War on Christianity - The Trudeau Government Still Refusing Funding for Christian Summer Camps for Kids

Group to go to court after Bible camps denied

federal summer jobs grant

Applications are refused if the organization's activities

'work to undermine or restrict' abortion rights

Michael Tutton · The Canadian Press 

The federal government is being sued over its denial of a Canada summer jobs grant to Bible camps

in Ontario and Nova Scotia. (The Associated Press)

A legal group is taking Ottawa to court over its denial of jobs grants for Bible camps in Ontario and Nova Scotia, with the camp's operators suggesting the rejection is due to their evangelical beliefs.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms said it will seek to overturn the federal refusal to fund summer counsellors for the two Bible Centered Ministries camps in Cooks Brook, 70 kilometres northeast of Halifax, and near Omemee, Ont., west of Peterborough.

John Carpay, the founder of the Calgary-based centre, said Tuesday the group will ask Federal Court to declare that the rejection unreasonably "interferes with the camps' rights to religious freedom." The application is expected to be filed this week.

The official reason given in the rejection letter from Service Canada is that the camps did not demonstrate "that measures have been implemented to provide a workplace free of harassment and discrimination." The letter said there's no possibility of appeal.

Abortion issue

However, Phil Whitehead, executive director of the camps, said in a telephone interview the camps provided comprehensive copies of discrimination and harassment policies, including its anti-bullying measures. He said he suspects Ottawa is refusing the two camps' applications for funding of about eight counsellors because it has an evangelical Christian background that includes opposition to abortion.

Last December, the federal Liberal government was pressured into dropping contentious wording in its summer jobs program that tied pro-abortion beliefs to funding eligibility.

Instead, Ottawa reworked the 2019 version of the program to require that groups show neither their core mandate nor the jobs being funded actively worked to undermine constitutional, human and reproductive rights.

Legal action

Employment and Social Development Canada declined comment on the camps' specific application and argument. It said in an email Monday that applicants in general were given the opportunity to provide added information on their projects and "needed to demonstrate that they didn't include ineligible activities."

Carpay said his group will ask the court for a declaration that the minister's decisions were unreasonable. He said the camps had received funding for close to a decade before Ottawa introduced its new policies last year. Carpay also said his group decided to take the case to court because the government's decision was considered final.

"The only way to deal with it is to go to court," he said. "The government had more than a fair chance to provide clear reasons for its denial ... there's no intelligible explanation that's come with it."

'We're here to minister to kids'

Whitehead said the camps will proceed regardless of the funding, drawing on funds raised privately by his group. He said more than 600 children aged between eight and 15 attend the two camps annually.

Bible study is included in camp activities, but the topics of reproductive rights and sexual orientation are not part of the curriculum, Whitehead said. "Summer camp is not about that," he said.

"We're here to reach kids. We're here to minister to kids. Nowhere on our website, nowhere in our material do we even address that [abortion]."

I wonder if it has less to do with abortion and more to do with LGBTQ rights? In any event, it is an obvious thrust by the far-left Liberal government of Canada to elevate LGBTQ and abortion rights over freedom of worship, specifically evangelical Christianity.

American Terrorist Gets Life in Prison for Aborted Plot in Canada

American woman sentenced to life in prison for Valentine's Day shooting plot involving Halifax mall

The plan involved shooters opening fire at the Halifax Shopping Centre

CBC News 

Lindsay Kantha Souvannarath, shown in provincial court for a preliminary hearing in Halifax on July 8, 2015, has been sentenced to life in prison for her role in a shooting plot targeting a shopping mall. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

An American woman who took part in a plotted Valentine's Day shooting rampage at a Halifax mall has been sentenced to life in prison.

Lindsay Souvannarath pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit murder in a plan that would have seen two shooters open fire at the Halifax Shopping Centre food court in 2015. She will serve at least 10 years before she is eligible for parole.

"The impact of an offence like this would have changed the city forever," said Crown prosecutor Shauna MacDonald.

"It seems like something that's only in the news and happens elsewhere. This made it very real, brought it home to us that our community is at risk, was at risk, and something very serious was only narrowly averted by the quick action of the police."

The sentencing comes exactly 19 years after the Columbine High School massacre, something Souvannarath and her co-conspirators had said was their inspiration for the foiled plot. 

Police thwarted the planned attack after receiving an anonymous tip, but not before Souvannarath boarded a Nova Scotia-bound plane in Chicago.

Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Peter Rosinski called it a "very unusual and difficult case." On Friday, Rosinski said he was satisfied that if police hadn't thwarted the plot, it would have been successful. 

Souvannarath is eligible to apply for parole after 10 years in custody, which would be February 2025. 

MacDonald pointed out that a life sentence comes with no end date. If Souvannarath does not show signs of rehabilitation, she could potentially remain in custody the rest of her life.

Souvannarath declines to address court

Rosinski said he couldn't ignore the timing of her guilty plea. She was charged in February 2015 and pleaded guilty in April 2017 — only after she learned her social media conversations with her co-conspirator, James Gamble, would be permitted as evidence.

In his decision, Rosinski wondered what carnage would have been inflicted that day. "One can readily infer multiple serious casualties."

He said Souvannarath remains a danger to the public, and continues to show no remorse for her plan. 

Life was the strongest possible sentence, and means potentially that Souvannarath may never be released from custody if rehabilitation is not successful. 

"It certainly sends a clear message that anyone who would think of participating in something to this extreme, random killing of innocent citizens, will suffer serious consequences," said MacDonald. 

Gamble killed himself as police surrounded his Halifax-area home, while she was arrested at the airport.

Randall Shepherd, a third accomplice, is a local man described in court as the "cheerleader" of the plot. He was sentenced to a decade in jail.

When the judge asked Souvannarath if she would like to address the court prior to sentencing, the 26-year-old said: "I decline."

The case also poses interesting immigration questions.

The Canada Border Services Agency caught Souvannarath at the airport, before she was admitted into Canada. 

Crown prosecutor Mark Heerema says she's effectively on loan from immigration to the police while she serves her custodial sentence in Canada.

If she is granted parole, a spokesperson from CBSA says she would likely face deportation. 

Rare Video of Aftermath Greatest Man-Made Explosion in Its Time

Rare video of Halifax harbour explosion depicts fiery aftermath of 1917 blast

    The equivalent of 5,000 tonnes of TNT sent shockwaves through Halifax in a historic explosion
    99 years ago in Canada. CTV's Bruce Frisko reports.  3:40

CTVNews.ca Staff 

The Halifax harbour explosion of 1917 remains one of the most devastating disasters in Canadian history. Nearly 2,000 people died when a ship loaded with explosives bumped into another vessel and detonated.

Actually, after the collision the ship caught on fire and rather than put out the fire or scuttle the ship, the French crew abandoned it. The ship slowly drifted across the harbour to the Halifax docks before it suddenly exploded flattening half of the city. 

See below for more history...

Ninety-nine years later, rare archival video of the day is being publicly displayed at the Army Museum Halifax Citadel.

The black-and-white images are some of the only moving depictions of Halifax in the hours after the blast. Fires can be seen burning across town, windows are blown out and countless buildings are reduced to rubble. The scenes were shot by W. G. MacLaughlan, a photographer who had a studio in town.

“At the time, the population was a little more than 50,000 people, so half of this city was directly and devastatingly affected by the explosion,” Ken Hynes, a curator at the museum, told CTV Atlantic.

A view of the pyrocumulus cloud

The explosion unfolded on Dec. 6, 1917 when a French ship filled with explosives equivalent to 5,000 tons of TNT accidentally hit a ship from Norway in the waters off Halifax. The collision sparked a massive shockwave that rocked Halifax, levelled entire neighbourhoods and altered the course of Atlantic Canadian history.

Nearly a century later, historians are still learning more about the catastrophe. A researcher who extrapolated figures from the explosion says modern-day Halifax would be hit even harder by the blast.

“If the Halifax explosion were to occur today, we would immediately have 9,600 dead, over 43,000 wounded and 120,000 without adequate shelter,” said historian and author John Boileau.

Historians have spent decades poring over materials from the days after the blast in an effort to learn more about how the community responded to the crisis.

“It can be as little as somebody writing a postcard or a letter saying, ‘I was in Halifax and I saw the devastation,’” said historian Blair Beed.

For documentary filmmaker John Versteege, the harbour explosion was so fascinating that he compiled hours of never-before-seen footage and interviews with survivors to piece together what happened. He produced the film in “Thunder in the Sky,” a 97-minute documentary released in 1993 on the 75th anniversary of the disaster.

“Big pictures are made out of millions of small events,” Versteege said.

The priceless moving pictures are among a trove of other artifacts on display at the Halifax museum, including a watchman’s clock recovered from beneath a dock in the harbour. Its face is permanently frozen at 9:04 a.m. -- the same minute the explosives went off.

   Looking north from a grain elevator towards Acadia Sugar Refinery, circa 1900, showing the
   area later devastated by the 1917 explosion

The Halifax Explosion

The Halifax Explosion was a maritime disaster in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the morning of 6 December 1917. SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with high explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Narrows, a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin. A fire on board the French ship ignited her cargo, causing a large explosion that devastated the Richmond district of Halifax. Approximately 2,000 people were killed by blast, debris, fires and collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured.

Mont-Blanc was under orders from the French government to carry her cargo of high explosives from New York via Halifax to Bordeaux, France. At roughly 8:45 am, she collided at low speed – approximately one knot (1 to 1.5 miles per hour or 1.6 to 2.4 kilometres per hour) – with the unladen Imo, chartered by the Commission for Relief in Belgium to pick up a cargo of relief supplies in New York. The resulting fire aboard the French ship quickly grew out of control. Approximately 20 minutes later at 9:04:35 am, Mont-Blanc exploded. The blast was the largest man-made explosion prior to the development of nuclear weapons, releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT.

    Map of present-day Halifax and Dartmouth. Bedford Basin is top left and the Narrows between
    Dartmouth and Halifax leads towards the Atlantic off the bottom on the right.

Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (2,600 ft) radius, including the entire community of Richmond, were obliterated. A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Hardly a window in the city proper survived the blast. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage. A tsunami created by the blast wiped out the community of Mi'kmaq First Nations people who had lived in the Tuft's Cove area for generations.

Thousands of people were injured because they were standing at their windows watching the burning ship when it exploded. Most of the injuries were shards of glass in people eyes. When I was growing up in Nova Scotia I knew people who were blind, or blind in one eye because of the explosion. And as if the explosion wasn't enough a blizzard struck Nova Scotia that night and temperatures dropped well below freezing for the next several days.

Relief efforts began almost immediately, and hospitals quickly became full. Rescue trains began arriving from across eastern Canada and the north-eastern United States, but were impeded by a blizzard. Construction of temporary shelters to house the many people left homeless began soon after the disaster. The initial judicial inquiry found Mont-Blanc to have been responsible for the disaster, but a later appeal determined that both vessels were to blame. There are several memorials to the victims of the explosion in the North End.

99 years later Nova Scotia still sends a huge Christmas Tree to Boston every year in appreciation for the extraordinarily benevolent response from Bostonians.

    Halifax Regional District, Nova Scotia

Halifax Woman Says She Vomited 'All Day Long' for Eight Months from Cannabis Use

Medical marijuana user warns about

cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome

By Nina Corfu, CBC News

    Dawn Rae Downton says she lost her appetite, and when she wasn't in bed, she was vomiting.
    (Carol Bruneau)

A Halifax woman says she threw up "all day long" for eight months straight — and her medical marijuana is to blame. 

It wasn't until a specialist diagnosed Dawn Rae Downton with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, and she stopped taking marijuana entirely, that she says the vomiting finally ended.

"Vomiting and just a complete malaise, I was bedridden most of the time," she said of the period she took marijuana.

The condition, which was first documented in 2004 and has not been widely researched, is characterized by cyclical bouts of nausea, vomiting and gastrointestinal discomfort, said Toronto family doctor Peter Lin.

If it occurs often enough, it can lead to things like weight loss, dehydration, and vomiting blood, said Lin, who is also a health columnist for CBC.

Health Canada, however, does not mention the condition on its consumer information page for cannabis.

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is most commonly diagnosed in long-term, frequent marijuana users, Lin said. However, that doesn't apply to Downton.

"I got sick within two weeks of ingesting this stuff," she said.

'Shooting myself in the foot'

Downton said she lost her appetite, and when she wasn't in bed, she was vomiting. "It would start the minute I woke up and the only way that it would stop is when I went to sleep," she said.

Downton, who was baking her medical marijuana into cookies and eating them to treat a medical condition she doesn't want to disclose publicly, said she was under the impression that marijuana could ease nausea.

"I was actually taking more, thinking that it was going to help me," she said, "and not realizing that I was shooting myself in the foot."

    Traditional treatments for nausea and vomiting don't seem to help in cases of cannabinoid 
    hyperemesis syndrome, Dr. Peter Lin said, although hot showers or baths can provide temporary
    relief. (David McNew/Reuters)

Diagnosed by specialist

Downton said it took eight months to get an appointment with a gastroenterologist, and she continued to ingest medical marijuana — and vomit — every day.

On Oct. 24, she said she went to her appointment and the specialist diagnosed her "virtually the minute he saw me."

"I was on the scope table, getting ready for an endoscopy. He said you have the symptoms of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome," Downton said, "and immediately I thought, 'This guy's nuts.'"

'I want to warn people'

Downton told the gastroenterologist she had stopped taking marijuana for a week as a test to see if it caused the vomiting, and it didn't work.

He told her cannabis has a long half-life, and she would need to stop for a more extended period of time in order to clear it from her system, Downton said. She stopped, and about a month later, the vomiting did too.

"I'm afraid that people are walking into trouble" when they start taking medical marijuana, she said.

Downton said her family doctor had never heard of the condition. "I want to protect people, I want to warn people," she said.

Spike in cases

Lin said in American states like Colorado, where marijuana is legal, hospitals are reporting a spike in the number of people reporting cyclical vomiting conditions.

He said it's possible that cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome has been misdiagnosed in the past.

Traditional treatments for nausea and vomiting don't seem to help in these cases, Lin said, although hot showers or baths can provide temporary relief. The best solution, he said, is to stop taking marijuana entirely.

Your body is telling you something; listen to it!

The Legal Fight Over TWU’s Law School Grads Continues on East Coast

The latest skirmish in the war on Christianity

Shane Woodford

Trinity Western University is in court in Nova Scotia Wednesday morning, fighting to allow graduates of its controversial school of law to work in the province.

The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society is arguing the school’s covenant, forbidding sex outside the traditional marriage of a man and a woman, is discriminatory.

The Society has already lost a court battle and is appealing a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge’s ruling, that it exceeded its authority in banning TWU grads from working in the province.

In court, the Barristers Society says the covenant means LGBTQ students aren’t being given equal opportunities at the university.

Lost in this absurdity is that fact that there are almost certainly no LGBTQ students at Trinity, nor are there ever likely to be any. Trinity is a Christian school and very few LGBTQs have any desire to be around Christians.

Then there is the fact that there are dozens of other places to get a law degree, one does not need to attend Trinity Western.

The Law Societies are clearly biased toward LGBTQs and against Christians, some of which we have brought on ourselves with un-Christ-like behaviour, and some is simply bigotry.

Wednesday is the first of three days of court proceedings.

Here in B.C., the Law Society is appealing a similar ruling.

It too doesn’t want to give TWU law school grads accreditation, due to the community covenant.

A date for that appeal has not been set yet.

Christians, please be praying for the courts to see the bigotry and absurdity of the Law Society's position.

Were Halifax Couple Planning a San Bernardino-like Attack?

Search of Nova Scotia man’s home yields a cache of illegal weapons

Posted by: Ilana Shneider  CIJ News

According to a November 23 RCMP news release, on November 20 RCMP officers with the Integrated General Investigation Section of the Criminal Investigations Divisions arrested Samir Dib Elias, 33, after conducting a search of his Halifax home. As a result of the search, officers seized a 9mm handgun, two semi-automatic rifles, 28 prohibited magazines for the weapons with over 500 rounds of ammunition and a kevlar vest.

According to the Herald News, the search was conducted after RCMP obtained a warrant following threats Elias made against a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officer Todd Houston demanding the return of $15,000 in cash which Houston seized from Elias’ wife on her return from Lebanon on September 13. Elias’ wife claimed the cash belonged to Elias which he received after the sale of his deceased father’s house, but could not provide any documentation to back up her claim. When Houston asked Elias, who was waiting for his wife at the airport, about his father, Elias said his father was doing well.

Shortly after Houston seized the cash, Elias began calling CBSA repeatedly and demanding information on Houston’s whereabouts. He allegedly issued a 24 hour ultimatum to return the money and, according to RCMP Const. Colby Smith, made threats against Houston, including “throwing him in the dumpster”.

Elias was charged with a total of 35 criminal code offences including uttering threats, transfer of firearm without authority, intimidation of a justice system participant, two counts each of unsafe storage of firearms and 28 counts of possession of a prohibited item.

According to the documents filed at Halifax provincial court, Houston believed the money should be seized as “proceeds of crime to support terrorism,” and his supervisor agreed with this statement.

In other words, he suspected that Elias and his wife were planning on using the money to buy more weapons or materials to be used in a terrorist plot.

Elias is scheduled to appear at the Dartmouth provincial court on December 29 to enter a plea. RCMP say the investigation is still ongoing.

It is the third time in three weeks in which Canadian police seized a cache of illegal weapons. On December 4 in Toronto a police search of a car following a single-car crash during which the driver fled the scene, discovered a machine gun with a silencer and two handguns, one of which was equipped with a silencer. Some “religious materials” were also found inside the abandoned vehicle, but Police did not provide any further information about their nature, and said that these materials are “unrelated to the investigation”.

If those 'religious materials' were Islamic, it would be naive, if not moronic, to say they are unrelated to the investigation. 

Earlier on November 20, the Police arrested in Toronto and Vaughan nine suspects and seized guns, drugs, and cash. The firearms included two 9 mm automatic Sterling MK4 sub-machine guns, a Zustava Arms, Scorpion M84 sub-machine gun, a Para-Ordnance P10 .45 calibre pistol, a Para-Ordnance P45 .45 calibre pistol, a Springfield armoury .40 calibre pistol with silencer and numerous rounds of ammunition of various types (.45 calibre, 9 mm and .40 calibre). (See photo at top). Note: All nine arrested in Vaughan were orientals, not Muslims. This was likely drug-gang related, not terrorism.

Last month, a total of 86 long rifles, 22 handguns and over 8,000 rounds of ammunition were turned in during the Toronto Police two-week gun amnesty that ended on November 16. In 2014, 27 firearms were reported stolen in Toronto.