Robert Wood, Author at Loonie Politics

I’m not sure, as an Albertan, that the biggest Alberta political news of the week isn’t the official secession of

the Alberta New Democratic Party from the national NDP.

Last weekend members of the NDP-A voted at a general assembly to allow for separate provincial memberships in the party: no longer will the NDP be one and indivisible. It seems there is widespread agreement that Alberta’s economy and its political culture are so distinctive from Canada’s, and so permanently incompatible with it, that the two entities really needed to… what’s the word I’m looking for? “Separate”?

NDP-A leader Naheed Nenshi, who executed the NDP schism, also spent some of the weekend denouncing Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to allow and

even slightly facilitate

a referendum on Alberta independence: maybe I’m being flippant, but I guess he’s a separatist only for his own gang. As a federalist Albertan, I’ve observed a lot of dread and anger both inside and outside the province about Smith’s openness to using the threat of separatism as an advanced Quebecois-style version of what are otherwise time-honoured anti-Ottawa tactics.

Smith insists she favours a united Canada: even (or especially) if you take her at her word, any conscious risk to the political unity of the country could be seen as playing Russian roulette. On the other hand, she has to hold together her own political governing coalition, which certainly has a separatist minority of significant size within it. I do not see any reason whatsoever to believe that a test of genuine public separatist sentiment in Alberta, a test with stakes on the table, would accomplish anything other than to instantly reveal the pathetic size and feeble calibre of that minority.

I say this having near-total sympathy with most of Alberta’s grievances against Canada. The very constitution of the country is explicitly rigged to diminish our electoral and senatorial power. Our heavy funding of the rest of Confederation seems to earn us nothing but contempt from central Canada. I don’t have major complaints about explicit fiscal equalization between provinces per se, apart from the unceasing ad-hoc updates, but equalization is just the questionably necessary top layer of a cake.

Other provinces’ economies are all to some degree engineered around employment insurance, and around contrived seasonal industries that wink in and out of existence to allow for the hoovering of implicit labour subsidies from the federation. And unlike most of what the species calls “insurance,” eligibility to collect is lowered for the regions that use EI inveterately, not raised. The long-term effects of this haven’t been good for anybody.

Alberta’s contributions to the Canada Pension Plan are also, as the recent controversy over a project for an Alberta Pension Plan showed, enormously disproportionate. The most important source of Alberta’s relative wealth is its oil and gas, and perhaps the rest of Confederation is now prepared to stop treating this industry as a despicable moral poison. But what the RoC certainly won’t stop doing is dismissing Alberta hydrocarbons as a lucky endowment from heaven to which the province has no legitimate moral entitlement — unlike, say, nickel mines, or ocean fisheries, or hydropower, or potash and uranium, or old-growth forests and coastlines.

I’m a federalist anyway — and I’m sure I’m speaking for most Albertans. (At any rate, I can speak for any Albertans who, like me, put in a decade working at Alberta Report.) Say what you want about Quebec separatism: before it could become a threat to Confederation, it had to build, despite its huge inherent ethnic, linguistic, and historic advantages, and this took a good long time.

Alberta separatist political parties are gnats, invisible to the naked eye. They haven’t come within an order of magnitude of passing any electoral test, despite lots of chances, since the National Energy Program crisis. Alberta separatists don’t have recognizable intellectual leadership — none that you’d use those words to describe, anyway. They haven’t either captured or formed any popular journals of opinion. They haven’t written catchy songs that Albertans bellow at each other in bars.

The Maple Leaf flag is as popular here as anywhere. Try applying

Tebbit’s cricket test:

we Albertans cheer for Canada at the Olympics, and sing “O Canada” with incomparable gusto at hockey games. We don’t have an entire cultural vanguard that plays footsie with separatism. The separatists don’t have a permanent literature going back decades: there’s no ready-made Alberta pantheon, no list of Alberta sovereigntist classics.

And, of course, there’s the biggest problem of all. Who’s supposed to be the Alberta-separatist René Lévesque, the affable, stylish Alberta genius who routinely argues circles around federal ministers and Canada Council trough-feeders alike?

National Post

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Mark Carney has returned from Washington and is taking a bow from the highly supportive Canadian political media for a very cordial meeting with U.S. President Trump. He set out to replicate his mighty but unsuccessful effort as governor of the Bank of England to terrorize the British public over the prospect of the United Kingdom departing the European Union, which Britain had never voted to enter, and squeaked into the minority reelection of an otherwise failed Liberal government of Canada as the man who could stand up to Donald Trump. President Trump heaped compliments on his visitor and with some justification took credit for Carney’s election victory, said that he (Trump) was the best thing that ever happened to him (Carney) and slapped him jovially on the knee. Readers will recall that I said at every stage that the hysteria about Trump was a nothingburger and that no more would be heard about Carney’s theory that “Trump is trying to break us” and that “This country’s intimacy with the United States is over, a tragedy but the reality.” When asked about this last week President Trump said “He was running for public office,” a gracious explanation of the ludicrous canard that Trump is any kind of a threat to Canada.

The fawning political media of Canada could not accept being debriefed as abruptly as the prime minister was. In its otherwise unexceptionable cover story article about the visit, in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, May 7, the word “annex” or “annexation” was repeated six times. Every informed person in Canada knows that the use of that word in this context is dishonest. Trump never spoke of annexation, which implies an involuntary takeover, something the United States did not do even with Texas or California, which it took from Mexico to the great pleasure of the inhabitants. Trump never uttered one word implying an aggressive act against the independence of Canada. He said that he thought the Canadians would do better as Americans after a voluntary federal union, and it was refreshing to hear him repeat this past week that if Canadians were Americans they would not only benefit from lower taxes but better health care, as well as being able to dispense with the defence budget altogether, since it has come so close to eliminating it anyway. Two whole generations of Canadians have been force-fed the fraud that Canada’s health-care system is superior to that of the United States; 80 per cent of Americans receive a level of health care beyond the dreams of any Canadian who does not go to the United States for medical treatment.

Some Canadian journalists even employed the word “Anschluss,” the German expression for annexation generally used in reference to Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938, as being Trump’s conception of the future of Canadian-American relations. And the media that touted Mark Carney as the virtuous and indomitable Dudley Do-Right to slay the American Goliath, when the whole scenario of total disruption of relations with the United States and American aggression was revealed as unutterable nonsense, have hailed his return from Washington as a triumph of the underdog. It is a triumph of political posturing and chicanery. In the abstract, Mr. Carney carried it off well and deserves professional commendation for selling a fable and then harvesting the credit for helping to banish the threat that never existed. The not-so-flattering aspect of this process is that where the British public correctly saw in 2016 that Carney’s Brexit ”Operation Fear” was a myth, as subsequent events have proved, Canadian voters were more gullible when presented with the new and much more implausible bogeyman of Donald Trump seeking to strangle the pure snow-maiden of the North. Trump this week repeated his well-known and oft-stated liking for Canada, had nothing but praise for Mark Carney and emphatically stated that Canadian-American relations would remain friendly and positive under any scenario. The Liberals’ monstrous electoral rodomontade, incredibly, saved a government which desperately deserved a punishing defeat on its record, and the Canadian political media that crooned the Liberal song sheet has justly praised the prime minister for elegantly disposing of the charade that he himself invented to save his party.

Now that he can retire from his stirring performance as Canada’s Demosthenes, Canadians can only hope that Mark Carney will prove as agile and successful in the new role that he and his host in Washington promised to play in the positive renovation of our relations. There is some room for optimism. As an almost hallucinatory climate change fanatic he was an apostle of the carbon tax and an enemy of pipelines but the Liberal party polltakers induced the grace of mid-campaign conversion, and he joined the majority that had already seen the carbon tax as another confiscatory tax inadequately disguised by a lot of claptrap about saving the planet; an enemy of pipelines, he has become an advocate of them. The best hope for a successful Carney government is that its leader will continue to put expediency ahead of dogmatism and translate his support of great projects that historically have built this country, from the Canadian Pacific Railway to the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Montréal World’s Fair and will assist in projects already well underway to bring some of the most sophisticated resources of this country to the world that needs them at huge profit to Canada and particularly to its short-changed native peoples.

Among these are the Ring of Fire chromite deposits that appear likely to supply the entire world’s consumption of that crucial metal required in making stainless steel for more than a century. There are similar prospects for the Magpie Mountain magnetite deposit of billions of tons on Quebec’s North Shore, with vanadium and titanium byproducts, and with the very large rare earth metals deposits on the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the Sussex New Brunswick potash deposits. The development and marketing of all of these projects are in advanced discussion and are supported by the relevant Indigenous groups. If the prime minister got behind these projects now, he would strike a mighty blow for the economic resuscitation of Canada and put an end to this foolishness about the 51st state, which Donald Trump described last week as “having fun with ‘Governor’ “Justin Trudeau.”

The conjured spectre of an American Canada has returned to the ether. Canada for the Canadians: let’s get back to making this country the world’s next Great Power.

National Post

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OTTAWA — Indigenous groups in Canada say they want to see Pope Leo XIV continue the reconciliation work started by his predecessor, the late Pope Francis.

Francis was recognized as an ally of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and was known for advancing reconciliation efforts and apologizing — both in the Vatican and in Canada — for the Catholic Church’s role in widespread abuses at residential schools.

His visit to Canada in 2022 was described as a “penitential pilgrimage” as Francis insisted on meeting with Indigenous survivors of residential schools and hearing their stories.

Pope Francis also expressed a willingness to return colonial-era artifacts in the Vatican Museum that were acquired from Indigenous people in Canada.

National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, who was in Rome for Francis’s funeral, said the late pontiff did “a lot of good things.”

Chicago-born Robert Prevost, who has chosen the name Leo XIV, is the first pontiff from the United States, though he worked for many years in Peru.

Woodhouse Nepinak said she welcomes Pope Leo and hopes he will be “open and receptive” to working together.

“I know that we have a lot of work to do but I think we can get there together,” she said. “I think the former pope had left lots of work undone and I think that we want to get back to that.”

Work on repatriating artifacts is “ongoing and we hope to have those discussions with the new Pope” and the Vatican, she said.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a national organization that represents over 65,000 Inuit in Canada, said on social media that it welcomes Leo’s selection.

“We look forward to continuing the productive work we have undertaken with the church on advancing reconciliation with Inuit,” the post says.

“And we hope that under his leadership, the Catholic Church will uphold and strengthen efforts to repatriate cultural heritage and support the priorities of Indigenous communities.”

The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, released in 2015, included a call to action urging the pontiff to travel to Canada to apologize.

Other calls to action included developing education strategies to ensure church congregations learn about their role in colonization, teaching the need to respect Indigenous spirituality and providing permanent funding for culture and language revitalization projects.

Woodhouse Nepinak said there must be an examination of Canada’s progress with the church on the calls to action, given that almost a decade has passed.

“We’re not doing as much as we should have and I think that we have to start measuring that,” she said.

Woodhouse Nepinak also said she hopes Pope Leo will come to Canada and meet with residential school survivors.

She added she is optimistic about his willingness to engage with Indigenous peoples, given his time in South America.

“Working in Peru, he would have been exposed to Indigenous culture, Indigenous ceremony, Indigenous ways of life,” she said. “I’m hoping that he would be open to seeing that here with First Nations in this country and meeting our residential school survivors to fully understand what they went through.”

About 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools in Canada. More than 60 per cent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.

Neil MacCarthy, a spokesman for the Catholic archdiocese of Toronto, said he is “hopeful” that reconciliation work will continue, citing “huge strides” under Pope Francis.

“I think we have to acknowledge a lot was done,” said MacCarthy, who was involved with the Indigenous delegation to Rome in 2022 and the papal visit to Canada. “It was, I think, a whole new chapter, most would agree, in the relationship with the Catholic Church and Indigenous Peoples.”

MacCarthy suggested that moving these issues along will take time.

“Part of that is working with the bishops in Canada and others who’ve been part of this journey and will continue to be moving forward,” MacCarthy said. “I think we all recognize that it’s a journey that needs to continue.”

— With files from Kelly Geraldine Malone, Brittany Hobson, Nicole Thompson, Cassandra Szklarski, Fakiha Baig, Nicole Winfield and The Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 10, 2025.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press

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By withstanding perhaps the worst case of foreign interference in Canadian electoral history, and managing to grow his party’s share of the House of Commons despite the electorate’s sudden Liberal rush, it’s clear that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre deserves his place at the head of the party.

There will again come a time when Canadians will have an opportunity to vote for change — and Poilievre should be there to lead when it does.

It’s true that the embattled party leader suffered setbacks of significance. His fortunes of leading the party at a time when the country was most receptive to new Conservative ideas crumbled as President Donald Trump assumed office in the United States and immediately waged a trade war — accented with threats of annexation — against Canada. Trump’s fixation immediately boosted the Liberals’ standings and, well, you know the rest.

Aside from losing the election after holding a commanding lead for months previous, he lost his own seat of Carleton, in suburban-rural Ottawa.

But, the only way to fairly evaluate the setbacks suffered by Poilievre is to take them in stride with his accomplishments, which are far greater than anything achieved by the two party leaders who preceded him.

Poilievre at his height had the party

leading

27 points

. Even when party support collapsed post-Trump — and this was only a collapse in the relative sense, since he retained most of his support — he still managed to grow the party’s foothold in Parliament. Poilievre now leads a party caucus of 144 seats, which makes his caucus larger than those of former prime minister Stephen Harper in both 2006 and 2008, as well as those of Andrew Scheer in 2019 and Erin O’Toole in 2021. He also gained

41.3 per cent

of the total vote share — a level unseen by the party since 1988, which, back then, won them a majority.

Poilievre’s Conservatives notably surged in Ontario. Before the election, they held only

of the province’s ridings; in 2025, they’re now at

(the Liberals, by contrast, have 70 Ontario seats, down from 77), with a strong showing in the 905.

Less quantifiable — but more impactful on the daily lives of Canadians — has been Poilievre’s influence on completely changing the conversation in Canadian politics, transforming the Conservative party from defence to offence.

On climate policy, the party was once completely under the thumb of the Liberals. After fighting the carbon tax since its inception under Trudeau, in 2021, then-Conservative leader O’Toole

conceded

that a carbon tax on fuel should be kept in place — a major flip-flop, as he had promised during his leadership campaign to get rid of the tax. O’Toole went further and proposed the

idea

of special carbon-rebate bank accounts, which would only be spendable on government-approved climate-friendly purchases. It was almost as if the party was trying to out-Liberal the Liberals.

Affordability, meanwhile, took a back seat. The Liberals took the offensive, inflaming social divisions by encouraging the country to see the world in terms of race, sex and COVID vaccine status and berating the Tories for not doing the same.

Poilievre took a sledgehammer to the status quo, embodying the frustrations of so many Canadians at a time when it felt like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. He unapologetically held the Liberals to account, forcing then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to answer for impoverishing the country. Instead of cowering to avoid attacks of COVID-denialism — a common, false accusation the Liberals launched against Conservatives — he was

demanding answers

for Trudeau’s inflationary, COVID-excused overspending.

Instead of supporting drug consumption sites — as the Conservatives

did

under Erin O’Toole — Poilievre

promised

to close them. Instead of staying silent and avoiding the question of whether to cap immigration altogether — as

Scheer

and

O’Toole

both did — Poilievre boldly

announced

that he’d tie his intake numbers to homebuilding. And on the carbon tax, Poilievre’s steadfast criticism brought the Liberals to abandon their beloved flagship policy. At no point did he slouch away in shame of his own party; he stood up for common sense, and, until Trump stole the attention of Canadians, he had election-winning levels of support from his countrymen.

Trump’s interference in 2025, much like John F. Kennedy’s open

efforts

to defeat Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker in 1963, robbed Canadians of an election about domestic issues at home. What should have been on the ballot in both elections was governance; it should have been a referendum on which party was better-poised to lead Canada into the coming years, and fix the broken bits left behind after longtime Liberal rule. Instead, we got an election about Trump — a temporary hurdle that inspired more fright than it should have, due to Canada’s weakened state after its decade of waste and decline.

Poilievre knows what he has to do next. In a post-election video, he

told

his followers that “it wasn’t enough. We didn’t get over the finish line, which means that I need to learn and grow, and our team needs to expand.”

The underlying fundamentals that made Poilievre the best leader the Conservatives have seen since Harper haven’t changed. His support is high. His principles are strong. He still has what it takes to win — and for the good of the Conservative movement, the party must give him that chance.

National Post

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OTTAWA — The federal government expects to spend about $7 million this fiscal year to store and maintain four custom-made, portable hospitals that cost taxpayers more than $200 million to buy — facilities meant to bolster overwhelmed hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic that were barely used.

Early on in the pandemic, as the federal government moved at breakneck speed to respond to a global health crisis, it issued rush orders for these Mobile Health Units.

They are deployable field hospitals designed to deal with acute respiratory illness cases and were meant to backstop overflowing hospitals.

But the facilities are now packed away in controlled storage spaces in Brockville and Chesterville, Ont., and the federal government is spending millions of dollars every year to maintain them there.

Documents obtained through the Access to Information Act reveal that off-loading the massive, technically complex structures — which were deployed during the pandemic but saw only a handful of patients — has turned out to be a difficult and slow-moving task.

The same documents also suggest Ottawa has been negotiating agreements to sell or donate the field hospitals since last year, and that GCSurplus, which handles surplus federal government assets, “aims to clear both warehouses by September 2025.”

While cost forecasts for the field hospitals for 2025-26 were redacted from the documents, the federal government has said it expects to spend 12 to 18 months and $8.4 million in maintenance fees to turn the facilities over to new owners.

“Public Services and Procurement Canada is actively pursuing multiple divestment avenues for Mobile Health Unit assets,” department spokesperson Nicole Allen said in an email. “This includes transferring the assets to other federal government departments, selling assets, and donating assets to eligible organizations and other levels of government within Canada.”

The four units take up 588 tractor trailers worth of space and need constant access to electricity to refrigerate medicine. Fully deploying one can take about seven weeks. One of the units takes 75 transport trucks to move — almost as many as pop star Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour.

Documents show PSPC struggled to get speedy approval to get rid of the units — after learning that the obvious places to off-load them already had smaller versions of their own.

“PSPC purposed all opportunities to donate the MHUs, such as working with Global Affairs Canada and National Defence to support situations in places such as Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East and Libya. The department also received inquiries from municipal governments such as Toronto and Ottawa, to temporarily alleviate homelessness situations,” an internal government memo says.

“In all cases, it was determined that the MHUs did not meet the needs for various reasons, including the size of the units, the high complexity of deployment, the configuration of the equipment, the significant maintenance costs of these units, etc.”

Global Affairs Canada said there was no benefit to keeping the units or donating them to the international arm of the Red Cross. The government said the facilities “would not be practical for international deployments for humanitarian purposes,” according to an internal draft Public Safety slide deck from 2023.

The Canadian Red Cross maintains its own mobile health units, which are smaller and can be deployed quickly, while the Canadian Armed Forces has a 50-bed structure that does not come with an intensive care unit or advanced medical equipment.

Ottawa had allocated up to $300 million for the units at the outset of the pandemic in spring 2020, when it granted two contracts — one to Weatherhaven and another to SNC-Lavalin in a joint venture with Pacific Architects and Engineers — to build them.

Documents said the purchase followed a “limited tendering process” and the firms were chosen because they had made “similar types of structures” for National Defence.

As of Jan. 3, 2024, Ottawa had paid $124.9 million to Weatherhaven Global Resources Inc. and $82.1 million to SNC-Lavalin-PAE to build the units, an internal memo said.

Internal emails show procurement bureaucrats were frustrated because they were stuck managing the structures as their pandemic funding was running out. The units were supposed to be shipped off to another department, such as National Defence or the Public Health Agency of Canada. No other department wanted them.

The Department of Finance told PSPC to try to divest the assets back in October 2022. A year later, on Dec. 18, 2023, the Deputy Minister Emergency Management Committee, which originally endorsed the swift purchase of the health units in 2020, approved a plan to get rid of them.

A departmental memo signed by then-public services minister Jean-Yves Duclos, dated Feb. 27, 2024, declared them surplus and granted GCSurplus approval to sell them at below market value, sell off sub-components or donate them.

One procurement manager in November 2023 said it was “deflating” that it took a year after recommending next steps to get top-level officials to advance the file, only for the project to end up back at “square one” without a divestment plan or the goods declared surplus.

Ottawa ordered two of the units in 2020. Then, in the second wave of the pandemic in 2021, Ontario requested federal permission to use them, so the federal government ordered another two.

The two units dispatched in Ontario were temporarily deployed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences in Toronto and at Hamilton Health Sciences.

Neither one was actually used to deal with critical hospital overflow, federal documents said, although the one at Sunnybrook took in 32 “low-risk” patients, according to a 2021 media report.

Other provinces weren’t interested in requesting them because — according to Duclos’ 2024 memo — the “size (capacity) and design of the units made deployment and takedown complex and too long,” and provinces were short of health-care workers who could operate them.

The oxygen concentration system from one of the units was deployed to Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife, then was moved to a hospital in Northwest Territories in 2022.

The federal government donated the units’ expiring supplies to schools and moved some of their medical equipment into the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 10, 2025.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press

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Bestselling author of eight books, including The War on The West and The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray has just released On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.

In it, he paints a detailed picture of the minutes, and hours, of the devastation wrought in the Gaza envelope during the massacres of October 7, 2023, as well as the hours, days and months afterwards; the heroism of Israelis who defied orders, and fended off Hamas on their own; the weaponry IDF soldiers discovered in civilian Gazan homes; and the exclusive harrowing accounts of the massacre’s survivors. As one of the first outside observers inside Gaza, he recounts the “pitiful sight” and the “utterly avoidable devastation” triggered by the Hamas-led attacks.

Murray takes a microscope to the question of how modern Jew-hatred has reached unprecedented levels since wartime Europe. That includes the global campus demonstrations that sprung up almost immediately, which he describes as “revolutionary cosplay,” their message communicated with “bludgeoning” — subsequently thanked by a Hamas leader as the “great student flood.” He follows the blood-soaked international money trail that has made Hamas leaders billionaires, and details the global web of Jihad supporters — the “death cults” — as an imminent danger not just to Israel, but to civilization.

Dave Gordon interviews Murray, a columnist for the New York Post and The Free Press, who has for decades filed stories from Middle East war zones, frequently appears on major broadcast channels, and recently had a much-discussed, tension-filled appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.

What compelled you to write the book?

DM:

Three things. One, was I wanted to get down as accurate an overview as possible, of what happened on October 7 in Israel, by collecting first hand testimony, and much more. The second thing was to give a firsthand account of the Israeli response to October 7, the war, and just get as much as possible up close, an account accurately and truthfully, in an era where much is written a lot about it untruthfully.

And thirdly, to look at this question which haunted me throughout the last 18 months and indeed many years before, which was: why so much of the world finds it so hard to decide which side to be on, in a fight between a democracy like Israel, and a death cult like Hamas?

After October 7, Western democracies doubled down on a two-state solution. Why?

: I think that much of Western policy making has just ended up in the realm of magical thinking in recent years. Put aside whether or not they deserve one, but there’s this completely magical belief that the Palestinians have to get another state, and it will right some great historical wrong. This thinking goes, it would cause an outburst of peace and growth, not just in the Middle East, but in the wider world.

I think they mucked up in Gaza so badly, by now it’s clear that another Palestinian state would just be another terrorist proxy state, another Iranian front state, and that it would have done nothing to improve the lives of anyone in the region or the wider world.

The two state solution paradigm has failed completely since 1948, when Arabs rejected having a state, and rejected ever since, and they only ever responded with violence.

Is this a case where Western leaders don’t want to say the conflict is about jihadism, lest they be seen as Islamophobic?

: Yeah, very weak and dangerous world leaders will quite often try to give themselves some kind of collateral in the human rights bank, by saying how important a two state solution is, and how important another state for the Palestinian people is.

My belief, as I explained the book, is that the “death cult” has the ideology that seeks a downfall, not just of Israel, but of all Western democracies. The triumph of jihadism. The people who think they’re buying themselves time by wittering on about a two state solution are, at best, in denial.

In the book, you mentioned that you spent time in Israeli prisons, face-to-face with Hamas terrorists. What that was like?

DM:

It was to meet, and see for myself, the people who carried out the atrocities and invaded Israel in order to slaughter, rape, kidnap and seek death.

What I really wanted to confront was this question of what this unbelievable evil actually is. And one of the things I say in the book is that I think that we’ve stripped ourselves of the language of evil in the West. In popular culture we speak like: There’s no such thing as evil, we haven’t understood it properly yet, people are misunderstood, or people had a bad childhood, or much more.

But when you stare into evil, what they did on October 7, we need to use this term evil because that’s exactly what it is. People not just engaging in evil actions, but rejoicing positively high on them. Now that is an evil we have seen in the West, in sometimes profound glimpses.

Things like 9/11, the Manchester arena bombing in 2017 (that took 23 lives), Pulse nightclub attack in 2016 (that took 49 lives), the Bataclan massacre in Paris (which took 138 lives.) We’ve seen it, but we’ve tried to turn our eyes away from it, and I wanted to focus the reader on the reality of it.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that Israel’s PR war has fallen considerably short since the war began. Do you agree? And what could it do differently?

: I tend entirely to disagree. I think Israeli communications has explanation of the actions, of the ideas, much better in this conflict than any previous conflict involving Israel that I’ve covered.

Twenty years ago, getting information out of the Israelis was getting blood out of stone. In this conflict, access to media and information is pretty much real time, and a lot better.

That’s different from whether or not the world wants to accurately report what is happening.

This morning, I opened the BBC website, as I do most mornings, among other media. And you know, despite all the other things going on in the world, there’s story number two about Israel, which is a story which has really no immediate news relevance, and almost always there will be misreporting, deliberate and malicious reporting of Israel’s actions, and deliberately skewed or under-reporting, of the actions of Hamas and their governments of Gaza.

You can criticize Israeli communication strategies as much as you want. But it’s extremely hard to communicate things accurately when most of the world’s media will gleefully report Hamas claims as if they are true and interrogate and misrepresent any actions of the IDF as if they are lying.

This is obviously a big challenge for Israel. The war for public opinion is extremely important. But it’s not as important as the immediate aims of the war, which are the release of the Israeli hostages and the destruction of Hamas.

Maybe if somebody compiled a list of the top 20 thinkers like yourself and a list of the top 20 resources to go to for information about Israel, and hand delivered it to our friends at certain media, and said, “it’s clear that you don’t have this information on hand, now you do. Now there’s no excuses.”

DM:

I’m very fond of the quote of Jonathan Swift, the great Irish-born satirist who said “it is not possible to reason somebody out of the position they were not reasoned into.” And for many people, the Israeli-Hamas war is not something that they feel about because of reason.

I think that’s the same with what I warn about, in On Democracies and Death Cults. I warn about the magical thinking, as well as the bigoted thinking in the West that originates not from reason, but out of anti-reason and out of senses of bigotry and prejudice, ignorance and much more.

That doesn’t mean I’m fatalistic. I think that there’s a lot of good that can be done by actually reasoning people out of positions that they were reasoned into, or would be reasoned into. And I think that’s a very important thing to do. I don’t give up on that. But I think a lot of people in Canadian society and elsewhere in the West, are simply swimming in lumps of bigotry that they may not understand.

I am very keen to bring across, people should notice the order in which the enemies of Israel have their targets. It really isn’t the case that they simply hate Israel. They always hate Israel first, and everyone else in the West next. I can’t think of a society in history that would have tolerated that before now.

That idea of Western society being at risk — do people know what that really means? Would it be more accurate to say they want to kill off liberal values, like a “liberalicide”?

DM:

Yeah, yeah.

People should notice that. For instance, when I’ve been in Canada in the last couple of years, I noticed that the anti-Israel protesters will fly the Palestinian flag, the flag of Hamas or Hezbollah, and various other death cults. They will never fly the Canadian flag.

By comparison when, for instance, last year I spoke at an event for Christians, Jews, Hindus, progressive Muslims and others, which was supportive of Israel, we finished the evening by singing Hatikva and O Canada.

I challenge anyone who thinks that they know what they’re playing with in the “anti” circles, check whether or not any of the Palestinian or Hamas supporters and the anti-Israeli bigots in Canada ever sing O Canada.

They believe that the destruction of a country of 9 million people is possible. But they also want the destruction of the rest of our societies in the West.

Whether or not we continue to fail to identify that, will have huge repercussions, not just on Israel, but Canada, America, and the rest of the West as well.

You’ve embedded yourself in the IDF extensively. How would you answer a critic who’d say you were only getting the Israeli side of the war?

DM:

Well, I’m not only seeing that. I mean, there’s a lot in the book about the Palestinian perspective, and Hamas perspective, and I’ve spent a lot of time with their leadership. But when it comes to embedding, you tend to, in a conflict zone, have to choose a side you embed with.

Some journalists from outside the region have had permission from Hamas to go into Gaza, but it’s extremely limiting, and with my own views of Hamas, they would not welcome me warmly.

When somebody does occasionally raise this question, I’m always struck by the fact that when I’m in Ukraine reporting, as I have done in the last few years, I’ve embedded with Ukrainian armed forces. What I find interesting is that nobody says to me, “why didn’t you hop over the line and embed with the Russian army as well?”

There’s a sort of inbuilt presumption that, unlike reporting from Ukraine, if you report from Israel and Gaza, you are uniquely prone to not reporting the other side. I think that’s flat out wrong. And by the way, in the book, there’s plenty of criticism of the failures of Israeli military and intelligence in the run up to, and obviously on the day of, October the seventh. The book by no means avoids criticism of Israeli failures.

In light of October 7 should there be accountability for the Israeli officials who signed off on the 2005 Gaza disengagement?

DM:

Well, I always think people should be held to account for failures, but they almost never are. It’s unlikely that George W. Bush and members of his government are going to be made to take responsibility for forcing elections on Gaza in the wake of disengagement, when so many people, including in Israel, warned that this would lead to only one thing, which is electing Hamas. One of the reasons there hasn’t been an election in the Palestinian areas of Judea and Samaria in 19 years is precisely because no one wants Hamas elected.

This engagement question is incredibly sore and difficult, because it was obviously the decision of Ariel Sharon. And he was strongly encouraged by the Americans and others in the West, including the sort of know-nothings who go on about the “two state solution” again.

Gazans could have made a lot of it. But as usual, they couldn’t resist deciding that the annihilation of their neighbours was more important than the creation of a state themselves. They prioritized the destruction of Israel over the creation of a viable entity in Gaza.

With rising Jew-hatred, what might be the tipping point for Jewish North Americans?

DM:

It’s extremely hard to say, because everybody has their own early warning system in their heads, in their hearts. All I would say is that many Jews in the West have felt the first time in their lives, the re-eruption of hatred of Jews.

And by the way, nowhere more so than in Canada. To my mind, Canada has disgraced itself in the last 18 months by showing that that anti-Jewish hatred is permissible and is tolerable in a way which hatred of no other group would be.

I would submit that if there were a large number of protests across Canada calling for lynching of black people or Indigenous people or gay people or anything else, that all of the strength of government and civil society would condemn the people doing that. Swiftly, too.

This is the great shame of Canada, that synagogue after synagogue and Jewish school after Jewish school across Canada should have been attacked, fire bombed, shot at. Canada’s politicians, if they care about Canada’s view in the world, should address this. But of course, seems that they’re doing the classic thing of feeding the crocodile.

So what would Prime Minister Carney have to say and do, in your view, to show that he’s truly on Israel’s side?

: First of all, he wouldn’t do the pathetic signalling of talking about a two state solution and revealing, once again, that he knows nothing about the region.

The fact that he did that so early was very telling. He simply wants to feed the crocodile in the hope it’ll eat him last. What he reveals is he knows nothing of what has happened in the region, in particular, in the aftermath of October 7.

What he should do is to make it clear that in a fight between a democracy and a death cult, Canada will be on the side of the democracy. And if thousands of Canadians had been massacred in one day in their homes, and hundreds more taken hostage and held in a terrorist entity next door to Canada, I would like to think that the world sympathies would be with our friends in Canada, and not with the terrorist group who did that to them. But it seems that many Canadian politicians and others would in that situation, expect people to side with the terrorists. I think anyone who does that is showing not only they’re an ignoramus, but they have no moral compass at all.

Why should people pick up the book?

DM:

October 7 was one of the most appalling atrocities of our lifetime, and it’s a warning for people in the West, not just to stare into the face of evil and to understand evil, but to understand the reality of what we could all find someday.

It’s also about what is happening in our own societies in the West, the threat to it, and the opportunity we still currently live in to avoid those threats.

In the end, the book is optimistic. I say, towards the end of the book, I saw a society that after the seventh of October, rose back, and showed that life is a thing worth fighting for, and that in the face of the death cults like Hamas, those of us who value life can win.

This interview was edited for brevity

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LONDON — As America signed its first trade deal since threatening to rip up the postwar economic order, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s famous line: “All the world’s a stage.” Rarely has global trade felt more theatrical.

The announcement was made live on television, with

the screen split

between officials in their respective countries. On one side sat British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, hunched with advisers in London’s blandest, most claustrophobic conference room. It looked like a space launch: boffins squinting at screens, willing the mission into orbit.

On the other side sat U.S. President Donald Trump, in the leather-upholstered throne of the Oval Office, unmistakably leading the performance. The U.S. president hailed the deal as “comprehensive” and “historic.” Announced on the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, it was a symbolically loaded assurance that the United Kingdom remains, in Trump’s words, “truly one of our great allies.”

These were welcome words, no doubt, just weeks after the United States seemed ready to declare economic war on the world. Perhaps the fallout from Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, with U.S. economic growth dipping in the first quarter of this year, prompted the president to expedite the U.K. deal to lift the mood at home.

Free-market Conservatives were quick to

hail the deal

as a “win for Brexit.” It would not have been possible , after all, to skip to the front of the queue in bilateral trade talks had Britain still been inside the European common market.

It was another reminder that Trump’s America is nothing like former president Barack Obama’s, who once warned Britain it would be “at the back of the queue” if it left the European Union. America’s preference to deal with Europe as one entity had its day, but has now been eclipsed by Trump’s Euroscepticism.

He underlined the point himself. “That was always a big part of your decision on Brexit, they were never able to make that deal,” he told Starmer, a staunch Remainer.

In any case, the substance of the agreement was far thinner than either leader let on. Most tariffs, including the 10 per cent global baseline, stayed in place. For those hoping for a return to free trade, the olive branch looked more like a birch switch — one Trump shows no sign of putting down.

Britain’s economic outlook remains far gloomier than it was just two months ago, with the deal offering only minor relief on tariffs overall. British car manufacturers received some relief, with the tariff on the first 100,000 vehicles cut to 10 per cent from the 25 per cent rate initially touted; and levies on steel and aluminum were reduced to zero.

This is positive for Britain, and may provide, as ambassador Peter Mandelson optimistically put it, a “springboard” for future concessions. But ultimately, it is thin gruel: as Sam Ashworth-Hayes wrote in

the Telegraph

, “The net effect is that between lower export volumes and lower prices, we’ll still likely be £9.5 billion worse off than we were before.”

Still, the deal marked a tentative step toward economic rapprochement. It was a modest win for both Starmer and Trump, each eager to offer a sunnier economic story to their respective citizens.

Perhaps its overriding significance was the message sent to the rest of the world about China. The U.S.

demanded assurances

that Britain would freeze out Beijing from critical infrastructure, including pharmaceuticals and steel production. Anyone looking for favourable trade ties with the U.S. will likely have to follow suit. As ever, it’s not really Britain, but “Chi-na” that’s at the forefront of Trump’s mind.

National Post

Twitter.com/michaelmurph_y

Michael Murphy is a journalist based in London. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and presented the documentary “Ireland is full! Anti-immigration backlash in Ireland.”

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Last Saturday, a large crowd of people rallied for Alberta’s independence in front of the legislature in Edmonton. Disappointed that the federal election didn’t deliver their preferred result, many in the group felt a boost when the government of Alberta introduced Bill 54, which will lower the threshold for citizens to trigger a referendum. But that bill has also stirred up anger with another group: Indigenous peoples across the province.

Several First Nations leaders across Alberta have argued the law blatantly disregards Treaty rights. Many in our communities, including in my home Nation of Fort McKay, are outraged and emotional — and understandably so. But today I invite all frustrated Albertans to consider wisdom drawn from the path towards reconciliation.

Anger and alienation towards the government is a feeling that’s all too familiar for Indigenous peoples. The failed extermination of Indigenous cultures, languages and traditions fuelled those exact emotions, and far worse, for generations. Those sentiments have run deep, and have been an unfortunate fact of life with roots dating back before Canada’s Confederation.

But despite having more reasons than anyone to be bitter and resentful, Indigenous peoples are overwhelmingly rejecting separatism. We respect the Treaty relationship we made with the Crown. At times we have had to fight in the courts and negotiate hard to enforce the Treaties, but we have not walked away from the Treaty relationship.

Thanks to that determination, some Indigenous people of today’s generation are starting to see results — tangible improvements to their lives that are directly tied to our demand to be treated with the dignity and respect called for under our treaties with the Crown. But progress is uneven.

In truth, we are only on the first few steps of the road towards reconciliation. For Fort McKay First Nation, that has included making strides on economic reconciliation. After decades of work, today we are both a strong partner in the energy sector that drives Alberta’s economy, and we are environmental stewards developing innovative solutions to protect our land for the future. We got there by working hard, acting in good faith, and being persistent. We built our own financial success, one contract and one company at a time. When we needed to, we fought hard: we first negotiated and then litigated the Moose Lake Accord, which created a protected zone preserving our traditional lands from expanding oilsands development.

Our Nation is a living example of how a commitment to reconciliation and respect for Treaty rights can generate results. We advanced our interests by being reliable partners, using reason, and playing the long game.

Today, Canada is at a crossroads. We are living in a tense, critical time when Canadians’ livelihoods are threatened by a neighbour to the south. The pressure on leaders to make the right decisions is enormous. But the rewards for accomplishing it would be tremendous. For Indigenous peoples, that includes getting a permanent, overdue seat at the table, using new tools to forge our own prosperity, and creating better lives for our children.

Despite the many real frustrations, the threats to our economy have aligned the people of Canada on common goals to a degree that would astonish our ancestors.

A recent poll from Angus Reid shows a clear majority of Canadians, including in Quebec, support expanding the country’s oil and gas pipelines to reach new markets and secure our economy. The federal Liberal and Conservative parties, which together will make up 90 per cent of the seats in the new House of Commons, agree that there is an urgent need to get our natural resources to fresh customers, and to build the infrastructure to do it. In a recent report, RBC pointed out that 73 per cent of the major energy projects that are currently planned for Canada would run through Indigenous territory. For both Canada and Alberta, there is a clear path to opportunity, and the public will to take it.

As human beings, we must always acknowledge our own emotions. Frustrated community voices also have a right to be heard. But it is our responsibility as leaders to act practically, and to be constructive. We must not make a challenging situation even more fraught by feeding our most destructive instincts. The stakes, and rewards, are great enough already.

We must meet the moment. It’s time for us to put the division aside, and get to work together.

Special to National Post

Raymond Powder is the Chief of Fort McKay First Nation, in Northern Alberta.

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CBC’s The House spoke with four of at least 40 incumbent MPs who lost their seat in the House of Commons last election. Some described the moment as more than just losing a job. It’s the end of a chapter of their life they’ve spent years, even decades, writing.

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GENEVA (AP) — The U.S. treasury secretary and America’s top trade negotiator will meet with high-ranking Chinese officials in Switzerland this weekend to de-escalate a dispute that threatens to cut off trade between the world’s two biggest economies and to damage global commerce.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet in Geneva with a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier He Lifeng.

Prospects for a major breakthrough appear dim. But there is hope that the two countries will scale back the massive taxes – tariffs – they’ve slapped on each other’s goods, a move that would relieve world financial markets and companies on both sides of the Pacific Ocean that depend on U.S.-China trade.

U.S. President Donald Trump last month raised U.S. tariffs on China to a combined 145%, and China retaliated by hitting American imports with a 125% levy. Tariffs that high essentially amount to the countries’ boycotting each other’s products, disrupting trade that last year topped $660 billion.

Even before the talks began, Trump suggested Friday that the U.S. could lower its tariffs on China, saying in a Truth Social post that “ 80% Tariff seems right! Up to Scott.″

Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, noted it will be the first time He and Bessent have talked. And she doubts the Geneva meeting will produce any substantive results.

“The best scenario is for the two sides to agree to de-escalate on the … tariffs at the same time,” she said, adding even a small reduction would send a positive signal. “It cannot just be words.”

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has aggressively used tariffs as his favorite economic weapon. He has, for example, imposed a 10% tax on imports from almost every country in the world.

But the fight with China has been the most intense. His tariffs on China include a 20% charge meant to pressure Beijing into doing more to stop the flow of the synthetic opioid fentanyl into the United States. The remaining 125% involve a dispute that dates back to Trump’s first term and comes atop tariffs he levied on China back then, which means the total tariffs on some Chinese goods can exceed the 145%.

During Trump’s first term, the U.S. alleged that China uses unfair tactics to give itself an edge in advanced technologies such as quantum computing and driverless cars. These include forcing U.S. and other foreign companies to hand over trade secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market; using government money to subsidize domestic tech firms; and outright theft of sensitive technologies.

Those issues were never fully resolved. After nearly two years of negotiation, the United States and China reached a so-called Phase One agreement in January 2020. The U.S. agreed then not to go ahead with even higher tariffs on China, and Beijing agreed to buy more American products. The tough issues – such as China’s subsidies – were left for future negotiations.

But China didn’t come through with the promised purchases, partly because COVID-19 disrupted global commerce just after the Phase One truce was announced.

The fight over China’s tech policy now resumes.

Trump is also agitated by America’s massive trade deficit with China, which came to $263 billion last year.

In Switzerland, Bessent and Greer also plan to meet with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter.

Trump last month suspended plans to slap hefty 31% tariffs on Swiss goods — more than the 20% levies he plastered on exports from European Union. For now, he’s reduced those taxes to 10% but could raise them again.

The government in Bern is taking a cautious approach. But it has warned of the impact on crucial Swiss industries like watches, coffee capsules, cheese and chocolate.

“An increase in trade tensions is not in Switzerland’s interests. Countermeasures against U.S. tariff increases would entail costs for the Swiss economy, in particular by making imports from the USA more expensive,” the government said last week, adding that the executive branch “is therefore not planning to impose any countermeasures at the present time.”

The government said Swiss exports to the United States on Saturday were subject to an additional 10% tariff, and another 21% beginning Wednesday.

The United States is Switzerland’s second-biggest trading partner after the EU – a 27-member-country bloc that nearly surrounds the wealthy Alpine country of more than 9 million. U.S.-Swiss trade in goods and services has quadrupled over the last two decades, the government said.

The Swiss government said Switzerland abolished all industrial tariffs on Jan. 1 last year, meaning that 99% of all goods from the United States can be imported into Switzerland duty-free.

____

Wiseman and Tang reported from Washington.

Paul Wiseman, Didi Tang And Jamey Keaten, The Associated Press

Author: Robert Wood

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