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Kevin O'Leary, an entrepreneur and "Shark Tank" star, announced his entrance into the race to lead the Conservative Party in Canada.
The "Shark Tank" star, nicknamed Mr. Wonderful, announced his campaign in a video posted on his Facebook page after flirting with the idea for months.
He spoke about his background as the child of Lebanese and Irish immigrants and how Canada was the "land of opportunity" for his family.
"That's the promise of Canada. It always has been," O'Leary said. "Somehow, we've lost that. It's been squandered. And there's a reason — his name is Justin Trudeau.
"Today, with you, I'm starting my journey to do something special for him," O'Leary continued. "I'm going to help him find his real calling in 2019 — 'cause it's not running Canada. He doesn't know what he's doing."
O'Leary said Trudeau's "feeling of failure" is "permeating everything" in the country.
"I'm going to be his worst nightmare, but I'm doing it for us — you, me, my kids, yours," O'Leary said.
He likened Trudeau negotiating with US President-elect Donald Trump to "Godzilla versus Bambi" in a November interview after Trump won.
"I think Trump versus Trudeau is Godzilla versus Bambi," O'Leary told the CBC. "It's going to end very badly. You need someone that can negotiate."
With his announcement, O'Leary enters a crowded field to take over for Stephen Harper, Canada's former prime minister, as the leader of the Conservative Party. There are 13 other candidates, including current and former members of Parliament — some of whom have been campaigning since last spring.
He also waited until the morning after the French-language debate to announce his candidacy, meaning the reality-TV star didn't have to participate. O'Leary doesn't speak French, according to the CBC.
O'Leary's campaign will have to scramble to make up for lost time, with the Conservative Party's election five months away, on May 27.
Canada’s Financial Ministry has continued to act out its insanity. The Ministry has actually stripped Canada of every last, single ounce of gold.
This at a time when China and Russia are buying whatever they can. China holds over 1,700 tons of gold though it probably holds a lot more than that. Russia holds a huge amount of gold too and is buying more.
The dollar has again moved down hard against gold after moving down nearly US$1,000 over the first decade of the 2000s.
Knowing gold is in demand around the world and that the West’s major adversaries own hundreds and thousands of tons of it, what does Canada do? It sells.
Global News talked to a spokesperson for the Ministry and was told that the sale, “was done in the normal course of business for the government. The decision to sell the gold was not tied to a specific gold price, and sales are being conducted over a long period and in a controlled manner.”
Oh, great. The Ministry’s insanity is not the result of a short-term accident but a long long-term condition. It’s being done out of calculated maliciousness. I’ll explain in a moment.
But let me be clear: The sale is part of a larger pattern of profligacy, mental degeneration and destructiveness.
With wars around the world, the Western banking system again teetering again on the edge of insolvency and rage rising over central bank economies, most people with any common sense are buying real estate, farmland and precious metals.
Not Canada’s bankers. We just wrote about Canadian gold sales in early February after the news came out that Canada’s hyperactive Financial Insanity Ministry (which should be called FINish Canada) sold half of its current reserves, leaving only 1.7 tons.
We wrote this in retrospect:
In 2011, we posted this graphic, which showed then Prime Minister at the time, Stephen Harper, standing beside a to-scale image of the tiny amount of gold Canada held.
Then this past month, after the additional sale we updated the picture again.
And here is how it looks today:
Canada has reached the nadir of financial irresponsibility and Trudeau has scraped the bottom of his treasury, though he probably has no idea what his finance ministers have done. Of course it’s difficult to find pundits to explain it. They have to protect their jobs after all.
ZeroHedge, writing about this latest sell off, reached economist Ian Lee of the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University who explained that the US and thus the world went off the remnant of the gold standard in 1971 when Kissinger invented the petrodollar. “In the modern world,” he pontificated, “the metal is no longer considered a form of currency.”
Tell it to the Chinese who line up around the block to buy gold and silver. Or tell that to Indians who won’t sell their gold to the Indian government even for a fairly considerable interest rate on their non yielding metal assets.
Back in 1965, Canada had 1,023 tons of gold reserves but by 1985 it only held 500 tons. Throughout the 1990s up to 2002, Canada kept selling. And last month it held a laughable 1.7 tons. And this month it holds a hysterical nullity.
Congratulations to the Ministry of Insanity. What impeccable timing they have. Price inflation is climbing in Canada just like in the US. Canadian officials have probably sold close to the bottom just the way England did in 2000.
Such idiocy must be manufactured for a reason. In this case, it seems obvious to us that the West’s central bankers generally are doing all they can to debase currency and generally prepare the West and the world for an even deeper and more agonizing global depression.
Why would central bankers do such a thing? Because they want to create a more global currency and government and they will only get there by destroying the current nation-based system. They want to render Canada effectively insolvent and unable to act.
At TDV, we understand full well what these bastards are doing and its what we write about and analyze from a trading standpoint.
Our trades were up in the first months of this year by hundreds of percentage points because we are built to specialize in this type of environment when everything is falling apart and whatever is left standing won’t remain upright for long.
Central banks are destroying the world out of malice and rage in order to bring in something even worse. To stay up on the details and plot your next moves, you need someone telling the truth rather than relaying more central banking lies. Please subscribe to our TDV newsletter HERE.
Anarcho-Capitalist. Libertarian. Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks. Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast. Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and gold conferences including his own, the world's largest anarcho-capitalist conference, Anarchapulco, as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exit a joint press conference in Jerusalem in January 2014. (Photo: Flash90)
By: Sean Savage
Under the administration of President Barack Obama, much has been publicized regarding the above-average strain in the historically stalwart U.S.-Israel relationship. To the north, a different trend has unfolded with Canada, which has quickly become one of Israel’s most outspoken allies amid growing anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism worldwide.
But after nine years of Conservative party rule led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada has elected a new prime minister, Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau, who has promised Canadians a return to “sunny ways.” Will Canadian-Israeli relations fall under the umbrella of Trudeau’s promised bright future, or are darker days ahead?
Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, was Canada’s prime minister from 1968-84. The elder Trudeau is rated by many Canadian scholars as one of the country’s greatest prime ministers, with his accomplishments including preventing the Quebec province from separating.
Justin Trudeau, 43, is a relative newcomer to the political scene. Prior to his election to Canada’s parliament in 2008, he held a wide variety of occupations such as ski instructor and school teacher. As such, he remains a mystery to many political observers.
“The only really troublesome matter as far as Trudeau goes is his flakiness. In his defense, over the three years of his long march to the prime minister’s job, he has grown up quite a bit, or at least he’s given every impression of becoming incrementally more of a serious person,” Canadian author and journalist Terry Glavin, a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, told JNS.org.
Trudeau’s father, according to Glavin, “was a bit dodgy on Israel, but not in any dangerous way.” Pierre Trudeau opposed the Arab boycotts of Israel during much of the 1970s, abstained from a number of United Nations resolutions that were critical of Israel, and increased Canadian relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, named his brother Alexandre as his prime minister campaign’s senior adviser. In 2012, Alexandre produced a documentary film, “The New Great Game,” which was criticized by some for downplaying the threat of Iran’s nuclear program and heavily criticizing Israel.
The direction of the younger Trudeau’s official Israel policy remains to be seen. While a “deference to the old Liberal diplomatic establishment,” which is fairly anti-Israel, should be expected of the new government “at least to some extent,” the prime minister-designate himself “is such a new phenomenon that it is really difficult to say,” Glavin said.
In a recent interview with the Canadian Jewish News, Trudeau came out strongly against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, calling it “an example of the new form of anti-Semitism in the world.”
“When Canadian university students are feeling unsafe on their way to classes because of BDS or Israel Apartheid Week, that just goes against Canadian values,” said Trudeau.
Trudeau also said that the only way to achieve peace “is a two-state solution of a secure, democratic, stable Israel alongside a secure, democratic, stable Palestinian state.”
Yet Trudeau went against Israeli government policy by calling the recently reached Iran nuclear deal a “good step in the right direction,” though he cautioned that the agreement “needs to be carefully monitored.”
Further, Trudeau has gone after Harper policies that target Islamic terrorism and has promised to end Canada’s airstrikes against the Islamic State terror group as part of a U.S.-led coalition.
At the same time, regardless of Trudeau’s policies, what is the cost for Israel of losing Harper? During Harper’s tenure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israelis believe the Jewish state has “no better friend than Canada.”
In a widely anticipated January 2014 speech at the Israeli Knesset, Harper said Canada would stand by Israel ‘‘through fire and water.”
“Canada supports Israel because it is right to do so. This is a very Canadian trait, to do something for no reason other than it is right even when no immediate reward for, or threat to, ourselves is evident,” he said.
During his term, Harper pushed to pull financial support for anti-Israel NGOs such as Kairos and Rights and Democracy, while also withdrawing Canadian funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In 2009 and again in 2011, Canada declared that it would boycott the anti-Israel U.N. Conference on Racism, which was often used to single out Israel. Harper suspended relations with Iran over its nuclear program, opposed the lifting of sanctions following the Iran nuclear deal, and worked to expand and modernize Canada’s free trade agreement with Israel.
Indeed, Glavin said Harper’s greatest legacy might be establishing a strongly pro-Israel approach as a mainstream policy in Canada—and that may bode well for Israel under Trudeau’s leadership.
“The one big thing Harper managed to accomplish on the Israel front is a shift he engineered in the federal political center to a very pro-Israel posture,” Glavin told JNS.org. “It is no longer just an eccentric Canadian Conservative thing.”
“For all the buzz around Harper’s ‘strident’ support for Israel and his insistence that Canada must be ‘Israel’s best friend in the world,’ all three [major Canadian political] parties have come to want that mantle, more or less,” he added.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Laureen Harper, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Sara Netanyahu (Photo: GPO)
This support was evident during a Canadian foreign policy debate in late September.
“The issue of Israel where we most disagree as Liberals with Mr. Harper is that he has made support for Israel a domestic political football, when all three of us support Israel and any Canadian government will,” Trudeau said in that debate.
Since World War II, Canada’s foreign policy has centered on multilateralism and participation in international organizations. But Harper has moved beyond those traditional corridors and has focused on a stronger and more independent Canadian foreign policy.
“I think we will see something of a return to that [multilateralism], although it’s quite possible that Justin Trudeau will rise to the occasion and assert something of the liberal idealism in foreign affairs that Canadian voters have found so attractive in him,” Glavin said.
Christians United For Israel (CUFI), the largest pro-Israel organization in the U.S. with 2.2 million members, recently appointed a new CEO for its Canadian branch. CUFI said in a statement provided to JNS.org, “Canada has long been a stalwart ally of the Jewish state, and Prime Minister Harper’s friendship with Israel was exceptional. We look forward to the new government continuing Canada’s strong and longstanding support for Israel.”
Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai B’rith Canada, told JNS.org that Trudeau “has clearly stated that he will continue Canada’s support for Israel because it is the right thing to do on the world stage,” and that Israelis “can rest assured that B’nai B’rith will continue to be a strong advocate for the safety of the global Jewish community in Canada, Israel, and abroad.”
Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said, “We are grateful for the positions Mr. Trudeau and his party have taken on a number of issues, including: support for hate crimes legislation; sanctions against Iran; a range of social justice challenges; and a close Canada-Israel relationship—to name only a few.”
In Glavin’s estimation, Trudeau “is very much an untested quality,” but “is surrounded by enough smart people that he is unlikely to do anything too stupid.”
Read more at https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/51965/stephen-harper-exits-for-justin-trudeau-israel-faces-canadian-crossroads-jerusalem/#oft1xXxCDVvJxXyJ.99
Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts
By Robert Spencer in FrontPage:
OCTOBER 21, 2015
In FrontPage today I explain why the next Prime Minister of Canada will get along fine with the President:
For years, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has served as a welcome counterpoint to Barack Obama, and the object of wistful musings about what a fine President of the United States he would have been, if only he had been born south of the border: generally realistic about the jihad threat, determined to do what was necessary to meet that threat, and a strong supporter of Israel.
But now Canada at last has its own Obama: Justin Trudeau. And that means that Canada, like the United States, faces deep trouble ahead.
The new Prime Minister of Canada, like Obama, has consistently downplayed the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and ascribed it to other causes. Christine Williams, a Canadian journalist and a Federally appointed Director with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, has noted that in the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing, Trudeau issued a bizarre statement: “There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.”
At war with innocence. That rivals the Obama Administration’s ascribing the Fort Hood jihad massacre to “workplace violence.” In reality, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev explained after the bombing that he and his brother committed murder at the Marathon because they wanted to defend Islam. Tamerlan Tsarnaev had vowed to die for Islam.
But – also like Obama – as far as Justin Trudeau is concerned, if you’re looking into Islam as having anything to do with jihad terror attacks, you’re looking in the wrong place. Williams notes that Trudeau in 2013 “came under fire for his participation in Canada’s largest Islamic Conference, held in Toronto, and entitled, ‘Reviving the Islamic Spirit.’ The criticism was over the conference’s sponsor, IRFAN [International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy], which was stripped of its federal charity status because of its ties to the terrorist group, Hamas. Even the moderate Muslim Canadian Congress advised Trudeau not to attend.”
Did the Hamas links put Trudeau off? Not any more than the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ ties to Hamas stop American politicians – at least those on the Left – from appearing and glad-handing at its conferences. Trudeau,” Williams reports, “according to a report, Trueau smothered the Islamic conference in platitudes. (sound familiar?). He apparently went so far as to imply a totally inapt comparison in trying to liken the fierce division between English and French Canada, under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, to that of the current divisions between mainstream Canada and Islam.”
Trudeau has been behaving this way for years. In 2011, he visited the Al-Sunnah Al-Nabawiah mosque in Montreal, which was identified by U.S. intelligence officials as a site where “known al-Qaeda members were recruited, facilitated or trained.”
What is a man like Justin Trudeau, with the kind of record that he has, likely to do as Prime Minister? Pamela Geller points out that he is already on record with some very specific intentions that should be disquieting to anyone interested in defending the West: “Canada,” Trudeau said in September, “must immediately accept 25,000 Syrian refugees We can expect the following from Justin Trudeau in the short term.” He didn’t say anything about trying to screen out jihadis from among them – if that were even possible.
Trudeau will also restore Canada’s diplomatic relations with Iran and end his country’s involvement in military operations against the Islamic State. He will doubtless aid Obama in pressuring Israel at the G8 summit, where Harper had stood in the President’s way. At home, Trudeau will scrap a bill that strips convicted terrorists of their Canadian citizenship, along with part of Canada’s counter-terror legislation.
In sum, Justin Trudeau, young, handsome, born to the scepter courtesy his father, will fit right in with Barack Obama, David Cameron and the other leaders of the Western world today. And that’s why we’re in the fix we’re in.
- See more at: http://israel-commentary.org/?p=11995#sthash.NlvCgIRu.dpuf
On Monday, October 19th, the Canadian parliament will hold elections, possibly jeopardizing the pro-Israel stance of its government. The Conservative-led Canadian government has been one of Israel’s best friends for nine years, standing up for Israel time and again in international bodies such as the United Nations, as well as the G8, under the leadership of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Breaking Israel News spoke with Ilan Mann, a Conservative party activist working on the campaign of an incumbent MP (Member of Parliament) for Thornhill, which has a very strong Jewish representation. Manndescribed why it is so important for people who care about Israel, Jews and non-Jews alike, to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.
“The Conservative government’s record on Israel has been second to none, both in Canadian history, and in the international community,” he explained. “This is represented clearly by the fact that several Israeli and Canadian publications have commented that Harper is ‘Israel’s best friend.’”
In January 2014, Israel honored Harper by giving him the “Key to the Knesset” in thanks for his friendship. Harper, in an address to the Knesset, told the Israeli people and the world that Canada will stand with Israel through fire and water.
Harper’s “morality doctrine” has been the lynchpin of his government’s foreign policy for the Middle East, often garnering bad press for Canada. When Canada’s bid for a coveted seat on the United Nations Security Council was rejected, the Conservative government’s Israel stance was cited by its critics as a possible explanation why.
“The Conservative Party of Canada recognizes Israel as a beacon of freedom in a region plagued by oppression, tyranny and terror, which is why we will continue to stand with Israel on the world stage,” said Mann. Indeed, the Harper government has not flinched from the proverbial slap in the face it received from the United Nations, even going so far as to harshly criticize the international body by calling it a “debate club for dictators.”
It seems that other parties vying for control over the Canadian parliament are looking to appear strong on Israel as well. According to Mann, “This election, every party has tried to emulate the Conservative Party’s principled position on the Canada-Israel relationship.”
However, Mann added, this newly adopted stance may not be as genuine as it seems for the Liberal or National Democratic Party (NDP). “The reality is, that actions speak louder than words,” Mann said. “The Conservative Party is the only party that is not running, and will not run, a single anti-Israel or anti-Semitic candidate.”
“The Conservative Party will never take the middle road when it comes to the only democracy in the Middle East,” he added.
Mann said that the track records of other candidates running for office speak for themselves. “The NDP ranks are ripe with anti-Israel candidates, including star candidate Andrew Cash, who has spoken in favor of the BDS movement,” he pointed out.
Mann also noted that the Liberal party’s list features anti-Israel MPs. “The Liberal ticket includes Omar Alghabra, former head of the Canadian Arab Federation, who has refused to condemn Palestinian suicide bombers as terrorists, doesn’t believe that Hamas is committed to the elimination of Israel and said that Israel’s actions in defense of its citizen during last year’s operation in Gaza were ‘blind and cruel’,” he told Breaking Israel News.
Mann compared the empty rhetoric of other parties to the Conservative Party’s consistently pro-Israel actions. “Meanwhile, the Conservatives have spoken publicly against the BDS movement, have stood by Israel in the face of rockets and ongoing terror, and defunded the Canadian Arab Federation for their support of terrorism and promotion of anti-Semitism,” he said.
“When it comes to the question of the Canada-Israel relationship, there has never, in our short history as friend and allies, been a starker choice,” he concluded.
Canadians go to the polls on Monday, October 19th, in what is shaping up to be one of the closest elections in Canadian history. According to current election polls, the Liberal party has a strong lead. What this will mean for Canada’s close relationship with Israel remains to be seen.
Read more at https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/51515/israels-best-friend-at-risk-as-canadian-conservative-party-faces-elections-jerusalem/#1wvBZ9EW30gZMJy2.99
