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The state secretary for youth and family affairs decried criticism levelled against the Europe Uncensored Conference held in Budapest last week, saying that liberals were intolerant towards ideas other than their own, intolerant regarding open debate and intolerant towards nation states.

Katalin Novk reacted on Twitter to an article written by Romanian MEP Dacian Ciolos, published on the euractiv.com news site earlier on Monday. Ciolos called the speakers of the conference, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, Serbian President Aleksandar Vui and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jana ignorant and arrogant, and said the conference was a teambuilding event for politicians who seek to exploit their nationalism in a post-truth and populist era.

Orbn: Europe Needs Strategy Not Tactical Responses

In reaction, Novk wrote that liberals today are intolerant towards ideas other than their own, intolerant regarding open debate [and] intolerant towards nation states. Europe Uncensored is about freedom of thought and opinion.

Featured photo illustration by Gergely Botr/ kormany.hu

Link:
Novk: Liberals 'Intolerant Towards Ideas Other than Their Own' - Hungary Today

The people in Rutland and the state who claim to be leaders go from the ridiculous to the sublime. You let a few people dictate to the public what is right in their eyes only changing a school's mascot known as the Raiders to the rattlesnakes is absurd.

What's next? You going to tell veterans who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, that they can't wear their hats? People protested the Vietnam War, a war I proudly served in like so many others. Let them try and take my hat off.

This state has already said they are going to vote for Biden. You voted twice for Obama who put us deep in debt we will never get out of. You voted for Hillary who stole from you and you voted for Clinton who was an adulterer. And you continue to vote for Bernie Sanders who does nothing.

People wonder why other people aren't moving to Vermont because of high taxes, no real jobs and foolish leadership. And now Rutland is losing GE. Vermont was the 14th state to sign the declaration because of wayward thinking. I also bet the students and faculty at Rutland High School don't know what school spirit is. We have the best police force in the state but because of regulations brought on by liberals, their hands are almost tied.

Twenty-one years ago, Rutland was thriving, people were happy, places to eat and shop and a mall, but today, the mall has gone downtown, is almost empty, with no population to go to these places, they close up and move. But Vermont still thinks like a liberal, just keep raising taxes.

Go here to read the rest:
Liberal thinking | Letters - Rutland Herald

Canada is absurdly and self-punitively restrictive about travel. Canadians returning even from European countries with lower incidences of COVID-19 than Canada, such as Germany and Switzerland, are still required to self-quarantine for two weeks. This should apply only to people that have recently been in high-risk places. All intra-Canadian travel should be unrestricted the present regime of in-country travel is like going across Europe 80 years ago from one dictatorship to the next being told your papers are not in order, as in grainy films of the 1930s.

As a country, and as a species, we have to emancipate ourselves from the paralytic fear that has reduced us to inert moles and snitches, a pitiable condition that the federal government has endlessly encouraged. It is hard to be precise about these things but amongst the 80 per cent of comparatively risk-free Canadians the fatality rate of the coronavirus is approximately one in 20,000, a statistical insignificance. Even among those in the 20 per cent who are more vulnerable, the fatality rate is not much more than one in 1,000; our overall death rate, 237 per million people, is lower than all other large advanced countries that publish credible numbers except Australia, Japan and Germany.

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Conrad Black: The Liberals are failing us on many fronts - National Post

Robyn LeGrow is among the thousand-odd people rejected by the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador to vote for its next leader. (Peter Cowan/CBC)

Some people registered to vote in Newfoundland and Labrador's Liberal Party leadership race are being ousted from the process, and left questioning the party's reasoning why.

Among the rejected is Robyn LeGrow of St. John's,who two weeks ago posted on herpersonal Facebook account a critique of candidate Andrew Furey's campaign policies.

"I can only assume that that is why I have been disqualified. I had no idea when I put that post out on my personal page, to my personal friends, that it would get as much attention as it has," LeGrow told CBC News on Wednesday.

The party is informing the former voters via email.

"We want to thank you for your interest in the Liberal Party and this election. However, our records indicate that you do not support the aims and objectives of the Liberal Party of NL. As a result, you have been found ineligible to vote," reads an emailwritten byLewis Stoyles, chief returning officer of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador leadership election.

The upcoming party vote will elect its nextleader and the province's next premier on Aug. 3 ahead of a provincialgeneral election which will be called within the next year.

LeGrow took to Twitter Wednesday morning with her concerns, with many people commenting that they, too, have received rejection notices.

Emails being sent to rejected voters include an opt-inreview process by the party.

"If our records are incorrect or you wish to have this decision reviewed, please respond to this email by9:00 PM (NST) on July 8, 2020," the email from Stoyles reads.

That leavesmany, includingLeGrow, with less than 12 hours before the deadline for appeal closes.

An appeals process will continue throughout the rest of the week, according to Judy Morrow, a member of the leadership election committee and past president of the Liberal Party in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The first part of the appeals involvesasking Stoylesto review thedecisionthat rendered the voterineligible. If the voter is not satisfied,then they have an opportunity to make an appeal to the party's appeals committee, which wasput in place in February.

The party plans to have a finalized list of voters by July 14, with voting starting onJuly 28.

LeGrowistaking the party up on its appeals offer, and says she has notified them she'll be pursuing it.

"My concern is that communications all along haven't been consistent," she said.

"It seems to me that they are creating the rules as they go, making decisions and then responding to them based on feedback from people who are on the other end of those decisions."

On Wednesday afternoon, the Liberal Party held a virtual news conference for anupdate on the election process.

Since voter registration closed on June 25, the election committee has been going through what its calling a "multi-faceted vetting process." Thatincludedcalls and email blasts to verify and authenticate registered voters, and waspartnered with a research company.

As of Wednesday roughly 33,500 voters have been designated eligible, according to Morrow, who took questions from reporters.

When asked if the vetting process included the research company combing through social media accounts of registered voters to find past comments which could find them in the ineligible category, Morrow said no.

"They were just given pure lists from our Liberal list database," she said.

Morrow saidanyone who signed up with the party to vote for itsleadership, and in a follow up robocallsaid they would vote for any other party, were automatically disqualified from voting.

Anyone who said they didn't support the aims of objectives of the Liberal Party were also disqualified. Those categories addedup to about 300 people.

There were about 1,000 ineligible voters total, Morrow said.

"They were for various reasons. That could be because their date of birth was missing, or they didn't have an email or telephone number, or they were no longer a resident of the province," she said.

"We found some individuals who had been deceased. There were different reasons for knockouts."

Read more articles from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

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Liberals rejected 1,000 voters in its leadership race. One of them is questioning why - CBC.ca

We is once again a touchy subject in Justin Trudeaus Liberal party.

While the hits just keep on coming about Trudeaus connections to the WE charity, the controversy has touched off grumbling in Liberal circles about the lowercase we as in, how exactly did we get into this mess, and who is we anyway in the decision-making circle around the prime minister?

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, the Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York, says he was on the phone immediately after the news emerged about WE being chosen to hand out nearly $1 billion in pandemic relief to students. He placed a call last week to the office of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth Minister Bardish Chagger whos now gone silent with the media to get an explanation.

I was struggling to understand why it was being done this way, said Erskine-Smith, a rare MP willing to go on the record on Friday about his concerns with the entire WE affair.

He made the call before he knew all the details, which have been emerging daily, about how closely WE had been working with Trudeaus family, including nearly $300,000 in speaking fees paid out to Trudeaus mother and brother.

Had I known what I know now, I would have said this was too close to the prime minister, Erskine-Smith said.

Other MPs, preferring to talk off the record on Friday, said there has been a lot of chatter in the caucus over the past week about how this WE controversy has revived concerns about team culture or lack of it in Trudeaus government.

There arent a lot of relationships between the PM and caucus, one MP said. Now, he said, with most of caucus relations taking place remotely during the pandemic, there are even fewer opportunities for MPs to have contact with the PM and the tight team around him.

It is either ironic or fitting that WE has made the Liberal we annoyed and nervous.

One MP said he was surprised to learn from news reports first in the Star, as it happens that WE had been given a contract to do work that would normally be done by the public service.

This is a real head-scratcher for me and several of my colleagues, the MP said. I like to consider myself plugged in but the first time I heard of the WE contract was when I read the controversy in the papers. I know for a fact that I was not alone.

What baffled many MPs was why the government needed to do any contracting out at all, especially after months of proving that it was nimble and adaptable enough to get COVID-19 aid directly to citizens.

This was Erskine-Smiths main concern at first: the government has generous and effective programs in place already for students and summer jobs. MPs themselves, of all stripes, are often helpful in steering that help toward where its most needed in their ridings.

So, while Erskine-Smith didnt put it this pointedly, not only was the WE decision made without input from MPs, the plan itself which has now been reversed also kept MPs out of the loop.

Its just so frustrating, he said, citing all the good work the government has been doing to provide help to citizens in this crisis. Now this is taking up so much of the conversation. Erskine-Smiths own mother asked him on Friday why this was going on, though he says his office is not being inundated with complaints, at least not yet.

The exquisitely bad timing of this controversy has Liberals frustrated too. Not only is it happening during a pandemic, but also still in the shadow of the humbling the government received during last years election.

From all accounts, Trudeau had been making genuine efforts after the election, also after last years SNC-Lavalin saga, to forge some greater connections with the Liberal team. Just this week, Trudeau handed a major ambassadors appointment to former interim leader Bob Rae a decision seen as a symbolic olive branch to Liberals who had been kept at arms length from the PMO.

Make sense of what's happening across the country and around the world with the Star's This Week in Politics email newsletter.

But the WE controversy is viewed by some Liberals as being about how easy it is for Trudeau and his team to lapse back into old habits of keeping to themselves and giving access and benefits only to the small number of people they trust. Many MPs chose to speak off the record on Friday precisely because they were worried about reinforcing that outsider-insider culture.

None of the MPs or Liberals I reached were calling for Trudeau to resign, as his official opponents are. But there were suggestions that the PM had to surround himself with people who ask harder questions, who would have immediately spotted that WE would hurt the Liberal we.

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More here:
Blindsided by the WE scandal, Liberal MPs wonder: How did Justin Trudeau get us into this mess? - Toronto Star