As the clock ticked down to the final stretch of the spring parliamentary sitting, Rebel News commander Ezra Levant joined the chorus of Conservative — and non-Conservative — commentators sounding the alarm over a last-minute push by the federal Liberals to use their newly-secured narrow majority to “dramatically curtail debate” on Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s plan to overhaul the protocols for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain electronic and digital data.

The “the so-called lawful access bill,” as Levant dubbed it, “would compel technology companies to retain user data for up to a year and make that information available to government authorities,” he noted.

“Civil liberties advocates have raised serious concerns about privacy, government overreach and the expansion of state surveillance powers,” but the Liberals were laying the procedural ground work put the bill on an “accelerated timetable,” in which “the normal rules are being set aside,” Levant explained.

“No quorum calls, no procedural delays, no meaningful ability to slow the process down. For a bill that critics describe as one of the most significant expansions of government surveillance powers in Canadian history, Parliament is being afforded remarkably little time to examine the details.”

And that, he argues, is the answer to the question of why Prime Minister Mark Carney was “so desperate” for a majority, and it isn’t just “ugly,” but “a direct assault on parliamentary democracy and your freedoms,” he warns.

“Last year, (Carney) won the election with just 43 per cent of the vote. That delivered him 169 seats out of 343 in the House of Commons, three short of the 172 needed for a majority. Canadians deliberately gave him a minority government. Sometimes voters do that on purpose, wanting to keep a politician on a shorter leash and force him to work with Parliament rather than dominate it.”

Carney, however, “was not content with the verdict of the electorate,” Levant contends.

“While the political establishment spent years warning that Donald Trump might refuse to accept election results, Carney set about changing his own. By persuading a string of opposition MPs to cross the floor, he secured the majority Canadians had declined to give him at the ballot box.”

Fast forward to the soon-to-be-wrapped debate on the lawful access bill, and this “is why Carney bribed the opposition MPs to cross the floor,” Levant posted to X shortly after the motion to speed up the lawful access legislation was tabled.

“This is what they wanted but couldn’t get without a majority: secrecy, authoritarianism, and the right to spy on Canadians.”

And this, he noted in the recap of his nightly show, “is what an unchecked majority can look like under Mark Carney: Parliament reduced to a rubber stamp, debate curtailed, privacy placed at risk and major legislation rushed through with minimal scrutiny.

Last week also heralded the launch of what Levant describes as a “journalistic accountability project” spearheaded by Rebel News: namely, TimHortonsWatch.com, “a hub for Rebel News’ ongoing investigation into Tim Hortons, its franchise system, and the workers affected by it — both Canadians passed over for jobs and foreign workers who may be vulnerable to mistreatment,” as he puts it.

Among the features: An open invitation to “join the boycott” by pledging “no coffee, no breakfast, until Tim Hortons commits to hiring Canadians and investing in our next generation” that, as of Wednesday morning, had collected 18,775 signatures towards its 25,000 target.

There’s also a rolling #TimsBoycott meme contest looking for the ‘best, sharpest, most creative memes” that “call out their use of foreign labour over Canadian workers, mock their shameless corporate spin and PR campaigns, highlight their attempts to silence journalists, or simply capture the absurdity of a brand that claims to be Canadian while selling out Canadians at every turn,” a whistleblower tip line seeking anonymous leads from “staff, former staff, franchise insiders, suppliers, and others with first-hand knowledge of misconduct, worker mistreatment, labour issues, immigration concerns, unsafe conditions, retaliation, or corporate behaviour the public deserves to know about,” and an online shop.

As part of the ongoing campaign, the Rebel team has dispatched its billboard truck to Tim Hortons outposts across the Greater Toronto Area, which, as Rebel mission specialist David Menzies reports, prompted a letter from the company that declares Rebel News staffers “essentially persona non grata at all Canadian Tim Hortons.”

The missive also includes a direct reference to Menzies himself, he notes, who “due to past behaviour, is not, for any reason, permitted access to the premises, including parking lots, landscaped areas, and drive-thrus of any Tim Hortons restaurant in Canada, any and all manufacturing and distribution facilities owned or operated by TDL across Canada and the Tim Hortons offices in Montreal, Calgary and Toronto.”

For his part, Menzies attempted to get more details on exactly what he is and isn’t permitted to do in the vicinity of a Tim Hortons, but was advised that the “trespass notice speaks for itself,.” an assertion he was quick to rebuff.

“Lawyers are typically all about putting down the nitty-gritty tangible details in writing,” he points out. “Stating that ‘the trespass notice speaks for itself’ is the opposite of tangible. It’s completely abstract.”

Elsewhere on the site, Rebel correspondent Tamara Ugolini documented her exchange with a “Statistics Canada enumerator” who “arrived unannounced at my property,” and whose “message was clear: participate in the mandatory census or face consequences,” she notes.

“A calm response of ‘I’d prefer not to’ is apparently not good enough, and the agent enumerator made it clear that there would be a follow-up.”

She also flags a recent application for judicial review filed by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms that raises concerns about “certain invasive aspects of the long-form census on Charter grounds, (and) begs the question: At what point does ‘civic duty’ become state coercion? And how much of your private life are you willing to surrender before you say ‘enough is enough’?”

Meanwhile, the Alberta Fact Check is still cranking out near real-time rebuttals to “Liberal politicians in Ottawa, their friends in the legacy media, the taxpayer-funded CBC” who “twist the facts about Alberta’s future,” with recent dispatches taking on David McLaughlin’s claim that the upcoming referendum is “really just (Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s) decision,” a CBC News story that examined what could happen to mortgages and banking in an independent Alberta and the suggestion that “foreign trolls” are driving the independence movement.

The Rebel-associated third party advertising group ‘Alberta’s Choice’ has also launched a contest to “choose a design” for the lawn signs they plan to roll out as part of their campaign, which offers the choice of three slogans: “Alberta makes, Ottawa takes,” “Quebec got to vote, why can’t we?” and the straightforward, all-caps “LET US VOTE.”

Over at the Post Millennial, David Krayden scored a one-on-one interview with Smith, who, in addition to “downplaying the construction of a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean as part of her memorandum of understanding” with Carney’s government, claimed it “was also about stopping the Liberal government’s ‘woke agenda,’” and the “nine terrible policies from the (Justin) Trudeau – (Steven) Guilbeault era.”

Smith “is also dealing with a thriving Alberta independence movement,” and, as a “strong federalist, has chosen to reject an October referendum on separation and instead have a referendum on whether to have a future referendum on independence,” a “response” that “satisfied no one,” Krayden notes.

“’I don’t want to prejudge what Albertans are going to do,” Smith told him.

“Everyone is going to be in the polling booth and make … their own choice on the basis of what their heart and their conscience is telling them. All I know is that we have made tremendous progress with the approach that we have taken.” Still,  with “that being said … if Albertans choose to go in a different direction, then that is also the marching orders for those of us who are democratically elected,” she added.

Rounding out the right-of-centre media circuit, Juno News writer Cosmin Dzurdzsa weighs in on CBC “s ditching nearly 75 years of Hockey Night in Canada after this season,” Gabriueand “walking away from NHL broadcasts to pour resources into women’s professional leagues instead,” even as “those same leagues are still deciding whether biological males who identify as women get to compete against actual females,” he argues.

Trending on the progressive-left side of the Canadian activist mediaverse:

• Ricochet reporter Brandi Morin stopped by a weekend rally in Calgary, Alta., where First Nations chiefs who “are preparing to fight Alberta’s nascent separatist movement with every tool available to them” offered the crowd “less a defence of the status quo than a warning: that the politics now driving Alberta toward the ballot box this fall are the same politics that have spent a decade corroding public life south of the border — and that it now falls to Treaty people, Indigenous and settler, to stop them.”
• Over at Rabble, politics writer Karl Nerenberg explores how Carney’s government “left the Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise leaderless for more than a year,” and then, “after drastically underfunding it and giving it a weak mandate,” declared it to be “ineffective, and summarily executed the office.”
• Press Progress labour reporter Emma Arkell chronicles the successful push by Victoria-are Uber drivers to  “become the first app-based workers in Canada to gain the protections of a collective agreement.”
• Finally, Pam Palmater, Sharon McIvor and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell team up for a triple-bylined piece in Canadian Dimension that calls on Carney to “halt the legislated extinction of First Nations” by passing proposed changes to the Indian Act registration system before the House shuts down for the summer.