After Michael Ignatieff was declared leader of Canada’s official opposition at the Liberal Party convention in Vancouver on Saturday, he slammed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and accused him of dividing Canadians.
“You have played province against province, region against region, individual against individual,” Ignatieff said in a hall of party members. “You have failed to understand that a prime minister of Canada has one job and one job only, which is to unite the people of this country.”
An academic, author, broadcaster and human rights advocate, Ignatieff left Canada in 1978 for a career in England at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and later in the US at Harvard University.
PHOTO: AP
More than 97 percent of 2,023 voters at the convention supported Ignatieff, the only candidate, on a symbolic leadership ballot. Party delegates also voted to make a major change in rules for choosing future leaders to give each party member a vote instead of using delegates.
Ignatieff, who has previously been tight-lipped about what policies he would promote in a future election, stressed education in his acceptance speech.
Canada needs to be a knowledge society “where what counts is what you know, not who you know,” he said.
Ignatieff said Liberals would support early education and childcare programs, equal pay for equal work by women and a “world-class” education for Canada’s aborigines children, whose drop-out rate is much higher than average.
Ignatieff used the last part of his speech to “speak directly to Stephen Harper.”
“Mr Harper, you have failed us. If you can’t appeal to the best in all Canadians, then we can,” shouted Ignatieff, promising that a Liberal government would promote confederation “based on cooperation and not confrontation.”
Liberals “are the big tent of Canadian life,” Ignatiff said, calling for courage during tough economic times.
“If we offer citizens a message of hope ... Canadians will ask us to form the next government of Canada,” he said.
But Ignatieff did not say when the Liberals might try to overthrow Harper’s minority government.
Harper’s Conservatives won minorities in Canada’s last two federal elections, forcing the party to rely on opposition parties.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS