The News Rundown

Trudeau plans on stacking Senate before retiring

Justin Trudeau is said to be looking to fill 10 senate vacancies before he leaves office in March. These senators would sit until the age of 75 and would leave the vast majority of the senate appointed by Justin Trudeau.
A source close to the PMO says that the selection process is already underway.
There are 3 senate vacancies from Ontario, 2 from Quebec, 1 from Saskatchewan, and 2 from BC. While New Brunswick and Nova Scotia each have 1 vacancy.
The Prime Minister established an advisory board when he formed government in 2015. This advisory board makes recommendations about who should be in the Senate.
The idea was surrounding this that you’d end up with a non-partisan senate. The reality though is that the people who have been appointed have been Liberal supporters.
Most of the independent senators appointed under Justin Trudeau have voted with the government and have proceeded to organize themselves into what is basically the Liberal party in the senate.
Past appointments for Alberta in particular have been LGBT activist and professor Kristopher Wells who in his work has been anything but non-partisan. Journalist Paula Simons was a frequent critic of the former Conservative government. And former mayor of Banff Karen Sorensen was also named to the senate and has been a Justin Trudeau supporter.
There’s also Justin Trudeau’s appointment of Charles Adler, former radio broadcaster who for the longest time was seen as the common sense conservative but earned points among progressives by standing up against Jason Kenney’s past LGBT policies and standing against the populism that Pierre Poilievre brought to Canada.
Adler also drew his own criticism in the past when he referred to Indigenous leaders as boneheads and to that the Manitoba chiefs did not want Adler appointed.
Trudeau also appointed Daryl Fridhandler who at his core contributed over $30,000 between 2004 and 2024 to the Liberal party.
With Trudeau on his way out we can look to these appointments to see what kind of senators Trudeau has appointed recently and we can expect him to up the ante as he is on his way out.
When Stephen Harper left office in 2015 there were 20 senate vacancies following multiple scandals, some of which that were amplified by the media at the time.
Harper did not make those appointments. He did not make those appointments before the election or after he knew he was leaving office.
Justin Trudeau opens up the can of worms that this could become par for the course for lame duck governments.
It also shows a certain level of entitlement within the Liberal party. A level of entitlement that we’ve seen in governments of the past - the Alberta Progressive Conservatives come to mind.
Most of Canada has been focusing on the incoming tariffs from the United States. After that the focus has been on the Liberal leadership race.
No one has stopped to ask Mark Carney or Chrystia Freeland or Ruby Dhalla what they think of this idea.
In fact one may say that the idea of senate appointments didn’t even break into the mainstream of Canada’s news discussion this week.
The unfortunate bit is that to make any meaningful changes to the senate the constitution must be opened.
That then opens up countless other special interests seeking additions to the senate and then requires 7 provinces representing at least 50% of the population to sign on to the changes.
It is this quagmire that spurred the Reform Party in the 1990s to make senate reform one of the central ideas of their platform.
The ability for a Prime Minister to appoint loyalists to the Senate while on the way out.
A reformed senate would also limit the power of population centres like the big cities and the provinces of Ontario and Quebec by providing a check on pure representation by population.
A reformed senate could also be accountable direct to the people either by election or recall.
A reformed senate could also be truly independent of the Prime Minister who appoints them.
They call thsemvez the independent senators group but a 2021 study found that the independent senators group voted in favour of bills proposed by the Trudeau government more so than any other group including those still aligned with the Liberal party.
These are facts in the weeds for many Canadians and as such they don’t crop up too often unless it’s convenient for the media to trash the senate.
But as the appointment of people like Paula Simons and Charles Adler shows, in Trudeau’s Canada it pays off in the end.
Supplementals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_politician#Senate

The BC NDP has taken a rare move in firing the entire elected school board of School District 61, which is located in the southern parts of Greater Victoria. School District 61 administers about 20,000 students in 28 elementary schools, 10 middle schools, and seven secondary schools in the municipalities of Esquimalt, Oak Bay, Victoria, View Royal and a portion of Saanich and Highlands.
The firing was the last step in an escalating situation after a lengthy dispute over the board's refusal to allow police in schools except in emergencies. The board has said the ban, in place since 2023, was based on reports that some students and teachers, particularly those who are Indigenous or people of colour, did not feel safe with officers in schools. The ban however resulted in parent-led protests, criticism from local First Nations and politicians, and concerns from local police regarding an uptick in gang activity in south Island schools.
But B.C. Education Minister Lisa Beare said Thursday that students were at risk in the district from the board’s failure to implement a revised safety plan, as she fired the nine-member board and appointed a lone trustee to oversee the district until municipal elections set for the fall of 2026. That trustee is Sherri Bell, a former president of Camosun College and superintendent of schools in Victoria, and Beare said her appointment, effective immediately, cleared the way for completion of a safety plan.
She announced the appointment of a special adviser to help the board “revise and improve” a safety plan, saying it was evident there had been a breakdown between the board and community agencies and rights holders.
But Beare said in her statement Thursday there was evidence the board did not assist the special adviser, demonstrated significant governance issues and failed to collaborate with partners in the development of a safety plan.
Beare said at a news conference that the board failed to work with local First Nations, police and other key stakeholders to prioritize student safety.
“First Nations leadership have told me directly that they cannot continue to work with a board that does not believe in governing with transparency, integrity or in the public interest,” Beare said.
Songhees Nation Chief Ron Sam expressed “immense gratitude for Minister Beare and her entire team” in a statement. Sam said: “Recognizing that there are individuals and communities who will be impacted in significant ways by this decision, we want to express our deep compassion for the members of the SD61 board and acknowledge the challenges that they may face as a result of this decision.”
The firing of a B.C. school board is uncommon but not unprecedented. In 2016, the BC Liberal government fired the Vancouver School Board for failing to bring in a balanced budget. The same year, the North Okanagan-Shuswap board was fired over its financial woes.
Conservative Opposition critic for education Lynne Block called the firing of the Victoria school board “long overdue,” in a situation that “wasted time and resources, as well [placing] unnecessary stress on the community.”
While the lack of a safety plan and the removal of liaison officers from schools was ill-considered, it was the "remarkably inept, offensive and dismissive way they treated people who objected or even so much as questioned their judgment that contributed to their termination," according to Times Colonist reporter Les Leyne.
The report by special adviser Kevin Godden — appointed by Beare to help the board clean up its own mess — is one of the harshest audits ever conducted of a public body in B.C. The most stunning example was its treatment of Indigenous stakeholders. Five years into a massive provincewide reconciliation effort in which every public body is supposed to be keeping First Nations interests top of mind, the school board managed to alienate nearly every important Indigenous leadership group in Greater Victoria.
Some First Nations think the board view was based on U.S. data about marginalized students that has nothing to with the local situation.
Godden noted widespread criticism about how they engaged with others as well. The board ignored police chiefs’ input multiple times and didn’t respond to other parties on urgent process issues.
Godden reported that an app was created requiring principals to record all instances of police contact. The data was then sent monthly to the board. “One of the unintended consequences of this was a hyper-vigilance about police presence in schools for fear of going against the wishes of the board.”
Some people are worried about the arbitrary dismissal of a democratically elected body. But Godden’s recounting of the disdain these now-former trustees displayed to stakeholders and taxpayers suggests we’re much better off without them. Only about a third of eligible voters turned out in 2022 to put them in power.
It's the sort of power hungry people like the former SD61 school board that get into power when voter engagement is at its lowest. The media needs to be more informative on elected officials, so that these situations don't happen, but also so that the public has a better handle on what's going on in their own city.
Supplementals:

Held hostage': City council reluctantly approves province's Green Line plan

The City of Calgary has voted to go ahead with a new Green Line LRT plan as proposed by the province.
This is the plan that would see the line built from a new grand central station in Victoria Park to Shepard in the southeast.
The province mandated elevated track through downtown.
If everything goes to plan the province hopes to see construction start later this year with functional planning of the downtown routing complete by 2026.
This was passed by a divided city council with Mayor Jyoti Gondek, councillors Walcott, Mian, Penner, Dhaliwal, and Wyness voting against.
Councillor Jasmine Mian was so angry over how the province handled this that she has declared she will not run for re-election.
In her own words, the city was held hostage over the project and this decision ‘was the last straw’.
The issue for Mian and others including the mayor is that the province insisted on an elevated downtown portion despite the Calgary Downtown Association and local business owners wanting another option.
Mayor Gondek also said, “they’ve showed us their actual intent to contractually obligate the City of Calgary and its taxpayers for a vision that’s only been five per cent designed . . . the province has dumped all of this risk and responsibility onto the city.”
For the vast time that the project has been on the table, it has been under control of the city. As such the city does share a portion of the responsibility for not being able to execute on a long term vision.
A decision on the Green Line had to be made by March 31 or else it would not have been eligible to be included in the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.
Presently the city’s share of the project stands at 46%, the province will pay 26% and the federal government 27%.
The province for their part is happy because in their view they get more stations, 76% more track, and 60% projected more users.
They also see themselves as removing a blockage in what became the back and forth of city hall going back to 2015.
2015 is also when current NDP leader Naheed Nenshi was mayor of Calgary.
Nenshi sees this as blatant political play by the UCP and went as far to call it a “shameful day for the province.”
He also pledged that should the NDP form government that they will build the full Green Line from the north to downtown and then to the southeast.
The question is though that if the city wasn’t able to get it done with Nenshi as leader, wouldn’t he then be doing the same thing he’s ridiculing the UCP for today? That is, intervening in municipal politics?
Big government types like Nenshi seem to want to have it both ways, they want cities to have their own powers but at the same time they also want to give money directly to the cities to have projects of their own viewpoint implemented.
The province has a chance here to show that with decisive action things can get built.
We’ve long said here at Western Context that one of the core issues facing our country is the inability to build anything - anything at the federal level, provincial level, and even in our cities.
The province has to show that they can get it done. If they can’t then a new plan is needed to build infrastructure like the Green Line and other projects that are desperately needed.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Trudeau Government Left Canada Vulnerable to Foreign Interference, Report Finds

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, a Court of Appeal justice from Quebec, who led the commission on foreign interference in Canadian Politics, released her final report this week, which contained recommendations to the government to implement before the next election, some token scathing criticism, but not much in the way of spicy evidence revealed to the public.
The final report, which summarized 18 months of hearings, testimony and examination of classified intelligence documents, said “Trust in Canada’s democratic institutions has been shaken, and it is imperative to restore it,” and that the government’s efforts to rebuild trust have been “piecemeal and underwhelming.”
The final report included 51 recommendations by the commission to strengthen Canada’s electoral system, ranging from stricter rules for the country’s political parties and third-party financing to better sharing of intelligence and oversight of disinformation during campaigns.
Justice Hogue said about half the recommendations “should be implemented promptly, perhaps even before the next election.” However, the Trudeau government had no immediate response to the report, and with Trudeau himself announcing he will step down, makes it unlikely that the commission’s recommendations can be put in place before upcoming elections, which will be held in October or earlier, if Jagmeet Singh decides to actually follow through on his promise to stop supporting the Liberal minority government.
Months of public hearings, as well as the sworn testimonies of witnesses and the release of intelligence reports, revealed how rising foreign powers — especially China and India — had tried to further their interests in Canada by backing or opposing certain candidates in the elections.
In particular, Hogue decided two people, known only as "Person B and Person C" can give evidence in secret about how the People’s Republic of China “co-opts and leverages some Chinese Canadian community associations and politicians of Chinese origin.”
Hogue also issued a simultaneous order to seal their affidavits from the public for 99 years, after commission materials are deposited at the National Archives of Canada when the inquiry ends.
Hogue added: “The information that Person B and Person C have is primarily first-hand. Any public disclosure of this evidence would give rise to a very significant risk – if not inevitability – that the actual identity of Person B or Person C would become known to others who were involved in the events in question. This would include individuals who may be acting at the behest of the PRC.”
It's a decision that protects those two witnesses but leaves everyone wondering and speculating whether or not there was actually fire from all the smoke that we saw.
China and India focused their activities in electoral districts in Toronto and Vancouver, where large and well-organized Chinese and Indian diasporas are populated by some of the voters highly sought after by Canada’s political parties. The public hearings showed that China and its proxies tried to undermine candidates of the main opposition Conservative Party, which has adopted a tough line on China’s record on human rights and its control over Hong Kong.
By contrast, the Chinese government and its proxies tended to support candidates of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, intelligence reports showed. After Trudeau was first elected in 2015, he pushed for friendly ties with Beijing, including through a free-trade agreement, and dismissed warnings about allowing the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies to work in Canada.
That's one reason why the Liberal government's handling of the situation was so limp-handed, because it actually benefited them directly.
A late-in-the-game addition to Hogue’s study stemmed from a bombshell report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report last June, stating some parliamentarians were “semi-witting or witting” participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in Canadian affairs.
Hogue said: “There are legitimate concerns about parliamentarians potentially having problematic relationships with foreign officials, exercising poor judgment, behaving naively and perhaps displaying questionable ethics. But I did not see evidence of parliamentarians conspiring with foreign states against Canada. While some conduct may be concerning, I did not see evidence of ‘traitors’ in Parliament.”
In a sense, with so little tangible information released in the report, it could be considered that Hogue is actually defending Trudeau in the report, even as she blamed the government for its missteps.
In many ways the Hogue commission and its final report was a repeat performance of previous inquiries into the serious matter of foreign interference in Canada’s government and elections. Hogue’s career footnote that is seldom recounted is the fact that she was a colleague of Pierre Elliott Trudeau at the Heenan Blaikie law firm.
More to the point, Hogue was member of the legal team who brokered the deal for Justin relating to his quick exit from West Point Grey Academy, a deal that included an expensive non-disclosure agreement. Details of the incident(s) that landed drama teacher Trudeau in hot water have leaked out over the years, but all mention of his time and departure from West Point Grey has been labelled “conspiracy theory” and avoided by the government-sponsored legacy media. The Hogue-Trudeau backstory is purposefully overlooked.
The report states that China is the country of gravest concern for Canadians, the main perpetrator of foreign interference. Hogue cited six instances of foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. She concluded that although the overall election results were not affected, foreign meddling in the election process is a serious issue.
So either it's a serious issue, or it didn't affect elections, it can't be both.
In his National Post editorial column, Jamie Sarkonak was perhaps the most cynical in his criticisms of the commission’s work. He lambasted Hogue for concluding that acts of foreign interference were a result of a systemic problem, “Overall, the report amounts to another Laurentian elite lecturing the rest of Canada about how a major system failure in government — caused by people who supervise and serve it — amounts to another precious Learning Moment For All of Us Canadians. Just like the blackface incident, just like the Kokanee groping allegation. Instead of, you know, an occasion for a few major high-profile firings, fines and perhaps criminal investigations.”
As a concluding thought, it is most troubling that Canadians are only getting glimpses of the controversies arising from the tight ties between the Trudeau Liberals and the CCP. Foreign interference in elections is just one issue. It is a Pandora’s box once the lid is raised: CCP police stations operating in Canada; the activities of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; denial of the genocidal human rights violations of the Uyghurs; delay in establishing a foreign agent registry; the lobbying activities of Chinese business organizations; and the approvals of Chinese purchases of natural resource companies. Then there is the Chinese money flowing into the Trudeau Foundation. What about the possible gain of function virus research that was shared between the Winnipeg Lab and Wuhan Lab? And what about those 11 possible treasonous parliamentarians who have been colluding with foreign governments? Even at the end of the story, we are still left with many questions.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“There are legitimate concerns about parliamentarians potentially having problematic relationships with foreign officials, exercising poor judgment, behaving naively and perhaps displaying questionable ethics. But I did not see evidence of parliamentarians conspiring with foreign states against Canada. While some conduct may be concerning, I did not see evidence of ‘traitors’ in Parliament.” - Justice Marie-Josée Hogue on the contradicting information given in the final report on foreign interference in Canadian Politics.

Word of the Week

Traitor - a person who betrays a friend, country, principle.

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Show Data

Episode Title: Traitors and Testimony
Teaser: Trudeau plans to stack the Senate before resigning, a Victoria school board is fired by the BC NDP, and Calgary reluctantly approves the UCP’s Green Line plan. Also, the final report into foreign interference is released by Justice Hogue.
Production Code: WC-405-2025-02-01
Recorded Date: February 1, 2025
Release Date: February 2, 2025
Duration: 1:01:08
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX