough to be honest about what they really believe,
“This is what's terrifying: Even if Clinton wins, there are SO MANY people willing to vote for a bigoted imbecile. This is not my country. https://t.co/5wlgxi3viSJill Filipovic

“Where is the primetime special on the pervasive white supremacy that allowed for Trump's rise & popularity?”— deray mckesson (@deray) November 9, 2016

“It appears racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are powerful drugs. I'm so sad tonight. So so sad.”Jillian Michaels (@JillianMichaels) November 9, 2016

“This was a white-lash. This was a white-lash against a changing country. It was a white-lash against a black president in part, and that’s the part where the pain comes.”Van Jones

“Fascism just got hold of the United States. We are now seeing the worst of the worst elevated to positions of incredible power. Racism has been legitimized and the reports of hate crimes are rolling in. Trans children are committing suicide. 

Stock prices of private prisons and coal have skyrocketed. Women are months away from truly losing the right to control their own bodies.”The Daily Kos 

This was combined with liberals going to the psych ward, cutting all their hair off and faking hate crimes. Those are all signs of stability, right? 

How about all the political violence we’ve been treated to by the Left? It’s turned into an epidemic. The Steve Scalise shooting may have gotten the most attention, but some of the other politically motivated assaults have been almost as jarring. Just to name a few

“A Trump supporter was beaten and dragged by a car.”
“Protestors knocked a 71-year-old female staffer for California GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher unconscious during a protest outside the representative’s office.”

“Masked protesters at Middlebury College rushed AEI scholar and political scientist Charles Murray and professor Allison Stranger, pushing and shoving Murray and grabbing Stranger by her hair and twisting her neck as they were leaving a campus building. Stranger suffered a concussion. 

Protesters then surrounded the car they got into, rocking it back and forth and jumping on the hood.”
“A former professor was arrested after police said they identified him on video beating Trump supporters with a U-shaped bike lock, leaving three people with “significant injuries.”

Liberals project their own hatred onto conservatives regularly with their rhetoric. She doesn’t support gay marriage? She must hate gays. She doesn’t want to expand welfare? She must hate the poor. He doesn’t want to tear down a statue of a Founding Father who held slaves? He must hate black people.

 That’s their excuse for their own hatred. It’s actually YOU who hates everyone; so they have to HATE YOU right back. This accounts for what my girlfriend Sierra Marlee calls their "I care about everyone and if you don't believe that then I hope your kids get cancer" attitude. 

You want evidence of this? Besides the fact that the Democrat nominee was someone who quite literally noted that “Republicans” were her enemies in a debate
 How about this? How about the fact that there is almost no soul-searching by liberals after their defeat by Donald Trump? There’s no talk of changing their agenda (other than making it more radical), no talk of appealing to people who didn’t vote for them, no wondering what they did wrong. 

That’s the problem. They don’t believe they did anything wrong. They believe the real issue is that you’re racist, sexist, subhuman pieces of garbage who need to be punished. When they get back into power, they’re going to do EXACTLY that and they will feel like you DESERVE IT the entire time because you’re so evil. 

I wish it wasn’t that way, but that is what the modern Left has become and if we don’t acknowledge that reality, we’re kidding ourselves.