Several Canadian commentatorshave noteda certain irony in the mass outrage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s supposed “renaming” of Lake Ontario. Where was that outrage, they ask, when vandals decapitated statues of various Canadian historical figures and successfully demanded the historic names of schools, buildings and other things be changed?

It’s certainly a valid question (along with “What were we thinking?” and “Remind me what police are for?” and many others). But those questions don’t really have anything to do with Trump and his trollish naming, renaming and self-branding of things : the Gulf of Mexico, the Kennedy Center , the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace .

They’re just not the same kind of problem. And in a way, the comparison almost seems to diminish our own issues with historical erasure. How we’ve treated our collective history is far worse, infinitely more serious, than Trump pretending to have created “Lake America.” At most, his executive order binds U.S. federal government agencies and officials to refer to it as “Lake America,” not state agencies or officials, and certainly not Canadian ones.

Meanwhile Ryerson University is still Toronto Metropolitan University, and Yonge-Dundas Square is “Sankofa Square” for absolutely no good reason at all. And that’s just within a few blocks of downtown Toronto.

I realize it’s not in our nature to ignore the U.S., nor is it usually in our self-interest to do so. For one thing, that leads to headlines like “(Insert Canadian politician) refuses to condemn Trump.” Still, we should at least consider the motives for political outrage and question whether silence might have served us better. Trump can only be thrilled by this morning’s press clippings.

Had “Lake America” simply produced universal condemnation and mockery, that might have been different. But it also turned Canadians against each other, and even against their own self-interest. “On Sunday … social media users noticed that maps on sites including Hydro One, Ontario’s Metrolinx, Elections Canada, Loblaw and Infrastructure Ontario all showed ‘Lake America’ when zoomed out,” Global News reported . Same with Ontario’s provincially run LCBO liquor stores, CBC noted .

Stephen Crawford, Ontario’s public and business service delivery minister, sprang into action, assuring the public he had ordered the offending maps fixed. And suddenly the online station-locator map function for the province’s GO Transit line was (temporarily) gone. Was that a win for Ontarians?

To my eye, we basically handed a sad, sleepy troll (the equivalent of “a rock band … in a casino playing some song from 50 years ago,” in Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s apt description ) the most total victory he could reasonably hope for from such a stupid, unoriginal stunt. We danced like marionettes for a man who recently posted a video of Canada geese marching in formation under American flags. The geese have Trump’s haircut, human forearms (definitely not Trump’s) and rifles, which they proceed to shoot in the air in front of an AI-hallucinated city somewhere on Lake America.

But these fights clearly work for politicians — or at least, they think they do. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government spent $25,000 on a giant sign along the lakeshore, in Winona, near Hamilton, declaring the ostensibly self-evident truth that it’s called Lake Ontario. Winona just so happens to be in Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, a swing riding that’s holding a provincial byelection on Thursday.

No doubt Monday’s federal byelections played a role in Carney’s reaction, which was similar to Ford’s but used the word “hydronym” (i.e., the name of a body of water).

And this is a Toronto Star headline : “Donald Trump needs to treat Canada like Dolly Parton would, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow says.” Chow, too, is soon up for re-election.

Some other headlines: “Welcome to the map resistance”. “Let’s change Trump’s name”. “Google changing Lake Ontario to Lake America isn’t just frustrating . It points to a deeper problem for Mark Carney” and, relatedly, “ It’s time Canada logged out of tech platforms owned by Donald Trump toadies”. (The problem there supposedly being Carney’s obvious willingness to back off on Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault’s anti-internet, tax-the-web-giants agenda.) And: “ Here at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society , Lake Ontario is Still Lake Ontario.” (Was there ever really any doubt about that?)

Trump did well to drop this into a late-summer news hole. And it’s tough to keep quiet about Trump, I get it. But we could at least try. It’s how a mature, confident, dignified country would react to meaningless nonsense. And politicians keep telling us we’re a mature, confident, dignified country.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

• Lake Ontario renamed ‘Lake America’ for U.S. users of Apple Maps
• Ontario agencies restore Lake Ontario to their websites after Google Maps updated it to Lake America in the U.S.

There has been no greater gift to the Liberal Party’s powerful pro-Beijing comprador caste than U.S. President Donald Trump’s exasperating bellicosity and exhausting trade-relations vandalism. Even after nearly a decade of scandals involving China’s Uyghur slave camps, its “hostage diplomacy,” mass espionage, intellectual property theft, forced corporate co-ventures and clandestine election-interference operations, by this summer the Pew Research Centre found that Canadians had come to view China more favorably than the United States.

You could say the American president can be thanked for that.

In the crude calculus of political advantage, by the time China’s former favorite Justin Trudeau was obliged to walk the plank and resign as prime minister in January last year, a deep reservoir of favorable ratings had become available to any Canadian politician who could be convincingly prescribed as a therapeutic remedy to the pestilence of Trumpism. No matter what your own promiscuous record in Xi Jinping’s corporate circles might be, you can get away with almost anything.

If there is a better explanation for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s choice of Dominic Barton as the Liberals’ spirit guide in their “new world order” project to radically expand foreign direct investment in Canada and pull the country out of the American economic orbit, it is not immediately obvious.

In a surprise move this week, Carney named Barton as the new board chair of a reconfigured Invest in Canada initiative, which will be hosting a Davos-like summit bringing together “the world’s largest investors, including top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” in Toronto later this month. There’s no evidence that any distinction will be drawn between foreign direct investment from democracies and dirty money from torture states.

A key element in the Invest in Canada mandate is to double Canadian exports to non-American markets over the next decade. The project itself was one of the key proposals that arose a decade ago from Barton’s time as chair of Justin Trudeau’s inaugural Advisory Council on Economic Growth, an operation within Bill Morneau’s finance ministry run by McKinsey and Company, the multinational management consultancy Barton was serving at the time as global managing partner.

Another proposal from Barton’s council that was adopted by the Trudeau government: the catastrophic idea of doubling immigration to 500,000 people annually by 2025. It isn’t entirely clear that the Carney government has abandoned the “demographic deficit” thinking of its predecessors.

Barton came to the inner chambers of the Trudeau government after bringing McKinsey’s heft to Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal Party leadership in 2012. Trudeau’s manifesto proposed that deepening trade relationships with China would “build middle-class wealth in Canada.” As for Beijing’s convention-defying trade practices: “China, for one, sets its own rules and will continue to do so because it can. China has a game plan. There is nothing inherently sinister about that.”

There was no rationale involving Trumpist vulgarity available to the Liberals back then, and as it turned out there’s quite a lot that’s proved to be sinister about Beijing’s own rules. Its “game plan” has involved hollowing out western economies by flooding markets with its subsidized industrial overproduction, financing Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, funding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by the purchase of 90 per cent of Iran’s oil via the Khomeinists’ sanctions-evading “ghost fleet” and ensnaring developing countries in its Belt and Road debt traps.

As recently as four years ago, the folly of the Trudeau-Barton approach to foreign trade was so obvious that Ottawa had shifted to enthusiastically following U.S. president Joe Biden’s lead by rapidly reducing Canada’s exposure to Chinese economic strongarming. “What we want is certainly a decoupling: certainly from China,” Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said at the time.

But by January of this year it was back to the Trudeau-Barton approach and to the opposite of decoupling when Prime Minister Carney struck a multi-faceted trade, law enforcement and cultural “strategic partnership” with Beijing, declaring his embrace of China’s “new world order.” It’s not certain that the current American president can be blamed for this. Barton’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth was succeeded by the Liberals’ Leaders’ Task Force on Economic Growth, which Mark Carney took over as chair in 2024, and here we are.

Barton is best known to most Canadians as the ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, and for his McKinsey and Company having unaccountably ended up with more than $200 million in rules-flouting federal contracts after Trudeau came to office in 2015. Barton had been picked as ambassador to replace John McCallum, the hapless former Liberal cabinet minister and China enthusiast who had to be fired by Chrystia Freeland, who was foreign affairs minister at the time.

McCallum had more or less taken the side of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou during her house detention in Vancouver while the courts deliberated on a U.S. Justice Department sanctions-evasion warrant for her arrest. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were held hostage in China for the duration — 1,019 days.

But elsewhere, and especially in the United States, Barton is known for having doubled McKinsey’s annual earnings to $10 billion during his decade as the firm’s global managing director by means that are an indelicate subject in Liberal circles. McKinsey’s notoriety didn’t come just from its lucrative habit of providing business services to the legions of kleptocrats and strongmen from the United Nations’ torture-state bloc, which has been growing in number, in power and influence for the past 25 years.

That phenomenon all by itself goes a long way to explain the collapse of the “rules-based international order,” and it preceded Trumpism. The story is set out meticulously by the New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsyth in their book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm.

During Barton’s years as the firm’s Global Managing Partner from 2009 to 2018, McKinsey’s consultants had also embedded themselves at the senior levels of almost all of the world’s largest corporations, playing their part in raising the income of a typical CEO from 20 times a worker’s wages to 300 times as much. It’s another story that helps explain the rise of Trumpism, and it’s well told in the Atlantic magazine’s How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class.

During Barton’s time at the top of the company, and during his term as the firm’s Asia chair from 2004 to 2009, while he was based in Shanghai, McKinsey’s client list came to include 26 of Beijing’s 96 state-owned enterprises — weapons manufacturers, agri-food empires, telecommunications giants, oil companies and steel companies.

Meanwhile, during his years in the executive suite of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025, Carney went out of his way to praise Xi Jinping. During his several visits to China, he congratulated the regime for its application of Artificial Intelligence technologies. Brookfield owns millions of square metres of Chinese real estate and holds sensitive investments in Chinese state-owned enterprises.

Back in 2025, during the federal election campaign, Charles Burton, the eminent China scholar and senior fellow with the China-focused thinktank Sinopsis, based in Prague, raised an interesting point. “I’m really wondering whether, if Carney becomes the prime minister, it’ll be like if Dominic Barton became the prime minister,” Burton told me. “I worry that ultimately, Carney’s plan is to out-Barton Dominic Barton.”

National Post

• Barry Appleton: Ontario paid for the map that renamed its lake. It shouldn’t have
• Colby Cosh: The U.S. president breaks his own laws in waging the trade war

Over the weekend, Ontario Premier Doug Ford stood in front of a sign declaring Lake Ontario “Now and Always.” Within about a day, however, Hydro One, Metrolinx, Infrastructure Ontario and the LCBO had all labelled the body of water as “Lake America” on their own websites. So did Loblaws.

No Canadian official decided that. Nobody was lobbied, and nothing was conceded. The Ontario government had bought a mapping service, and the mapping service changed the lake’s name.

Here is how this came to be. President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming the United States holds most of the volume of Lake Ontario and bears responsibility for its security, economic activity and environmental stewardship; the order renames the lake to “Lake America.” The U.S. Geographic Names Information Service made the change on the American register. Google resolves place names from official government registers, so Google Maps followed. Ontario’s agencies draw their maps straight from Google, so their websites followed, too.

Metrolinx fixed it by switching the map off .

Sit with that. A provincial transit agency’s only available remedy, on a service it pays for, was to stop using the service. Hydro One said the problem originates with a third-party mapping service and that it is working with its vendor. That word is exactly right, and it is most of the story.

The name of a lake is the least of it. The same pipe that carried “Lake America” onto a Hydro One outage map carries boundaries, jurisdictions, municipal limits and service areas onto the screens of utilities, transit systems, insurers and retailers across this country; whoever supplies the register supplies all of it.

The map that mislabelled a lake on a quiet weekend is the same map a utility runs during an ice storm, when an outage layer is how crews and customers find each other. Metrolinx could switch a station map off on a Sunday. Hydro One cannot switch off its outage map in January. A dependency you escape only by shutting the service down is not one you can afford in an emergency.

Any board would ask management what happens if a vendor changes something in the middle of a crisis. Crown agencies should answer this question long before such a storm hits.

None of this is novel. When the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America, Google made the change within days , Apple the following day, Microsoft after that. MapQuest did not, and nothing happened to MapQuest. Compliance was a commercial choice, not a legal duty.

Now, the part that should sting: Canada has kept its own register of official place names since 1897, through what is currently named the Geographical Names Board of Canada . Natural Resources Canada maintains the database , roughly 350,000 approved names, published as open data and refreshed weekly. It is free. It contains Lake Ontario.

Ontario’s agencies were reading Washington’s register instead, and they were paying an American company for the privilege.

Google’s arrangement makes this look better than it is. Users in the United States see “Lake America,” users in Canada see Lake Ontario, and everyone else sees both. For a Canadian holding a phone, that is a real accommodation. It did nothing for the LCBO’s store locator. A Canadian looking at an Ontario government website was shown the American name anyway, and how a purchased service is configured is the purchaser’s business.

Ottawa, to its credit, asked the right question about a different purchase last year. In a procurement notice for “sovereign public cloud capability,” Shared Services Canada invited potential cloud suppliers to explain whether federal data could stay inside Canada, and whether providers were subject to foreign laws reaching that data without Canada’s consent. A question about a purchase, put before signing.

The 2026 National Trade Estimate Report by the U.S. trade representative lists that question among barriers to American trade in Canada, under the heading “Sovereign Cloud Initiative.”

Two governments, two purchasing decisions. Ottawa asked what its supplier would do, and Washington put the question on a list of trade barriers. Ontario did not ask, and got “Lake America.”

None of this calls for a new regulator, a new agency or a levy on anyone. Canadian governments spend billions every year on software and services, and every dollar of it moves under a contract. A contract can name the register that governs, say where the data sits, and set what a vendor owes a customer in notice before changing something that customer publishes under its own logo. Governments are buyers, and buyers set terms.

The premier’s instinct was sound. But a sign is a statement of intent and a procurement clause is a statement of fact. Ontario agreed to let somebody else decide how its maps were labelled long before it commissioned the sign.

Canada has kept its register of place names since 1897. We should start reading from it.

National Post

Barry Appleton is the interim director of the Balsillie Legal Advisory Centre at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, adjunct professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, managing partner of Appleton & Associates International Lawyers LP, and a co-director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School. He is the author of Navigating NAFTA.

The Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation (CAEF) is asking lawyers to sign a petition in hopes of persuading the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) to hear a motion in mid-September that could ultimately prevent graduates of Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) law school from ever practicing law in the province.

In a formal motion to the LSO, a copy of which was sent to me by a source requesting anonymity, 10 lawyers cited a recent report by Mary Lou Benotto in which the former Ontario Appeal Court Justice describes TMU — once known as Ryerson University — as a cesspit of antisemitism at which Jewish students have been spat on, pelted with sour milk, intimidated, harassed and threatened, and are living in fear. Benotto found that the university has failed to tackle the scourge of antisemitism that swept through its halls after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists.

The lawyers want the LSO to include their request on the agenda of its Annual General Meeting on Sept. 16. Specifically, the lawyers aim to have TMU’s Lincoln Alexander School of Law accreditations withdrawn by the Law Society. The LSO, however, has told the lawyers that their motion arrived past its deadline of 40 days before the AGM.

Enter the CAEF, which is endorsing the lawyers’ motion and is attempting to apply pressure on the LSO by asking it in a petition to waive the deadline because of the urgency in the matter surrounding the vile antisemitism at TMU.

The lawyers’ motion states: “The report of the Honourable Mary Lou Benotto, released Aug. 14, 2026, describes how Jewish students, faculty and staff at TMU experience hostility ‘that crossed into intimidation, dehumanization and antisemitism,’ abetted by the failure of TMU to ‘consistently and decisively’ enforce its rules intended to prevent such misconduct. According to the Benotto Report, many Jewish TMU community members report feeling unsafe attending classes, that they have to hide their Jewish identities, and that they tell their Jewish friends not to let their kids go to TMU. Simply put, the Benotto Report establishes a prima facie case that TMU has, through it actions (or lack thereof), created a discriminatory environment which discourages Jews from attending TMU, and, by extension, Lincoln Alexander School of Law.”

The motion adds that the LSO has been clear that accreditation of a law school at a university that adopts policies that discourage attendance by students, “is contrary to the public interest, inconsistent with the Law Society’s function to ensure a competent bar and deeply offensive to the public.”

There is a rumbling that the LSO would like to see a followup report on TMU’s antisemitism by a task force that has been commissioned by TMU president and vice-chancellor Mohamed Lachemi. The task force is being chaired by Bob Rae, a former Ontario premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

In a recent column in the Financial Post, labour lawyer Howard Levitt criticized TMU for failing to accept Benotto’s independent report and investigation outright and appointing the Rae-led task force to review her findings instead.

“What (an employer) should never do,” Levitt wrote, “is effectively investigate the investigation.” Calling TMU’s response to the Benotto report “troubling,” Levitt also said: “An independent investigation has a purpose. An organization brings in an outsider to determine what happened, where it failed and what should be done. The value lies in the investigator’s independence.”

Sam Goldstein, one of aforementioned 10 lawyers who signed the motion to the Law Society, agrees fully with Levitt.

“Why should there be any further delays on taking action on TMU’s toxic environment?” Goldstein, a longtime criminal lawyer, asked me rhetorically. “Why should this fester at an institution that receives government grants? Why should Jewish students continue to be fearful at TMU?

“Some sort of significant action must be taken now, today, and not delayed by yet another study into what we all know is a cesspit of antisemitism. The Law Society of Ontario has a chance now to make an important statement. We hope it will.”

I must say that, after all the reports of antisemitism at TMU, I agree that the LSO should consider this motion. The sooner, the better.

National Post

• Michael Higgins: Toronto Metropolitan University is a disgrace
• TMU provides lesson in what not to do with independent investigations

We can’t know exactly why Ontario Superior Court Justice Heather McArthur decided on Thursday to uphold bail for a man accused of shooting up the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, but her reasons can’t make much sense. Perhaps she was compelled by some kind of sob story, or perhaps she convinced herself that whatever stern warning she gave against disobeying bail conditions would resonate with the alleged gun-for-hire. Who knows; that’s all covered by a publication ban.

What is public inspires a whole lot of doubt in the justice system. The crime unfolded one morning in March at around 5:29 a.m.: shots were fired upon the U.S. Consulate by mystery men in a stolen car who filmed themselves in the act. It wasn’t until months later that those believed responsible were arrested .

First to be caught was 18-year-old Sheldon Tracey-Stewart, who was nabbed in early June during a series of police raids targeting the crime ring connected with the consulate shooting. This triumph was overshadowed by tragedy, however: Toronto police Const. Marc Pinizzotto was shot and killed by a subject of the raid , resulting in 19-year-old Nicholas Bennett being charged with murder.

It took another week to catch our man Zara Jabbi, who wasn’t home at the time of the raid. He was granted bail on July 7, just a few weeks later. (And thanks to Justice McArthur, he’ll continue to enjoy release.)

Despite the raids and arrests — and an increase in patrols — the U.S. Consulate was hit a second time. On July 27, at around 4:45 a.m., the occupants of another vehicle shot up the U.S. Consulate again . Police stationed nearby were able to respond right away, but the ensuing chase saw speeds above 140 km/h on the nearby expressway and police called the chase off. Toronto, in all its dysfunction, didn’t have a helicopter to deploy, so the offenders got away.

A week and a half later, the alleged shooters were brought in: 19-year-old Xen-Ul-Abdeen Syed and a nameless 15-year-old. These two were also suspected of pouring gas on a residential driveway in late July and lighting it on fire.

The U.S. has pointed to Iran being behind all this, and Canadian police have at very least connected this group to other crimes against synagogues and businesses. Both shootings at the U.S. Consulate involved payments being offered to the gunmen through encrypted messaging apps, according to police.

The upholding of Jabbi’s release would have been offensive if he was merely accused of being a lone-wolf shooter, but it is so much worse in its full context. The soup of allegations related to this group is unthinkable to regular Canadians. Stealing cars, shooting buildings, conducting hybrid warfare against allies, killing police, evading police, etc. It’s indicative of extremely dangerous men who will unleash violence and evade justice where they can.

As bail is a risk-management exercise, it shouldn’t have been hard to conclude that granting freedom to those accused of such crimes places unacceptable risk upon the public. But we are often cursed with judges, including possibly McArthur in this case, who believe too strongly in the obedience of those thought to be among the most dishonest and violent in the country. In court, they’ll give out a long list of bail conditions and deliver a very foreboding lecture to whatever family member or friend who has offered to ensure the compliance of the accused. And then they’ll be shocked when bail violations occur.

Indeed, it was just early August when a woman was sentenced to a year of jail for giving her brother scissors to cut off his ankle monitor while he was on bail, and helping him escape the police who were searching for him. She had been his surety at the time of the crime, meaning she made a promise in court to supervise her brother’s bail compliance and report any breaches. The brother, who was facing gun charges, had been released on “very strict” conditions because she had assured court she was a “strong woman” who would carry out her duty. Little good that did.

Alas, even if Jabbi’s defence lawyers came up with a supposedly iron-clad release plan, his judge had a final card that could have been played to keep him in custody. The Criminal Code says that bail can be denied “if the detention is necessary to maintain confidence in the administration of justice, having regard to all the circumstances.” And then it rattles off some of those circumstances: the strength of the prosecution’s case, the gravity of the offence, whether a gun was used, whether a long jail term is on the table.

Jabbi is accused by police of using a gun to shoot up a diplomatic site while being allegedly involved with a gang that killed a police officer. If a judge doesn’t consider the release of such a man to be an assault upon public confidence in the administration of justice, she is extremely out of touch. Canadian courts have a weak reputation for ensuring order as is; decisions like these only bring it lower.

National Post

In the 2025 general election, the Conservatives won 41.31 per cent of the vote. In the seven byelections since then, the party has averaged just 24.6 per cent support — and that includes leader Pierre Poilievre’s whopping 80.86 per cent win in Battle River—Crowfoot.

Politicians can dismiss polls as being a snapshot in time. The Conservative leader may be able to scoff at polls like Research Co. ’s preferred prime minister survey, which suggested that even if Poilievre’s popularity doubled, it would still trail Carney’s.

But byelections are real people putting their “x” on real ballot papers — and they are increasingly disinclined to do so in Poilievre’s favour.

Prime Minister Mark Carney noted that the Liberals won more than 50 per cent of the vote in each of the three byelections held on Monday: in the safe Liberal seat of Beaches—East York, in North Vancouver—Capilano (held by the Conservatives as recently as 2011), and in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, which was won by Conservative Richard Martel in 2018 and held in three subsequent elections.

In Chicoutimi, the Conservative candidate came in third place with just 12.5 per cent support, garnering barely one-quarter of the votes picked up by Liberal Daniel Gobeil.

The prime minister attributed his party’s success to Canadians being “united and ready” in support of the government’s plan during a time of crisis.

It is hard to argue with his premise that the country is rallying behind what people see as a national unity government, at a time when voters are preoccupied with the trade war with the Trump administration.

By contrast, Poilievre has little to say on the matter.

In March, he went to New York and made a speech that sounded much more accommodating towards America than Carney’s “elbows up” rhetoric and claim that there has been a permanent rupture in relations. Conservatives argued at the time their leader was just being more realistic in recognizing Canada’s geography and limited leverage.

But it was not a winning argument, and he has since made it clear that if voters don’t like his principles, he has others.

After Trump announced his plans to impose additional tariffs on Canada in July, Poilievre wrote an open letter to Carney demanding “no more caving.” He said the government had already made too many concessions to the Americans over the Gordie Howe bridge, the cancellation of the digital services tax, and by overriding the CRTC’s demand that streaming giants like Netflix should pay more of their Canadian revenues to fund homegrown content (a move Poilievre had called for publicly).

The brazen nature of Trump’s strategy in breaching the terms of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement by imposing tariffs on autos has forced Poilievre to call such measures “unjustified.”

While he is now more aligned with the public mood, it does not look as if he got any credit at the ballot box.

The Conservative leader’s political obituary has been written countless times already.

Perhaps he will outlast the prime minister, who was asked again on Tuesday whether he intends to lead his party into the next election , and who once again did not answer with a simple affirmative.

The lack of an obvious rival in the Conservative ranks means it is unlikely Poilievre’s job is under immediate threat. But there are another six byelections pending. One in particular — Brantford-Brant South—Six Nations in Ontario — has the potential to set the bell tolling. Larry Brock, the sitting MP, has said he will soon resign and return to Brantford’s Crown attorney’s office. The seat has been safely Conservative since 2008 and Brock won it with 52 per cent of the vote in 2025.

Caucus members will be watching anxiously, because if Brock’s seat is flipped, very few of them will be safe come the next election.

As goes Brantford, so could go the Conservative leadership.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

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