RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2025/05/09/separation-or-collapse-which-comes-first-n4939639

The province of Alberta has a legitimate grievance with the ROC (Rest of Canada).

According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, since the inception of Canada’s equalization program in 1957, which sees the wealthier provinces subsidizing their less fortunate counterparts, Alberta has made a net contribution of $67 billion, $2.9 billion alone in 2021 — which in turn represents only a portion of the province’s immense financial contribution to federal coffers and the governments and residents of other provinces. 

The Fraser Institute notes that the equalization drain represents “just a small part of the province’s outsized contribution to confederation in recent years.” It calculates that “the gap between Albertans’ contribution to federal revenues and federal expenditures plus transfers to the province, totalled $20.5 billion annually in 2017/18. And this measure excludes Albertans’ disproportionate cumulative contribution to the Canada Pension Plan, which on net totalled $2.9 billion in 2017.”

Albertans had voted in a referendum to abolish the system of equalization payments to other provinces. Speaking of transfer payments, it was former Premier Jason Kenney who made that issue a referendum question. Alberta voted yes, an affirmative totally ignored by Ottawa and the rest of the country.

Meanwhile, the Liberals are doing everything in their power to eviscerate Alberta’s energy industry, the source of its prosperity and a major contributor to Canada’s overall solvency, by shutting down pipeline projects, banning tanker activity along the coast of British Columbia, and levying anti-emission, net-zero protocols designed to strangle the province’s economic output. The cognitive dissonance is appalling. 

Obviously, it is not only Alberta and Saskatchewan that are at risk, but the rest of the country as well, as the Liberal administration under Mark Carney moves to effectively collapse the country’s economic output. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, and now the UK are the models for a Canadian makeover. Debt, deficit, money printing, and capital flight are the inevitable results of the net-zero fantasy. Canada is intent on committing economic suicide.

As emeritus professor of economics Steve Ambler points out, “Private investment in Canada was already hemorrhaging under the Trudeau administration. Even larger federal deficits under the new Liberal administration, and its continued emphasis on managing the economy from the top down by administrative fiat, will not improve the situation. Instead, investment funds will continue to migrate to the US where tax rates and the business climate in general are more advantageous.” Indeed, an internal government report from Policy Horizons Canada warns of a “near-collapse of Canada’s economy, trigger[ing] a mental health crisis and more grassroots approaches to housing and food—including families foraging and hunting wildlife for food.”  

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/the-british-elites-have-capitulated-to-islamo-censorship/

Does freedom of speech include the right to blaspheme? In 21st-century Britain, you’d have thought the answer would be ‘yes, obviously’. Our last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. England’s blasphemy law was abolished in 2008, having been a dead letter for decades. The centuries-long struggle for free speech in this country, as in so many others, was built on defaming gods, kings, clerics, prophets. Without the right to blaspheme, there is no right to speak freely. But in this identitarian age, what was once taken for granted is fast melting into air.

In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.

Hussain’s arguments are as banal as they are illiberal. Free speech isn’t absolute, ackshually. Those who claim to care about Koran-burners are really just racists. Do you know who also burned books? Hitler! What most sticks in the craw is how depressingly pedestrian they are – not simply among the ‘Gaza independents’, but also the liberal elites, who long ago sacrificed genuine liberalism on the altar of multiculturalism. It is their cowardice and relativism that has brought us to this point: where the old Christian blasphemy laws may be long gone, but informal Islamic blasphemy laws are fast taking shape, with hate-speech laws refashioned to forcefield a faith from criticism.

Those shocked to see a case like Coskun’s haven’t been paying attention. Ever since the Rushdie affair, we have witnessed an unholy alliance between Islamist censors, a cowardly political establishment and an increasingly identitarian left. The first protest against The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel which earned him the Ayatollah’s fatwa and almost cost him his life, was not on the subcontinent or in the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2 December 1988. While this movement never succeeded in getting Rushdie’s novel banned in Britain, or extending Britain’s blasphemy laws to cover Islam, it put the fear of Allah into anyone who dared publish a book, display a cartoon or make a statement that some perma-outraged prick, claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims, might deem to be offensive or heretical. This haunts us to this day, as the still-disappeared Batley school teacher or the recent – mercifully foiled – attempts to murder ex-Muslim Hatun Tash show.