Retired Islander retweeted
There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴🇬🇧
One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.
Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.
Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.
Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.
Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.
It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧
It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.
Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪
Retired Islander retweeted
This BCTF statement does not speak for many of the teachers it claims to represent.
No one’s rights are being taken away. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people exist across the political spectrum. Same-sex attracted teachers and parents hold a wide range of views, and many reject the promotion of gender-identity ideology in schools.
We hear from lesbian, gay, and bisexual teachers in British Columbia who oppose gender-identity ideology and the overtly sexual materials made available to young children. They resent participating in language demands that may affirm children in delusions. Their gravest concern is that this ideology is contributing to a medical scandal in which distressed youth are being steered toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
These teachers overwhelmingly feel unsupported by their union. Many are afraid to speak out at all, concerned they will be bullied, isolated, or professionally punished for stating biological facts or questioning the medicalization of minors.
The union’s framing treats disagreement with contested gender ideology as an existential threat. It erases the same-sex attracted educators who want sex-based protections, resources based in biological reality and age-appropriate education. Protecting children from experimental interventions and sexualized materials is not discrimination. It is safeguarding.
The BCTF leadership is free to hold its views. It does not get to claim those views represent every teacher—or every lesbian, gay, or bisexual person in British Columbia. Many LGB teachers remain silent precisely because they know their union will not support them when they dissent.
The BC teachers union president issued this statement today 🥴
"I recognize that with the outcome of a Conservative government, many of us may be feeling disappointed, scared, or deeply concerned about what might come next.
I know these results may be particularly concerning for Indigenous, racialized, and 2SLGBTQIA+ members. You are not alone."
Retired Islander retweeted
Teacher's unions are harder to fight when they're not froth-mouthed ideologues. Anyway, here's a BCTF publication that told teachers to use outdoor education as a tool to smash "cis-heteronormative assumptions" in kindergartners. nationalpost.com/opinion/fir…
The BC teachers union president issued this statement today 🥴
"I recognize that with the outcome of a Conservative government, many of us may be feeling disappointed, scared, or deeply concerned about what might come next.
I know these results may be particularly concerning for Indigenous, racialized, and 2SLGBTQIA+ members. You are not alone."
Retired Islander retweeted
Prediction: "Anti-social" behaviors will be weaponized against the native population.
Anti-social behaviors:
Eating pork
Dog walking
Drinking alcohol
Eating & drinking in front of people during Ramadan
Walking directly in front of someone praying
Retired Islander retweeted
Lots for the new government to do, but Victoria's police-escorted Hamas rallies were entirely a creation of the Eby government. VicPD bills the babysitting costs to the province, and they would have stopped on day one if those monies had been withheld.
Retired Islander retweeted
Eby NDP candidate Roly Russell (Boundary-Similkameen) says Eby called his early, opportunistic election because he couldn't control his own radical caucus!
Lmao.
Retired Islander retweeted
I’ve increasingly come to worry about the rise of “judicial nihilism” (for lack of a better term) in Canada.
We have a justice system that spends enormous energy considering the personal circumstances of offenders, their rights, identities, mental health, and prospects for rehabilitation. Yet it seems unconcerned with the victims whose lives have been destroyed, or the public that must live with the consequences when dangerous individuals repeatedly reoffend.
I think we need to take judicial reform more seriously, rather than dismissing concerns about overreach and malfeasance as conservative fearmongering.
The more I look at recent cases (many highlighted by @sarkonakj) the more concerned I become that our institutions are losing sight of some basic moral values in justice.
I’ve been thinking about the
principles that should guide us to a more liberal, rules-based approach to criminal justice (I’ll admit that this is hardly new thinking, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen them laid out):
1. Justice should begin with victims, whose suffering should never become secondary to the circumstances of offenders.
2. Protecting the public from dangerous individuals must be a central responsibility of sentencing, and we should lean towards caution.
3. Punishment must be a meaningful deterrent and reflect the gravity of crimes. Some crimes warrant permanent imprisonment (if not capital punishment). Some crimes are so heinous that the mere prospect of rehabilitation should not be considered.
4. Repeat offenders should face dramatically greater consequences, including long-term incarceration or asylum to protect society. Nobody with dozens of separate criminal convictions should be roaming freely.
5. Mental illness should determine treatment and facility type, not reduce punishment. The bar for criminal non-responsibility should also be much higher than it is today.
6. Sentencing must apply to those convicted equally, based on actions and responsibility, not race, religion, cultural identity, immigration status etc. The rule of law should be non-discriminatory, the right time to address the “root causes” of crime and pursue social justice is before crime is committed.
7. Parliament needs to figure out how to reclaim its authority, with courts exercising much greater restraint in constitutional interpretations.
8. Judicial “independence” must be balanced with meaningful accountability for serious failures and overreach. The judiciary is not supreme to legislature.
I worry that too many political leaders have become uncomfortable defending the very concepts of order, punishment and personal responsibility, as though doing so is somehow incompatible with liberal moral values.
They aren’t.
A liberal democracy has two fundamental obligations. To protect people from the arbitrary exercise of government power, and to protect them from the violence and predation of others.
We cannot fulfill one by neglecting the other. They are together the necessary preconditions for liberty.
When the public sees rulings that seem fundamentally disconnected from shared expectations of right and wrong, it erodes trust in the system.
Order and public safety are necessary conditions for freedom.
The freedom to walk down the street, take public transit, operate a business or simply live peacefully in your own home means little if the government cannot protect you from disorder, violence and criminality. It’s often those with the fewest resources who suffer most when that protection fails.
If we want Canadians to have faith in the rule of law, they need to believe that it applies equally, that serious wrongdoing carries serious consequences, that dangerous people will not repeatedly be allowed to victimize others, and that the system will not be careless with the lives and suffering of victims.
“Arnold and Joanne De Jong were in their seventies when three men they had once hired to clean their gutters came back to their Abbotsford home in the middle of the night in May 2022 and murdered them. Arnold was suffocated, his head wrapped in duct tape. Joanne was beaten, and her throat was cut. The killers left with the couple’s cheques, credit cards, and a power washer. The trial judge found they planned to murder the De Jongs because they knew they would be recognized in the course of their robbery.
On Monday, the De Jongs’ daughters came to court expecting to watch those men receive justice in sentencing. Instead, they heard the judge declare that the law denying multiple murderers any chance at early parole violates the Charter’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The cruelty, apparently, lies in making men who suffocated an old man with duct tape and bludgeoned his wife wait 25 years before asking to go free. Sentencing has been pushed to 2027.
Canadians settled this question a long time ago, and we settled it twice. A Liberal government in 1997 and a Conservative government in 2011, elected by different voters with different priorities, each concluded that people who kill more than once should be offered no early exit. That is what a free people does with its moral convictions: it argues about them, elects representatives who share them, and writes them into law. One judge has now informed Canadians that the answer they reached together, through two elected Parliaments, isn’t allowed.”
- - -
I don’t think there is any issue I’ve become more conservative on more than the sickness in our judicial system, even as I’ve become more left than I used to on economics/role of government.
It feels like several times a week there is another story that represents a deep miscarriage of justice, ill consideration for victims, or neglects society’s need for and equally applied rule of law or real punishment as a deterrence to crime. I fear there is not enough recourse to judges who reinterpret the constitution to ideological ends better left to the actual legislature.
This story honestly makes me sick and it saddens me that there are no practical accountability options for the judiciary in a case like this.
@stevestaley
thehub.ca/2026/10/21/how-can…
Retired Islander retweeted
Yes. He reminds us of the hubris of western leftists and their shocking solipsism. These Muslims’ testimonies should be given 100 times the weight of clueless lefty westerners. No, a million times..
Retired Islander retweeted
#culturalsuicide Why did it take so many years before anyone would listen? It was clear as a bell then to so many of us who aren't geniuses or clairvoyants, just ordinary people with a working brain. Why did it take so long for our chattering classes to *get it* - and most of them still won't admit they have gotten it, but they have gotten it, only they don't know WTF to do about it.
Retired Islander retweeted
The NDP wants you to think the Conservatives are the radicals.
Their Premier was an anti-Olympics activist who wrote a guide on suing the police.
Their Attorney General called election results "unbearable" because of how many white people won.
Ask yourself who the normies are.
Retired Islander retweeted
Wondering what "globalize the Intifada" meant?
This is what it always fucking meant.
WAKE UP.
Retired Islander retweeted
Canada, I’m warning you now.
When Carney signs that associate member deal with the EU, here’s what happens next, step by step.
First, Trump doesn’t wait.
He doesn’t send a diplomat.
He doesn’t call a summit.
He just acts. Energy gets hit first because that’s where Canada hurts most. Oil and gas flowing south slows down or stops.
Not because Trump hates Canada, but because it’s the fastest way to make the point that choosing Europe has a price.
Then it spreads. Autos, steel, aluminum, lumber, potash, beef.
Every sector that depends on the American markte feels it within weeks, not years.
The Canadian dollar drops.
Interest rates climb.
Provinces start cutting services because the money isn’t coming in like it used to.
Europe won’t save us. They’ll issue statements. They’ll hold meetings. They’ll say they’re standing with Canada.
But they can’t buy what we sell, they can’t ship it across the ocean at the same cost, and they can’t protect us if it turns into something worse than a trade fight.
An associate membership gives them influence over our rules without giving us anything that actually replaces what we’re losing.
And here’s the part that should scare you most.
This isn’t about one election or one prime minister.
It’s about whether Canada stays a country that controls its own future or become a place where outside powers decide what we can and can’t do.
The Monroe Doctrine was written 200 hundred years ago to keep Europe out.
Trump is using it now to keep everyone out, including us if we don’t play along.
You can call it fearmongering. You can call it politics. But the math doesn’t care what you call it.
Three out of four things we sell go south.
No deal with Brussels changes that. Not now, not in five years, not in twenty.
So before you cheer for this and lift your elbows higher ask the people selling it one simple question.
What exactly replaces the American market?
Because if they can’t answer that, they’re not leading. They’re just hoping you won’t notice.
We seem to be on a suicide mission and signing that Associate Membership with the EU is just tightening the noose!
This isn’t a game!
Retired Islander retweeted
An important announcement from the leader of the Conservative Party of BC.
Retired Islander retweeted
To have a plurality of young people just begging for things to go back the way they were is a cultural disaster the likes of which this country has never seen. It's such an inversion of the usual order of things that it's clear something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Retired Islander retweeted
For those of you nervous about removing DRIPA, it was always bad legislation. Many indigenous know it. It is only some corrupt groups that want it to remain. It is corroding our province and killing industry. We must repeal it. Reconciliation does not mean crushing our province.
Retired Islander retweeted
Three years ago, on October 7, 2023, we woke up to horrific images from Israel as Hamas terrorists carried out the deadliest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, recording and live-streaming their crimes.
More than 1,200 people were murdered, including Canadians, thousands were injured, and more than 200 were kidnapped and dragged into Gaza as hostages.
Today, we remember every innocent life stolen, in particular, 22-year-old Vancouverite Ben Mizrachi, a graduate of King David High School who was attending the Nova music festival. A trained medic, Ben stayed to help the wounded as terrorists attacked. He was murdered trying to save others.
But three years later, British Columbians must also confront what October 7 exposed here at home.
The networks that sympathize with, glorify and in some cases support terrorist movements are not confined to the Middle East. They have been organizing and fundraising in Canada, including right here in British Columbia.
Samidoun should be a wake-up call for every Canadian.
For years, the organization operated openly in Vancouver. Its international coordinator lived here. It organized demonstrations here. Its activists praised Hamas and celebrated October 7 here.
The Government of Canada ultimately listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity because of its links to and support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, itself a listed terrorist organization. FINTRAC has since described Samidoun as a sham charity that served as an international fundraiser for the PFLP.
Then Canadians saw where this ideology leads.
At a Samidoun rally on Vancouver streets, a Canadian flag was burned, a speaker declared "we are Hezbollah and we are Hamas," and protesters chanted "Death to Canada, Death to the United States and Death to Israel."
Their hatred does not begin and end with Israel.
Vancouver and British Columbia have become places where people sympathetic to these movements can organize, raise money, recruit support and attempt to legitimize their ideology.
We cannot pretend this is somebody else's problem.
We need to know where money is being raised and where it is going. We need to know who our governments, universities and public institutions are funding and partnering with. Not one taxpayer dollar or ounce of institutional legitimacy should go to organizations connected to terrorism, terrorist financing or the glorification of political violence.
To British Columbia's Jewish community: you are not alone. You should never have to hide a Star of David, fear attending synagogue or worry about sending your children to a Jewish school.
As leader of the Conservative Party of British Columbia, I am committed to rooting this dangerous and hateful ideology out of our province's institutions, root and stem, while protecting the lawful rights and freedoms of every British Columbian.
October 7 showed us what this ideology is capable of. The three years since have shown us that those who celebrate and support it can exist much closer to home than Canadians wanted to believe.
Today, we remember Ben Mizrachi and every innocent person murdered on October 7.
May their memories be a blessing
























