Derelict building burning facing opposition
WATCH: As Wayne Mantyka tells us, Sask. firefighters are sharing concerns over legislation allowing municipalities to burn down derelict buildings.
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National Post
an hour ago
- National Post
Opinion: Indigenous leaders call Canada's anti-Israel joint statement hypocritical
We are deeply disappointed by the joint statement, co-signed by Canada, France, and Britain on 'the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.' This call rewards Hamas for the torture and murder of 1,200 innocent civilians on October 7 and the kidnapping of 250 others. We note that these are the same Western powers that bombed Raqqa and Mosul into rubble to eliminate ISIS, yet now invoke humanitarian concern to shield Hamas from the consequences of their own atrocities. Article content Article content Hamas started this war, and Israel has every right to defend itself against terrorists. One wonders what Canadian authorities would do if these Hamas atrocities had targeted Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. Article content Article content From the outset of the war, Hamas has hijacked international aid, diverting food, fuel, and medical supplies to sell on the black market. The proceeds— estimated at up to half a billion dollars — have effectively been a war subsidy, funding the recruitment and arming of more terrorists. Article content Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, aid restrictions are entirely lawful when there is a risk that the aid will be diverted to enemy combatants. Every truck that Hamas seizes is a reward for terrorism and an incentive to repeat their strategy. In spite of this, Israel ensured there was enough aid in Gaza to last months, with 25,000 aid trucks entering Gaza during the 42-day ceasefire. Indeed deliveries of aid have re-started, and a new mechanism has been put in place to ensure that aid is distributed to the needy, rather than diverted and stolen by Hamas. Article content Article content Meanwhile Hamas still holds 58 hostages in inhumane conditions underground — starving, torturing, and sometimes murdering them. Article content The conflict in Gaza could end tomorrow if Hamas laid down its arms and released the hostages. This is the path to peace. Hamas has never accepted Israel's right to exist. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas did not build a state; they built terror tunnels and stockpiled rockets, planning for October 7. To believe that a Palestinian state can be negotiated with a group that rejects the very existence of Israel is a dangerous and naïve fantasy. Article content Every ceasefire gives Hamas time to regroup and plan the next massacre. This is the unbearable dilemma Israel faces. Unless Hamas is defeated, this war will not end — it will merely pause, until the next October 7. If Western leaders enable this cycle, they will bear responsibility for the bloodshed to come — on both sides. Article content We are also concerned for the Jewish and Israeli people in Canada. Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs upgraded its travel alert for Canada to Level 2 due to rising threats against Israelis and Jews, following multiple recent attacks on Jewish institutions and a rise in hostile rhetoric. Israelis in Canada were urged to avoid public displays of Jewish/Israeli identity. Leaders of nations should be mindful of how their pubic statements (or lack thereof) might correlate with a rise in antisemitic attacks.
National Post
an hour ago
- National Post
Kelly McParland: Poilievre needs to earn an extension as leader
Canada's federal Conservatives are stuck with a dilemma as they consider whether to do anything different in the next two years than they did in the last two. Article content At the centre of the dilemma are a host of riddles. As in, did they actually lose the last election? Sure, they didn't win, but did they lose lose? Like, did Canadians actually reject them, or did something else happen that got in the way of the victory they anticipated? Article content Article content Article content If they did lose, what do they do about it? And if they didn't lose lose, what do they do about that? Article content Article content Depending on the answers to those questions is another of equal weight: do they head into the future with the same team of decision-makers who didn't quite win if they maybe didn't lose? And how do you answer that question when you don't know what the future holds, given that one complaint against the current leader is that he didn't respond effectively enough when the playing field changed? Article content As far as Pierre Poilievre is concerned, there's nothing to decide. 'We had the biggest vote count in our party's history, the biggest increase in our party's history, the biggest vote share since 1988 and we're going to continue to work to get over the finish line,' he replied when asked. That same argument is on offer from other Conservatives keen on moving past the vote that left them once again in second place. Article content The 'nothing to see here' case goes like this: In any previous election dating back 40 years the Tory results would have put them in power, likely with a majority. The fact this one didn't was the result of unprecedented exterior factors, specifically, the timing of Justin Trudeau's departure and the coinciding emergence of a U.S. president even his most fervent detractors didn't foresee as being quite this nuts. Alarmed and unnerved, voters opted for continuity and incumbency over the very real practical policies they'd been firmly embracing until then. Article content It's not a bad argument, but also not entirely convincing. In the Liberal bastion of greater Toronto, it sounds a lot like the local NHL team's annual excuses for once again failing to deliver the goods. 'Hey, at least we did better than our last collapse,' doesn't quite cut it. Article content Article content To its credit, the conservative universe isn't ready to simply roll over and accept the excuses. In this the party shows itself once again to be more independent-minded than the rival Liberals, who — after refusing to give themselves the power to oust Justin Trudeau, and living to regret the fact — made the same decision over his replacement. A majority of the caucus voted not to accept the rules of the Reform Act, meaning Prime Minister Mark Carney knows he can rule as he sees fit, safe in the knowledge the minions can't get rid of him. Would any other party in the democratic world vote to remain minions? Article content Conservatives not only adopted the Reform rules, but are discussing whether Poilievre should face a leadership review. A decision could be made as early as this month, with a review to take place next spring. It's possible they'll reject the option, but it would be a mistake. The world a year from now may look a lot different than it does today. Given the level of international uncertainty and the daily madhouse in Washington, it would be a shock if it didn't. Locking themselves into a recently-defeated leader when circumstances could easily demand an entirely different set of calculations would not be a show of confidence but an act of denial.
National Post
an hour ago
- National Post
Christine Van Geyn: Do police have the right to peer at you in your car with a drone?
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home's private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police? Article content Article content These questions are not hypotheticals; they are real live issues in Canadian law. We are living in the mass surveillance era. But many Canadians do not have a thorough understanding of how far surveillance goes, or what the limits on it are, or whether our legal protections are adequate. Article content Article content Article content The police in Kingston, Ont., are ticketing drivers at red lights for merely touching or holding their cellphones based on evidence collected by a drone. The Supreme Court recently heard a case about police entering a private driveway and not just looking in a truck window, but opening the door and collecting evidence — all without a warrant. The Alberta Court of Kings Bench just considered a case involving the facial recognition technology of Clearview AI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government was tracking the cellphone location data of 33 million Canadians. After the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, the government ordered the freezing of bank accounts of a police-compiled 'blacklist' of demonstrators, which was distributed by the government to a variety of financial institutions and even lobby groups. Article content Article content What these cases are demonstrating is that we have entered the era of mass surveillance, and Canada's legal protections are inadequate. Article content Article content First, Canada's privacy legislation is outdated. Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne has said we are at a ' pivotal time ' for privacy rights in Canada. Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has also called for updates to Canadian privacy laws, 'so they apply to all data, including anonymized data.' Much has changed since the current federal privacy legislation was drafted in the early 2000s, but efforts to modernize this law died when Parliament was prorogued. Article content Second, when it comes to state intrusions, the concept of privacy may be inadequate. Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has interpreted this right to mean the protection of a person's 'reasonable expectations of privacy' against state intrusions. The notion of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' has become a mantra in Section 8 jurisprudence. But some academics have said that in the era of mass surveillance, this guiding principle is an inadequate gatekeeper.
