The News Rundown

Toronto terror arrests raise questions about security screening

This week it was announced that Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, 62, and Mostafa Eldidi, 26, father and son were charged with 6 terrorism offences and that they were planning an imminent attack in the Toronto area.
The attack was to be carried out in the name of ISIS. ISIS is something that has faded from people's minds but it’s important to remember that given the current geopolitical focuses of Russia and China, ISIS still remains an issue.
The father was also known to RCMP in that he was involved with a June 2015 ISIS attack or “aggravated assault” outside Canada. What happened was that the father was shown in an ISIS video maiming another with a machete. It’s not known whether the person he was attacking was dead or alive at the time.
It was this aggravated assault as the media puts it where the father in question appeared in an ISIS propaganda video.
The investigation began in early July and was fast moving according to the RCMP. CSIS played a role in the investigation.
There is a publication ban in place but sources describe the attack as a low tech and hard to predict and hard to prevent. It would have involved stabbing, hacking, and slashing.
Of course at this point many people are going to be asking, were these people welcomed into our country?
The answer is yes.
The RCMP told the media that both suspects were Canadian but later Global News learnt that the son doesn’t have Canadian citizenship and the father arrived in Canada after the ISIS execution video was released.
The CBSA didn’t comment this week on this development.
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada also didn’t answer comments nor did pPublic Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc.
Since 2001 we’ve been told that we can not paint an entire community with a singular brush. That is true. But these revelations will have Canadians questioning that.
It will also be adding more fuel to the fire which is Canada’s upcoming immigration election next year and will have people asking if the values test deemed horrid by Trudeau in 2015 is needed and if Trudeau’s policies led to this slip-up.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said, “The Trudeau government must immediately explain how this alleged ISIS terrorist with blood on his hands managed to immigrate to Canada and be granted Canadian citizenship.”
The CBSA provided some clarity as to the flow on how someone gets into the country.
First either a refugee, permanent resident, or temporary resident application is made. Then Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada assesses the applicant's personal information and history against a set of criteria, which are the security screening indicators.
After this if there are concerns then it is handed off to the CBSA for in depth screening and if the concern is valid or even bigger then it goes to CSIS.
As for what the Trudeau government could do on this?
They could deport the younger suspect, the son, back to his original country.
They can also revoke citizenship from Canadians who misrepresented their pasts when they immigrated.
Supplementals:

It's clear that the BC United name change and rebranding, along with leader Kevin Falcon, have proven to be one of the biggest failures in modern Canadian politics. Numerous BC United MLAs have crossed the floor to the BC Conservatives, who are polling just behind the governing BC NDP. Speaking of polling, the BC United have fallen to a dismal 4th place, behind the BC Greens, and aren't projected to retain even a single seat at this point.
Even BC United itself acknowledges the rebranding failure, as the party says it wants to include the party’s previous BC Liberal name on the fall election ballot after internal polling shows up to 30 per cent of people didn’t know the party changed its name.
BC United communications director Adam Wilson says the party is preparing to formally apply to Elections BC to have a phrase acknowledging that it was formerly known as the B.C. Liberals included on the ballot for the election this fall.
Wilson said: “We conducted a poll of British Columbians over the last week and we found that 30 per cent of the respondents did not know that the B.C. Liberal Party had become BC United. So, that’s where the change is stemming from.” He also said he would not release the complete polling data.
BC United changed its name from the B.C. Liberals in April 2023 in a membership vote after Leader Kevin Falcon said a name change would fuel party renewal and end long-standing concerns about links to the federal Liberals by its Conservative supporters.
BC United, which has yet to formally apply to Elections BC to include the Liberal name on the ballot, now believes voters may need a reminder of the party’s recent past. Elections BC has not publicly commented on the proposal, but said in a statement it has yet to receive a formal request from BC United to change how its name is listed on the ballot.
Wilson said: “We still have almost one-third of British Columbians unaware that the party that was the B.C. Liberal Party, the party that built the Sea-to-Sky Highway, built the William R. Bennett Bridge, built the Port Mann Bridge, that they’ve changed their name to become BC United.”
It's clearly a desperation move to try and scrape back some goodwill from voters, who clearly lay much of the blame for BC's problems on the former BC Liberal government, who were in power from 2001-2017. Still, United is in free fall, with 12 of its now 23 members saying they are not running again, and with 5 members defecting to John Rustad's Conservatives, himself also elected as a BC Liberal in the last election.
The latest MLA to cross the floor and join the BC Conservatives was Teresa Wat, the MLA for Richmond North Centre. This follows Elenore Sturko in early June, and Lorne Doerkson in May, bringing the BC Conservatives up to 5 MLAs.
Wat’s defection wasn’t the only good piece of news for the Conservatives on Tuesday as a new poll by Research Co. puts the party only three points behind the NDP, with 38 per cent support among decided voters compared to the governing party’s 41 per cent.
United, meanwhile, is fourth with nine per cent support, a point behind the B.C. Greens who remain steady with 10 per cent.
Research Co. CEO Mario Canseco said the results demonstrate the public’s unhappiness with the NDP handling of the cost-of-living crisis and an increasing jump of support from United to the Conservatives among free-enterprise voters.
He said: “I think the biggest message is, we’re going back to the way in which elections used to be fought in this province, where you have a dominant centre-left and a dominant centre-right.”
Notably, this 2 party system is similar to what things were like before 2017 and is also very similar to what's in place in Alberta next door.
For those concerned about vote splitting, it's hard to say exactly what will happen, and where all the former BC Liberal voters will go.
Canseco doesn't seem to think it's an issue as things stand right now: “You go back to the moment of the centre-right split [it could help] the NDP and maybe win some of those seats with 35 to 37 per cent of the vote. Now, because of how much the Conservatives have grown, it no longer is a factor. If you have B.C. United in single-digits, the split isn’t going to hurt you.”
So at the end of the day, for those wanting to see change in BC, voting Conservative may be the best way to get it. One thing is for sure, Premier David Eby, as well as United's Kevin Falcon and Conservative's John Rustad have not been battle tested by an election as party leaders yet. October's election will be quite exciting to watch what will happen.
Supplementals:

Council approves budget hike for Green Line LRT, cutting 6 stations from Phase 1

This week in Alberta we are seeing another example of how our cities are unable to build infrastructure projects. And when they do they’re smaller, off budget, and don’t serve the originally intended purpose.
This week in Calgary it was announced that the green line LRT would lose 6 stations in phase 1 with its budget increasing to over $6.2b.
Calgary mayor Jyotic Gondek said, "Today's decision is more than a decade in the making and sets Calgary up for success for years to come, especially at a time when we are the fastest growing city in the nation.”
The main reporting on this issue doesn’t underscore what a huge change this is for the green line and how substantive the cost increases are.
Phase 1 of the green line is to terminate at Eau Claire near the Bow River. Phase 2 will head north of the Bow.
These changes are seeing stations be removed from Centre Street S, Ogden, South Hill, Quarry Park, Douglas Glen, and Shepard.
This means that the green line essentially becomes a project of the downtown core and just to the south of it rather than extending south with phase 1.
It remains to be seen if phase 2 will continue north beyond the bow.
City Councillors are right in that this isn’t what people were expecting. Councillor Sonya Sharp said that, "Calgarians will feel disappointed. I feel that some might actually feel duped.”
And that’s the entire thing behind this, the entire reason Green Line got funding was that it was going to go north, go south, and be an expansive project.
The shock continued with Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner who posted on X, “Two mayors and multiple councillors wasted a decade and untold tax dollars to decrease the scope down to this and increase the budget by many multiples. It doesn't come north, at all - which was the reason it got funded to begin with. I just can't. What a pathetic joke.”
The political knives also came out this week from former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi turned NDP leader blaming the UCP government for the fiasco.
Nenshi's version of events says that it was Kenney as a federal minister who stalled the project for two years then again as UCP leader. The money from the federal government was given in June 2015 by the Conservative government with a value of $1.5b.
He then blamed Kenney who was Premier in 2020 for putting a hold on the project but of course we all know what was happening in 2020. In addition to that companies were underbidding because they were underbidding on projects and in the eyes of Nenshi, the government could’ve got a good deal but while that re-negotiating was happening, the project was on hold.
Now obviously Kenney doesn’t agree with these events and Nenshi’s comments this week have actually caused Kenney to break his silence on political matters.
Kenney called Nenshi’s allegations nonsense and cited Nenshi’s “very florid imagination” saying, “This is a broader problem Naheed has. He just makes stuff up. I think people call it gaslighting.”
The reality is that the city takes the lead on a project like this with funding from the federal and provincial governments. Kenney ended by saying, “Naheed can try to pass the buck, but he was responsible and the city administration were the managers of this project.”
Going back to 2015 Nenshi said that the construction would be underway by 2017 and done by 2024. He imagined the cost to be about $4.5b and said that the money received from Kenney and the federal government of the day would mean the project could immediately be built as an LRT and not need to be built as a bus-rapid-transit line first.
The truth at the end of the day is that the line continues to shrink and it will be built at a higher cost. This is something that taxpayers have a right to be upset about.
We already know there’s a great amount of strife towards the current Calgary mayor and numerous on council. The green line debacle is something that will feature heavily in next year’s election.
Media reporting this week talked about what happened this week but not the sheer magnitude of it nor the amount of work that was done by both federal governments and both provincial governments to see the project go forward.
But at the end of the day, the city dithering both at the hands of Nenshi and Gondek led to some of the problems we see today with the green line.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Cabinet minister Harjit Sajjan requested 100 soldiers to perform with Punjabi pop star Diljit Dosanjh

Trudeau's Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Harjit Sajjan may have been shuffled from the Defence post last year, but he is still accruing scandal after scandal. We have already gone over his past scandals, including where he exaggerated by calling himself the 'architect of Operation Medusa', a major military operation in Afghanistan in 2006. He was later censored by vote in the House of Commons for his claims about Operation Medusa, as well as his poor handling of the issue of sexual assault within the Canadian Armed Forces.
Afghanistan would come back to haunt Sajjan once more, as the fall of Kabul and the takeover of the country by the Taliban was extremely quick and chaotic, and led to a scramble to get people evacuated. As Defense Minister, Sajjan instructed Canadian special forces to rescue about 225 Afghan Sikhs during the 2021 evacuation of Kabul. Anonymous military sources accused Sajjan of misusing military resources that could otherwise have been dedicated to evacuating Canadian citizens and Afghans linked to Canada.
Sajjan alleged that he merely passed along information about the Sikhs to the military and did not issue any direct orders to rescue them. However, General Wayne Eyre, the Chief of the Defence Staff, told the media that the military was following "legal orders" when it attempted the rescue of the Sikhs.
This scandal was just over a month ago, and already Sajjan is under fire for yet another controversy over misuse of his powers.
As Minister of International Development, on April 15th Sajjan lobbied the Canadian Armed Forces for 100 soldiers to act as backdrops for a pop concert by Punjabi musician Diljit Dosanjh.
Sajjan’s office confirmed that he received a request on April 15 from the singer’s manager, Sonali Singh, for Canadian soldiers to participate in his April 27 sold-out performance at BC Place. The following day, Sajjan sent a letter, dated April 16, from the manager, “along with his endorsement,” to Defence Minister Bill Blair, Sajjan’s press secretary Joanna Kanga said.
National Defence said Blair then forwarded the request to Canadian Armed Forces commanders, who rejected the idea of having soldiers serve as backdrops at Mr. Dosanjh’s concert. A military source said the request was for 100 soldiers.
Kanga said Sajjan makes no apologies for his support of the Punjabi pop star’s request: “Diljit Dosanjh is the biggest Punjabi artist in the world and was on the verge of making history as the first Punjabi artist to sell out a concert at one of the largest stadiums in Vancouver. Minister Sajjan agreed the concert would be a good opportunity for the Canadian Armed Forces to engage with and expand connections to a diverse community of young Canadians, along the lines of the CAF outreach and recruiting events at professional sporting events.”
The Office of the Minister of National Defence “provided the letter to the Canadian Armed Forces, which determined that meeting this request would not be feasible due to the tight timeline and personnel availability,” Lieutenant-Commander Linda Coleman said in a statement to The Globe.
“Additionally, it is crucial that participation in such events does not impact domestic and international operations, and our operational readiness must be sustained at all times,” she said.
Bill Blair's office did not push back at the refusal to comply with Sajjan’s request, Coleman said in the statement: “The office of the minister of national defence promptly acknowledged and thanked the Canadian Armed Forces for its assessment, thus concluding the matter.”
Coleman said the Armed Forces do play a role in public-relations activities such as the Calgary Stampede, professional hockey and baseball games, as well as multicultural festivals across the country: “While we strive to engage with Canadians and tell the Canadian Armed Forces story consistently and compellingly, our engagements are subject to a number of factors – including budgets, schedules, conflict of interest guidelines, and operational needs,” she said.
Diljit Dosanjh has been a vocal critic of India’s ruling government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lending his support in 2020 to Punjab and Haryana farmers who held mass protests after the Modi government brought in reforms to open the highly regulated farming sector to private players. At the time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was accused by the Modi government of making “ill-informed comments” when he criticized how the police had clashed with the protesters.
The artist kicked off his world tour with a sold-out stadium show at BC Place to a crowd of 54,000 people, the biggest Punjabi music concert outside of India.
Trudeau also recognized the appeal of Dosanjh among the Indo-Canadian community. He stopped by the Rogers Centre in Toronto before Dosanjh’s July 15 concert to meet the singer. Trudeau later posted pictures of the two on social media, saying: "Canada is a great country — one where a guy from Punjab can make history and sell out stadiums. Diversity isn’t just our strength. It’s a super power." His statement was widely criticized domestically and in India.
Kanga said Sajjan, who is also the MP for the riding of Vancouver South and the minister responsible for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada, was just doing his job as an MP for Vancouver: "As the MP for Vancouver South, and minister responsible for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada, Minister Sajjan will continue to support historical achievements with great economic and cultural benefits for Vancouver."
“Minister Sajjan attended the concert with his family. He bought his own tickets, and all expenses were covered by Minister Sajjan personally. It was a terrific show,” Ms. Kanga added.
With this many scandals under his belt, it's remarkable that Sajjan has been allowed to stay in cabinet after all this time. It's these sort of out of touch actions that have led to widespread discontent with the Trudeau government.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

"Minister Sajjan will continue to support historical achievements with great economic and cultural benefits for Vancouver. Sajjan attended the concert with his family, bought his own tickets, and all expenses were covered by Sajjan personally. It was a terrific show.” - Minister of Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan’s press secretary on not apologizing for asking the Canadian Armed Forces to send 100 soldiers to participate in a Punjabi concert.

Word of the Week

Aggravate - to make a problem worse or more serious, or to annoy or exasperate someone

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Show Data

Episode Title: Aggravating Rebrands
Teaser: A terror plot in Toronto gets thwarted, BC United wants to put their former name on the ballot, and Calgary’s Green line is more expensive and shorter than planned. Also, Harjit Sajjan lobbied to get soldiers to participate in a pop concert.
Recorded Date: August 3, 2024
Release Date: August 4, 2024
Duration: 54:22
Edit Notes: 2025

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX