FIRST READING: The mammoth quantity of activism fuelled by taxpayer money

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

This week, the National Post’s Terry Newman covered how a $100,000 federal grant intended to fight antisemitism was instead given to an anti-Israel activist group.

The group Toronto Palestinian Families was given $99,500 for a program they pitched as “combating anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinian racism for all 2024.” But as Newman documented, Toronto Palestinian Families has a history of vocal anti-Zionist advocacy. They’ve even used their social media to share content from Palestinian Youth Movement, a group that openly celebrated the October 7 attacks on Canadian streets while they were still unfolding.

It’s a window into the vast archipelago of government grant money ending up each year in the hands of full-time activists. And it’s an archipelago that’s expanded dramatically under the Liberals, with whole new categories of government grants earmarked for everything from “gender equity” to “climate action” to “anti-racism.”

Here are three examples of just how much activism is being footed by the Canadian taxpayer. And these are just a cursory sample. Key an activist buzzword into the official Government of Canada database of grant recipients, and it will yield dozens of others.

Canada’s leading trans advocacy group is mostly government funded

Egale Canada was founded in 1986 as a charity pushing for equal rights for gays and lesbians, and claims the title as Canada’s “leading organization for 2SLGBTQI people and issues.”

Of late, it’s been at the forefront of defending the frontiers of gender identity. This has been most visible in Egale’s vocal opposition to new Alberta laws barring males from women’s sports, or banning the prescription of puberty-blockers to minors. Egale lawyers are in court to sink both policies.

And somewhere along the way, Egale Canada’s budget has become majority dependent on government.

A profile by Charity Intelligence Canada pegs Egale’s government funding at around 69 per cent of their total revenue. For fiscal year 2023, they brought in $4.2 million in government funding versus just $1.5 million in donations.

Taxpayer funding is also paying the bills of Queer Momentum, the group led by trans activist Fae Johnstone.

Among one of Queer Momentum’s causes in the last calendar year was reacting against Conservative calls for male offenders to be barred from women’s prisons based on self-identified gender. “This commitment, if enacted, would place transgender women at increased risk of violence and harm in an already-violent criminal justice system,” they wrote in a statement, urging voters to stay focused on the election’s core issues of “affordability and standing up to (U.S. President Donald) Trump.”

In December 2023, Queer Momentum was a featured recipient of a Liberal press event in Halifax announcing $5.4 million in gender equality funding. “I’m pleased that the Government of Canada is investing in local community organizations, like the Society of Queer Momentum … here in Kentville, Nova Scotia,” said Liberal MP Kody Blois in a statement.

In October, Queer Momentum was celebrating another multi-million dollar tranche of government “gender equality” funding, including more than $10 million per year “to support LGBTQ communities.”

“Queer Momentum applauds the Government of Canada’s announcement of continued investment in gender equality and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities,” it wrote in a Facebook post. “This announcement wouldn’t have happened without our collective advocacy.”

The “pro-Palestine” cause is awash in federal grants

Toronto Palestinian Families made headlines largely because it was a particularly brazen example of “antisemitism” funding being directed to anti-Israel advocacy.

But federal money can also be found in the budgets of any number of organizations that have been active in pushing anti-Israel policy in Ottawa, or even in accusing Canada of complicity in Gazan “genocide.”

The National Council of Canadian Muslims, originally founded as the Canadian branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a registered Parliament Hill lobby group vocal in pushing the idea that Israel is a genocidal state. Their website claims responsibility for the fact that Prime Minister Mark Carney has threatened to arrest his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. They’ve also advocated for the abolition of the Canada Revenue Agency’s Research and Analysis Division, as it keeps investigating Muslim charities for terror links.

The federal government has awarded 10 grants to the NCCM since 2018. The two largest ones were nearly half a million dollars each. Women and Gender Equality Canada gave the group $471,842 in 2021 to “support a feminist response and recovery from the current impacts of COVID-19, through systemic change.” Canadian Heritage gave them $451,168 just this year for “engaging schools, parents and communities against Islamophobia.”

Earlier this year, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association released a guide to “anti-Palestinian racism” that, among other things, deemed it racist to link Palestinian politics to terrorism. The guide also wrote that “jihad” is a benign term misrepresented by Western media.

The entire guide was funded by government. Canadian Heritage paid $99,950 for it via its “Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Program.”

A top climate change lobbyist pays almost all of its bills with government money

Roughly every few days, a spokesperson for the Canadian Climate Institute can be found cited in a newspaper report or appearing as a talking head on TV or radio.

In September, for instance, they were the sole source of a Canadian Press story entitled “Environment groups are calling on the federal government to move swiftly on climate policies in the upcoming session of Parliament.” In 2022, they were the source behind the headline “Adapting to climate change faster will save Canada billions.”

The institute has published multiple reports backing the virtues of carbon pricing, both the consumer and industrial variety. Of late, the group was denouncing the Carney government’s signing of an MOU with Alberta to build a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean. “With this agreement, the federal government risks doing significant damage to minimum national standards that will have broader impacts on Canada’s climate change efforts,” it wrote in a statement.

Canadian Climate Institute executives are routinely brought in as expert witnesses to House of Commons committees. Prime Minister Mark Carney has cited their “independent research” in official statements. And just this week, the Department of Finance announced that the Institute was working on the “arm’s-length development” of new “sustainable investment guidelines.”

But the Canadian Climate Institute isn’t just funded by government, it was explicitly created by government to act as a “wholly independent” advocacy organization. The Canadian Climate Institute notes that it was birthed as a result of a call for proposals by Environment and Climate Change Canada seeking the creation of a non-profit “to help Canada move toward clean growth in all sectors and regions of the country.”

To this end, the institute received $500,000 in federal money in 2022, and $30 million in 2023. The latter payout was written up as a grant for an “expert engagement initiative on clean growth and climate change.”

IN OTHER NEWS

For the first time since Canada’s borders were effectively closed by COVID lockdowns, the country’s population has shrunk. The latest Statistics Canada population estimates show that the total population of Canada went down by 76,068 between July 1 and Oct. 1.

Statistics Canada says this is due almost entirely to the departure of various categories of temporary migrants, from foreign students to temporary foreign workers. In fact, the agency said it was the largest recorded drop in temporary migrants since record-keeping began in 1971.

Nevertheless, it’s still a tiny portion of the unprecedented migration spikes of the post-COVID era. Over just three years starting in 2022, Canada’s population grew from 38,516,138  to 41,528,680 — an increase of about one million per year. Put another way, that 76,068 drop in population reverses just 27 days of post-COVID population growth.

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According to that StatsCan population update, the number of temporary migrants in the country is still at 2,847,737. As recently as 2021, that tally was just 1,361,855.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.