“For a moment, it sounded like a prime minister preparing to act,” Rebel News commander Ezra Levant recalled.

“In a tightly scripted, carefully stage-managed speech at a synagogue on Monday, (Prime Minister Mark Carney) finally said the quiet part out loud. ‘Across our country’, Carney said, ‘antisemitism has surged to levels not seen in the post-war period.’ He admitted Jews make up just one per cent of the population yet face more than two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes.”

And yet, even as Carney “painted a grim picture of a country where Jewish schools are shot at, synagogues are firebombed, and Jewish students are driven from campus … reality set in,” he notes.

“The speech wasn’t broadcast live in full, wasn’t delivered in Parliament, and wasn’t open to media scrutiny. Reporters, including Rebel News, were locked out while a hand-picked audience watched another carefully managed Liberal production.”

The upshot, according to Levant, as summarized by the official Rebel recap: “Instead of stronger enforcement, tougher prosecutions, or naming who is responsible, Carney delivered bureaucracy,” and as for his “big announcement” — namely, the launch of the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion, it will be “chaired by none other than Marc Miller, (the) same minister whose government got tangled in the Laith Marouf scandal, handing public money to a vicious antisemite.”

What’s more, Levant points out, “even though the speech was framed around antisemitism, this council’s mandate is far broader: fighting racism and hate in all their forms,”so “a crisis hitting one community gets buried in the usual progressive laundry list of grievances.”

Given all that, the newly unveiled council “is not a solution,” he contends.

“It is the problem. It dilutes a specific crisis against Jews into a broader political project, produces reports instead of real enforcement, and proves this government would rather manage optics and balance interests than confront the actual people attacking Jewish Canadians.”

Also keeping tabs — or at least trying to do so — on Carney’s appearance at the Holy Blossom temple: Rebel’s Toronto-based mission specialist David Menzies, who filed a 12-minute report from outside the venue where Carney “was being welcomed … with open arms.”

Carney “hates Jews (and) hates Israel,” Menzies contends in the opening seconds of the video.

In the written recap, Menzies suggested that Carney is “all about rewarding Islamist terrorism, recognizing ‘Palestine’ as a state, (and) says ‘Muslim values are Canadian values.’ What does that even mean? And yet there he was virtue-signalling at Holy Blossom. It was gross.”

For their part, the on-site Rebel News team “did try to get answers to many questions, but this proved no easy task,” Menzies explained.

“Par for the course, only state-funded and state-approved members of the mainstream media were allowed into the venue. OK, no problem, we reckoned. We’d hang out in the parking lot and interview attendees. Somebody claiming to be the venue’s security head honcho, (who) would not show his security guard licence … told us to vamoose. No impolite questions allowed, you see, move along, move along. And handsy cops with the Toronto Police Service were only too happy to do his bidding.”

It was “a bizarre day,” Menzies concludes. “What was Holy Blossom thinking in terms of letting someone like Carney into this temple in the first place? As for Carney, all we can think of is our all-time favourite Yiddish word: chutzpah. It means sheer, unadulterated gall. How else can you explain his presence there?”

Menzies also made the trek to Burlington, Ont., to find out more about the “eight homeowners .. fighting to save their backyards from the clutches of the Government of Ontario, the Ministry of Transportation to be precise,” he reports.

“The crux of the matter is that the eight homes back onto the Queen Elizabeth Way highway. The current boundary is marked by a chain-link fence. As well, a few metres away from the chain-link fence stands a stone wall. One wouldn’t even realize there is a major highway on the other side of that stone wall unless this fact was brought to one’s attention. (For) seven decades the current boundary existed without controversy. But the MTO is now maintaining that the land in question has always belonged to the government and that the province is simply reclaiming land that has always been government property.”

In response, those homeowners “have indeed lawyered up and are not bending the knee without a fight,” he reveals.

“They are also very concerned that in the expanded boundary area, homeless people might set up encampments, which would seriously impact their quality of life.”

Elsewhere on the site, the newly launched Alberta Fact Check, the Rebel-initiated “rapid-response war room … working around the clock to fight back against Ottawa’s disinformation machine” flagged by R2RR last month, has been cranking out rebuttals in near real-time, including a recent dispatch from Alberta-based Rebel Sheila Gunn Reid, who does her best to debunk a claim by Alberta New Democrat leader Naheed Nenshi accusing Alberta Premier Danielle Smith of “secretly conspiring with Alberta separatists to deliver a referendum on independence,” which, while a “serious allegation, (is) also one Nenshi appears unable to substantiate,” she concludes.

Meanwhile, her fellow fact checker Cory Morgan takes on former New Democrat MP Charlie Angus’s claim that United States Ambassador Pete Hoekstra “is supporting Alberta independence,” and concludes that there “no evidence .. Hoekstra has ever addressed the independence debate within Alberta, much less supported it.”

It’s worth noting that Morgan seems to be every bit as willing to challenge claims emanating from both the premier and the United Conservative Party — including Smith’s recent estimate on the “costs of provincial independence,” which she suggested could top $400 billion based on “figures that could be considered misleading or exaggerated,” he writes.

“Albertan independence wouldn’t lead to the creation of an immediate economic paradise. There would be some capital flight, some instability, and some startup costs for replicating federal services. To imply that Alberta would be assuming over $400 billion in new expenses to become independent is inaccurate and hyperbolic.”

Morgan also disputes the claim made by “multiple public figures (who) have falsely stated that the United Conservative Party (UCP) has a clause in its founding principles calling for loyalty within a united Canada,” including Smith, former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and columnist Don Braid.

“The nine core principles of the UCP appear on its website and not one of them refers to loyalty to a united Canada or federalism in any way,” he points out, although an editor’s note does acknowledge that an early draft of what would eventually become the agreement in principle that led to the merger of the Wild Rose and Progressive Conservative parties did include language about “loyalty to Canada,” which was “debated and rejected by the founding UCP members.”

Over at Juno News, Clayton Demaine secured “exclusive” commentary from “civil liberties and constitutional litigation groups” concerned about the recent Senate-initiated rewrite of the Liberal government’s bid to expand and extend the current hate crimes laws, which “would criminalize additional symbols and add ‘residential school denialism’ to the already controversial bill,” and could “chill genuine historical inquiry and amount to legislated bias,” he reports.

Rounding out the right-of-centre media roster, Keean Bexte scored a one-on-one interview with newly elected B.C. Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, in which the two chatted about her “remarkable rise.” Although the full interview is currently only available to “premium subscribers,” in a pre-release teaser video, Bexte notes that “capturing this moment through a fair lens was crucial for us, because you just can’t trust the CBC to frame (the) next premier of British Columbia through their lens.”

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

• Ricochet contributor Christo Aivalis makes the case that Carney “would rather cozy up with ‘separatist premiers’ and their climate catastrophe agenda before cooperating with a democratic socialist movement that actually supports this country.”
• In an essay for The Breach, Jordy Cummings explains why “the left’s opposition to antisemitism must be unconditional,” and “is not a distraction from Palestinian solidarity but a prerequisite of genuine internationalism.”
• Over at Canadian Dimension, Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada president Sean O’Reilly and Canadians for Tax Fairness executive director Jared Walker warn that “cutting Canada Revenue Agency experts won’t save money,” but “will leave billions behind.”
• The Maple’s Alex Cosh weighs in on Carney’s “recent efforts to appease the United States president and his ‘Make American Great Again’ agenda,” as outlined in the prime minister’s recent speech in New York, just days before  U.S. President Donald Trump “repeated his threat to turn Canada into the ‘51st’ American state.”