The News We Cover, The News We Avoid. . .

. . . the news that we're suddenly covering like white on rice, and the news that's manufactured out of whole cloth, with the embroidery done in Ottawa.

In today’s print editions of the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen I take cheerful note of the sudden blizzard of front-page interest in the opaque and strangely intimate relationship between the Trudeau Liberals and McKinsey and Company. This is “the shadow government you're not supposed to know about” from the headline of last weekend’s Real Story newsletter.

And gosh, what a blizzard of headlines this week has given us. Globe and Mail: Opposition parties planning investigation into spike in outsourcing contracts to McKinsey under Liberals. Toronto Star: Conservative leader calls for probe into federal contracts awarded to McKinsey. National Post: Poilievre pushes for answers on what influence McKinsey has had on Trudeau Liberals.

As anyone who has followed my work will know, you could say I’ve been banging on about McKinsey for a long time. Subscribers who pay to get to the far side of this newsletter’s occasional paywalls will be acutely aware that I think it’s a massive and preposterously under-reported story, and those subscribers will have known pretty well everything that’s been reported under this week’s headlines.

Besties: Dominic Barton and Justin Trudeau. In happier times.

It’s a story about a powerful globe-spanning management consultancy that mutated into a service agency for dictators, oligarchs and corporate drug pushers under the leadership of the longtime Trudeau confidant Dominic Barton. It’s about the lucrative role Barton and McKinsey played in corrupting and undermining the “liberal rules based order” that has fallen apart around the world.

It’s also about how Barton and McKinsey equipped and trained Team Trudeau in the experimental transformation of Canada into a “post-national state with no core identity” dependent on the money, markets, whims and tantrums of Xi Jinping’s state-capitalist oligarchy in Beijing. That’s a bullet we now seem to have dodged, mostly because the Biden White House finally got around to reading the Riot Act. Cross your fingers.

So, once more, with feeling: Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 1, and Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 2. My assessment of the current state of play is well described in the headline and subhead on top of my column this week, Ottawa Citizen version: McKinsey's Liberal ties go very, very deep. . . If the opposition is serious about digging into the global consultancy firm's relationship with government, it must look back to before Trudeau was party leader.

I mean, way back.

But hey, I’m writing this for Real Story subscribers, so you’ll know this stuff already.

Now. Onward to some News of the Weird and Worrisome.

In my last newsletter, there was this bit: Over the holidays, what the hell was New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh thinking? That nobody would notice, I guess, but I thought the NDP was supposed to be the party that was militantly opposed to truck or trade with antisemites and homophobes and misogynists.

I’ll come to that in my next newsletter, which I’m just putting together.

Also there was this bit: And what’s the deal with that wholly fabricated and fictional deep-state conspiracy targeting the Muslim Association of Canada? Why has Team Trudeau been pandering to federally-funded axe grinders who propose that such “systemic” Islamophobia could actually be a real thing in the higher ranks of the Canada Revenue Agency and the RCMP?

That’s coming up in the next edition of the Real Story too.

It all follows from a thing I mentioned in a newsletter from a month ago about a strangely unreported cloak-and-dagger standoff at the Canada Revenue Agency over national-security confidences arising from a case involving an organization that has been blessed with about $3 million in federal “anti-hate” money - the Muslim Association of Canada. You may recall the MAC from a story it gave me no pleasure to break last summer: The Liberals are funding hate. How else to describe the speakers at this Toronto convention?

The federal money has kept flowing even though the MAC has been subject to an ongoing Canada Revenue Agency audit since 2015. Last month I reported here that there’d been a holdup in the review that came out of the complaint about the audit because “certain national security information that’s top secret and only divulged on a “need-to-know basis” was unavailable to the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson Office, which is undertaking the review.

The result, Ombudsperson François Boileau told the Senate Committee on Human Rights a few weeks ago, was that he couldn’t get the CRA to explain “the mandates and respective roles of a number of national security partner organizations” involved in the audits of the Muslim groups. With the impasse, the MAC said the review should be deemed “inherently flawed.”

The National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) had asked for the review on behalf of its member organizations after their own study identified “potential Islamophobia and racism in how the CRA carries out audits that are motivated by national security interests.”

This shadow has been hanging over the CRA for some time now, and without evidence Prime Minister Trudeau has encouraged the view that Islamophobia is embedded in federal agencies and that Muslims have been made a “target” of the CRA.

Canada’s Muslim charities face “systemic challenges and barriers that go back many, many years, indeed, starting with actions under the previous government,” Trudeau claims.

This is in keeping with his foundational “post-national” proposition that Canada was a genocidal racist colonial settler state until he came along, and now he’s going to make everything nice. So everything fits together quite neatly.

In light of Boileau’s submission to the Senate committee, the NCCM said what they wanted was “a fulsome examination of systemic Islamophobia and racism” in the CRA, and a suspension of the CRA’s review and analysis office pending a hard look at both the CRA’s risk-based assessment model and the national strategy to combat extremism and radicalization.

Now, who would go to such trouble to fake systemic Islamophobia in the CRA?

And I mean a whole amazing heap of trouble, and effort, and expense, all in an attempt to gin up the idea that the CRA is a howling wilderness of systemic Islamophobia and racism. Full marks here go to the Globe and Mail’s Steven Chase and Robert Fife, who broke the story (that’s just how those guys roll) about a complex, multi-agency Islamophobic spy-versus-spy operation to bolster the CRA’s case that it’s justified in targeting Islamic charities. Except there’s no such thing. The whole thing, as Fife and Chase went to slam-dunk lengths to show, is a spectacular invention.

And I do mean spectacular. It’s the Mother of All Hoaxes, with hundreds of pages dated back to last April that include fake RCMP search warrants, fake money transfers and forged emails between the CRA and the Mounties and fake spies inside the MAC. This isn’t child’s play ( well, in a way it is, the forgeries were so bad).

The upshot: The RCMP is now investigating the hoax, the MAC & the NCCM have demanded a separate independent investigation-review rigmarole, and Prime Minister Trudeau says, yes, whatever you say, sure.

Anyhow, that’s for the newsletter I’m putting together right now. In your inbox, first thing Saturday morning. With bells on.