November 2011 Archives

It's time to sell the state broadcaster

Yesterday I debated against four CBC executives at once. It was hardly a fair fight.

Unfair for them, I mean.

Four on one would have been a good idea if the CBC's goal was to rebut everything I said four times.

But their own arguments made the case to defund the state broadcaster better than I did.

The debate was hosted by the International Institute of Communications — and the opening remarks were by none other than Hubert Lacroix, the CBC's president, fresh from his humiliating defeat at the Federal Court of Appeal. Last week that court unanimously ruled that, under Lacroix's leadership, the CBC would be forced to hand over information about how it spends our money to the federal transparency ombudsman. Yet he still had the chutzpah to ask for another another $1.1 billion bailout.

The CBC is 75 years old. It has received a government bailout every one of those years. If you add it up since 1936, including the interest on that debt, the cost of the CBC is greater than Canada's national debt, $571 billion.

When I revealed that calculation, the room of CBC supporters laughed. It was the sound of people laughing all the way to the bank.

Carol Off, one of the CBCers who was debating me, was particularly hard to argue with. Because she made all my points for me.

She is supposed to be a journalist. But she declared herself a public servant. As in, a government worker. Hey, that's my line!

She said she envied the state broadcaster in North Korea, because it never had trouble forcing political guests to appear on its shows, as Off apparently does.

I heard that authoritarian streak several times in the debate. Marie-France Bazzo, a former CBC host, said that in a democracy such as Canada, there are too many voices — and they need someone to sort through them and filter them. Not surprisingly, that someone would be her and her CBC friends. She said the CBC was a "way to structure society."

And you thought it was just an expensive channel on your TV dial.

Patrick Beauduin, the executive director of French CBC, wasn't as ideological as Bazzo or Off. He said the CBC's advantage over its private rivals is that it is smarter and more thoughtful. So, an extra helping of self-esteem and snobbery. He obviously has been hanging out with Lacroix.

It was sad, actually. Once, the CBC had a great mandate. Seventy-five years ago it was to build a national radio network. Perhaps 25 years ago it was to provide public affairs content that was available nowhere else.

But today, 500 channels from the History Channel to A&E to Bravo clean the CBC's clock. YouTube and Netflix are coming to finish it off. The CBC is reduced to airing Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. We need a government broadcaster for that?

As its national importance has fallen, its self-importance has skyrocketed.

We used to have a national gas station, called Petro-Canada. We used to have a national airline, called Air Canada. We used to have a national train, called CN. All had some political justification in the past. All are privatized now, and doing great.

The CBC had its moment. That moment is gone. Time to sell it.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Global-warming sham
'Environmentalists' spend our millions in exotic locations while talking about the weather

The annual convention of global warm-mongers gets underway at the resort city of Durban, South Africa.

It's gorgeous down there. There's surfing right in the city. Safari parks aren't too far away. It's full of great hotels and fancy restaurants. It's a bit of a party town. Which is why it was chosen by the world's global warming professionals as their latest winter getaway convention.

This is the annual United Nations get-together to talk about reducing our carbon footprint, which means using less fuel.

Of course the best way to do that is for thousands of very important bureaucrats, diplomats, Greenpeace fundraisers and politicians to jet from all over the world to South Africa. The only place further away by jet would be Antarctica, but that would miss the point — to give their global warmists a free sun vacation in winter.

They went to Cancun last year. They've been to exotic retreats like Bali and Marrakech. They get to see their friends every year at another five-star resort, all paid for by you and me.

This annual five-star party has been going on for nearly 20 years.

It got started in Rio in 1992. It moved to Kyoto, Japan in 1997.

If those cities sound familiar it's because global warming treaties are named after these meetings. Between gourmet meals and tax-paid massages, these bureaucrats and diplomats cook up new taxes and treaties. Like the Kyoto Protocol, which would have forced you and me to pay more for fuel.

If these global warm-mongers wanted to reduce fuel use, couldn't they meet by Skype, or by conference call, instead of jetting to Durban or Cancun?

Just kidding. Then they couldn't go to the beach.

This conference is a good time to look at a major global carbon emitter, a multinational corporation that makes a big profit off Canada's oilsands.

Greenpeace.

Greenpeace is a $350-million-a-year multinational corporation, headquartered in the Netherlands. They are a huge energy consumer — not just jetting around the world to fancy press conferences. They've also got heavy-oil-burning ships. Greenpeace has the carbon footprint of a city.

Greenpeace attacks Canada in a way they attack few other countries. Because they can. We don't give them the Tiananmen Square treatment that they'd get in China if they dared to criticize the government there.

So they hate Canada, but they love us too. Because we're a profit centre for them.

The 2010 financial report for Greenpeace's Canadian branch plant tells the story. Their Canadian operations sent $2.28 million to other Greenpeace business units around the world, and paid a $595,000 fee to Greenpeace headquarters in Holland, called the Stichting council.

So that's close to $3 million dollars annual profit that Greenpeace wrings out of Canada.

That's pretty good money.

Just to be clear, that's Canadian money they're not spending on environmental issues in Canada. It's repatriating corporate profits to their executives overseas.

Perhaps Canadians are wising up. We're sick of being fleeced of our money and abused. In fact, according to Greenpeace documents, Canadians are abandoning Greenpeace by the thousands. According to Greenpeace's own statistics, their Canadian membership plunged last year by 4,000 people.

Four thousand Canadians quit Greenpeace last year. They see Greenpeace for what it is: A branch plant for the big multinational company based in Holland.

But Greenpeace doesn't care. They still took nearly $3 million out of our country to pay for their lavish offices and fancy jet-setting overseas.

Greenpeace used to be a charity in Canada. But they were stripped of that status by Revenue Canada, since they broke the charitable laws.

I'm sure Greenpeace will have a big contingent in Durban. It's their kind of get-together. Fancy, big budgets, five-star hotels, lots of money. A great opportunity to disparage Canada on the world stage.

Welcome to the Green movement in 2011. The only green movement they care about is the green of your money.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Mental defect 'joke' a real knee-slapper

A few days ago Pat Martin, the MP from Winnipeg Centre, came unglued. He was writing on Twitter and he just went nuts.

He said the Conservative government was a "f------- disgrace" and was engaging in "jackboot s---." When someone criticized him, he told them to "f--- off."

The man's been an MP for 14 years, giving speeches every day. And that's the height of his eloquence.

So, how was his filthy-mouthed tirade treated by the media?

Why, he was the toast of the town!

The Globe and Mail actually ran a headline that said: "NDP profanity marks Parliament's hastened decline under Tories." Got that? NDP vulgarity is Stephen Harper's fault.

Martin's a New Democrat — the self-proclaimed party of civility.

It was their holy leader, Saint Jack Layton, who worked with his party's spin doctors to craft one last press release to be released after his death.

"Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear," he wrote.

I think I read that on a Hallmark greeting card once. Trouble with that is Saint Jack didn't live up to it in his lifetime.

Dr. Alex Sevigny of McMaster University went through question period in the last Parliament, one question at a time, and ranked MPs in terms of their rudeness.

Saint Jack was ranked the absolute lowest, the absolute rudest out of all 308 MPs.

Same thing with other leftist saints, like David Suzuki. He gave a one-word review of my book Ethical Oil to the Calgary Herald: "Bulls---," he told them. That's his "scientific" opinion. And he runs a "charity," you know.

It probably sounded clever in his own mind.

Not all left-wingers are rude, and not all conservatives are polite. But there's a double-standard in how the media treats rudeness.

On Sunday, I was on the receiving end of some invective from a leftist named Emmett Macfarlane. He called me a "mental defective" because he disagreed with my criticisms of the Occupy Toronto protesters.

Calling me a mental defective isn't even going to make the top 50 list of insults that I get in an average week. It was just some inarticulate boor reaching into a bucket of slop and throwing it at me. Boring.

But Macfarlane is a PhD, a teacher at the University of Victoria. He's one of those fancy types who always likes to prove he's more politically correct than you.

Here's an excerpt from a letter he wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2008: "I've taught at Queen's for five years. Several times, I've rebuked students for offensive language in the classroom. I hope that any private citizen would confront someone who spouts racist, homophobic or sexist language."

So he's a language cop.

Of course, since Macfarlane is a PhD, he didn't call me a "retard." He used the phrase "mental defective" because he's fancy that way.

I asked him if mental illness was a standard insult for a UVic teacher. He said it wasn't an insult, it was a joke.

But that's not any better, is it? If you have a child who is mentally retarded, is Macfarlane's joke funny? Is being retarded a moral flaw?

I'm not for censorship. I'm just pointing out that the leftist elites think of themselves as civil when they're as capable of as much rudeness and bigotry as anyone.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

No more witch hunts
Persecuted sure to win reprieve from ridiculous, costly hate laws

For 34 years, Canada has had a disgraceful censorship law that violates our human rights.

In 1977, Pierre Trudeau rammed through the Canadian Human Rights Act — an Orwellian name for a law that actually destroys real rights.

The entire law is a corruption of justice — it creates a kangaroo court, run by non-judges, that does not follow the same rules and procedures of real courts, but has massive powers to punish and fine people who aren't politically correct.

But the worst part of the law is Section 13, the censorship provision. Section 13 creates a word crime — the crime of publishing or broadcasting anything that can cause hurt feelings.

Back in 1977, that law was focused on telephone lines and answering machines. But 10 years ago, it was expanded to include the Internet.

So it even covers things like whatever you post to your Facebook page. Section 13 says "it is a discriminatory practice ... to cause to be ... communicated ... any matter that is likely to expose a person ... to hatred or contempt."

So if you publish anything on Facebook, or on your cellphone voice message, that might make one person feel bad about another, you've just broken the law.

Truth is not a defence to being charged with "hate" under Section 13. Fair comment is not a defence. Religious belief is not a defence. Telling a joke is not a defence. The law has nothing to do with truth or the right to have an opinion. It's about whether or not you've offended someone or hurt their feelings.

Section 13 is an insane law. So un-Canadian, so contrary to our traditions of liberty that go back centuries, inherited from the United Kingdom.

It's no surprise that this law had a 100% conviction rate in Canada for the first three decades of its existence. This federal law was copied by provincial legislatures. B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan all have censorship provisions, too.

I found out about this the hard way. In February of 2006, I published a magazine called the Western Standard. We reported on the major news story that month — riots around the Muslim world purportedly in response to some pretty banal Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed. Those riots killed more than 200 people, and we wanted to show our readers what all the fuss was about. But a radical Muslim imam in Calgary named Syed Soharwardy complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

He said I violated his human right not to be offended. He wanted to ban the cartoons, and his hand-scrawled complaint even bitched about the fact that I dared to publicly defend my right to do so.

I laughed off that little nut-bar. I mean, get a life — you're in Canada now, not Saudi Arabia. But to my surprise, the Alberta Human Rights Commission took his complaint and ran with it.

The Alberta government, using its provincial version of Section 13, prosecuted me for 900 days, with no fewer than 15 government bureaucrats and lawyers. It spent $500,000 prosecuting me, before dropping the case — and leaving me with my $100,000 legal bill. But sometimes freedom wins a round.

Last week, the federal justice minister, Rob Nicholson, stood up in the House of Commons and answered a question about Section 13.

The question was about a private member's bill, put by Brian Storseth, an MP from northern Alberta. Storseth has introduced a private member's bill, C-304, to repeal Section 13. But private member's bills have little chance of passing without the endorsement of the government.

But Nicholson did endorse it. He called on all MPs to support it, too. Bill C-304, Storseth's bill, is now effectively a government bill. And with a Tory majority in both the House and Senate, this bill is as good as done.

No more witch hunts by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. No more persecuting their political and religious enemies.

This is the best thing the Harper government has done in five years. Freedom is on the march.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Obama prefers Saudi conflict oil

Barack Hussein Obama announced America's new energy policy: He prefers Saudi conflict oil shipped in on tankers over Canadian ethical oil in a pipeline.

It's a bizarre decision for the president of a country with 9% unemployment, that could use the thousands of well-paying jobs that will be created building the state-of-the-art pipeline.

It's not just jobs and the property taxes that the pipeline will pay in perpetuity. It's the energy security. There's no risk of a Gadhafi-style revolution in Canada.

There's no need to spend $1 billion on a Pentagon mission to secure Libyan conflict oil, with friendly Canada to the north.

But in some ways, Obama's decision isn't surprising. He has adamantly opposed drilling in northeast Alaska, though his own administration estimates that would provide an additional 800,000 barrels a day, almost as much as America imports from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

Obama doesn't much like drilling in the Gulf of Mexico either — his moratorium there caused many deep-water rigs to move to other countries, costing more than 100,000 lost jobs in states like Louisiana, jobs that won't come back for years.

Who benefits from Obama's refusal to use oil from North America? The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will. Those dictatorships are on track for $1 trillion in revenues for the first time in history.

But, as luck and geology would have it, we Canadians are sitting on top of the world's third-largest proven oil reserves — 175 billion barrels, 99% of it in Canada's oilsands. And over the past decade, the oilsands managed to push the Saudis out of top spot for the number one source of U.S. oil imports.

The Saudis obviously hate the oilsands. So do Hollywood B-list celebrities such as Daryl Hannah and Mark Ruffalo, who have tried to use this issue to change their airhead reputations.

Obama values the Saudis' approval ­ and Hollywood's political donations ­more than he values American energy security.

Canada will still have enough pipeline capacity to sell all our oil to the U.S. for the next few years, even without Keystone XL. But it's simply prudent for Canada to consider what might happen if Obama does eke out another win next year.

The biggest market for oil these days isn't America. It's Asia. It's China, India, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

There is a proposal, called the Northern Gateway, to pipe oil to the B.C. coast and ship it to Asia — 550,000 barrels a day.

That would put $20 billion a year in our pockets and could cut our trade deficit to China in half. It would be a strategic blunder for Canada not to speed up the approval of this pipeline.

But there's another idea too. Did you know that Eastern Canada actually imports most of its oil? We sell our oilsands oil to the U.S., but Eastern Canada burns Saudi oil. Russian oil. Algerian oil. We're an oil exporter, but we also import OPEC oil.

Let's fix that. Let's look at pipelines running from the west to the east.

Not built by any government fiat — we don't need another National Energy Program telling us what to do.

But let's at least permit it.

There is an MP who proposes doing just that. She's not a conservative. But maybe you've heard of her: Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Ganging up on the enemy
Shocking e-mails show Mother Corp.'s panic as we push for full financial disclosure

Three months ago, I visited the CBC's Toronto headquarters to shoot a brief promotional ad for a TV show I was doing on privatizing the state broadcaster.

But while I was down there, I thought I'd see if their president and CEO, Hubert Lacroix, was available for a chat. I presented myself to security, and asked if he or another spokesman was in.

No, they said, but they sent four security guards to ask me to leave. I waited for 15 minutes, and then had a good laugh about it on our show.

But last week, I received copies of an e-mail exchange amongst CBC brass — including Lacroix himself — about my visit.

They were in panic mode, all because I showed up at the state broadcaster to ask questions.

Literally 20 people at the CBC sent or received these panicky e-mails.

Take Julie McCambley, the director of radio production. She authorized the CBC to call the police to come.

Didn't the CBC just have a week-long field day about how laughable Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was, for calling the police when the CBC sent someone to his home?

Didn't the CBC mercilessly mock Ford for that — even though they were on his private property? I was in the public atrium in the CBC building. And a CBC radio producer says call the cops.

Other CBC brass started coming up with reasons to kick me out, too. Fred Mattocks, a CBC manager, sent a panicky e-mail around, saying "we don't allow any media to shoot in the building without advance permission."

And no one less than the CBC's Senior VP, Kirstine Stewart, asked, in desperation, "He needs a permit? R (sic) we a public space?"

Could you imagine the ridicule and scorn that the CBC would heap on someone else who tried to hide from their cameras in the same way?

They can dish it out. But they sure can't take it.

The CBC has an enemies list with people like me and Rob Ford and other conservatives on it.

For the people the CBC hates, nothing is off limits. Including its own journalistic independence.

One of the most shocking e-mails was written by Elizabeth Lea, the CBC's director of public affairs. She's a suit. She's not supposed to be involved with journalism.

But she wrote to her fellow brass: "Why don't we send 22 min to their lobby?"

She meant the comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

She was directing them to do a political attack. To do corporate work. To shape their comedy into attacking their political enemies.

And Lea's e-mail was not corrected by anyone. She sent that suggestion around — and no one said they don't do that.

In fact, the opposite. They got in on it. Bill Chambers, the CBC's VP for corporate affairs, said "No, I meant to send 22 min as a counter attack."

The CBC directs their journalists to do "attacks" on their enemies.

How many other editorial decisions have been made by suits — by Lacroix himself? Have reporters been told to "attack" MPs who have asked the CBC tough questions about their government funding?

But the most shocking revelation was an e-mail from Stewart, the senior VP.

She was in panic mode. Security has been called. But then she had a brainwave. It's an old trick she's used before to silence critics.

She wrote: "We need to hire this guy."

Seriously — to pay me to stop criticizing them.

Nothing else was working. So she reached for some of her $1.1 billion slush fund.

And Bill Chambers wrote back approvingly.

The CBC, in its own words. Thin-skinned people who can dish it out but can't take it.

A place so over-staffed that 20 people responded to my visit.

A place where journalists are told to attack political critics.

A place where, when all that fails, they just try to buy you off.

Our state broadcaster is a national disgrace.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

The western Wall

Media elite reporting on Saskatchewan brings comical results

Brad Wall has been re-elected the premier of Saskatchewan by a landslide.

The final results were not available by the time this newspaper went to press. But put it this way: Tommy Douglas, Canada's first official saint (the second being Pierre Trudeau) never received more than 54% of the popular vote in that province. An opinion poll last week put Wall's Saskatchewan Party at 66%, with the man himself at a stratospheric 83% in personal approval.

Here's another statistic for you: 4.1%. That's the new jobless rate in Saskatchewan, as of Friday. That's down from 4.6% last month. So now it's barely half that of Ontario. Saskatchewan is a have province. Ontario isn't anymore. There's news out here.

It's tempting for the consensus media to ignore Saskatchewan. It has barely a million citizens, and most people in the centre of the universe will never go there it's flyover country for our media elites. So you won't learn anything about Saskatchewan by reading the Toronto Globe and Mail or watching the CBC. But you'll learn a fair bit about the media themselves.

Take the Globe's unintentionally funny story yesterday about Wall's looming win. Here's their headline: "Wall's lead unhurt by wheat-board feud."

The Canadian Wheat Board forces prairie farmers to sell their wheat only to the government but lets Ontario farmers sell their wheat to whomever they choose. The Globe is puzzled that Wall's opposition to the wheat board's bullying hasn't hurt him. Because everyone on Front Street in Toronto knows that the wheat board is what farmers want.

Perhaps we will see another headline from the Globe about how Wall's stubborn refusal to deliver half his speeches in French surprisingly did not hurt his electoral chances, either. Or how shocking it is that Wall didn't lose the election, with his inexplicable opposition to having Saskatchewan duck-hunters register their shotguns.

The Globe is on a bit of a roll, reporting news about the prairies from downtown Toronto. Last month, when Alison Redford­ that is, a woman ­became Alberta's new premier, the Globe ran a banner headline, "Alberta steps into the present." Yes, Alberta has won the approval of Toronto's opinion elites ­ Alberta, home of the Famous Five suffragettes; Alberta, home of the first woman magistrate in the British Empire. Yes, those Alberta dinosaurs now have the grudging respect of the Globe, which has yet to appoint a woman editor-in-chief. Sometimes the Toronto narrative about the west is so strong, mere facts can't get in the way. After the 1999 election in Saskatchewan, Paul Wells gave his assessment in the National Post. The NDP "makes it look so easy,"he wrote. "Saskatchewanians wonder how long Roy Romanow's dynasty can last," and "New Democrats everywhere wish his luck would rub off."

Really? You wouldn't know that the Saskatchewan Party had just won the popular vote in that election, and pushed Romanow's governing NDP into a minority position ­ enough to make Romanow call it quits. At least yesterday when Heather Hiscox, a CBC reporter, said this election was a "close race," she said it before the landslide had happened, not after.

Oh well. Let the Globe and the rest of the consensus media nurse their fantasies about the prairies. Judging by how few Saskatchewanians watch the CBC or read the Globe, no-one out here even cares.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Saskatchewan booming: Premier set for a landslide return

Imagine a province where migration from other provinces is up 40% — where people are streaming in from places like Ontario and Quebec, and even Alberta.

A place that's cutting taxes — but still running a surplus. A place that the recession seems to have missed completely. Where is this lucky place? Why, it's Saskatchewan, the great success story of the past decade in Canada.

Saskatchewan used to be a socialist, have-not province. The NDP had such a lock on it that this rectangular-shaped province used to be called "red square." Not anymore — it's so business-friendly that companies have fled neighbouring Alberta to set up shop there. World commodity prices have helped. Saskatchewan is blessed with oil and gas, uranium, potash and wheat — all of which are in high demand these days.But Alberta is blessed with resources, too — and yet it's running record deficits and has higher unemployment. And Saskatchewan has always had these resources in the past — but never truly benefited from them before.

So what's changed?

The answer is red square turned green — the colours of that province's new Saskatchewan Party, led by Canada's most dynamic premier, Brad Wall. The Sask Party was born in 1997 out of the ashes of the former PCs. The new party, with Wall as its leader, finally broke the hammer-lock of the NDP and their labour union bosses.

In 2003, the Sask Party came within two seats of winning a majority and in 2007 it vaulted ahead, with 38 out of the 58 seats in the legislature. Monday is the next election, and the latest poll has the Sask Party at 66%, with Wall personally at 83% approval. The only real question is, how big of a landslide will it be?

Saskatchewan and Alberta both joined Canada on the same day, Sept. 1, 1905. They were originally going to be one big province, called Buffalo, but the Liberal prime minister of the day, Wilfrid Laurier, thought that would be too powerful a block, and would challenge Ontario and Quebec's dominance in Canada. So Buffalo was split in two, the western half named after Queen Victoria's daughter, the eastern half taking an Aboriginal name. For the first 25 years, the twins boomed. And then the Great Depression hit — and it hit the Prairies the hardest.

Both governments teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Farms were foreclosed, eastern banks were blamed, with some justification. And both provinces sought radical political solutions. Alberta turned to a preacher named Bill Aberhart, with a kooky economic theory called social credit. Saskatchewan turned to a preacher named Tommy Douglas, with a kooky economic theory called socialism. Aberhart's ideas — like printing his own money, called prosperity certificates — were thrown out by the Supreme Court. And in 1943, he passed away, with his deputy, the great Ernest Manning, becoming premier, a post he would hold for 25 years.

Manning got rid of the cranks and nuts and social credit, and set Alberta on a path of prosperity. Tommy Douglas didn't die, and neither did his socialist ideas. For the better part of a century they dominated Saskatchewan, and had a strong influence on national politics.And so the twins, which had grown together at more or less the same pace, started to look quite different.

Saskatchewan's population peaked in the Great Depression, and 80 years later, it's pretty much the same. Zero population growth. Compare that to its twin, Alberta, which is now close to four million people. Now, Saskatchewan is growing again. Saskatchewan's economy now is the stronger one. Now, resource companies favour the eastern side of the border, not the western side. Now, it's Alberta with the big taxes and regulations and deficits and labour union bullies. Saskatchewan was stuck in amber for 75 years. Brad Wall hauled it into the future — with a gentle hand and a smile.

Monday will be a landslide.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Arrival of Mohawks takes Occupy up a notch

The Occupy Toronto protest has been pretty empty these past weeks — there are a lot of tents up, but they're empty. They're like flamingo lawn ornaments, or political lawn signs. They're for show.

Even two weeks ago, it was clear that most of the protesters there went home at night, when the media wasn't there to notice, because they wanted to sleep in comfortable beds and to have hot showers. Other than union organizers, only a few genuinely homeless people stayed there full time — people who were on the streets long before Canada's labour unions decided to copycat the U.S. Occupy Wall Street protests.

The whole thing was rather pitiful: Effete, elitist, rich, spoiled, entitled white kids pretending to find common cause with homeless and disturbed people.

Canada's protests have been embarrassingly lame — even if they have cost police millions of dollars in overtime.

So what's next? In the United States, Occupy protests have decided to stay relevant by turning violent. Oakland, Calif., saw outright riots. It's not accidental: This is the next stage of the protests, to spark a violent encounter with police in the hopes that the police response will gain them public sympathy and give them the political credibility that their whiny incoherence hasn't provided so far.

But last week, a group of hard-bitten men dressed in camouflage gear showed up and camped out in the ruined Toronto park, too.

They call themselves Mohawk Warriors. And they don't believe that the laws of Canada apply to them.

Being exempt from Canadian laws has become a specialty of the Mohawk Warriors. These were the folks who had a two-month armed standoff with police and the Canadian army in Oka, Que., that led to the murder of Quebec police corporal Marcel Lemay and the injury of 10 RCMP officers. The Canadian Forces had to be called in.

The Mohawk Warriors conducted another military mission in the Ontario community of Caledonia in 2006, when they occupied a residential development site — again, setting up barricades, harassing and threatening citizens.

This time when the police came, they didn't try to stop the Mohawks — they stopped the law-abiding community from fighting back. The illegal, gun-toting criminals were protected by the police; mere taxpayers were the ones driven out.

So now the Mohawk Warriors have moved on to their biggest and boldest target yet: Downtown Toronto.

They watched how the vegetarian hippies managed to stare down Toronto's police. And if these weak, pale suburban rich kids could occupy a Toronto park illegally, why couldn't some hardened Mohawk Warriors?

What's going to happen next? Will they start demanding that passersby now stop at a Mohawk checkpoint and show their passport? That's what they did at Caledonia and Oka. Will they block the streets?

We saw that when Tamil extremists blocked a major Toronto highway in 2009 — putting children on the middle of the road to stop cars. The cops didn't arrest anyone, and neither did child protection services.

The cops didn't do anything when Occupy Toronto illegally set up camp.

And now they're getting set to do sweet nothing, with the heavy artillery moving in.

Do you think they'll enforce the law if Mohawk Warriors bring their machine-guns to downtown Toronto?

Or do you think they'll pull another Oka or Caledonia — just cut a big cheque to the criminals, and give them the park?

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY