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NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, left, announcing in April that former two-time MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau would seek a return to office in the Quebec riding of Berthier–Maskinongé. Brosseau is now a potential leadership candidate.

What if the NDP had a leadership race and no one showed up to vote? While this is an obvious exaggeration on my part, it may not turn out to be that far from the truth.

A recent Research Co.

poll

included a question about favourable and unfavourable opinions of potential NDP leadership candidates running to replace Jagmeet Singh. Former NDP MP and House Leader Ruth Ellen Brosseau had the

highest favourability

rating with 18 per cent, followed by MP Jenny Kwan (17 per cent), MP Heather McPherson (16 per cent) and former MP/Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart (16 per cent). Conversely, left-wing filmmaker and activist Avi Lewis had the

highest unfavourability

rating with 16 per cent, followed by Stewart at 15 per cent and four candidates at 14 per cent: Kwan, McPherson, former B.C. MLA/MP Nathan Cullen and MP Gord Johns.

That’s not the interesting part, however.

Every single potential NDP leadership candidate

scored

above 50 per cent when it came to this response,

“I don’t know who this person is.”

The highest was Johns at 59 per cent, which makes sense, since he’s one of the least well-known names. Close behind was Lewis, one of the more well-known names, who was tied with MP Leah Gazan at 58 per cent. Other notable candidates like Cullen (55 per cent), Brosseau (54 per cent) and Kwan (53 per cent) suffered a similar fate.

These numbers will likely change once the leadership race is off and running. It still doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s an embarrassing start to this forthcoming campaign. Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised by the NDP’s dismal state of affairs. The party is a shell of its former self. It’s broken in ideology, popular support and ability to

pay back

its national campaign expenses. While it’s not dead or dying right now, it’s certainly been on political life support for quite some time.

Singh’s leadership is the main reason for the NDP’s decline. He took the massive electoral gains earned by the late Jack Layton in the 2011 federal election, and partially maintained by Tom Mulcair until 2017, and almost immediately turned them into dust. That takes talent, and not the good kind.

The icing on the cake was this year’s federal election. The NDP dropped from 24 to 7 seats out of a possible 343 ridings. They fell below the 12-seat requirement for official party status in the House of Commons and won’t receive the annual research allowance of $18,600 per member as

outlined

in the Parliament of Canada Act. The NDP finished fourth in the popular vote with 6.29 per cent, which meant they were behind the Bloc Québécois, which only runs candidates in one province. To top it off, Singh lost his own seat and immediately resigned.

To provide some additional perspective, this was the worst election result in the party’s history. Even the NDP’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), had a slightly better result in its first election campaign. The party won 7 out of 245 seats, with 8.77 per cent of the popular vote, in the 1935 federal election. Then-CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth, who had served as an Independent Labour MP since 1925, didn’t lose his seat, either.

Some political analysts have suggested Singh’s downfall can be largely attributed to the majority of Canadian progressives holding their collective noses and voting for Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney as the best choice to take on U.S. President Donald Trump and his tariffs. When he lost traditional NDP support, he had nowhere to go but down. That’s partially true, but far from the entire story. Singh caused immeasurable damage as party leader between 2017 to 2025 that the NDP will struggle to overcome.

For instance, Singh propped up former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in the supply and confidence agreement for far too long. If he had walked away from this contentious agreement, which ran from March 2022 to Sept. 2024, at a much earlier date, he would have lost his lifeline to government policy but would have earned the respect of many progressive voters. It’s entirely possible that Singh’s NDP could have leapfrogged Trudeau’s Liberals in an election — some polling data seemed to

indicate

this — and he could still be an MP and party leader today. Blind ambition, the quest for power, and his desire for a gold-plated pension likely put an end to this.

Singh also took many far-left positions on politics, economics, race, religion and gender as NDP leader. Some of this was in keeping with his party’s ideology, but not all of it. His support for costly, state-run policies like national dental care and pharmacare, which were both rejected by most voters in elections but slid in during the supply and confidence agreement, will cost taxpayers dearly for generations. His obsession with progressive policies — such as

racial profiling

, political correctness, climate change,

opposition to pipelines

,

rejecting the monarchy in favour of republicanism

,

criticism of the Israeli government during the war in Gaza

, and other loony left ideas — likely earned him far more detractors than supporters.

End result? Singh’s ineffective leadership has set back the NDP by at least 2-3 election cycles. Any hope of recovery likely won’t rest with the next unknown party leader chosen at a sparsely attended political convention. Or the one after that, it seems.

National Post


Dinah Justice report screenshot

Just months after the atrocities of October 7, I wrote to the dean of a Canadian university expressing outrage. The university’s sexual assault centre director had

publicly questioned

whether the rapes of Jewish women and girls by Hamas terrorists had even occurred. To its credit, the university swiftly dismissed her. But the moment left a bitter aftertaste — a disturbing confirmation of something I had long feared: when Jewish women are raped, the outrage dies in silence.

Now, the recently released

Dinah Project report

has exposed the full horror of the sexual violence perpetrated on October 7. The report is exhaustive and damning: “Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon, as part of a genocidal scheme…with the goal of terrorizing and dehumanizing Israeli society.” The evidence is clear and organized into a rigorous framework:

Survivor testimonies from 15 released hostages.

Eyewitness accounts of gang rapes and mutilation.

Reports from 27 first responders across six locations.

Forensic evidence from morgue workers.

Photographic and video documentation of sexual humiliation.

We now know this: women were stripped, raped, and mutilated. Some had objects forcibly inserted into their genitals. Others were tied to trees and executed. Girls were paraded in the streets for sexual degradation. In captivity, they were assaulted, harassed, and threatened with forced marriages. Most were murdered. The few survivors are too shattered to speak.

And yet — the silence from the feminist community has been deafening.

Where are the women’s groups, sexual assault centres, and human rights advocates who claim to stand for all women? Where are the vigils, the solidarity marches, the campaigns for justice? When Jewish women are raped, silence isn’t just indifference — it’s complicity.

Six months after the massacre, even the UN issued only a

watered-down acknowledgement

: that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” sexual violence occurred on October 7. But even that was buried in general language about “both sides,” failing to confront the specific, systematic targeting of Jewish women.

Imagine for a moment if any other minority group had been subjected to such atrocities — at a concert, in their homes, in front of their children. Would anyone dare suggest we needed “more evidence”? Would feminist organizations fail to issue statements? Would sexual assault centres look the other way?

Of course not.

But for 20 years, the pro-Palestinian movement has

seeded campuses

and institutions with rhetoric that justifies resistance “by any means necessary.” And now we see what “any means” truly means. Rape. Mutilation. Silence. Excuses.

In cities across Canada, demonstrators hold signs reading “by any means necessary.” We know exactly what they mean. And the worst part? Children are being taught that rape and murder of Jews is part of that resistance.

If that makes you uncomfortable to read, imagine living it.

So here is what I ask of you. This week, take action. Visit The Dinah Project

website

. Read the report. Then write to your local women’s centre, your local sexual assault organization, and your local feminist group. Send them the link. Demand they issue a public statement condemning the rapes of October 7.

Ask them plainly: Do Jewish women matter to you?

And then let me know what they say. Let’s publicly acknowledge the organizations that show moral courage — and call out those that don’t.

We cannot allow the rape and murder of Jewish women to be ignored, minimized, or rationalized. The feminist movement must not fail its most basic test: to stand for all women, regardless of religion, race, or ethnicity.

October 7 was not only a massacre. It was a moment of truth — one that revealed who would stand with Jewish women and who would stay silent.

History is watching. And so are we.

Avi Abraham Benlolo is the CEO and Chairman of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative, a prominent Canadian think-tank.

National Post


Thursday marked the 100th anniversary of the commencement of

the “Monkey Trial” of science teacher John T. Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee

. It is one of many candidates for the title of “American trial of the (20th) century,” perhaps the best-deserving up until the O.J. Simpson fiasco. In some ways the Scopes trial can be seen as an early warning to judges about the warping effects of mass media attention on the courtroom, a warning that was perhaps misplaced by the time O.J. came to be tried.

Scopes was tried under a then-new Tennessee law, the Butler Act, which contained the following language:

“… it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

At the time he ran afoul of this law, Scopes was a lad of 24, freshly graduated from the University of Kentucky with a law degree and a minor in geology. He had come to Dayton, a small town dominated by high-octane evangelicalism, mostly to be the football coach, with a sideline teaching physics and chemistry classes. The school’s ordinary biology teacher was its principal, for whom Scopes had subbed in at times during the 1924-25 school year.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been combing Tennessee for the makings of a test case, an opportunity to put the Butler Act on trial. Local lawyers in Dayton saw an opportunity to inflate the renown of their town, but the principal of the school was an older married man who didn’t want to play chicken with his local reputation or risk accumulating a criminal record. That left young bachelor and outsider Scopes, a gentle 1920s freethinker who would, later in life, run for Congress in his native Kentucky as a Socialist Party candidate.

The lawyers asked Scopes if he remembered teaching evolution to the kiddies. He didn’t, but he agreed with the lawyers that you couldn’t teach scientific biology properly without including evolution, and admitted that he would have paid no mind to the Butler Act while in the classroom. According to his memoir, he even fetched the school’s official biology textbook down from a shelf to illustrate. Tennessee had passed the Butler Act without mandating any new creationist textbook — nothing of the kind yet existed — so Scopes had been required to use an older text absolutely crammed with modernist Darwinian horrors (and, for that matter, a smattering of eugenic theorizing about the duty of racial improvement).

Scopes was “arrested” in a brief act of perfunctory theatre, though he was never detained, and the stage was set for a media carnival that swallowed the town of Dayton alive. When the famous left-wing defence lawyer Clarence Darrow turned up at the ACLU’s invitation to battle on behalf of Scopes, the state of Tennessee called upon William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee and populist advocate of Christian fundamentalism.

We’ve lost awareness of how weird this was. If the Monkey Trial had never taken place, and an expert historian were asked in 2025 to name the two greatest American orators of the period, “Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan” might still be the answer you would get. Nothing of this kind had ever happened before, nor has it happened since: an actual criminal jury trial with honest-to-God mega-celebrities acting as counsel on both sides.

The trial was, we now know, a thoroughly contrived occasion for “culture war” cooked up by the ACLU and some of its friends in the American liberal establishment. In 2025 we are more than familiar with such things: anybody who has internet access would understand, would say without pausing for a second thought, that William Jennings Bryan was being “trolled.” But when the trial began it seemed that the trolling effort was bound to fail.

The judge, John T. Raulston, accepted some written evidence on the scientific evidence for evolution, but refused to allow experts to be cross-examined in court, and tried to stick to the actual issue in the case: had defendant Scopes broken the law of Tennessee? With the defence left hanging, Darrow asked if Bryan would be willing to face questioning as an expert on the text and teaching of the Bible. Bryan, who was as eager as Darrow to add some theatrical colour to the proceedings, unwisely agreed.

The result was a confrontation that has become immortal, mostly through the avenue of the oft-adapted play Inherit the Wind. (The Darrow-versus-Bryan parts of the play are quite faithful to the trial transcript. These gentlemen didn’t need help creating drama.) Darrow, who is perhaps still the archetypal American unbeliever, asked village-atheist questions about the accuracy and consistency of the Bible. Bryan became flustered, indignant and abusive, and did much more poorly in handling Darrow’s questions than any decently educated fundamentalist would now.

When the dust settled, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. His conviction was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the Butler Act; however, the amount of Scopes’s fine was technically contrary to the state’s constitution, and the appeal judge, observing that Scopes had long since moved on from Tennessee, urged against a re-trial.

I have written about the Scopes trial

 a time or two, and I am a little sad to say that it appears to be losing its hold on the popular imagination. Partly this is because the famous people involved are no longer famous. But the culture war has also moved on from the topic of biological evolution to a surprising degree, hasn’t it? When I was a young man, and the year 2000 still lurked in the future, there was a brief vogue among religious folk for varieties of “scientific creationism” that might somehow locate the hand of God in the story of humanity. In retrospect, “scientific creationism” seems like a fatal compromise, and little is heard of it in the era of cheap DNA sequencing. You might object to the possibility that you had distant Neanderthal ancestors, but, if you care to, you can pay someone a few hundred bucks to find out 

the exact quantum

 of Neanderthal DNA in your cells.

In other words, almost everyone has accepted the premises that the Butler Act was specifically designed to condemn: man did “descend” from “lower” beasts, from primates, and if God intended for there to exist a creature in His own image, evolution seems to be how He went about it. Bryan and the Tennessee legislature believed that the Bible was literally true, and that its divine status and meaning would be annihilated by conceding any presence of mere allegory or metaphor or instructive invention.

Even today’s evangelical fundamentalists aren’t usually that fundamentalist. Indeed, in 1925 Bryan himself proved shaky on the witness stand, conceding that the six-day Creation might not have involved 144 actual hours of clock time. I daresay, even speaking as an atheist, that it seems a touch insulting to the Bible to regard it as a brute factual record or as some sort of unartful consumer-product manual.

National Post


The head of a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, lies on the ground after the statue was toppled and beheaded during a demonstration in Montreal in 2020.

You cannot reason with people who hate your existence.

It was reported last week that the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada

was halting
all further

plaques and commemorations honouring Sir John A. Macdonald.

The reason given was that Canada’s first prime minister was too “

polarizing

” to be worth the headache. This is not borne out by the evidence, with surveys consistently

finding

Macdonald to be among the most

well-regarded

prime ministers in our history.

However, these bureaucrats have no time for what Canadians think or feel. Appeasing people who wish Canada did not exist is a greater priority.

Canadians are a far more patriotic people than they typically get credit for. Unfortunately, their leaders are often complacent and meek when it comes to defending national identity with any measure of backbone or pride.

The exception is during elections, when both Liberals and Conservatives bang the patriot drum for votes. With the April election far in the rearview mirror, there is fresh space for anti-Canadian organizers to resume their campaign of undermining national pride from within.

Who makes up this faction? Among them are radical decolonization groups, academic zealots, professional activists and elected politicians who are fellow travellers to the cause. What unites them is a fierce antipathy for Canada and Canadians.

The moratorium on honours for Macdonald is the latest victory in their campaign to demoralize and unmoor the population from their history, and bludgeon them into believing they are no more than party to an evil, artificial project.

According to the anti-Canadians, for this is the best way to collectively describe them, Canada is not a legitimate country. It is “

stolen land

,” or “

so-called Canada

”.

A pan-Canadian identity is usually denied. At best, it is described as the “

settler imaginary,

” as if to identify as a Canadian is an exercise in self-gaslighting.

Within this worldview, the settler and the colonizer will always be considered a sort of invasive species that is a natural antagonist to the Indigenous people.

When monuments to national figures like Macdonald are brought down, critics often decry it as an

erasure of history

. It is a noble objective to try to have a rational debate about history and its merits, but it is ultimately a waste of energy with these ideologues.

Those who toppled Macdonald do not want to erase history, they want to see Canada torn down, and Canadians rendered spiritually hollow. It is far from a solely Canadian phenomenon.

In Australia, a country with whom Canada shares common heritage, monuments to figures like James Cook have been hacked down, and the

remains vandalized

with the slogan “the colony will fall” in spray paint.

In many cases, the national holiday of “Australia Day” has been cancelled, with calls to

rename

it “Invasion Day.”

Like Canada, Australia is increasingly portrayed as a primordially evil settler state that is irredeemable until a sort of bureaucratic cultural revolution takes place.

Last year, a school field trip in Toronto resulted in students of “

colonizer

” ethnicity being asked to wear blue to set them apart from their classmates.

It was an inappropriate, if not dehumanizing, decision by the school staff, who should have lost their jobs over it. That is all part of the process of demoralization and alienation.

This racial division of society is a branch from the same tree that sprouted “Kill the Boer” in South Africa.

For context, “Kill the Boer” is a song

that emerged

during the apartheid era in resistance to South Africa’s white-minority government that ended in 1994.

The tune was

revived

in the 2010s by far-left political leader Julius Malema, who routinely accuses the remaining white population of hoarding their wealth and continuing to oppress the country’s Black majority.

Malema has insisted that the title of the song is a metaphor,

stating that,

“we’ve not called for the killing of white people, at least for now.”

That sort of extreme discourse has not been broached in Canada, and people should not expect mass violence anytime soon. However, the underlying assumptions about the value of “colonizers” hardly differ from Malema’s.

Take the reaction from the hard-left to the massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Former Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama’s first reaction was to

issue

a statement accusing Israel of apartheid and engaging in “settler colonialism.”

Jama made sure to mention that she, too, was “a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.”

The inability to wait until the victims’ blood was dry before equivocating was telling.

