How absurd does it have to get?

How many victims need to shutter their businesses?

How much stress should defendants have to endure with this ridiculous case?

How much more international embarrassment should Canada endure over this?

I am of course speaking about the bizarre and ongoing saga of Jonathan (Jessica) Yaniv and the ludicrous claims brought before the BC Human Rights Tribunal.

The question is: “Should a woman be forced by law to handle a man’s balls upon demand.”

I am not making things up. That is what this entire circus boils down to.

This sham is not harmless and the damage is only amplifying for Yaniv’s victims in this case. Some have settled, others have shut down their businesses and the rest are confused and unimaginably stressed while the clowns at the BC Human Rights Tribunal sit on their hands with this idiocy.

The BC Human Rights Tribunal has the means to dump this sham right now. They have had the means to end this injustice since it began over six months ago.

From the BC Human Rights Tribunal page:

” Reasons the Tribunal may dismiss the complaint under section 27(1)(c)

The Tribunal is not deciding the complaint or any defence. Instead, it is deciding whether a hearing is not warranted because there is no reasonable chance that the complaint will be successful at a hearing.

The Tribunal may dismiss the complaint if it determines that:

• there is no reasonable prospect that the complainant will prove one or more of the parts of discrimination at a hearing, or
• there is no reasonable prospect of success because a defense would be proved at a hearing.”

The key word here is “reasonable” and it has been used multiple times. The members of the tribunal have a degree of discretion in these cases though they refuse to use it. Nothing about this entire travesty or Yaniv is reasonable.

One can see why Yaniv initially tried to remain anonymous when all this began. Under the light of public scrutiny, Yaniv has been exposed as a very odious person who at best is a simple scam artist and at worst is a child predator. There is some pretty clear evidence of both.

On the scam artist front it is evident that Yaniv is hoping to get compensation from these actions whether from rulings of the tribunal or from settlements from those just wanting to free themselves from this legal limbo. Apparently a couple of Yaniv’s victims have already settled though it is unknown what Jonathan may have gotten from them. This is extortion and Yaniv is using B.C.s gormless human rights commission very effectively in order to do so.

The more disturbing revelation is Yaniv’s predilection towards young girls. Jonathan is setting trans rights back as he does exactly what opponents of trans rights claim will happen if we have trans people using washrooms in their new gender. He is entering the ladies rooms in order to take surreptitious pictures of young girls.

His communications online with young girls and apparent creepy discourse on menstrual issues is distressing and may be indicative of a dangerous, predatory man.

Yaniv’s blatant racism in many of his communications have hardly made him endearing either. Perhaps his motivation in targeting these woman had racial motivations rather than fiscal.

It is not beyond reason to speculate that Yaniv is not actually a transgender person but is purposely identifying as such in order to perpetuate his numerous scams.

As media pays attention to Yaniv, it becomes clear that he is quite unstable and possibly dangerous to others as he brandishes illegal weapons during interviews.

Yaniv travels in a handicapped scooter when in public.

This appears to be part of another of Yaniv’s scams however as he proved himself to be rather agile when he wants to be.

Yaniv sure sprinted quickly upon realizing that his “handicapped” farce was being exposed on camera.

Despite all this, the luminaries at the BC Human Rights Tribunal think it may take them 3 more months to rule on Yaniv’s vexatious claims.

How bad does it have to get before a dismissal is applied?

The BC Rights Tribunal is as complicit as Yaniv himself in the victimization of these innocent, immigrant women who simply didn’t want to handle a man’s genitalia.

The means are there for the tribunal. This punishment of innocent women can be brought to an end tomorrow. There is no excuse to drag this out any longer.

Are the fools running the BC Human Rights Tribunal capable of applying simple reason though? Sadly it looks unlikely and this is an embarrassment to us all.

Alberta has never fared well when a Trudeau holds power in Ottawa. It took over a decade for the energy sector to recover from Pierre’s National Energy Program and it has languished stagnant under Justin’s tenure.

Justin Trudeau has all but killed Alberta’s energy sector through legislation such as Bills C-48 and C-69 which have caused an investment exodus from the province along will killing Energy East and the Northern Gateway pipeline. Trudeau’s inept dithering led to Kinder Morgan bailing on the long planned Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion which led to a hasty and ill planned purchase of the pipeline by the federal government. To date not a gram of dirt has moved in the construction of that line.

While the oil and gas sectors in Texas, Pennsylvania and even Kazakhstan are booming, Alberta’s industries remain in stasis due to lack of pipeline capacity and lack of investment. We are losing millions daily and Trudeau couldn’t care less.

This fall we have another federal election and while we should be looking forward to this as an opportunity for the betterment of Alberta it looks like things may become far worse.

While people have tired of Trudeau’s infantile antics and his shallow governance, Andrew Scheer has so far remained incapable of capitalizing on that weakness for the Conservatives. A lot can change politically in a few months but as of this writing things are not looking good.

The Liberal Party under Trudeau appears locked into position to win a minority government this fall and that will be nothing less than an unmitigated disaster for Alberta’s already damaged economy.

In a minority situation, Trudeau will be forced to form a coalition with the NDP and or the Greens in order to remain in power.

BC is providing a live example of a weak leader who is being controlled by a Green Party leader who holds the balance of power in the province. Horgan is Premier in name only while Weaver with only a few seats is calling the shots in that province.

Trudeau is too weak and gormless to maintain control in a coalition situation so we have to look at who will actually govern Canada by proxy should we see a Liberal minority.

Will Elizabeth May gain enough seats to hold the balance of power? Sour Liberals in lower mainland BC and select Eastern ridings may indeed switch to Green and give her those seats.

How would life with Liz holding the levers of power in Alberta look? Not very damn good.

One can hope that she sticks to her more loony pet projects such as banning WiFi but we know in reality that she will set her rheumy sights on Alberta.

May is speaking openly about shutting down Alberta’s entire fossil fuel sector and she will eagerly get to work on doing exactly that if given the chance.

The TransMountain expansion will surely be dead in the water. May would demand that in order to support Trudeau immediately.

Liz just enjoyed a token arrest while protesting that expansion last year. I wonder if she got to sample any prison hooch during her short time in holding?

The other person that Trudeau will wheel and deal with in order to hold power is Jagmeet Singh.

Singh isn’t a lot brighter than Trudeau is but he is an anti-energy ideologue and he will demand a stop to the Trans Mountain expansion as well and will be sure to push for Canada deeper into a socialist leaning mire. Justin will be way too weak to withstand that pressure.

The future looks bleak. One can hope that Scheer finds sudden strength and national appeal in short order but it is a lot to hope for. Polls certainly aren’t always accurate but they have been pretty consistent so far.

Alberta and Saskatchewan can be counted on to vote Conservative but we know quite well that our votes don’t really matter on the federal scene in the end.

Things are bad for Alberta right now but they can always unfortunately get worse.

We will do all we can in leading up to the election but I think that we had best get to work on our post-election contingency plan as well.

I am going to guess that it was about a year and a half ago when Dave Bjorkman called me up at my pub. He explained that he was working to revive the Alberta Independence Party which had essentially been defunct since falling apart under my watch nearly twenty years ago. Dave was asking my permission to use the party name. I have and haven’t had any legal claim to that name since back when I led the party. All the same, I did appreciate his doing me the courtesy of tracking me down and asking. I told him it was his for the taking and wished him luck.

I put it out of my mind after that. I have been sporadically contacted by secessionists over the years who were working to build one separatist party or another. None have really managed to gain much traction.

Well over the coming months I kept hearing from Dave. As a welder he was of modest means and he had little experience in party organization. What I quickly learned though is that Bjorkman is exceedingly tenacious and optimistic. His dogged determination made up for his not having had a large political contact or donor list. Using social media (I dearly wish we had had such tools when I was leading the AIP), Dave gathered a respectable following and built the basis of the Alberta Independence Party.

Dave came out to my pub a few times to chat. He was always in recruitment mode and I appreciate his efforts but I couldn’t be convinced to get involved. I got to see how his stubborn determination managed to get the job pulled off though.

Getting a party registered in Alberta is very difficult to do. One has to either have three sitting MLAs, or get nearly 8000 signatures from registered voters (not online signatures, they must be gathered on paper in person with full address and phone number and in a limited time frame), or have endorsed candidates running in half of the constituencies in Alberta in a general election.

As the election neared last spring, I admit I was pretty skeptical about seeing a registered Alberta Independence Party entering the race.

Well I’ll be damned if they didn’t pull it off and announce 46 candidates on nomination day thus becoming a registered party for the election.

The Alberta Independence Party was in the race.

This was an impressive organizational feat. While the mechanism to attain registration through having candidates in over half of the constituencies has been around for a long time, the Alberta Independence Party was the first party to have ever actually done it that way.

The logistics alone are brutal. While unregistered a party can’t offer tax credits for donors which offers a tough fundraising hurdle. An aspiring party has to round up over 44 people willing to run for them. These people will have to put forth a deposit to run and get the requisite signatures to run in the couple weeks between the writ drop and nomination day. Many people can talk big but when it comes to actually pounding the pavement for signatures and signing a cheque they often don’t follow through. Bjorkman and his party organizers managed to get 46 people to do it. I can only guess how many more they signed up but who didn’t follow through.

There are few people more difficult to organize than separatists who are about as independent by nature as it gets.

Over the next couple weeks the party ran a mostly unnoticed campaign with few to no scandals but they made little to no mark on the ballots when voting day came as well.

To be blunt, the 46 candidates were electorally slaughtered.

The Alberta Independence Party garnered 0.7% of the popular vote. Their best showing was 2% and most candidates struggled to get 1%.

There were a number of factors contributing to the electoral obliteration.

The AIP was technically only weeks old as a registered entity. Nearly nobody knew who the hell they were. They had next to no money and virtually no experience. It is clear that they have some dedicated and gifted organizers among them but there are limits. They didn’t have time to build an actual formal campaign or a way to reach out to the general public. They really could only manage to tread water as a party until election day and they did so as well as they could.

Another and even bigger challenge for the party is that while Albertans will respond favorably to polls for independence, when push comes to shove they are reticent about actually voting for it in an election. Albertans are reluctant separatists at best (for now).

Now the Alberta Independence Party will endure its next test. The doldrums between elections for a fringe party can be brutal. I know this from my years on the board with the Alberta Alliance and then the Wildrose Party. This is the time when the funds are tightest, interest is lowest and infighting can be highest.

The AIP has a diverse group of supporters. They are unified by a shared desire to pull Alberta out of confederation. This does not mean however that they all agree on what an independent Alberta should look like. The current policy direction of the party is unfocused and has something of a shotgun approach. There are many potential flash points for supporters to fight about and they will.

When times are slow, parties can be targets for the more extreme sorts to slip in as well. If the party organizers are not careful, they may find their party taken over by folks who really don’t have their best interest in mind. That can kill a party fast to say the least.

What a new party needs to avoid these pitfalls is strong leadership.

A few weeks ago, interim leader Dave Bjorkman resigned. He is tired and took the party as far as he feels he can for now (at least that’s what I gather, I plan to chat with him).

The AIP can’t afford to drift leaderless for long. It takes far less time to tear down a party than it does to build one up and right now they are vulnerable for an internal explosion.

The party needs a leadership race and it needs it soon. That being said, they have to be careful as their choice of a new leader will be critical for the future of the party.

Support for Alberta independence has been steadily growing for years. Just last week a poll indicated that 30% of Albertans feel that Alberta would be better off out of Canada than within it. Bear in mind this does not mean that these 30% would vote to leave, it just means that they feel we are getting a bad deal. With a good ground game and good leadership, a party such as the AIP could change many of those folks from being soft to being dedicated supporters for independence.

I feel a sense of déjà vu as we head into a general election this fall. In 2000 Canada went to the polls in a terribly divisive federal election. Jean Chretien barely even stepped foot in Alberta during the campaign but didn’t hesitate to take shots at Alberta culture for political gain in the East. Stockwell Day led the Canadian Alliance which was already considered a compromise by grumbling Albertan Reformers. Chretien increased his seat count in that election and Albertans felt that their compromise was for nothing, Separatism flared in Alberta and the Albertan Independence Party of 2001 came into being under a dashing young leader.

As we approach this fall’s election, I feel much deeper separatist undercurrents than I did back in 2000. Alberta has been taken for granted and abused by the federal government and we know it. If (and it looks very possible) Trudeau maintains a majority or even worse, forms a minority coalition with Elizabeth May, we will see a resurgence of separatism in Alberta like none seen since Pierre Trudeau dropped the NEP upon us.

Will the Alberta Independence Party be prepared to capitalize on this though? Will they have a leader or a leadership race under way? Will they have a rational approach or will they be dominated by fringe thinkers? Will Jason Kenny take a strong enough stance in order to keep his party support from bleeding to a new separatist competitor?

There are a lot of questions in the air.

Personally, I don’t think a party approach is the best way to pursue Alberta’s independence but it can be a facet of the approach. I didn’t think that they would get registered either so I can certainly be wrong here too.

With the combination of a Liberal victory in the federal election and a good leadership race within the AIP producing a strong leader, I think we may see the AIP suddenly entrenched as a formidable, long term player on the Alberta political stage.

They could of course implode as well. We will have a much better idea in about four months or so. I look forward to seeing who pursues the leadership of the party when they get the race formally going.

We are living in interesting times.

Calgary’s city council and administration (its harder and harder to distinguish between them) were pissed off before they went to their summer break this year. They entered the summer in dealing with a full blown tax revolt from businesses who have been enjoying tax hikes up to 400% and then spent months in squabbling over who was at fault for the fiscal disaster and how they may possibly fix it.

City council cobbled together a rather flaccid spending reduction proposal calling for a reduction of $60 million in spending. $60 million is a drop in the bucket for a city that spends nearly $4 billion per year. That however was the best that the cowardly council could come up with.

They then dumped it on city administration to figure out where to make these relatively miniscule cuts. City administration is utterly beholden to civil service unions so they promptly ensured to cut in areas where they knew that citizens actually wanted their tax dollars expended. Rather than find efficiencies in administration or cut unnecessary programs (they are myriad), they made sure to cut things such as emergency services and low income transit passes. City administration wanted to make sure that these small cuts hurt as much as humanly possible in hopes that taxpayers would never dare question how their money was spent as possible.

Taxpayers remain unconvinced in the efforts of city hall to say the least. Its hard to convince people that the city is working at peak efficiency when it takes ten city workers to paint a small green box on a city street.

Council and city administration were not happy with those damned uppity taxpayer ingrates during this summer of discontent.

These people plan on getting tax funded legacies and dammit they won’t be deterred.

Having learned from the Olympic bid fiasco last fall, council and administration made very sure that the new Flames arena deal would never go before those unwashed taxpayers for scrutiny much less debate or a vote. They dumped the deal in front of us with scant days to look at it, enshrined the expenditure of hundreds of millions and then retreated for their summer break. They sure can suddenly become efficient when working together to pull one over on the taxpayers.

The arena deal was not enough however. Despite Calgary city hall still remaining in fiscal crisis, the powers that be have decided to lob yet another turd into the taxpayer’s punch bowl for the summer. This one involves Stephen Avenue Mall.

At what is still an unknown cost, the city has hired a firm from Denmark to redesign Stephen Avenue. As with their purchases of ghastly, overpriced public art, apparently it was impossible to find a Canadian company capable of doing this job much less a Calgarian one. Denmark knows what is best for Calgarians in this case.

There is little doubt that Stephen Avenue Mall is not living up to its potential. What the mall needs though is a thriving business sector not a costly, tax funded foreign makeover.

Through over a decade of overspending and inept management, Calgary city hall has decimated downtown businesses. Massive tax hikes, outrageously high parking costs and a terrible regulatory regime have taken their toll on the sensitive retail and hospitality businesses on Stephen Avenue. Who wants to go down there to walk past shuttered stores and closed restaurants?

Stephen Avenue does not have natural scenery. It is right in the middle of a downtown loaded with skyscrapers. That means people have to be drawn to visit the area and that means we need lively, vibrant enterprise.

Lets face it, we are a seasonal city. The “world class” cities that Nenshi and others claim to want to emulate all have milder climates than ours. Businesses on Stephen Avenue have to make the bulk of their revenue during the 5 nice months of the year and tighten their belts during the other 7. Bike lanes haven’t, don’t, won’t and will never bring a large influx of spenders. A strip of interesting stores, bars and restaurants would but they can’t afford to operate in Calgary right now.

When I hear Nenshi and city planners dreamily talking of their planned wonderland downtown all I can think of is how the Mayor and city planners sounded at the start of the 1990s when they said that Eau Claire Market was going to transform the neighborhood and turn into a social hub which will be enjoyed for generations.

The Eau Claire district has advantages over Stephen Avenue right off the bat. It is right next to the river and a beautiful park. There is plentiful parking in the area though the prices are still ridiculous. It has a lot more residential traffic as well as there are many large condos in the area.

Despite all that, the whole Eau Claire concept was a catastrophic failure. The mall was opened with great fanfare and anchors such as the Hard Rock Cafe were drawn in. Paths were constructed from all directions and the mall was marketed heavily within and outside of Calgary. Despite all that, within a few years the mall was already losing most of its retail tenants and people shied away from the area. Today the mall simply looks pathetic.

We have to be realistic (a tall order for city hall). Calgary has no Granville Island and it never will. We have a rough climate and a population that would rather go to the mountains for a day trip than walk around some city planned mall. Lets work within these constraints.

Stephen Avenue is historic and has a good base. All it needs is thriving enterprise and all enterprise needs is to be left the hell alone by city hall. It will take a mass turnover of city council in the next election in order to do this however. Until that changes, city hall will continue to try to micromanage business development at the expense of taxpayers and they will invariably fail.

I am annoyed to say the least that the city is giving scarce tax dollars to a foreign firm to make plans that we don’t need. I shudder to think of how many wasted millions will be poured into these plans once they work to bring them to fruition.

Sadly, most of Calgary’s city council and administration doesn’t give a damn about the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for these vanity projects. All they care about is legacies built on the backs of others and until taxpayers rise up and kick them out it won’t change.

In a popular tourist area North of Kamloops BC near the community of Blue River, a small band of extremists has set up an illegal roadblock on a public road for over a year and the RCMP refuses to act on it. The cowardly approach of the authorities has emboldened these extremists and they are becoming increasingly aggressive and potentially violent. Local community members are frustrated and concerned as they can’t access a public zone which they have used for recreation for decades.

Incidents are starting to stack up and it is only a matter of time before a tragic outcome occurs. Who will be held responsible if a local citizen or even one of these protesters gets injured or killed in a confrontation?

The anger and aggression of these ideologues is clear in multiple videos where they have turned people back from legitimate use of this public road as can be seen in the video below.

Nicholas Oakman took the video above when he tried to use the road to access Murtle Lake last Canada Day. Oakman is from the area originally and had accessed the road for years. He had no reason to feel that he couldn’t or shouldn’t now. The crazed protesters pushed Oakman back and he gave up on his trip. Thankfully Oakman maintained self-control and violence did not break out. This may not always be the case in the future.

It is not only public recreational users who are being turned away on this roadblock. Local maintenance crews simply trying to do their job were pushed back in a racism laden confrontation with the squatters. It should be noted that there were female and people of aboriginal decent in the work truck. The tirade from the extremists was rather baseless.

These incidents have prompted the Thompson-Nicola Regional District to ask for a meeting with BC Public Safety Minister.

As reported in Kamloops This Week months ago:

” “This group is escalating. People were actually chasing children. When an eight-year-old asks his father, ‘Dad, what’s rape?’, our community has had enough,” TNRD Thompson Headwaters Blue River director Stephen Quinn told the board on Thursday. “

As far as can be found, the BC government has not done anything to address this issue.

But what of the RCMP?

Well their approach can be seen in the video below.

The RCMP pull up, they are aggressively approached by the illegal protest and told to leave, like compliant kittens the officers get back into their vehicle and leave the encampment alone.

It is truly sad and embarrassing to see what was once such a respected police force reduced to slinking away from situations such as this. If they can’t clear a road being illegally blocked by a handful of extremists, what indeed are they for?

A Kelowna publication called “Infotel” contacted the RCMP on this issue recently and the quotes were telling.

” Clearwater RCMP Sgt. Grant Simpson says police have been aware of the blockade on the road to Murtle Lake for approximately a year but wouldn’t comment on the legalities of it.

“We have been aware of the roadblock since day one,” Simpson says. “At this point, I have to be careful on how I comment on (this).”

Over a year???? What the hell does it take to get the law enforced?

Why not comment on the legalities of it? Does it take a lawyer to know whether it is legal or not to block a public road for over a year? Rest assured that most citizens would be arrested within minutes of trying such a stunt.

The response reeks of cowardice I am afraid. The bottom line is that these are aboriginal protesters and few things make the collective buttholes of the authorities pucker up faster than the thought of a confrontation with aboriginal protesters even if it is a ragtag bunch of extremists such as this.

So just who are these extremists?

Well, they call themselves “Tiny House Warriors” and they have ostensibly been formed to fight pipeline development in BC though they seem to have a myriad of issues that they want to burn down the nation over.

While this little collection of people has some folks who are indeed of native origin, this protest is not a part of or sanctioned by any real native organization. These protesters aren’t even right from this spot but are from Chase where their “leader” owns a gas station among other things. Rational groups have disassociated themselves from the Tiny House gang.

The head of this group is an odious person named Amanda Soper.

Soper has a number of aliases and a rap sheet that goes back over a decade with numerous crimes

Its little wonder that Soper prefers to go by her alias of Kanahus Manuel these days.

Soper is attracted to dangerous criminals. She sought out and married Orlando Watley who is serving time in a maximum security prison for committing a triple homicide!

The chances of a multiple murderer like Watley being released are extremely slim thankfully. What he does do though is provide Soper with another cause to fundraise as she collects money from donors which supposedly will go towards her efforts to free him. Soper constantly begs and gains donations from naive or simply extreme supporters for her causes. I imagine that it doesn’t cost much to reside in a squatter encampment on a roadside but Soper apparently needs a pretty steady flow of income to do so and she isn’t shy about asking for it.

Assuming that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion construction ever begins, protesters are going to need to be removed. If we won’t even remove Amanda Soper and her little gang of extremists from their illegal roadblock, how are we to expect the authorities to clear out the inevitable protests and blockades which will be coming from the more organized and numerous of protest groups?

The “Tiny House Warriors” are a small group but they are dangerous and they set a terrible precedent. The lawsuits will be myriad if and when a conflict becomes violent there as citizens will have a strong case in pointing out how the RCMP have refused to enforce the law after an entire year of illegal occupation by these people.

Let’s hope they wise up and act sooner rather than later.

Neil Waytowich was one of the most belligerent and prolific trolls in the Canadian scroll. He spewed profanity laced vitriol at conservative politicians and journalists with energy and time that seemed limitless. He prided himself on being blocked by numerous public figures. His contribution to the often toxic environment of twitter was outstanding.

That is, until his security blanket of anonymity was shed.

Blacklocks.ca discovered and exposed Mr. Waytowich’s true identity and the sudden change in attitude from Neil was nothing short of miraculous.

For whatever reason, Waytowich elected to do a live radio interview with Lynda Steele after having been exposed. The transformation from internet tough guy to a meek and contrite little man was striking.

Give it a listen below:

Quite the transformation eh?

Hey, I am not a sweetheart on social media either. I can be prone to profanity and prone to being an asshole just for the sake of entertaining myself. That is indeed classic trolling and I have been guilty of it.

The difference between myself and Mr. Waytowich though is that I have the balls to be like that under my own name.

I own my comments whether good or bad and deal with the consequences. I have been called all sorts of things and have gotten some pretty choice communications from folks that I have pissed off at times. I have had people try to organize boycotts of my business and I have had people demand that my social media accounts be deleted. These are consequences of both my choice to be abrasive online and to do it under my own name.

Enduring the price to pay for being outspoken online makes it difficult for me to respect pussies such as Waytowich who can only talk tough when remaining hidden. They are the online version of folks who throw bricks through the window in the night.

Some folks have reasons not to want to put their own names out there and they certainly have that right. It is hard to respect or take their postings seriously though, especially when they engage in personal attacks on others from behind their wall of anonymity.

If we want to see more civil behaviour online, we should be encouraging more folks to drop the anonymity.

The anonymous cowards offline are an even more dangerous sort of scumbag.

We saw that in spades as a collection of pussies in Portland hid their identities while they attacked journalist Andy Ngo so viciously that he was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage.

You can bet that these assholes would never have so viciously attacked an innocent man like that had they been unmasked. Like Waytowich they would have skulked away in cowardice rather than act out when they would have to face the music for their actions.

I know it works up civil libertarians but too damn bad. In nations such as Canada and the USA, there is no reason for protesters to hide their identities. There are no death squads rounding them up in the night and no blacklists.

Lets face it, the shitbags who show up masked, with weapons and helmets at protests are seeking trouble and truly want to hurt people.

Want to see a massive reduction in violence at demonstrations? Unmask them. Like Neil, they will turn into instant pussycats.

Want to take a side in a demonstration? Well, if the demonstrators have the balls to show their faces they likely are on the side of good.

If they hide behind anonymity, they are simply cowards who want to cause damage rather than good.

The other day during the kickoff of the Global Petroleum Show, a diminutive lunatic stormed a stage, took a microphone and began incoherently ranting about the oilfield and Jason Kenney. The nutcase was quickly and correctly dragged kicking and screaming from the stage by members of the Calgary police service.

It didn’t take long for charter members of Alberta’s social media loony left to pop out of the woodwork and bizarrely try to tie the removal of this crackpot to Jason Kenney’s “war room” which is being created to counter misinformation in the oilfield

Never one to give up, when called out on the absurd tie-in to the “war room” this person then rambled about free speech which had utterly nothing to do with this.

OK lets get to it.

Free speech is the right to speak. It is the right to hold views and to put them forward.

Simple.

The right stops there however and here is where the confusion comes in.

WHILE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH, NOBODY IS OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A PLATFORM WITH WHICH TO SPEW IT NOR ARE THEY OBLIGATED TO LISTEN TO IT!

The crackpot dragged off the stage the other day had and still has a right to free speech. He could speak his view and can still do so today. What he can’t do is trespass and steal a microphone from another group in order to speak. He can’t stand in the middle of a private gathering with a bullhorn and scream his views. He can’t break into your living room and shout his twisted ideals to you. This shouldn’t be too complex.

There is nothing stopping this man from renting his own venue, setting up his own sound system, gathering his own crowd of listeners and speaking until his voice box runs out. If he was stopped from doing such, his free speech indeed would be violated.

Now on to where the right often gets confused on free speech.

Private social media outlets have every right to control who participates on their platforms and what they may or may not say. You may not agree with how they choose to control these things (I know I often don’t), but these are private entities. Your free speech has not been violated if you have been kicked off Twitter or YouTube or something.

Yes some social media giants are certainly dominating the scene and most are controlling their content from a biased left point of view. Hopefully other platforms emerge over time which respect open dialogue soon. Gab was something of a letdown.

All the above said, things will change radically if and when government controls social media controls and content. This is the road that Trudeau is exploring. If and when that happens, censorship will indeed be happening and free speech will be threatened.

Finally on to that lack of obligation among people to listen to you.

If you have been blocked on Twitter by a public figure, your free speech has not been violated. They are under no obligation to listen to you. You can still speak. You can still email or snail mail their offices. You just can’t directly communicate to them from that platform. Get over it. This is an area where both the right and the left indignantly and wrongly claim their speech rights are violated at times.

Now get out there and speak freely!

Just remember that the world doesn’t owe you an audience.

Its early. Its a Monday. Its downtown.

All that said, its important that as many people as possible come out to Calgary city hall this Monday morning to send a message to Mayor Nenshi and his gang of inept city councilors that taxpayers have had enough!

While Alberta’s economy creeps shakily towards economic recovery, Calgary is driving business away with overnight tax increases as high as 425% on businesses!

People are losing jobs and business owners are going bankrupt. This is a true crisis.

Groups and individuals have been warning Calgary city hall for years that their spending is unsustainable. The Mayor and council ignored these voices and continued to hike spending on things such as ugly public art projects and failed vanity projects such as the 2026 Olympic bid. Now city hall is broke and the council appears paralyzed as they pretend that they didn’t see this coming.

We need people to come out in droves this Monday to drive it home to this vacuous gang of city councilors that they need to take some solid action and they need to get on it yesterday!

No more denial. No more kicking the can down the road.

There will be no quick or easy solutions to the problem that this gang of fools has created but they will continue to go nowhere until they understand the gravity of this problem. Yes, they need to get to Step 1.

Make time this Monday and come down to city hall. The business community and their hundreds of thousands of employees are counting on it.

The rally site is here.


Thank you to Kristi Stuart, Kelly Doody and many others for bringing this issue to the fore and getting this rally off the ground.

There is no doubt about it. The earth is warming. It has been doing so since the last Ice Age. What had once been an impenetrable sheet of year round ice is now turning into a passable but seasonal ocean route from the Pacific ocean to the Atlantic ocean thanks to warmer temperatures and modern technology.

The Northwest Passage can reduce shipping distances by as much as 7000 kilometers and the route is becoming more viable every year. This of course has drawn the economic interest of pretty much every large, developed nation on earth from China to the United States.

We have laughed about the ongoing game between Canada and Denmark as they “battle” over Hans Island in the Arctic through the exchanging of flags, but this sport is going to become very serious and soon. Countries want to do much more than place flags to assert domination and sovereignty in the Arctic and Canada had best start preparing for this or expect to lose it.

When the inevitable international clash happens and Canada goes before international tribunals to try and assert Arctic sovereignty, two major questions will be asked. Can Canada even get to the high Arctic and is Canada doing anything with it?

I spent four winters working in the Arctic, predominantly in the Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk regions on the Beaufort Sea. That skunk hat came in damned handy in the brutal weather up there.

While warming is increasing access, make no mistake about it. The Arctic remains a brutal and unforgiving environment. Accessing, developing and surviving up there is a tough endeavor.

We would haul out camps in summer which would be anchored and then frozen into the sea ice for the winter. Starting in November or so we would build the ice road to the camp from North of Inuvik through the Mackenzie channels. If all went well, we would fire up the generators and move into the camp in January and could work on oil exploration until mid April.

The “Arctic Star” camp below was my winter home for many a long, dark Arctic night. The food was great but the sense of imprisonment was acute at times.

Whether at Bar C or somewhere on the Star, we always ended up lending some room to government scientists and such who needed access to the Beaufort for studies and such. While oil companies could come up with the means to get to those remote locations, government generally couldn’t. The sharing of the resources that way was a nice compromise.

In order to get even farther into the high Arctic, nuclear powered vessels are required. Canada unfortunately doesn’t have them. Russia, China and the USA do however and you can rest assured that they have been creeping around up there for decades. Canada can’t even get to the locations where these subs operate, much less police them. We bought rickety antique diesel submarines that killed our sailors just trying to cross the Atlantic. We sure as hell can’t try to send them to the Arctic.

If Canada wants to claim sovereignty in the Arctic we need to be able to get up there. Nuclear subs aren’t on the drawing board but they are essential. Seriously, how on earth could we claim parts of the earth that many other countries can access but we cant?

Energy companies will no longer provide access to even the lower Arctic islands any more. In typical Canadian fashion, we pissed around since the 1970s over getting a pipeline built to the Mackenzie Delta. Despite billions spent in exploration and thousands of wells drilled, not a drop of oil has been taken from Canada’s Arctic due to a lack of pipeline. With decades of dithering, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project was finally shelved after energy companies gave up. It had just become too expensive and ridiculous a proposition.

That leads on to the “use it” part of the equation when determining Arctic sovereignty.

How can Canada make a case of ownership and control of the Arctic when not only can we not get to it, but we have no plans to settle or develop it?

Like most isolated communities, the Delta towns have some very serious socioeconomic challenges to say the least. While money doesn’t solve everything, it sure as hell helps. Inuvik, Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk were actually doing relatively well due to energy exploration up there when compared to Arctic communities without any natural resource development. People were learning trades and energy companies were contributing some great infrastructure to the communities.

A road to the South was supposed to come with the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline which would have reduced the cost of living the the Arctic dramatically for Delta communities along with providing reasonable access to larger centers. Tourism would flourish and those towns could become shipping centers along with energy capitals. Things were looking good.

Alas, we destroyed all that potential. Those communities now languish as government dependents. Like other isolated communities with little to no local economy to speak of, substance abuse and other social ills have begun to become acute. What else is there to do? What is there to look forward to?

There is essentially another Alberta worth of oil and gas sitting in the Canadian Arctic. We are fools for refusing to develop it and we can rest assured that if we don’t, some other country will do so. How could we stop them? What would our claim be? We don’t appear ready to develop it and we can’t even get to it?

Time is running out. If we don’t act we will lose control of the Arctic. I suspect that China and Russia won’t treat it with the respect that we do when they move in and start shipping and developing.

It will be tough for other nations to claim rights up there if we have flourishing coastal communities accessing and developing the resources. It will be much easier to claim sovereignty over the passage if Inuvik is a well utilized shipping port.

Despite claims from extreme environments, the reality is that demand for fossil fuels will continue to grow for decades and its use will continue to happen for generations. Let’s embrace reality for a change and develop these resources while we can. Otherwise, we will see new flags flying over the Arctic and we won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.

The amount of ignorance across Canada among the citizens with regards to the conventional energy industry and how it impacts them can be staggering at times. What can we expect when foreign funded environmental groups and public figures have been on an organized “anti-tar sands” campaign for over a decade? The effort to shut in Alberta’s oil has been coming from many fronts and keeping Canadians misinformed about their dependence on that oil has been a key part of that campaign.

I had an exchange on twitter the other day with Denny Morrison. Mr. Morrison made quite a name for himself as a Canadian speed skater over the last decade and was an Olympic medalist. He is a very talented athlete. Alas, now that he has retired from competitive skating it appears that he is trying to find a sense of purpose through online anti-oil advocacy and he isn’t very good at it.

I am not even sure how it began. Denny had inserted himself into an exchange I was having with Councilor Sean Chu over a bike lane and somehow it devolved into a debate on the evils of the combustion engine. Morrison has since blocked me and deleted most of his tweets from the exchange but I did manage to screen snap a couple gems from him that say so much.

The discussion of high gas prices in BC has been a top issue lately along with speculation of what may happen if Premier Kenney does reduce the flow of oil to BC and the rest of the country with Bill 12.

In response to the potential for increased gas prices, Mr. Morrison sent out the tweet pictured below.

OK, where to begin?

Even if somehow a spike in gas prices didn’t directly effect Denny (it would) and even if 2/3 of Vancouver didn’t drive (untrue), the profound indifference displayed by Mr. Morrison to the impacts that such a fuel hike would have on low income people who rely on filling their vehicles is striking. With an already high cost of living in the lower mainland, adding a few hundred a month in gasoline bills to a daily commuter may just break a family budget. Many folks can’t afford to live in urban Vancouver and they are forced to take a long commute daily from more distant but affordable districts. Denny doesn’t seem to care how they would have to deal with a price spike.

Getting back to Denny’s confusion as to whether or not such a hike in fuel costs would actually impact him, it appears that he doesn’t understand that he will pay for those costs whether he owns a personal vehicle or not.

What Denny & sadly a large segment of the population don’t understand is that high fuel prices impact every part of their cost of living. If you take the bus or taxis, fares will rise. If you live on the island, the already expensive ferry costs will spike. If you eat anything, food costs will rise. They don’t transport food by unicorn and farmers don’t harvest it with nuclear powered tractors. Aside from food, the cost of EVERY consumer product will rise if fuel prices rise. Even if one rides a bicycle, the cost of that will go up. They don’t ship bikes by sailboat and ride them to the store for display and sale. Taxes will rise as well as the cost of running a city or a province will rise. Look at all those gas and diesel powered government vehicles out there.

Denny didn’t stop there of course. Next he made the common but BS claim that oil is unprofitable.

Denny among many others live under the myth that oil is obsolete and only government subsidies and a conspiracy among corporations keep it alive. This is utter nonsense of course. Oil demand has done nothing but grow for the last century and it is expected to grow for decades further. Other oil jurisdictions are booming from Texas to Kazakhstan. Yes, Alberta has been having a tough go. That is not due to oil being unprofitable though. That is due to Alberta battling environmentalists and activist governments who are actively working to shut the province’s oil sector down and these efforts are being cheered by myopic dingdongs like Denny Morrison.

So if Denny Morrison is a myopic dingdong, why should I care what he thinks?

Well, dingdong or not Mr. Morrison has some public profile and a voice. People follow the words of celebrities and athletes no matter how vapid those words may sometimes be, These words need to be countered as the misinformation that they are spreading is damaging our entire country.

This is why I am looking forward to Jason Kenney’s “war room” which will be set up to defend Alberta’s industries. Legally it is time to strike back. Greenpeace lost a lawsuit for the lies it spread about a forestry company. It is time that Greenpeace and other extreme foreign funded groups got sued for their misinformation about Alberta’s industries. The passive approach that Notley took has been a failure, it is time to strike back.

While lawsuits and an information campaign will help, it will take some more tangible actions to drive the message home to Canada I fear. Its time for some short term pain for long term gain and that will mean cranking down Alberta’s oil output for a little while to teach the nation a lesson in economic reality.

Look how quickly BC Premier John Horgan panicked when presented with the possibility of an oil squeeze. Despite years of implying that BC neither wanted nor needed Alberta’s oil he went into full damage control mode when Bill 12 was proclaimed by the Kenney government. The basis of BC’s court challenge is laughable in light of the proclamations for so long that they didn’t need Alberta’s oil.

Yes. Paralyzed. Still, until that pinch is actually felt I don’t think enough people will get it.

Turning down the taps will cause a gas price spike in Ontario and Quebec as well. Perhaps their love of the Liberal government’s efforts to throttle Alberta will fade a bit when they realize that they can’t take a family vacation due to the higher costs that $3 or $4 per liter gas would bring. Alberta doesn’t supply a majority of the oil for Eastern Canada but it supplies enough that it would cause a large price spike if the oil was cut back.

In response to this, the economically illiterate typically will bleat “we will just get our oil from somewhere else!”

Well kids it just ain’t that easy.

Supply and demand is a simple economic law but it is always lost on the left.

If a province or nation suddenly approached another supplier and asked for increased shipments of product, guess what will happen? The price of the product will rise. There is no escaping it. That is not theory. It is economic law. The price spike can’t be avoided though I guess the dollars could be sent offshore. That of course would continue to cost Alberta which still remains Canada’s cash cow. Where will those precious social programs go if Alberta doesn’t keep pumping in billions more per year into confederation than it gets out as it has for decades?

Shutting in Alberta’s oil truly is one of the dumbest economic moves that Canada could possibly do yet that is exactly what is happening. Canada is sitting on a treasure of natural resources and is kicking itself in the nuts by working to shut down the production of them. This isn’t helping the environment as Canadian demand isn’t dropping. It just means that dictatorships are getting more of our money to supply us while we idiotically sit on our own pool of oil.

Some in BC yelp “We will just get our oil from Washington!”.

Again kids that won’t work. Much of Washington’s oil comes from Alberta so yeah the price will still spike.

There is a fella with a blog who has put out a number of postings that are excellent and well worth reading on this issue. His name is Blair King and his blog is called “A Chemist in Langley”. He breaks down where the oil comes from and how supply reductions will impact price. Please read it and share links to this guy when debating folks on this subject. It is gold.

Unfortunately the Blair King’s out there are few and far between while the Denny Morrison’s are all too common. That’s why its time to turn those taps off for awhile. Until Canadians truly feel the hit in the wallet, they just won’t get it.