National Post (Opinions) Archives

For the second time in a year, Chrystia Freeland has resigned. Less than a year ago, it was Freeland’s resignation as deputy prime minister that set in motion the eventual departure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And now, just a few months into the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney, she’s quitting again by abandoning her new post of minister of transport and internal trade.

The Conservative opposition claims Freeland is leaving for the same reason she did before: To avoid association with a federal deficit that is projected to be way higher than anyone anticipated. Freeland, for her part, said in a statement she just thinks it’s time to go, even going so far as to specify, “I am not leaving to spend more time with my family.”

In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Chrystia Freeland.

Monday

As I prepare to exit the public stage, I am leaving with the fear that this nation may again fall prey to the empty, unambitious siren call of “just keep us safe and let us afford things.” And I am aware of the talking points they may use to defame my legacy.

You can show me the figures on GDP-per-capita or homicide rates or average rental prices, but is this a nation or a collection of economic and social figures? Canadians of the future will not ask if Chrystia Freeland made them richer or safer or better housed. They will ask if she made them feel better about themselves. And on this metric — the only one that matters — everything has gone great.

Tuesday

When people ask me “was it all worth it, Chrystia?” I need only to remind them where they were 12 years ago. I remember where I was: veteran newspaper editor, bestselling author, an “influencer” before that word had even entered the vernacular.

Life was good, Canada was prospering, and the future looked bright. But where was the

soul

Canada was a cruel, inward-looking place that would sooner cut the GST than fund gender-inclusive rice farming projects in Myanmar. Canadians had become a scared people who sought insular, unsophisticated goals such as “historically low crime,” rather than pursuing a bolder vision that considered the higher-order implications of what crime even is.

Maybe it

was

safer, maybe it

was

easier to find a job. But who ever put up a statue to safety and employment?

Wednesday

It was at a cabinet retreat soon after our 2015 electoral victory where I first realized that I wasn’t like these people. They were ordering a round of San Pellegrino for the table, and I said, “You know what? Dasani is fine.” I didn’t even pour it into a glass; I drank it right out of the bottle.

Many people don’t know I was born in Peace River, Alberta. My father drove a stick shift. My neighbour owned an air compressor. I saw a bear once. And while my 20s may have been been a dizzying array of Ivy League admissions and European scholarships, I’ve never lost touch with those Peace River roots. Will I miss my cabinet colleagues? Maybe, but I am unapologetically excited about returning to my simple, country-girl roots of once again making eye contact with drivers and eating at the airport Moxie’s, instead of the airport Chop Steakhouse.

Thursday

As a proud daughter of Peace River — the Alberta town where I was born — I would be the first to admit that public service enshrouds the servant in a kind of bubble. People think I can’t see the coach section on the Air Canada flight, but I know it’s there. I can remember my last encounter with the rubbery, burnt fare of a Tim Hortons, where I was humble enough to appreciate that, for the vast majority of Canadians, the brief glucose-rush of a honey cruller is the highlight of their week.

But the job of a leader is not to be a mere mouthpiece to the base urges of their constituency. The miracle of democracy is that the elected representative becomes able to rise above the petty reflexes of their voters, and thus chart a course whose sagacity may not always be understood by the cruller-eating collective.

It would have been so easy to jail criminals, spike the GDP, manage population growth and buy public loyalty with an endless supply of cheap gasoline and groceries. But we tried to do hard things, and I make no apologies for that.

Friday

When I look back to my youthful days in the Alberta community of Peace River, where I come from, I often think of the women role models that first inspired me to a life of public service.

In 1970s Peace River, there were women councillors and women school principals and even women Rotarians, but they were the exception. As my Peace River mother used to tell me in Peace River, “Chrystia, they’ll let you into the halls of power, but only if you’re perfect. A boy can make mistakes, but

you

have to be flawless.”

As I look to the next generation of women leaders, I feel proud that I have helped charter a course out of this cruel double standard.

Obviously a generational talent like a Margaret Thatcher or a Golda Meir is going to rise to the top, regardless of the thickness of the glass ceiling. But what of the average woman? The one who struggles with basic public speaking. Who refuses to learn rudimentary details about her portfolio. Who constantly fumbles straightforward tasks, and then blames the resultant fallout on subordinates?

What is the legacy of Chrystia Freeland, the one-time deputy prime minister born in Peace River, Alberta? It was showing Canadians that anyone, regardless of sex, creed or basic competence, could have a place at the table.

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Next week, Prime Minister Mark Carney and his foreign minister will travel to the United Nations in New York, where his government has said it will recognize a Palestinian state. As much as he’d like to believe that a group of credulous world leaders can simply will such a state into existence, the reality is that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian state — not now, not in the past and not in the near future.

It’s true that the term “Palestine” has

a history

dating back thousands of years. But its origins stretch back at least to the fifth century BC, over 1,000 years before Muslims

colonized the area

. As historian David Jacobson

argued

in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, “The name Palestine, in its Greek form Palaistine, was both a transliteration of a word used to describe the land of the Philistines and, at the same time, a literal translation of the name Israel.”

Palestine was not used in an official capacity until the Romans renamed the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina” to

punish the Jews

for revolting against the Empire. When Arab armies conquered the region in the seventh century, they adopted many Byzantine place names, including “Palestine,” erected the

Al-Aqsa mosque

on the site of the destroyed Jewish Temple and proclaimed it the third-holiest site in Islam, setting up a conflict that continues to this day.

In the 16th century, the region was

taken over

by the Ottoman Empire. While many of the Jews had been kicked out in previous conquests, a Jewish presence was maintained throughout, and a concerted effort to bring Jews back to their homeland began in 1700 and picked up steam in the 19th century. Although the term “Palestine”

hadn’t been used

to describe a political entity since the fall of the Roman Empire, it was commonly used to describe the region south of Syria and bisected by the Jordan River.

In 1917, as the First World War was coming to a close and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, Britain’s foreign secretary issued the

Balfour Declaration

, promising “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After the war, the European powers divided up the Middle East, with the United Kingdom assuming a

Mandate for Palestine

from the League of Nations.

It was intended to eventually be divided into separate homelands for Jews and “Palestinians” — a term that “gained acceptance as a description of Palestine’s Arabic speakers during the first decade and a half of the 20th century,” according to

an article

in Academia Letters. A Palestinian state east of the Jordan River called Transjordan (now Jordan) was created in 1946, and the Jews declared the State of Israel in 1948.

Yet, just as today, Israel’s Arab neighbours were not content to allow a Jewish state to exist. They attacked from all sides, and by the time an

armistice

was signed in 1949, Transjordan had come to occupy the West Bank and Egyptian forces occupied Gaza.

Israel retook the territories during the 1967 Six-Day War, and Egypt and Jordan eventually relinquished their claims over them. Yet the moment was seized upon by Yasser Arafat, a skilled mythmaker who deliberately

distorted history

to unify the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza as a distinct nation — both in the eyes of his people and the rest of the world.

The PLO’s

Zuheir Mohsen

gave away the plot in a 1977 interview with a Dutch newspaper, when he said, “The Palestinian people does not exist … there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.… Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism.”

Nevertheless, the Six-Day War allowed Arafat’s nationalist movement to adopt a more politically palatable message — a Palestinian state in the territories previously conquered by Egypt and Jordan — though their goal of evicting the Jews from the region by “any means necessary” never changed.

Since that time, the Palestinians have received numerous offers for statehood, but rejected them all in favour of violence. The most promising was the 1993 Oslo Accords, which laid out a road map for peace that included the eventual negotiation of an international border between Israel and the West Bank.

Under international law, those borders still need to be negotiated, which presents a problem for the countries now trying to claim Palestine as a state. The

1933 Montevideo Convention

defines a state as having four primary characteristics: “(a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.”

While the Palestinian territories have a permanent population and a limited ability to engage in foreign relations, they don’t have a defined territory. Nor do they have a real government: the Palestinian Authority is corrupt, deeply unpopular and on the verge of bankruptcy; while Gaza is controlled by a terrorist organization that virtually everyone agrees cannot play a role in a future Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, Carney and his ilk are attempting to conjure a state out of thin air, before Hamas has relinquished control over Gaza and before its borders have been settled. It’s a foolhardy and ahistoric move that contradicts 80 years of Canadian foreign policy and will do nothing to further the goal of peace in the Middle East.

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In his provocative new book The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back) — release with Sutherland House Books on Sept. 16, 2025 — veteran producer and broadcaster David Cayley examines the decline of the institution he served for more than four decades. He argues that the CBC has abandoned its duty to speak to and for the whole country, retreating instead into narrow ideological echo chambers. In this excerpt, he examines what happened when Jian Ghomeshi became host of ‘Q’, a pop culture show that signalled a different CBC Radio was emerging.

Today, Ghomeshi is mainly remembered for the accusations of sexual assault that led to the CBC’s dismissing and disowning him in 2014. He has remained a non-person since, despite his acquittal at trial in 2016. But, to me, his sexual habits, whatever they may have been, are overshadowed by the change he represented, and helped bring about, in the broadcast style of CBC Radio. ‘Q’s hallmark was total immersion in popular culture. This preoccupation had many antecedents at CBC Radio, notably Prime Time, which ran from 1987 to 1993 with Ralph Benmergui and Geoff Pevere as the main hosts, and Definitely Not the Opera (DNTO), with Nora Young and Sook-Yin Lee, which lasted from 1994 to 2016. But ‘Q’ still marked a departure.

What struck me first was Jian Ghomeshi’s evident, if unarticulated, assumption that popular culture constituted a kind of second nature for his listeners — a taken-for-granted environment, rather than a suite of commercial products that would be known to some of his audience and not to others. In writing for Ideas, my colleagues and I were generally scrupulous about blind references that might make listeners feel they had strayed into a club to which they did not belong. It might be unnecessarily pedantic, for example, to qualify G.W.F. Hegel as an “early nineteenth-century German philosopher,” but it was preferable to assuming familiarity by a casual reference that might make a listener feel that anyone who had not read Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit might just as well turn off their radio right now. On ‘Q,’ on the other hand, an encyclopedic knowledge of popular television, movies, music, and celebrity gossip was simply taken for granted. For example, I remember one morning being mystified by a reference to “hair bands” — bands of the early 1980s, as I later discovered, whose members typically had big hair — but it could just as easily have been a learned discussion about a TV series I had never seen, or a careful parsing of autobiographical overtones in a song I had never heard. Intellectual culture needed signposts; popular culture was supposed to be a home ground on which every outcropping was known.

But popular culture isn’t quite the right word, coming, as it does, from a time when there was still a distinct high culture, and the remnants of a folk culture, and a working-class culture, with which to contrast it. After the 1960s, these distinctions were progressively erased. In the new departments of “cultural studies” that began to be established in universities, one could as plausibly study Batman comics as Finnegan’s Wake. The latter might be harder to read, but they both belonged to the same flat landscape. When the head of the Ontario Arts Council told philosopher George Grant, in the 1960s, that Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was “just the South Pacific of its age,” Grant was sufficiently shocked and appalled that he recalled the remark in a conversation with me 20 years later. Today, Grant would have a hard time convincing anyone that Mozart stands on a different plane than Richard Rogers. One might express a preference, but Grant’s assumption that Mozart demands and deserves attention of a higher quality than Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musicals belongs to the past.

Popular culture had become simply “the culture” — a term I heard repeatedly used on ‘Q’ to signify a cultural ecology that was treated as something as natural as a forest, a meadow, or a wetland. This culture constantly evolved and changed, throwing up new forms, outmoding others. It was conceived as a living organism, which, of course, culture had always been, but this was the first time that commercial culture, as an ensemble of engineered devices, designed to amuse, had ever been naturalized in this way. Aesthetic judgment flourished — one talked endlessly about what was in and what was out, what was generating buzz, and what was becoming a drag — but moral judgment was verboten. The aesthetic of the hit, a taste for the cool, attunement to those little bursts of glory that radiate from what is perfect of the moment — these governed the show’s sensibility. A sense of constant excitement was generated — the awesome, the amazing, the unbelievable were always at hand.

Jian Ghomeshi was a paragon of this sensibility — an impresario of cool — a celebrity among celebrities able to precisely gauge what mixture of deference and presumption each guest, artist, or commentator was due. In its second season ‘Q’ moved from the afternoon to a more conspicuous mid-morning slot and enjoyed immediate success. After Morningside had ended with Peter Gzowski’s retirement in 1997, the CBC had tried in various ways to replace it with similar programs — first, This Morning, and, then, Sounds Like Canada. But both suffered from the attempt to preserve and extend a formula that had depended heavily on Gzowski’s bashful charm, rather than developing a character of their own. ‘Q’ was a new departure, and, in time, it developed ratings that exceeded Gzowski’s, as well as being picked up by over 50 American public radio stations. CBC Radio had rarely had such a success.

An Inkling of Glory

A decisive moment in my understanding of the sensibility of the new program occurred in the spring of 2009. The occasion was an interview with Leonard Cohen that Ghomeshi recorded at Cohen’s home in Montreal. It was in listening to this interview that I learned to connect the contemporary use of the word icon with its traditional use. The Christian church gave this word its canonical definition at a council held at Nicaea in the year 787. An icon, the council said, is “a window into eternity,” “a threshold at which (an) artist prayerfully leaves some inkling of the glory which he has seen (beyond) that threshold.” Today, the word is ubiquitous and can be applied to whatever has entered the heaven of recognizable brands, whether person, product, or design. The fact that these definitions remain connected became clear to me while reflecting on the way in which Ghomeshi treated Cohen.

During the interview, Cohen made several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the name of Montreal poet Irving Layton. Layton had been a friend and poetic mentor during Cohen’s youth, and it seemed that Cohen’s return to Montreal was bringing those days back to mind. As an interviewer myself, I thought, he’s told you what he’s interested in talking about — follow the lead he’s given you. But Ghomeshi passed over these invitations and kept the conversation on the track that he and his colleagues had presumably planned for it. Cohen was to be frog-marched through the various stages of his ascent to iconicity. Ghomeshi used the term repeatedly, as if to remind Cohen of his status. This was not just an encounter with a writer, singer, and eminent Canadian, I realized — it was an access to divinity.

Today, it’s a rare episode of ‘Q’ in which some icon is not presented, remembered, or expected. It could be argued, of course, that the proximate source of the term is the computer icon — the clickable logo that opens into cyberspace — not the object of religious adoration. If this were so, it would still be evocative enough. The computer’s infinite inside/outside, everywhere/nowhere, is already a kind of immanent heaven, which absorbs many of the former functions of religion. But I think it’s the term’s Christian roots that are more clearly on display in the way in which Jian Ghomeshi approached Leonard Cohen. What I felt I heard, listening to Ghomeshi interview Cohen, was that Cohen was not quite a mortal. He was not just a man in Montreal whimsically recalling an old friend. He was a threshold at which Ghomeshi could gain access to a certain blessedness and, while basking in this supernal light, also share its glow with his listeners.

An icon, of old, was an “inkling” of the divine glory. What now makes Leonard Cohen one? The man himself did not appear avid for such a status, at least on the day in question. He was evidently a bit bored with Ghomeshi’s recitation of the litany of his achievements and eager, if possible, to introduce some more congenial subject. Yet Ghomeshi felt he ought to persist — presumably on the grounds that icons must be treated as icons. The first component of this new dignity, I would say, is sheer celebrity — a word that already puts us on holy ground, if we take seriously its derivation from the old French celebrité for a “solemn rite or ceremony.” The second is the romantic myth of genius in which various ideas of divine possession are compounded. (This, obviously, does not apply to a Coke bottle or a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air — both undeniably iconic in the sense we are exploring — but is apt for Cohen.) Together they create a compact quality which is present and available in the icon and able to induce a state of grace in those who come in contact with him or her. Ghomeshi, as I came to understand him, was a curator of this quality — and, at times, its priest. To some, he may have seemed vain and self-satisfied — and he was achingly, endlessly cool — but he also possessed the humility this curatorial task demanded — he wasn’t going to treat an icon as just another man — that would threaten the whole carefully graded hierarchy to which he commanded access.

‘Q’ achieved, as I’ve said, unprecedented popularity in its time slot, as well as wide distribution in the United States. Before this time a few American public radio stations had carried Ideas or As It Happens but not on anything like the scale achieved by ‘Q.’ This success made ‘Q’ something of an archetype of the new CBC Radio. It set a tone that was adopted by many CBC Radio programs. The most outstanding feature of this new tone, for me, was the way in which it erased what little remained of the foundational modern distinction between the public and the private.

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The Gaza War seems finally to be reaching its climax. On one side, Israel’s opponents are accusing it of genocide and of trying to starve the Palestinians into surrender and Britain, France, and Canada are recognizing the completely discredited Palestine Authority as a sovereign government of “Palestine.” On the other, Israel is finally assaulting the citadel of its terrorist opposition, the intense complex of tunnels and redoubts at the centre of the City of Gaza. There will obviously be a profound inquiry in Israel into every aspect of this war, once it is over, and particularly into why Israel was taken by surprise as it was, and why it has taken until now for the Israeli Defense Forces finally to assault the ultimate strong point of Hamas. The implicit assumption of most of Israel’s critics that the October 7 incident was merely another skirmish in a long-standing border dispute between the Jews and Arabs towards an eventual demarcation between a Jewish and an Arab state is bunk. This was not just another border incident, following Britain’s cavalier promise of 1917 of making Palestine a homeland for the Jews without compromising the rights of the Arabs.

It has emerged in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, including from an all-party investigation under the auspices of the British House of Lords, that Hamas actually thought that it could send a flying column of only a few thousand heavily-armed terrorists unobstructed to the eight gates of Jerusalem and that the attack would trigger a general Arab uprising throughout Israel. It confirms that the October 7 attack was intended to plunge the whole territory of the old Palestine Mandate into general conflict whose ultimate objective was to destroy the state of Israel and replace it with an Islamist Arab state which would either kill, subjugate, or expel the Jews. All of these fates are familiar outcomes in the terribly tragic and frequently noble history of the Jews of more than 5,000 years. But the greatest assault upon the Jewish people in all of its history by the German Third Reich and its accomplices during the Second World War was decisive in the world’s resolve to give the Jews a state for the first time since the suppression of the Kingdom of Israel under the heirs of King Solomon by the Persians in the ninth century BC. Israel has determined that the Jews will never again submit to such a passive and tragic fate. The Nazi Holocaust murdered approximately half of the entire Jewish population of the world and an equivalent number ( but obviously not a similar percentage) of non-Jews.

The problem that has existed and has finally forced itself into the consciousness of all serious observers, is that the controlling influences within the Arab population of that territory believe that the existence of a genuine Jewish state in and on that territory is intolerable and that they can never accept it and will therefore never acknowledge the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. This collides with the post-Holocaust Jewish view that the Jewish people finally again after a lapse of 29 centuries have a state of their own and they are determined that “never again” will the Jewish people be herded as passive victims to slaughter. They will preserve the integrity and the rights of the Jewish state at all costs and forever. Much of the “peace process” has so far been a hopeless cul-de-sac. The Palestinians could have had a state at any time in the last 25 years but they do not believe that any state that confirms the existence of the Jewish state is a satisfactory Palestinian state. In 2023, Hamas committed a heinous act of war with the support of Iran which became the champion of the Arab enemies of Israel as the Arab powers themselves became much more concerned at the encroachments of their ancient Persian and Turkish oppressors than they were at the presence of the Jews among them; radical Islam passed from the hands of the Arabs to the Iranian government, much hated though it is by the population of Iran.

Most of the Western world seems unable to take on board the fact that this is not just an interruption in the terribly difficult and syncopated progress toward enactment of the two-state solution. Some combination of unrigorous thinking and traditional antisemitism has caused the confection of an anti-Israel argument built on contradictions. This has been most clearly stated in the Financial Times on September 15, following the Israeli attack on the Hamas leadership meeting at Doha in Qatar last week. (The Financial Times is almost as viscerally hostile to Israel as the Guardian but couches its Jew-baiting in more intellectually presentable terms.) Israel was condemned for continuing to attack Hamas despite the mortal and irreparable damage it has already done to the terrorist apparatus of that organization and at the same time it was denounced for continuing its effort to exterminate Hamas when that objective is in fact impossible of achievement.

When that analysis is examined, Israel is effectively accused of attempting to do what is impossible and also of continuing to pursue what it has already accomplished. Neither is true and as with other wars which can ultimately be brought to a victorious conclusion by one side, Israel is perfectly within its rights to persevere until the entire military and terrorist apparatus of Hamas has been destroyed. The allegation of genocide is nonsense as genocide consists of a deliberate attempt to exterminate all or a substantial part of a defined group. Israel became exasperated with the Hamas habit of stealing food supplies for itself and starving the Palestinian people it supposedly represents, and reduced food assistance in Gaza in March but by May had recognized that this was a public relations as well as a humanitarian disaster and reversed course and is assuring that food is widely distributed. On a parochial Canadian note, Radio Canada should be congratulated for suspending the journalist (Elisa Serret) who explained to viewers that the United States was sticking with Israel because Jews controlled American politics.

Obviously, no people finds the thought of genocide more repulsive than the Jews, and if that were Israel’s objective it could certainly have achieved it. Israel should be encouraged and applauded for taking the one absolutely necessary step to make some sort of peace in its region possible: the destruction of the principal element in the Palestinian population that believes that peace in the area is impossible as long as a Jewish state exists. If Israel wishes to confound its unctuous Western critics, straddling gymnastically between incompatible positions, including Canada, France, and the U.K., it too should recognize the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as Palestine, to rub Hamas’ bloody nose in its failure, as the PA has no chance of meeting all the French demands for democracy and integrity and the whole initiative is a farce. The destruction of Hamas as a terrorist force will not only prove that peace is possible; it will create the only conditions that could give peace in Israel and Palestine a chance.

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In a Sept. 16

interview

, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said that Ottawa would recognize a Palestinian state at the UN next week despite its failure to implement any of the conditions and demands set forth in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s July 30

announcement

of Canada’s recognition plan. This is a mistake, which would regrettably reward terrorism, make peace less likely and contradict the longstanding international legal frameworks for recognizing statehood and for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is a better way.

In a July 30

announcement

, Carney said Ottawa’s “intention” to recognize was “predicated on the Palestinian Authority’s commitment” to fundamentally reform its governance, hold general elections “in which Hamas can play no part,” and demilitarize the Palestinian state. None of these commitments have been implemented.

Carney also demanded that Hamas immediately release all hostages, disarm, and “play no role in the future governance of Palestine.” None of these demands have been met.

Anand explained that recognizing Palestine doesn’t mean full diplomatic relations, and that Canada will “need to see reforms coming into place before any normalization of relations occurs.” But Palestine already has a diplomatic mission on the driveway in Ottawa,

listed

as the Palestinian General Delegation by Global Affairs Canada. Similarly, Canada

already

has a diplomatic mission on Elias Odeh Street in Ramallah, headed by Graham Dattels, listed by Global Affairs Canada as “Representative of Canada to the Palestinian Authority.”

Canada has long prided itself as a leading proponent of international law. Yet, recognition under the current circumstances would contradict the longstanding international legal frameworks for recognizing statehood and for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The international legal criteria for statehood require that a nascent state have a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government with effective control over that population and territory; and d) capacity to enter into relations with other states.

The European Council (EC) added several additional non-binding criteria in its 1991

guidelines

for recognizing new states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. These include prospective states providing their citizens “the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.”

The Palestinian Authority (PA), which the three Western countries plan to recognize, has had no control over the Gazan part of its territory since 2007 when Hamas

seized

power there in a bloody coup. Gaza contains

over

40 per cent of the purported Palestinian state’s population. The PA thus lacks the capacity to ensure the Palestinian population abides by any agreements it enters into with other states.

As for the EC criteria, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is

currently

in the twentieth year of the single four-year term to which he was elected in 2005 (subsequent presidential elections have been cancelled). In addition, the respected Freedom House has for years given both the

and the

Hamas

regimes worse scores for political rights and civil liberties than

nearly

any other government on earth.

The Carney government’s approach is more constructive than that of

France

(unconditional recognition) and the

U.K.

(which perversely pledged to recognize unless Israel agrees to a unilateral ceasefire). All three governments should withhold recognition at least until Carney’s commitments and demands have been met.

One of us (Irwin Cotler) has personally met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides many times over the years. They have repeatedly promised that they would abolish the pay-for-slay program and move towards demilitarization and deradicalization. Regrettably, those promises have largely gone unfulfilled.

The long-established “land for peace” legal framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, established by UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords, provides that Palestinian statehood can only come as part of a negotiated solution to the conflict, in which Israel receives peace in return. Recognizing Palestine as a state under the current circumstances would torpedo that framework.

Hamas is emboldened to continue holding hostages and obstructing a ceasefire, and the PA has no incentive to take concrete steps towards peace when Western leaders recognize Palestinian statehood without Israel receiving peace in return.

As the German government has rightly

explained

, recognizing Palestinian statehood now would be “counterproductive,” because the requirements have not been met, and such recognition would undermine efforts to reach a negotiated solution to the conflict. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen

similarly

called for recognition to

wait

until it “benefits a two-state solution” and a “democratic Palestinian state can be secured without the influence of Hamas.” Frederiksen also

expressed

concern that recognition now would be perceived as a “reward” for Hamas.

Britain, Canada, and France recognizing Palestine as a state should be paused until both Hamas and the PA take the actions necessary to ensure that a Palestinian state both meets the traditional international legal criteria for statehood and fulfills the Palestinian side of the “land for peace” legal framework for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Prior to recognition, Hamas must release the hostages and disarm. Also prior to recognition, the PA must fundamentally reform its governance, hold general elections without Hamas, gain control of Gaza, and demilitarize the Palestinian territories. Recognition must wait until the PA demonstrates that it is both determined and able to implement an agreement that provides both it and Israel with lasting peace and security.

If Israeli-Palestinian peace is to be achieved, recognition of a Palestinian state must be the end result of a negotiated peace agreement, not a reward for terrorism.

Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR), a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace-building for over 50 years.

Orde Kittrie is a law professor at Arizona State University, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and former legal and policy official at the U.S. State Department.

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I have a great fondness for the English short-story writer, journalist and apologist G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), and I have lived long enough to see his conservative fence metaphor re-enter common parlance in the English-speaking world. The canonical version of “Chesterton’s Fence” comes from his 1929 book

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic

“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been thinking of that darn fence ever since I read on Wednesday that the parliament of Scotland has passed a bill which will remove the most distinctive, renowned and mysterious feature of Scots law — the “not proven” verdict. For about 300 years, juries in Scottish criminal trials have had a choice of three verdicts: the usual two, “guilty” and “not guilty,” along with a third, “not proven.” The “not proven” verdict has exactly the same legal effect as a finding of “not guilty,” and no other country gives a jury an analogous choice of two different flavours of acquittal.

Yes, I know this sounds made-up. And there was perhaps never a better example of a real-world Chesterton’s Fence. Let’s admit it, dear G.K.: nine times out of 10, when Chesterton’s Fence is cited, it’s just a conservative implicitly accusing his opponents of swinish ignorance. But the abolition of Scotland’s “not proven” verdict is the real deal.

For a long time, the quality of Scottish legal history lagged that of England, and there was serious uncertainty about how the “not proven” phenomenon evolved. To this day, because juries deliberate in private, nothing can be said with confidence about the

effect

of its existence — about what purpose it is meant to serve, or whether it has worked. Judges aren’t even allowed to instruct juries on the meaning of “not proven”: there is no accepted meaning. When ordinary Scottish people are polled on the topic, they all know about “not proven,” but quite a lot of them don’t fully understand that “not guilty” and “not proven” are procedurally and legally equal in effect.

In short, we don’t know what the fence is for, or what it does, but it’s in the way, and the S.O.B.’s coming down. With that said, the historical background is better understood these days. The Scots grew self-conscious about legal history in the mid-20th century and made a strong catch-up effort to create libraries and train historians. So it is agreed by today’s scholars that the fence really was put up rather by accident.

In the 17th century, with Scotland beset by religious strife, the role of the jury in criminal trials was gradually circumscribed by the Crown, and restricted as tightly as possible to pure fact-finding. Basically, there was a whole lot of mulish jury nullification happening whenever the state tried to prosecute radical Protestants, i.e., typical Scots. At that time the two verdicts available to juries in Scotland weren’t “guilty” and “not guilty”: they were “proven” and “not proven,” on the theory that the jury’s job was only to evaluate the evidence. The judge was to be the ultimate decider of culpability.

But eventually, with everybody in Scotland well aware of the different system that had developed in England, there was a popular backlash. A key moment was the 1728 trial of James Carnegie of Finhaven, a misbehaving nobleman who killed a friend

in a drunken affray somewhat reminiscent of the death of Mercutio

Romeo and Juliet

. Carnegie drew his sword, intending to puncture a fellow party guest who had thrown him in a ditch: instead, he ran through an earl who was trying to keep the peace.

A dead earl attracts a lot of attention. The accused had acted violently with apparent homicidal intent, and ended a life, but nobody in Forfarshire believed Carnegie meant to kill his pal, and the prosecution was deemed an outrage. The jury couldn’t say the facts of the case were not proven — the facts weren’t even contested. So it insisted on its supposed right to declare Carnegie “not guilty,” and the triple-verdict system was established thereafter.

It has been condemned routinely, ever since, for its illogic. Sir Walter Scott, the ultimate arbiter of Scottish culture and nationhood, referred to “not proven” as the “bastard verdict.” But until 2025, “not proven” defied many attempts at abolition. Some Scottish lawyers worry that forcing a binary “guilty”/“not guilty” choice on jurors might lead to more unfair convictions. As a tradeoff, the new package of legal reforms makes a change to another unusual feature of Scots law: Scottish juries have 15 jurors, rather than 12, and convictions were hitherto obtainable on a simple 8-7 majority vote. Now the prosecution will have to get 10 “guilty” votes to put someone away for earl-slaying.

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This column was originally meant to explore whether the political right — like the political left — has a penchant for cancel culture. But that is no longer in question. The right does have a cancel culture problem.

This was crystallized with the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s eponymous late-night talk show over his commentary on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. His monologue was caustic, contained false statements (the killer was not, as Kimmel suggested, “MAGA”) and wasn’t entertaining (isn’t he supposed to be funny?).

Worse, it came at a point in the culture war when we should strongly consider mixing salves rather than deepening our profound wounds. None of Kimmel’s speech, however, was illegal.

U.S. President Donald Trump celebrated Kimmel’s cancellation,

calling it

“great news for America.” It is not. How the president of a country with strong First Amendment protections of free speech can find joy in their desecration evades all sense.

Brendan Carr, chairman of America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the industry regulator, likely pushed ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show. As Carr made clear in

an interview

with Fox News, he believes Kimmel’s words were not in the “public interest,” and that the FCC needs to refresh its mandate of “enforcing that public interest obligation.”

Prominent right-leaning pundits and social commentators have been revelling not only in Kimmel’s cancellation, but in the

cancellation of dozens

of mostly average people who’ve made grotesque comments following Kirk’s death. The right has made a sport of getting people fired.

Without a doubt, the comments being made about Kirk are misleading at best, and damned lies — accompanied by ghoulish celebrations of political violence — at worst. The bloodlust and inhumanity displayed by members of the political left over Kirk’s tragic killing is as mysterious to me as their desire to transcribe their depraved thoughts into words and release them to the public.

But let’s not forget the utility of unrestrained speech, which not only allows us to know what our detractors believe, but also allows us to defeat, through dialogue, their falsehoods and misguided convictions.

Is the phrase, “the antidote to bad speech is more speech,” not a mere platitude by now? Apparently not. We humans appear to need this most basic of principles broadcast into our psyches on an eternal loop.

In his book “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill warned us what can become of our ideas when we refuse to discuss them: they languish and die.

“However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth,” wrote Mill.

The political left, following its capture of our institutions and culture, has spent the past decade or more strangling any and all of its living, breathing truths into the dead dogmas that Mill warned us about. The far left destroyed their own credibility through their stifling of debate, silencing of critics and legal and social persecution of “heretics.”

Kirk’s assassination has presented the political right with a moment of cultural power — one that they are now squandering in a rash of unprincipled and blind rage. The temptation for revenge is eminently understandable, but giving in is equally as foolish.

It is at this juncture where a caveat is warranted: there is a line to be drawn in the sand. Those who incite, threaten or

glorify violence

, or call for more political assassinations, do, in fact, deserve to have their careers ended over their speech.

A teacher who showed the video of Kirk’s murder to

elementary students

also deserves to be fired — but such insane behaviour falls outside the purview of free speech.

It is an unfortunate truth that fallible, emotional humans are tasked with drawing and enforcing such a line. By virtue of our nature, there will be constant skirmishes over its correct placement.

We already know that today’s political left cannot be entrusted with such a task, and now — post-Kirk — we must wonder if the right will be any better at it. The early signs are discouraging.

If we could broker a deal with the left — you leave us alone for stating simple biological facts, we leave you alone for finding joy in the cruel murder of a young father — then perhaps the events of the past week would be less worrying. As it stands, too many of us are hellbent on retribution.

Nearly everything in this life can be taken from us. Possessions, relationships, careers, money — all can be seized, stolen, broken or lost. Our principles, by contrast, cannot be. If we hold fast to our principles, we can take them with us all the way to the grave.

So why, then, would we simply give them away?

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Legal manoeuvres in the Supreme Court of Canada may soon land the country in another constitutional crisis. Earlier this week, the Carney government, through Attorney General Sean Fraser, filed an

intervention

in the upcoming appeal on Quebec’s secularism legislation (Bill 21) at the Supreme Court.

Crucially, however, the federal government is not contesting the secularism law itself. Instead, it is urging the judges to impose novel restrictions on the use of the notwithstanding clause, which permits legislatures to shield laws from judicial review for a renewable period of five years. This legal argument, if accepted, would undo a key component of Canada’s constitutional settlement and further subordinate parliamentary government to adventurous exercises of judicial power.

Enacted as Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the notwithstanding clause was vital in the negotiations leading to the adoption of the 1982 Constitution. As historians have documented, the impetus for its inclusion in the constitutional settlement was the view, particularly favoured by Western premiers, that Canada should maintain continuity with the venerable British tradition of parliamentary supremacy and that a democratic safeguard is needed to check judicial excesses.

Hence, in keeping with its essential purpose, Section 33 has long been interpreted, in the words of the Supreme Court’s 1988

judgment

in Ford v. Quebec (Attorney General), as giving “no warrant for importing into it grounds for substantive review of the legislative policy.” Simply put, once the notwithstanding clause is invoked, it is not for the courts to assess the legislation for Charter compliance.

While professing to “clarify the law,” the federal government’s

latest intervention

actually contemplates a wholesale revision of this settlement. According to its legal submissions, the courts should refuse to give effect to the notwithstanding clause if it leads to an “irreparable impairment” of Charter rights or eliminates the “means indispensable to the exercise” of a right. Equally troubling is the federal government’s contention that the courts can and should declare whether a given law violates Charter rights, even when the notwithstanding clause is properly invoked.

Subtle though these arguments may be, they effectively invite the Supreme Court to sterilize the only democratic mechanism for remedying misuses of judicial power. Once the door is opened, it will be difficult for the courts to articulate any principled limits on lawfare — that is,

activist litigation

— challenging deployments of the notwithstanding clause.

Typically, the courts have refrained from adjudicating cases where the outcome would have no practical effect, to conserve time and public resources. But if the judiciary were empowered to determine whether a law shielded by Section 33 violates the Charter, litigants will be encouraged to seek a “private reference” opinion from the courts whenever the notwithstanding clause is used. Having endorsed this newfound power, the Supreme Court would be hard-pressed to explain why and when, if at all, it should be limited. But it would upend the traditional approach to constitutional adjudication, which focuses on concrete rather than hypothetical disputes, and stymie the law-making process even further.

Next, consider the federal government’s proposed revision to the notwithstanding clause, which would prevent it from being used to “irreparably impair” a Charter right or used for a “prolonged period.” The meaning of these terms is unclear — a point implicitly conceded by the government’s own lawyers when, in its legal submissions, they disclaimed the need for the Supreme Court to “establish a definitive or exhaustive test.” It is doubtful that these vague notions furnish genuine legal standards that judges can manage and apply, without infringing the separation of powers.

More concerningly, if a court can adjudicate a Charter claim despite the notwithstanding clause, then it may be entitled to grant remedies, as well. Though courts would still be incapable of striking down the law, according to some interveners in the Quebec appeal, they should be free to award monetary compensation and other relief to claimants who are harmed in these circumstances. Such an approach, if taken, would drastically curb the utility of the notwithstanding clause going forward.

Until recently, such arguments would have been dismissed as inconsistent with Canada’s constitutional order. But last year, in the case of Canada (Attorney General) v. Power, the Supreme Court

rationalized

a novel form of judicial intrusion into the legislative realm by allowing courts to sit in judgment over parliamentary processes and to award compensation from the public purse for the enactment of legislation they deem “clearly unconstitutional.” Notably, Chief Justice Richard Wagner and Justice Andromache Karakatsanis justified this unprecedented decision with the ahistorical assertion that the Charter effected a “revolutionary” break from Canada’s prior constitutional traditions.

To be sure, there is nothing in the Power judgment that requires a further revolutionary break in the form of a judgment weakening the notwithstanding clause. But a Supreme Court that is inclined toward revolution in one case can fairly be suspected of being inclined toward yet another, even more perilous proposal to depart from Canada’s constitutional settlement.

Should the court confirm these fears, the judicial effacement of the notwithstanding clause will almost certainly bring about a crisis of democratic governance, if not one of national unity. With the legal force of the notwithstanding clause severely diminished, political decision-making will remain exposed to the vagaries of expanding judicial power, which, in recent years, has granted “

constitutional benediction

” to novel constitutional rights,

revised

settled understandings of the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments, and trenched on socioeconomic decisions relating to

policy, and more.

These are not idiosyncratic legal disputes, but issues of high policy that impact virtually everyone who lives in Canada. Given that Canadian courts appear increasingly intent on growing their power to weigh in on matters of political judgment, the need for a mechanism such as the notwithstanding clause has become more salient than ever. Without it, governments across the country will have little choice but either to comply with the trend of judicial adventurism — and all its ramifications — or to ignore it. To seek to neutralize the notwithstanding clause is thus to court a constitutional crisis.

Regrettably, Fraser’s intervention is every bit as politically imprudent as it is legally flawed. One can only hope that the Supreme Court of Canada will see reason enough to step back from the brink.

National Post

Kerry Sun is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and Research Associate at UBC’s Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies.

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Diversity mandates as practiced by Canada are eroding basic science and discrediting the academic system, the renowned Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker warned in recent testimony to a House of Commons research committee.

“Allocating funding to scientists based on their race or sex works against the interest of science and the nation,” Pinker

told a Monday meeting

of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Rather, said Pinker, universities need to drop their “obsession” with enforcing ethnic diversity and focus instead on cultivating “viewpoint diversity.” “As the joke went, in a university, diversity means people who look different but think alike,” he said.

Born and educated in Montreal, Pinker ranks as one of the world’s most well-known Canadian academics. His books can regularly be seen atop The New York Times bestseller list, and his 2002 work The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Pinker’s testimony was mostly a broad critique of diversity quotas, which he said had their origins in the 1970s in the United States. Nevertheless, in recent years it has indeed become standard practice for Canadian universities to ascribe race-based quotas to everything from admissions to hiring to grant funding.

a February report

, the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy found that it was a near-universal practice of Canadian universities to either screen for candidates based on race or sexuality, or to require them to file “diversity statements” expressing adherence to campus “anti-racism” policies.

Multiple Canadian universities have also begun setting aside program seats that

can only be accessed

by members of a specific race. Toronto Metropolitan University, for one,

opened its medical school last year

with a requirement that 75 per cent of all admissions go to Black, Indigenous and other “equity-deserving” applicants.

Pinker told the committee that his own Harvard students, when faced with mandatory diversity statements to obtain a research position, have sometimes filled them out using the AI program ChatGPT.

Said Pinker, “they could not honestly fill them out; it would go against their conscience to say things that they knew were not true, but they knew they would be blackballed and eliminated from a job if they expressed their true opinions.”

Professor Stephen Pinker @sapinker calls out DEI at committee this week: “It’s a problem” and creates a “chilling effect” on federal scientific research in more ways than one.

Are Liberals destroying academic freedom? pic.twitter.com/AQJeytMdTa

— Vincent Neil Ho (@vincentneilho) September 17, 2025

In Canada, many of these identity-based policies have been driven by federal order. The more than $300 million in annual funding for Canada Research Chairs, for instance, requires universities to meet strict hiring quotas on race, sex and ability: 50.9 per cent of funds must go to women, 22 per cent to “visible minorities” and 7.5 per cent to “persons with disabilities.”

Pinker told the committee on Monday that it’s not reasonable to expect that every single branch of science is going to have an ethnic makeup that’s exactly proportional to the general population.

“It leads to rather monstrous consequences like saying ‘there are too many Asians on this committee,’ or too many Asians are getting funding, or too many Jews, or too many Sikhs, or too many Arabs,” he said.

Pinker said that under the guise of “looking” diverse, universities have increasingly become subject to chilling “monocultures” that shun and punish dissenting opinions.

“As a cognitive scientist, I can attest that the human mind is vulnerable to many biases and fallacies. The strongest is the ‘my side’ bias, the conviction that my tribe or coalition or party is correct and that a rival coalition is ignorant or evil or both,” said Pinker.

Pinker said the usual way around this is to maintain an intellectual culture in which biases can be freely attacked and criticized by colleagues who think differently. “One person can point out another’s errors and the whole community can be more rational than any of the individuals in it,” he said.

Pinker has previously

described his political alignment

as “liberal Democrat” and once told a writer for the Harvard Crimson that a framed candid photo of him meeting then prime minister Justin Trudeau was “one of my proudest possessions.”

Nevertheless, in recent years Pinker has become an outspoken critic of a “social justice monoculture” at North American universities.

He’s a co-founder of the

Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard

, a group pledged to endorsed free speech and viewpoint diversity at the Ivy League school.

When multiple Harvard campus organizations openly endorsed Palestinian terrorism in the immediate wake of the October 7 massacres, Pinker

published a five-point plan

in the Boston Globe on how to “save Harvard from itself.”

Among Pinker’s points was a call for the university to “disempower” DEI. “Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified,” he wrote.

Also testifying at Monday’s committee was Azim Shariff, a UBC psychology professor whose research has touched on how institutional politicization affects public trust.

In a 2024 study, Shariff’s team found that even when an institution (such as the Catholic Church, police or Major League Baseball) had politics that aligned with a person’s own leanings, it still caused that person to lose trust in the institution.

“We found that the perceived politicization of institutions—the extent to which institutions were perceived as allowing their political values to impact their work — was associated with lower trust toward those institutions as well as lower willingness to support and defer to their expertise,” it read.

On Monday, Sharriff told Parliamentarians that “Canada, unfortunately, has a reputation for having a somewhat politicized academy.”

“Politicization in science, it’s like bacteria in an operating room,” he said. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get rid of it entirely, but you do want to do as much as you can to remove it, and I don’t think you should trust any surgeon who’s not trying to do that.”

IN OTHER NEWS

After nearly two years of anti-Israel demonstrations blockading streets, massing outside of Jewish-owned businesses or picketing public spaces, the

Liberals are promising to table an “anti-hate” bill

that Attorney General Sean Fraser says would fix most of the worst issues. Among its rumoured contents are a ban on the display of terror symbols such as the Hezbollah flag, and a ban on blockading community centres and places of worship.There’s just one problem: The demonstrations are already breaking all kinds of laws, it’s just that police refuse to enforce them.

Here’s a few …

Various provincial motor vehicle acts, all of which have some sanction against obstructing roadways.
Section 423 of the Criminal Code. It’s considered “intimidation” to “block or obstruct a highway.”
Section 430 of the Criminal Code. It’s “mischief” to “obstruct, interrupt or interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property.” This is notably the main charge thrown at the Freedom Convoy organizers.
Section 319 of the Criminal Code. “Public incitement of hatred.” This is a difficult charge to prosecute, but there’s no shortage of video evidence of these demonstrations endorsing violence or using violent terms such as “intifada.”
Section 65 of the Criminal Code. This one bars you from wearing a mask in the commission of an offence. It could be relevant given that men concealing their faces with keffiyehs while blockading public spaces is a regular feature of these demonstrations

… and much more. You can read more about it in Carson Jerema’s column “

Has Sean Fraser even read the Criminal Code?

”

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Prime Minister Mark Carney brings a lot of new or rare traits to the job. He’s one of the richest men to take the post. He’s the first to be appointed prime minister despite no prior experience of elected office. And, as is becoming clear every time he speaks French, he has an unusually poor grasp of Canada’s other official language.

Watch the video or read the transcript.

Anyone who spends a little bit of time around Quebec politics realizes that they’re really, really serious about protecting the French language. Did you put the phrase “Go Habs Go” on a Montreal bus? Whoops, here comes the language police to get you into trouble.

So it’s somewhat unexpected that in the 2025 federal election they went all-in for a prime minister who doesn’t speak it.

Okay, that’s too harsh. But Mark Carney speaks the kind of French I do. He understands when other people speak French. He can read prepared remarks in French. But when it comes to off-the-cuff remarks on a slightly complex topic, things get ugly.

Here’s a French exchange that Carney had in the House of Commons with Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet. Right here, he struggles to find the French word for “85” until a Liberal MP yells it at him. And right here, he experiences the nightmare of anyone who claims to speak a second language: Halfway through a French phrase, he just blanks entirely and switches to English.

To find a prime minister with worse French you’d have to go all the way back to John Turner, if not Lester Pearson, who didn’t speak French at all.

Most Canadian prime ministers, at least over the last 50 years, were Quebecers: They spoke French perfectly, albeit with an Anglo accent here or there. Stephen Harper learned French as an adult but was nevertheless basically fluent. He sounds in French the way Jean Chretien sounds in English: Heavily accented, but the skill is there.

Oh, and the Governor General doesn’t speak French either. She even had to cut short a tour in Quebec after locals started to realize that she only seemed to be able to say “hello, how are you?”

Source: National Post (Opinions)

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