Others, such as a lecturer at Langara College in Vancouver, celebrated the “

amazing, brilliant offensive

” as an act of liberation, and have been unapologetic about doing so to this day.

“Kill the Boer” is not an isolated phenomenon, it is part and parcel of the global decolonial movement.

Macdonald is being wiped from the public eye for two reasons.

The first is that he was once commemorated with more monuments in Canada than any other prime minister, and was thus an easy target. Secondly, his efforts created the country that so many people despise.

It is not so much Macdonald whom they seek to dishonour as it is Canada itself.

A debate in the liberal tradition about erasing history is of no use here, for they have no willingness to listen.

For our bureaucrats to try to appease them is nothing short of disgraceful.

National Post


Screenshot of Encampment for Gaza Canadians Instagram page.

On June 22, a crowd waving pro-Palestinian flags and

protest signs

of the Ayatollah Khamenei at the “Hands Off Iran” rally in the middle of University Avenue in downtown Toronto

blocked buses

that were replacing subway trains, causing innocent people to be delayed.

Since early June, a motley crew has privatized a portion of the Ontario legislature grounds in opposition to Ontario’s new resource development law, complete with

sacred fire

and

intimidating dog

.

Now, social media posts are promoting an “

Encampment for Gaza Canadians

,” set to start on July 15, which promises nationwide encampments outside of Immigration Canada offices and a Parliament Hill sit-in until family members of Palestinians are brought to Canada.

As a civil libertarian, you might expect me to defend these protest tactics. I won’t. As John Locke

explained

, “where there is no law, there is no freedom.” All of these acts are illegal.

Canadians, especially protesters and police, need to educate themselves on the limits of the Charter rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly so order can be restored and freedom can return.

Here’s some of what I think everyone needs to know about the legal limits of protest.

Freedom of peaceful assembly protects one’s right to gather peacefully with others for a common purpose, including protest. The “peaceful” qualifier means that the constitution doesn’t protect behaviour that interferes significantly with the rights of others. As the Supreme Court explained in an early Charter case, freedom is the absence of coercion or constraint. Your freedom ends where another’s begins.

In practice, this means you can march down streets chanting and holding signs, even if that briefly delays traffic, but you can’t stand in the middle of an intersection refusing to move. While a march uses the street fleetingly just like driving a vehicle, a blockade exerts force and coercion. More than a dozen court decisions confirm that, depending on the protester’s intent, blockading is either criminal mischief (interfering with property) or criminal intimidation (blocking or obstructing a highway for the purpose of compelling someone to do something or not do something that they’re entitled to do). Police have no excuse to let the blockades continue.

While freedom of expression protects your right to say extremely offensive things outside a place of worship, as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of hate speech or advocating genocide, you don’t have the right to block anyone’s path: that too is mischief or intimidation.

While you can show up at a park every day to let your views be known, you can’t build a semi-permanent tent city. Even if one were to consider that action peaceful protest, courts have confirmed that trespass laws are a reasonable limit. You can’t privatize space that belongs to all.

While the Charter protects your right to show up in public buildings for protests, it doesn’t allow you to interfere with or halt their normal operations until someone concedes to your demands.

And while you can be noisy in the streets to try to get your message across, you don’t have a right to blast speakers or truck air horns so loud that people can’t sleep or work. To quote Ottawa’s Justice Hugh McLean, who issued an injunction against the truck horns during the Freedom Convoy, “you can dissent as long as you don’t hurt people.”

The state also must also follow the rules. Cities shouldn’t require permits to hold a spontaneous protest in a public park, charge fees so high that people can’t gather, or try to regulate what people can say in public spaces, as cities like Calgary, Toronto and Vaughan, Ont., have done with their bylaws creating “bubble zones” outside places of worship, libraries and more.

Police need to respect the public’s rights too. They can’t demand protesters stop filming them unless they’re interfering with an arrest. They can’t force people to move if they’re simply trying to engage with the other side. They can’t search people’s bags without reasonable grounds.

I’m convinced that if Canadians — police and protesters especially — better understood the rules, we could restore the order and the rule of law that is a vital precondition to liberty. If we don’t, we risk people taking the law into their own hands.

Josh Dehaas is counsel with the Canadian Constitution Foundation and author of the new Guide to Protesting Safety and Legally in Canada.

National Post


A woman takes a photo of the new national emblem of Syria during a drone show in the Syrian capital of Damascus on July 5, 2025. The emblem was officially adopted on July 3 to mark the end of the Assad era.

It’s been nearly a full decade since the photograph of a dead refugee child on a Turkish beach caused the world to

stop in its tracks

and focus its fleeting attention on the 21st century’s most obscene humanitarian catastrophe. In that one picture, in an instant, the dismemberment of Syria, which by then had been underway for four years, became suddenly comprehensible.

Barely two years old, little Alan Kurdi had drowned along with his mother, Rihan, and his brother, Galib, when the overcrowded boat they were travelling in capsized en route to the Greek island of Kos on Sept. 2, 2015. Before the year was over another million refugees had boarded makeshift boats to make the journey to Europe to escape Bashar Assad’s barrel bombs, Vladimir Putin’s air force and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s throat-slitting jihadists.

As things quickly turned out, the Kurdis had been making their way to Canada. Owing to the efforts of Alan’s aunt, a Coquitlam hairdresser, the plight of the Kurdi family had already been brought to the attention of the authorities in Ottawa, so the tragedy of the boy on the beach became something of a Canadian scandal. Auntie Teema was hoping to sponsor the family but they’d been stuck in Turkey, which isn’t a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees. The approved version of events was that Ottawa’s hands were tied, so that’s why the Kurdis ended up in a rickety boat.

It was a complicated story, but because a federal election was underway the tragedy tended to be rendered as a simple moral tale. Although the refugee policies of all three federal parties were practically indistinguishable by the time voters went to the polls on Oct. 19 that year, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had most loudly championed the cause of Syrian refugees, which was enthusiastically taken up by Canadians. Refugee resettlement became central to the Liberal brand.

Even though only slightly more than half of the 100,000 Syrian refugees who eventually settled in Canada were government-sponsored, it’s still all to the good. Ottawa has spent more than $4.7 billion on humanitarian assistance for Syrians over the past decade, and

$100 million more recently

. Canada also spearheaded the dramatic clandestine rescue of more than 400 first responders of the “White Helmets” organization from Southern Syria, with the assistance of the Israel Defence Forces, in 2018.

The point is that Canada is understood as a friend of Syria in good standing, and now that the barbaric Assad regime has been overthrown — an event that ranks with the ouster of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi or Cambodia’s Pol Pot — Canada has a unique opportunity to make some diplomatic use of itself in the Greater Middle East.

Following the early lead set by Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and the Abraham Accord Arab regimes, last week the United States finally and fully committed to lifting the sanctions on Syria that had been applied during the final years of the half-century that Syria was ruled by the savage Assad family and its Baathist mafia.

For all the unspeakable suffering of the people of Gaza and the chaos that has beset the region since the barbaric Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, in the broader scheme of things the good guys are winning. Hamas has been reduced to something on the order of one of those Port-au-Prince terror gangs in Haiti. In Lebanon, the once-invincible menace of Hezbollah has been decapitated and humiliated. Following Israel’s “12-day war” last month, the Iranian tyranny is now nearly defenceless, weaker and more pathetic than at any time since the Khomeinists seized power in 1979.

The “Axis of Resistance” assembled by Qasem Soleimani, the godfather of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force who was liquidated by an American precision strike in Baghdad five years ago, is not yet wholly crushed. But its sharpest arrows now consist of officially-accommodated warlords in the Iraqi military and the Houthis’ Ansar Allah front in Yemen — the Houthi terrorists are like Somali pirates but with missiles, and their days are numbered. It won’t be for long that they’ll be getting away with randomly sinking ships in the Red Sea, jeopardizing $1 trillion worth of annual cargo traffic.

The region’s greatest hope and its greatest peril lies in Syria. If Canada can make some small foreign-policy contribution in the region it will be where our reputation is largely unblemished. If Canadians want to make some genuine use of themselves in this corner of the “world stage,” we could do worse than devote Canada’s limited diplomatic capacities to Syria.

Last December’s ouster of Bashar Assad wasn’t just a gut punch to Tehran and Moscow. It wasn’t just the emergence of a government in Damascus that doesn’t regard itself in a state of war with Israel for the first time since 1948. It’s not just that Ahmed al-Sharaa’s interim government is intent on a

rapprochement

with the U.S.-backed semi-autonomous Kurds of Syria’s northeast as well as close relations with the Kurds’ adversaries in Ankara, or even that the Turkish government has lately made some historic overtures to the Kurds of its own accord.

The Syrian revolution was an exhilarating, lightning-fast revolutionary emancipation of a profoundly brutalized people. Much of the country remains a landscape of broken cities and mass graves. While tens of thousands of refugees are pouring back into the country, roughly half of Syria’s 24 million people are displaced inside Syria or scattered to the ends of the earth.

The throat-slitters haven’t entirely vanished. A

suicide bomber

slaughtered least 30 people at an ancient Greek Orthodox church in Damascus last month, and diehard Assad loyalists pose a threat as well. As many as

1,500 minority Alawites

were butchered in a three-day orgy of massacres last March. Sunni militias incorporated into the new regime have been deeply implicated in the bloodbath, which was set off in the course of crushing what appeared to be a bloody Tehran-incited revolt by Alawites associated with the deposed Assad regime.

The revolutionary government has pledged a transition period to a constitutional order that would guarantee freedom of expression, women’s rights and a recognition of Syria’s ethnic and religious diversity. A formal constitution is promised within five years, to be adopted in elections for a president and parliament.

The agony of the Syrian people is not yet passed. The country remains divided, bleak and broken. But it should not require something like a shocking photograph of a dead child to persuade Canada to put its shoulder to the wheel again.

There’s hope, and Canada should make the best of it.

National Post


Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, gives a statement after meeting with the Slovenian parliament's  Friendship Group with Palestine, in Ljubljana, on July 10, 2025. (Photo by JURE MAKOVEC/AFP via Getty Images)

Francesca Albanese, the nominal United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories but in truth a rabid anti-Israel crusader, may be doing the world a favour.
 

Her constant illegitimate complaint that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza is becoming so tiresome that sheer boredom may awaken people to the lie.
 

Her latest inflammatory
comments
came on July 3 when she said, “
Israel is responsible for one of the cruelest genocides in modern history.”
 

In perpetrating this untruth, Albanese does an injustice to the six million victims of the Holocaust; she disregards the four million who starved to death during the Holodomor and she is willfully blind to the almost one million who were butchered and slaughtered in 100 days in Rwanda.
 

Albanese can scream genocide as much as she likes but it does not alter reality. If we must engage in a tasteless body count, then it is obvious that Israel’s actions in Gaza come nowhere near a genocide.
 

But in presenting a new
report
this month:
Forever-Occupation, genocide, and profit, Albanese has stirred the United States to action.
 

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio
announced
sanctions on Albanese and said her “biased and malicious activities” had long made her unfit for service as a special rapporteur.
 

It was only a matter of time that Albanese, like all extreme left-wing activists, concluded that the heart of the problem (in this case Israel and Gaza, but it could be any problem really) was capitalism.
 

Companies were engaged in an “economy of genocide,” said her report.
 

There followed the usual bafflegab that anti-capitalists have been spewing in some form since Karl Marx.
 

The “corporate machinery” was sustaining the “Israeli settler-colonial project”; “corporate entities” were profiting from “illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide”; the “private sector” must be held accountable, and “
international business and legal systems” had failed to uphold basic rights.
 

“Colonial endeavours and associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector,” Albanese thundered self-righteously. “Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous people of their lands — a mode of domination known as ‘colonial racial capitalism’.”
 

Albanese demanded, “accountability for corporate entities and their executives at both the domestic and international levels.”
 

“This is a political economy that was always eliminatory and has turned into genocidal mode.”
 

Such accountability is all in service of Albanese’s ultimate aim.
 

“This is a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it,” she said.
 

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: let’s dismantle the global system, end capitalism and destroy the corporate sector. And what shall we replace it with? No doubt, Albanese and the United Nations would prefer some new world order where they are in charge.
 

No wonder the U.S. shuddered at the very thought.
 

Rubio accused Albanese of “writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC (International Criminal Court) pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. 
 

“We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”
 

He added, “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”
 

In her report, Albanese cited genocide 59 times. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran got zero mentions. The hostages were ignored completely.
 

The report constantly referred to Post-October 2023. For instance, Post-October 2023 the Israeli defence budget doubled; there had been an increase in Israeli drone projects and there had been an increase in weapons and military technology being used in Gaza.
 

But nowhere in the report does Albanese tell us what happened in October 2023 to make all these things happen. Post-October 2023 is Albanese’s bland descriptor to hide the atrocities of October 7.
 

Albanese is a perfect fit for the virulent anti-Israel bias that permeates the UN which continually lambastes the Jewish state while ignoring the outrageous human rights abuses in other countries.
 

Her prejudices have already attracted the ire of certain nations — including Canada.
 

In a
post on X
last year, Deborah Lyons said, “As a former UN official, as the Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, and as a Canadian, I am horrified to see a United Nations Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, engage in Holocaust distortion and inversion.”
 

Similarly, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather
posted
, “Francesca Albanese has a long history of using antisemitic tropes. It is absolutely baffling to me that the United Nations condones her behaviour and does not remove her from her position.”
 

The UN
code of conduct
for special rapporteurs demands they uphold the highest standards of “probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith.”
 

And yet Albanese has consistently breached that code.
 

One of her most foul and insidious practices is to link Israel with the Nazis, the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

She has
raised
the spectre of the Third Reich to smear Israel;
compared
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler;
evoked
the memory of the German death camps by referencing Gaza as
a “concentration camp of the 21st century”; has
reminded
Germany’s leaders of the failures of Nazi Germany and has explicitly linked Israel’s actions against Palestinians with a new Holocaust.
 

For this shameful conduct, the UN has appointed Albanese to another three-year term as special rapporteur. Only at the UN would a person with so much hatred and prejudice be welcomed instead of fired. 
 

National Post


It shouldn’t be the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s job to regulate the demographic composition of the people we see on television. Nevertheless, it’s become a growing CRTC priority — and a critical threat to media independence in Canada. 

The latest round of diversity measures in broadcasting was
proclaimed
by the CRTC in early June. In concluding a review of its multi-million-dollar subsidy program for local news, the regulator determined that eligible broadcasters should be given incentives to bring about “increased production of online content responding to the needs of members of equity-deserving communities, Indigenous communities, and (official language minority communities).”

Since it was created in 2016, the Independent Local News Fund has worked without diversity incentives. Broadcasters had to pay 0.3 per cent of their broadcasting revenues to the fund, which was then paid out to various small-market private TV stations to support local news reporting. 

The idea was to support local news production, and support it did: the fund collects about $18 million annually. Fund-eligible stations, CRTC-watcher Howard Law has
observed
, collectively spend about $27 million on news every year, which means that the CRTC is covering around 70 per cent of their collective news budget.

In the past, funding was doled out according to a broadcaster’s TV offerings: two-thirds of the money was granted “in proportion to each eligible station’s share of total expenditures on locally reflective news and information” in the last three years; the final third was distributed in proportion to the total hours of local news broadcast by eligible stations in the last three years. 

Now, grant calculations will include news that appears only on a station’s website — but only if the online news “relates specifically to an underserved community” within a station’s area and “portrays an onscreen representation of the underserved community by, for example, depicting its members or representatives or featuring coverage of an event related to the community.”

“This incentive is not an encouragement to migrate news content related to underserved communities from television to online; rather, it is an encouragement to increase production of content serving those communities,” reads the decision.

Practically, it means that news stations that receive these grants will have to factor, to some degree, the subject of the news into coverage decisions. Should a station send its sole evening web reporter to cover the equity-deserving diaspora festival that brings in CRTC funds, or the non-diverse car crash that won’t? The city council committee meeting, or the barbecue at the local mosque? The CRTC has no business trying to inject itself into these newsroom calls.

The fund recipients that will now have to ask these questions include 15 Global News stations, three Jim Pattison Broadcast Group stations (in Medicine Hat, Kamloops and Prince George), Newfoundland’s NTV, Hamilton’s Channel Zero, Victoria’s CHEK-TV, Lethbridge’s Miracle Channel, Thunder Bay’s CKPR-TV, along with several Quebec channels owned by RNC Media and Télé Inter-Rives.

The CRTC framed this as a simple measure of compliance with the law. The Broadcasting Act, prior to 2022,
stated
that the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect the “multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society.” After 2022, this language was intensified with the passing of the controversial Online Streaming Act;
now
, the system should “support community broadcasting that reflects both the diversity of the communities being served, including with respect to the languages in use within those communities and to their ethnocultural and Indigenous composition.” 

There was a time when this merely meant that Canadian broadcasting should allow for multicultural programming; yes, Canada had language rules in broadcasting, as well as Canadian content requirements, but the CRTC wasn’t concerned about ethnic scorekeeping. In 2013, the idea of even mandating regional content quotas was
considered
by the regulator to be an infringement of journalistic independence. 

That all began to change under the Liberal government, however. The Liberals don’t control the CRTC directly, of course, but they do decide who the commissioners are and what the broadcasting laws say. They can also step in if the CRTC takes its mission widely off course, as it’s been doing for the past few years now.

In 2022, the CRTC
imposed diversity quotas
on parts of the CBC’s programming budget to “reflect contemporary Canada” — i.e., to achieve the regulator’s preferred demographic balance. 

Among other requirements, the CBC was required to spend 30 per cent of its budget line for English commissioned TV programs on diverse producers (the quota will rise to 35 per cent next year). A smaller quota was applied to the French side (which will reach 15 per cent next year). This was a direct, propagandistic intrusion by the regulator — and really, the Canadian government — into the editorial realm. 

In 2024, the CRTC began collecting a five per cent government cut from the revenues of international digital streamers operating in Canada — Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc. — which
functionally
became a diversity tax. The CRTC used the funds to advance its evergreen goal of equity, with payouts going to the
intensely diversity-oriented
Canada Media Fund, to media creators who checked diversity boxes, and to the Independent Local News Fund, which has now been absorbed into the CRTC’s DEI machine. 

The CRTC has seen a whole lot of mission bloat in this last decade, and we continue to pay for it. Literally. The
staff headcount
at the regulator’s office rose from 450 in 2016 to 733 in 2025 — an increase of 63 per cent. And as it piles more regulatory requirements onto the companies it supervises, they have to hire more people in turn. We can assume any related bills are passed on to subscribers.

Are we getting any extra value out of this? No — in fact, it seems to be making the media landscape worse.

National Post


Quebec Premier Francois Legault

School boards, teachers and parents are

furious

with François Legault’s government for cutting

$570 million

from the province’s current year education budget.

Services to students, they

argue

, will inevitably suffer. The cutbacks having been announced without warning, the anger is understandable. However, Quebecers would do well to get used to such financial restrictions: the province’s fiscal situation is dire, and at this stage, there is no other choice but to slow the rise in expenditures, especially for the two largest parts of the

budget

by far, that is health care (44 per cent) and education (15 per cent).

Several school boards have announced layoffs of much-needed supporting staff, notably remedial teachers and speech therapists. Extracurricular activities have also been cancelled. To many, this is simply unacceptable. A

petition

to the National Assembly demanding that the spending cuts be reversed has gathered more than 150,000 signatures in two weeks.

The government argues that, in fact, spending on education this year will be

5 per cent higher

than in 2024-2025. This is only true according to clever calculations made by the Department of Finance’s officials. If you compare the moneys actually spent last year to the amounts planned for this year, the increase is only

2.1 per cen
t

. This is much less than what is needed to compensate for inflation and the generous pay increases negotiated with the teachers’ unions. Consequently, school boards have no choice but to cut somewhere.

The governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) also argues that since it was first elected in 2018, it has increased the education budget by

55 per cent

. Exactly! Therein lies the problem: in education as in other fields, the province’s expenditures have risen much too fast, so that the deficit is projected to reach a whopping $13.6 billion in 2025-2026. This has led Standard & Poor’s to

downgrade

Quebec’s credit rating,

citing

“a confluence of factors including slowing population growth, higher renumeration spending, and lower revenues” that will produce “persistent operating deficits and large after-capital deficits — even before heightened economic uncertainty related to tariffs.” The future is bleak, to say the least.

Last spring, the minister of Finance, Éric Girard,

introduced

a five-year plan to balance the budget. The plan requires a drastic slowdown in expenditure increases. Even so, the government will have to find a yet unidentified $6 billion in expenditure cuts or additional revenues to reach its objective.

In an editorial published earlier this week, the

Wall Street Journal
noted

that “the crisis of the welfare state — fiscally unaffordable but politically unreformable – afflicts nearly every 21st century Western democracy.” This is certainly the case of Quebec, where the welfare state has become larger than in any other jurisdiction in North America. This is a policy choice that Quebecers have collectively made beginning with the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s: they agree, at least in principle, to carry a heavier tax burden in order to benefit from more generous public services. Unfortunately, those services have become grossly inefficient while requiring ever increasing amounts of money, money that the province simply does not have.

Elected in 2003 with a strong mandate to “re-engineer” the state, Jean Charest’s provincial Liberals were never able to act upon their promises, so strong was the resistance organized by unions, intellectuals, artists and, in the end, most voters. Quebecers are very much attached to the “Quebec model,” that they see as part of what makes the province “distinct,” to use a poisoned word. Confronted with the cost of this model, they want to believe that there exists some easy fix: tax the large corporations! Make the rich pay! Demand more money from Ottawa! The truth is that such “fixes,” were they practicable, would not suffice.

In other words, the budget cuts that have been announced this year in the education sector are just the beginning. Those restrictions contribute to the current

dissatisfaction

towards the Legault government, and deservedly so, considering that they inherited a significant surplus and transformed it into a gaping deficit. However, even if the October 2026 elections were to deliver a new government, Quebecers will face the same intractable problem that for years they have sought to avoid: how to preserve the large welfare state they hold so dear if they cannot afford it?

André Pratte is a communications consultant and former chair of the Quebec Liberal Party’s policy committee.

National Post


A worker checks the copper furnace at  a copper production facility in Montreal in 2024.

As U.S. President Donald Trump escalates his global war on trade, Canada’s Liberals are getting a crash course in how vital the natural resources sector is to our economy.

Hot on the heels of the 50 per cent tax the Trump administration imposed on

steel and aluminum

imports last month, the president casually announced on Tuesday that he will be slapping an equivalent

tariff on copper

by Aug. 1.

Canada exported $9.3 billion worth of copper and copper-based products in 2023, according to

Natural Resources Canada

, with more than half going to the United States. Although this doesn’t make us a global player in copper production (we rank 12th in the world), it’s not insignificant.

And although we’re sitting on an estimated 7.6-million tonnes of copper reserves, production has fallen precipitously since the Liberals took office — dropping to 508,250 tonnes in 2023, from a high of 697,322 tonnes in 2015 — even as global output has increased.

The new tariff will only serve to add to the economic pain caused by Trump’s levies on aluminum, a sector that is even more exposed to the American market. In 2023,

Canada’s aluminum exports

were valued at $16.9 billion, with over 90 per cent heading south of the border.

The anti-resource lobby, which holds an incredible amount of sway in this country, is surely doing a victory lap, holding out the tariffs, and the glut of domestic supply they will inevitably cause, as proof that the Liberals did the right thing by stifling the natural resources sector over the past 10 years.

If only the government had spent money to foster the knowledge economy …

Except that it did. The Grits put billions of dollars on the national credit card to fund innovation-investment and super-cluster programs, including pledging $15 billion to the

Canada Growth Fund

and $2 billion over 10 years for

Global Innovation Clusters

.

And what did we get for it, aside from a huge debt burden that will plague future generations? Not much, according to business leaders who took part in a government roundtable on innovation a few years ago.

As

a 2023 report

in the Globe and Mail noted, numerous industry leaders who were invited to participate in the event complained that many of the government’s decisions were politically motivated and its programs lacked clear objectives, were overly broad and were designed by bureaucrats who had little idea what they were doing.

Take, for example, the Canada Growth Fund. It was intended to “keep Canada competitive on the global stage and to ensure it continues to be a leading destination for investment.” But not just any investment. Oh no, we can’t have that!

It specifically targets projects that will put Canada “on the path to emissions reductions,” so we can meet a series of “national economic and environmental goals” — all part of the Liberals’ grand plan to transition us into a “green economy.” And how well did that go?

Despite the massive public investments that fell from the Trudeau money tree over the past decade, Canada’s per capita GDP growth lagged well behind the OCED average in every year between 2015 and 2024, according to

World Bank data

, while the

government’s own figures

show that GHG emissions declined by a measly 6.6 per cent between 2015 and 2023.

Not exactly bang for your buck.

It’s true that some countries have successfully transformed their economies. Israel, for example, went from being a relatively poor country to the high-tech “Start-up Nation” it is today in a fairly short period of time. Some of that turnaround was achieved through government interventions led by the

Israel Innovation Authority

.

But its work was complemented by

free-market reforms

in the 1970s and ’80s, a 50-year process of

trade liberalization

that was completed around the turn of the century and

significant tax cuts

in the early 2000s that fostered the country’s entrepreneurial spirit and unleashed the potential of the free market.

Until

this week

, Canada had not made a concerted effort to reduce red tape since the Harper government appointed Maxime Bernier to chair the Red Tape Reduction Commission

back in 2011

.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The Trudeau government only added to Canada’s regulatory burden, including by designing an

environmental review process

that’s so onerous, it makes it virtually impossible to build a shed in a national park without submitting an encyclopedia’s worth of reports on how the project might affect transgender frog populations.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, former prime minister Justin Trudeau turned away not

one

, but

three

world

leaders

who journeyed to Canada, practically begging us to sell them liquefied natural gas.

There wasn’t a “business case,” you see, even though there were eager buyers and willing sellers, which is the textbook definition of a “business case.”

At the very least, Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to recognize the folly of electing a celebrity who cared more about courting his fanboys in the international press with tokenistic left-wing policies than furthering Canada’s national interests.

Carney’s

bill

to fast-track infrastructure and natural resource projects, which received royal assent late last month, is a step in the right direction, and a clear acknowledgement that many of the processes implemented by his predecessor make it next to impossible to get anything done.

But in typical Liberal fashion, the recently passed Building Canada Act gives the mandarins in Ottawa the power to

pick and choose

the winners and losers. Projects that the Liberals deem to be in the “national interest” will receive favourable regulatory treatment. Those that don’t? Well, good luck getting past the Impact Assessment Act.

The truth is that if innovation could be centrally planned and dictated from the top down, Canada would be one of the most innovative countries on earth. And if private enterprise could successfully be co-opted to further the goals of the state, we’d all be driving around in Fiats and Volkswagens.

As long as resource projects and other business ventures are backed by private funds, are consented to by landowners and take reasonable steps not to harm human health and the natural environment, they should be allowed to proceed.

Some of them will surely fail, just as countless computer hobbyists in the 1970s never managed to build Fortune 500 companies out of their garages. But every once in a while, a Steve Jobs and a Steve Wozniak will come along and start the next Apple Computer. Or a company will take a risk and turn northern Alberta’s tar pits into gold mines.

What Canada needs, if we are to survive Trump’s upending of the liberal trading regime and thrive in a very uncertain future, is a free-market revolution that would see governments get out of the way so that businesses and entrepreneurs can do what they do best.

This is especially true when it comes to natural resources. Like it or not, Canadians have always been “hewers of wood and drawers of water” — and no government program is going to change that any time soon.

National Post

jkline@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/accessd