Maps, Not Words
Ottawa, Ontario
Joined August 2011
- Tweets10.1K
- Following482
- Followers571
- Likes162K
John Marshall retweeted
My growing radical proposal is we kill OAS entirely. The full program gone. In return we double GIS (~$11,000 extra per recipient). This would give genuinely poor seniors $2000 extra dollars per year AND save something like $50-60 billion dollars.
I would then recycle some of this money in 3 ways:
1) increase CCB clawback thresholds from 38/83 to 45/90
2) cut PIT rates (specific numbers require a more detailed plan)
3) modestly increase defence spending
Then we keep 1/2 the savings to reduce the deficit.
John Marshall retweeted
No province—not Quebec, not New Brunswick—should receive a penny of federal transfer payments if it refuses to develop its natural resources.
New Brunswick’s refusal to develop its massive shale gas reserves while relying on federal transfers (largely funded by Alberta and Saskatchewan’s resource revenues) for 40% of its provincial budget is pure hypocrisy.
John Marshall retweeted
The law continues to be on the side of the bad guys. torontosun.com/opinion/colum…
John Marshall retweeted
I live in Ontario. I also have some advice, to be taken with a grain of salt.
Whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly and decisively. You have 4 years to show what you can do.
Rip the bandaid off now, you have a massive majority.
DRIPA, SOGI, tanker ban, whatever. Get it over with now. Leftists have short attention spans and they’ll forget all about it in 3 years.
Best wishes, B.C. Now is your chance.
Congratulations to Jennifer Whiteside on being named Interim Leader of the BC NDP.
I sat across the floor from her for a long time and she is a serious person who works hard for the people she represents.
A good opposition makes for a better government, and I expect her to hold us to account while we get to work delivering what we promised British Columbians.
John Marshall retweeted
More importantly, the number of asylum claimants in Canada is absolutely off the chain. Just five years ago, it was 160,000. It's now *500,000.* And these are the worst kinds of immigrants: The ones most likely to do crime, be on welfare, to hold extremist beliefs.
John Marshall retweeted
But can we agree that promoting LNG and mineral exports out of a mostly ice-covered port in Churchill using icebreaking, is a lot riskier than sending double hulled oil tankers out of Prince Rupert, which can already accommodate shipping containers that carry 50,000 barrels/8000 m3 of petroleum fuel in their own tanks?
Can we agree there are different standards being applied for political, rather than scientific or technical, reasons?
John Marshall retweeted
Progressives blaming Eby’s defeat in the election timing are totally missing the point. The whole purpose of the early election was to try to overcome the government’s unpopularity rooted in its poor outcomes.
The real problem was the cumulative cost of Eby’s ideological agenda. His government was the last holdout of the failures of Trudeauian progressivism: a subordination of economic growth in favour of deficit financed welfare spending, a dogmatic commitment to climate change and its anti-development effects, excessive identity politics and an overly self critical posture towards Canadian history, and its radical experiment with the harm reduction model.
Election timing and campaign choices didn’t defeat the Eby government. A broad cross-section of British Columbians—from rural parts of the province to downtown Vancouver—rejected it based on the self-evident failure of its ideas.
John Marshall retweeted
“You can’t build a provincial economy on whale watching and coffee shops.”
We need to be a province that builds, makes and creates. We need a provincial industrial strategy and we need to get serious about the loss of industrial land to real estate speculation.
Once industrial land is converted to other uses, it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to get it back. And without that land, where exactly do we expect the next generation of manufacturers, skilled tradespeople and industrial employers to go?
This is one of the most consequential challenges we face in British Columbia, with a lot of damage already done. I hope the new government makes it an urgent priority.
John Marshall retweeted
Cut fucking taxes and let the market decide instead of you, who know absolutely nothing about the venture capital sector.
Ottawa kicks off process to give $1.75-billion boost to venture capital sector
theglobeandmail.com/business…
John Marshall retweeted
I read the Hansard from when the UK House of Lords read through the British North America Act. One of their only objections was to point out how dumb the Senate idea was. To which the colonial secretary told them to shut up because this was what Canadians had worked out.
John Marshall 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.”
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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…
John Marshall retweeted
When you have unofficial public policy positions that housing prices are never allowed to go down and seniors’ entitlements are never allowed to be reformed you’re basically just buying time until the whole thing goes up in flames.
John Marshall retweeted
Really? You don't think adding 30,000 renters to a metro of 600,000 people in a single year might impact monthly rents?
Is housing somehow immune to the laws of supply and demand?
John Marshall retweeted
Anti-Israel website ‘The Canada Files’
registers with Foreign Influence Commissioner after accepting sponsored content from #China. Registration is mandatory for any media “acting at the direction of, for the benefit of or in association with a foreign entity.”
blacklocks.ca/china-backed-a…
@Safety_Canada #cdnpoli
John Marshall retweeted
"It's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity."
— Jeff Bezos
John Marshall retweeted
Judge Begbie was very particular about hanging people according to the content of their character and not the colour of their skin.
John Marshall 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
John Marshall retweeted
We’ve reduced average collection-to-delivery time by nearly 65% through improvements across the entire data path, including close collaboration with @KSAT_Kongsberg.
Fresher SAR data. Faster decisions.
Read how we did it: hubs.la/Q04zxx3X0
John Marshall retweeted
It has come to my attention that I have been denounced by @Advocates_Soc for criticizing judicial decisions — and yes, individual judges.
Here's the thing. When someone, for example, spends her lawyerly career writing op-eds in favour of migration and calling herself an activist, and then becomes a federal judge, and from that seat allows all sorts of undesirables to remain in Canada on weak grounds, people are free to draw a connection from A to B.
When a judge, for example, spends his lawyer years advocating fiercely for more race-based law, and then later throws out gun charges of black men on his (unsupported) assertion that police were racist during their arrests, people are free to question whether he's really a fair adjudicator.
When a judge, for example, says that a ban on drug trafficking is unconstitutional, and then *applauds* vigilante drug dealers for their self-proclaimed safe supply program — applauds them for supporting the business of organized crime and feeding the addictions of street people — that's beyond the pale. You're worried about democracy being poisoned? Worry about the judge who threw out Parliament's law against selling heroin because she felt it was "common sense" that it was supported by science.
I agree that it's not right to criticize a judge personally for impartially applying the law and coming to an unpopular decision (which they may even privately disagree with). But when their professional history, or their conduct in court, suggests allegiance to a cause that they happen to be ruling softly on, it will get noticed.
Bringing the administration of justice into disrepute is a two-way street, you know.
