This week, the Conservatives called on the federal government to permanently dismantle the temporary foreign worker program, saying that it’s become a system that undermines Canadian jobs. In this, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was quickly joined by B.C. Premier David Eby, who said Thursday it should be “cancelled or significantly reformed.”

The TFW program has been one of the most visible components of a massive spike in temporary immigration that has defined much of the last three years, with spiking levels of youth unemployment being blamed in part on the ease with which Canadian employers can hire a migrant worker instead.

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 the temporary foreign worker program.

Monday

We should not lightly assume that the presence of temporary foreign workers is in some way a fraudulent circumvention of the normal rules of the Canadian labour economy. I remind all my critics that any Canadian employer looking to fill a position with a TFW must first indicate that they have tried — and failed — to find a Canadian worker to do the job under any circumstances. Why would they lie?

Granted, I could potentially imagine some reasons why a business would prefer to prioritize employees collecting depressed wages and facing potential deportation if they refuse to work. But these are anomalies; we cannot lightly assume that Canadian private enterprise would ever consider cynically capitalizing off a system that offers them bottomless cheap disposable labour.

Tuesday

Of all the myriad economic benefits that I bring to Canada, the one for which I am proudest is that the system is a win-win. Despite what some cynical economic illiterates will try to tell you, temporary foreign employment is not a zero-sum game.

The Canadian employer receives an eager and otherwise uncommitted labourer. And the temporary foreign worker is paid a competitive yet fair salary for a set period before happily returning back to their home country forever.

Wednesday

One of the more pervasive myths about the temporary foreign worker program is that participants agree to its terms merely as a conduit to longer-term residency.

The misinformation is that temporary foreign workers decide to pursue entry-level employment in a deeply unaffordable country such as Canada solely because they’ve been told it is a surefire path to permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship.

Instead, they merely wish to labour temporarily under the maple leaf for entry-level wages before quietly going back to where they came from. What foreigner could possibly entertain wider ambitions than this?

Thursday

We have already addressed the false charge that temporary foreign workers are taking jobs that otherwise would have been performed by Canadians. Canada is a highly advanced economy; it is perfectly reasonable that our labour force should have ascended to a plane in which the lowly work of preparing food or cleaning offices is beneath them — even at $30 to $40 per hour. Thus, an equity-entrenching subclass is needed to fill the gap.

As to the charge that temporary workers overwhelm rental accommodations, this is also false. Just as the average TFW is happy to labour in conditions and at wages that might seem appalling to Canadians, this is also true of their living situation. I can assure you that a Tim Hortons worker hotbunking in the hallway basement of a Brampton boarding house takes no space that would otherwise have been occupied by a Canadian … and they are pleased as punch to do so.

Friday

When my mendacious critics ask me what the TFW program has contributed to this country, I need only to gesture at the average Canadian downtown or mall. It was not too long ago that this country was locked in an exploitative cycle of students and other low-skilled Canadian workers being expected to operate cash registers, serve food or drive trucks.

Those days are over, and all those Canadians have instead been freed to pursue higher callings such as inclusivity consultants, septum piercing artisans or other professions at the bleeding edge of the modern world economy.

If there’s anything that says “functional society,” it is a land where every fast food counter and every hotel desk is staffed by someone who knows little of their surroundings beyond contractual employment, has no meaningful Canadian social circle, and will be politely but firmly told to go away at the end of their tenure. We should all be proud of what we’ve built.

• Dear Diary: The imagined list of Russian proposals to end the war in Ukraine
• Dear Diary: The imagined thoughts of the Nova Scotia wilderness ban

Throughout history, and across the ideological spectrum, terrorists, extremists and racists — often under the guise of some righteous campaign or cause — have sought to suppress open Jewish life and identity. One of the spaces they’ve repeatedly targeted is international sport — an arena meant to harness the universal language of athletic competition, sportsmanship, equality, team building, and excellence. Sadly, this trend is once again rearing its ugly head in Halifax, where some are calling for Tennis Canada to bar Israel from participating in the Davis Cup later this month. For a variety of reasons, these calls should be treated as anti-Canadian, anti-sport, and of course, antisemitic.

Excluding Jews from athletic competition isn’t a new phenomenon. After seizing power in 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party undertook a systemic campaign of persecuting Jews — pushing them out of all public spheres, including sports clubs and national teams. Even world-class athletes who had won competitions had their medals taken back before they were prohibited from participating in any additional competitions. Some, of course, were murdered. Three years later in 1936, the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Summer Olympics in Berlin were held without participation from Jewish athletes — even though many of those athletes were among the very best in their fields.

Roughly 40 years later in the same country, Jews weren’t merely excluded from athletics, they were slaughtered in the Munich Massacre of 1972 when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of Israel’s national team during the Summer Olympics. Born out of Jordan’s civil war in 1970, which saw deadly fighting between Jordanian forces and Palestinian separatists groups, the terrorists used the world’s largest and most famous sporting celebration to call for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel and left-wing extremists in German jails. Yet for many, the attacks in 1972 felt like an assault on Jews for having the audacity to see themselves as part of a global community.

There are countless other examples of attempts to boycott or ban Jews from participating in athletic competitions. For instance, the Israel Football Association was expelled from the Asian Football Confederation group following a resolution initiated by Kuwait in 1974. There was a boycott of the 1976 Chess Olympiad held in the Israeli city of Haifa. In 2009, tennis authorities in Malmö, Sweden, tried to cancel a Davis Cup match between Israel and Sweden because of anti-Israel riots and because the city council did not want the Israeli team competing there. Pressure was so intense that spectators were barred from watching Israel compete. At the 2017 international judo championship in the United Arab Emirates, officials refused to fly the Israeli flag and play the Israeli national anthem. Israeli athletes weren’t even allowed to wear country uniforms.

Now, in 2025, under the guise of “human rights,” activists are demanding that Tennis Canada, the Province of Nova Scotia, the City of Halifax, the Scotiabank Centre and the International Tennis Federation bar Israeli athletes from taking part in the Davis Cup. Their message could not be clearer: exclude Israel, silence its representatives, and erase its presence from public life, in sport, in culture, and beyond.

This is not a protest. It’s collective punishment.

To its credit, Tennis Canada has quietly rejected this pressure, stating that sport brings unity and must exist outside political conflict. That principle, that individuals should compete on merit, not suffer exclusion based on nationality, is at the heart of Canada’s sporting ethic.

Athletics in this country has always been a space where politics take a back seat to character and community. Canadians welcome competitors, even those from countries with whom we may strongly disagree, because engagement, dignity and mutual respect are part of what makes us a mature and inclusive democracy. We treat people as athletes and fellow human beings, not as political proxies to be cancelled or erased.

What is so disturbing about this campaign is its obsessive and targeted nature. No other nationality is told its very presence is unacceptable. Only Israelis are singled out and told they are not welcome. Afghanistan has a team, competing, though it’s governed by the Taliban. China has a team, despite the country carrying out a possible genocide against its Uyghur population, and Iran has a team in the competition, despite the fact that the Islamic Republic has carried out widespread human rights violences and crimes against humanity, along with funding global terrorist organizations. Yet — the Jewish state stands alone as the only one facing calls for its removal.

And we know, from hard-learned history, where such logic leads. When Jews are told they are not welcome on the tennis court, it does not take long before they are told they do not belong on our campuses, stages or streets. Canadians must reject this trajectory absolutely, not only for the sake of Jewish Canadians and Israelis, but for the sake of who we are as a nation. These are not our values.

Canada has never shied away from difficult global conversations. But we conduct our debates through dialogue and democratic institutions, not by erasing people from our civic spaces. We do not exile artists or athletes because of their nationality. We do not allow the loudest agitators to decide who may and may not participate in the shared life of this country.

Halifax now finds itself at the centre of a fundamental test of Canadian values. To cancel this Davis Cup tie would be to capitulate to exclusionary pressure and to betray the openness and fairness that Canadians hold dear. Hosting the match does not endorse any government’s policies, it reaffirms the principle that in Canada, people are not erased because of where they come from.

This is not just about tennis. It is about the kind of country we choose to be.

Special to National Post

Casey Babb is Director of the Promised Land Project at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and an adviser to Secure Canada, in Toronto. Alan Kessel is a former legal adviser to the Government of Canada and a former deputy high commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

• Tennis officials refuse call to cancel Davis Cup match-up between Israel and Canada in Halifax
• Housefather, 31 Liberal MPs lead call to action against rising antisemitism in Canada

Andrew Coyne is an intelligent man and a victim of the recently discovered mental affliction which is caused by the lawful elevation of Donald J. Trump to the office of President of the United States twice. Unfortunately, Andrew’s column in the Globe and Mail on Aug. 29 is demented rubbish. He wrote that “the dictatorship of Donald Trump is no longer a theoretical possibility or even a distant probability. It is an imminent reality.” He accuses Trump of accumulating powers “illegally, in brazen defiance of the Constitution.” He cites the appropriately approved addition of a ballroom to the White House as indicative of his determination to remain there after the end of his term, and suggested he might simply remain in the White House, either having taken it upon himself to cancel the 2028 presidential election, or to allow it to proceed and ignore its results, both of which he would be able to do, despite the post-Roosevelt prohibition of a third term as president, because the senior officials of the armed forces at that point will be his appointees. He concludes: “That Mr. Trump is bent on making himself dictator is no longer in doubt.” It is well-established that the U.S. has a non-political military.

Almost every sentence is untrue, though Andrew, in his hatred of Trump, is in a delirium, and his lies are mitigated. Trump has not violated the Constitution; and Andrew construes this as the result of Trump having gagged and intimidated his opponents, packed all three coequal branches of the United States government with corrupt placemen and co-conspirators in the ultimate American crime (of which no one has ever been convicted), of systematically violating and revoking the Constitution of the United States. The chances of Donald Trump attempting to remain as president after January 20, 2029 are less than zero. I recognize that Donald Trump as a public personality, is an acquired taste, or not. As I’ve known him for many years, socially and as a business associate, I know him to be courteous, entertaining, and a loyal friend. I agree with Andrew and others that some manifestations of Trump’s egocentricity are unattractive, even in an office which requires anyone who aspires to it to have a mighty and indomitable ego.

The District of Columbia is under direct federal authority and the partisan Democratic mayor of Washington (Muriel Bowser), who was an enthusiastic champion of the racist operation, Black Lives Matter, has thanked Trump for deploying the National Guard and sharply reducing crime rates. Presidents routinely deploy the National Guard to deal with what could be called insurrections, a condition that did apply to Los Angeles last month when the mayor, Karen Bass, declined to restrain riots by violent criminals. Trump has a clear mandate to deport illegal immigrants. Year by year, Trump has expelled far fewer than those deported by President Barack Obama. The president can fire any employee of the executive branch of the federal government, like any other employer.

The FBI, CIA, and NIA in the late months of the Obama-Biden administration participated in attempting to have a pastiche of lies and defamations about Trump (the Steele Dossier), commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign, treated as authentic intelligence that could be accepted by the media without verification. (It has since been discredited.) The FBI filed false affidavits in support of illegal telephone intercepts of Trump’s campaign. The voting rules in the 2020 presidential election were radically altered by Congress and state governors and elected state courts and not, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures, supposedly to facilitate voting during the COVID pandemic. Trump has not remotely challenged the system as directly. Former FBI director James Comey responded under oath to a congressional committee “i don’t know” or “I don’t recall” 245 times when asked about these and other events around the 2016 election, less than two years later.

In 2020, the country had a very extended election period and 81 million ballots, most unsolicited, were mailed out and many millions of them were cast unverifiably in drop boxes. The number of people voting in the 2020 presidential election rose by 22 million compared to 2016 and after the pandemic, the number of voters shrank by at least four million in 2024. In 2020, if 50,000 votes had flipped in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won. Stolen or questionable elections occur in the U.S., (1876, 1960, 2000), but generally there is some review process; the courts declined to hear or judge all the cases contesting the constitutionality of the changes in the 2020 election. Trump and his followers had a legitimate grievance.

Trump has prevailed against overwhelming media opposition, was heavily outspent in last year’s election, faced utterly spurious indictments, and was even given insufficient security protection against potential assassins in his campaign. He is widely portrayed as a boob and a gangster but in his career prior to being inaugurated president, as a quality builder and developer, immense reality television star, and innovative political strategist, he achieved more than any president except those vital to the founding of the country (Washington, Jefferson, Madison), and the victorious commanders of great armies in just wars, (Grant, Eisenhower), and possibly Herbert Hoover for his administration of relief to war-ravaged Europe after World War I. In 2016 he saw a level of public discontent that no one else recognized and became the first person elected president of the U.S., never to have sought or held any public office or high military command.

No one has ever been so severely and illegally obstructed as president and as a presidential candidate as he has, and he has become a considerable president in reorienting the country club Republican Party of the Bushes, McCain and Romney, to crack the Democratic fiefdoms of working class and ethnic minority votes, and in producing and broadening prosperity, shaping up the Western Alliance, ending the invasion of the United States by illegal immigrants, attacking the forces of wokeness in the universities, forcefully reducing crime rates, drastically reducing the fiscal and trade deficits, attracting in seven months nearly $15 trillion of new investment to the United States, destroying the Iranian nuclear military program and evicting men from girls’ sports and requiring mature approvals of trans-gender changes. This will not be undone by venomous and ignorant piffle from the media, especially the Trump-deranged and chronically bigoted Canadian media.

National Post

Although Prime Minister Mark Carney has degrees from Harvard and Oxford and experience running two central banks, his fiscal plan doesn’t appear to be taking a page out of the book of famed economists like Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes, but is instead adopting strategies outlined in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

On Wednesday,

Carney told reporters

that the upcoming fall budget will be “an austerity and investment budget at the same time,” noting that, “We need to rein in spending, we need to find efficiencies … that create the room for these big investments.” The following day, his finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne,

said

, “We’re going to spend less so we can invest more.”

Congratulations to anyone who realizes the government can’t be both austere and embark on a massive spending spree — you haven’t yet succumbed to Liberal “

doublethink

.” What Carney is really saying is that Ottawa plans to focus on different priorities, cutting some areas in order to increase spending in others.

But the Liberals don’t have any fiscal room to manoeuvre. Last year’s

fall economic statement

projected a $31-billion deficit in the 2026-27 fiscal year, and if past experience is any indication, it will be much higher than that.

During the last election, the

Liberals promised

nearly $33 billion in new spending in the coming year. And since that time, they’ve announced a slew of new expenditures, including a

$9.3-billion increase

in defence spending. To pay for all the new goodies, Champagne asked federal departments to find ways to

cut spending

by 7.5 per cent in the upcoming fiscal year.

But here’s the rub: the government has already said that major transfers to individuals and other levels of government — which collectively represent nearly half of program expenses — will not be touched. Military and law enforcement will also be spared from the chopping block.

Meanwhile, the fiscal outlook has significantly worsened since the government’s last economic statement. The

unemployment rate

hit a nine-year high of 7.1 per cent, after the economy shed 66,000 jobs in August. Many businesses throughout the country are hanging by a thread, unable to withstand the punishment of U.S. tariffs for much longer.

This will further strain the public treasury through increased employment insurance and other benefits, at the same time as Ottawa dropped many of its counter-tariffs, which means less money in government coffers. And, of course, public debt charges will only increase.

Even the Liberal election platform only expected to find a paltry $6 billion in savings in the coming year, which will barely cover the cost of the

$5-billion bailout program

for companies affected by tariffs that Carney announced on Friday.

In order to get buy-in from the Canadian public for their fiscally ruinous plan, the Liberals are relying on the Orwellian concept of “

doublespeak

,” in which the meaning of words are altered to make the truth more palatable.

They’re not engaging in reckless new spending programs after the previous government managed to more than double the national debt in less than a decade, you see — they’re “investing” in Canadians.

To further obscure reality, Carney has promised that the next

budget will separate

operational spending from capital expenses. This will allow him to balance the operating budget, while still running sky-high deficits on the capital side.

If the government were a business, this might make sense, as short-term capital losses can be expected to turn into long-term gains when those investments start paying off.

But government is not a business. Most of the public infrastructure it “invests” in — from roads to fighter jets — never see any returns. On the contrary, they only add to the government’s long-term maintenance costs.

Some of the new spending measures — such as the massive increase in the military budget intended to meet our NATO commitment of spending two per cent of GDP on defence — is certainly necessary. And there’s no question that Canada is in desperate need of new large-scale infrastructure projects, such as pipelines and ports.

But like his predecessor, Carney has shown a preference for centrally planning the economy rather than unleashing the power and potential of the free market and attracting private investors.

The Carney government’s signature piece of legislation, the

Building Canada Act

, for example, does not seek to reduce regulation and red tape across the board in order to attract private investment; it only gives the green light to projects that the Liberals deem to be in the “national interest.”

No one should thus be surprised if this government uses the

Trans Mountain pipeline

— a boondoggle the Trudeau Liberals ended up footing the bill for after scaring off its private owners — as a template for future infrastructure projects.

Carney’s ambitious agenda will be very costly and it cannot be financed by shaving a few points off the operating budgets of some departments, no matter how much the Liberals would like us to believe they’ve seen the light and transformed into the party of “austerity.”

Canadians should not be fooled by Liberal doublespeak. When it comes to mortgaging our children’s future for short-term political gain, this government is just like the last.

• Opinion: Despite the ‘cuts,’ Carney will likely out-spend Trudeau
• Matthew Lau: The unrelenting growth of Canada’s wealth-destroying public service

The government of Quebec
announced
last week that it would soon introduce legislation to ban prayers in public spaces. “The proliferation of prayers in the street is a serious and sensitive issue in Quebec,” said Jean-François Roberge, the minister responsible for secularism. The announcement comes a few weeks after a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a public prayer in front of Montreal’s most famous Catholic Church, the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal.
 

This is not the first incident of the sort in the city. After a similar demonstration in the middle of a major commercial artery last winter Premier François Legault had expressed his unease: “Seeing people who pray in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec. When we want to pray, we go to a church or we go to a mosque, but not in public places.”
 
 

Roberge’s announcement comes at a time when Legault’s party, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), has dropped to third place
in the polls
, a year away from the next provincial election. For months now, the caquistes have been looking for an issue that would help them rise from the dead. They may have found it by this new attack on Quebecers’ fundamental rights. 
 

Contrary to what the premier has stated, freedom of religion is not limited to places of worship or private spaces. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
states, in its article 18, that freedom of religion “includes … freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Like freedom of expression, freedom of religion would be meaningless if it only protected the practice of one’s religion in private.
 

Based on what could be heard last week during
a popular radio show
, most Quebecers appear to be in favour of the proposed ban. Proponents of the measure cite the unease caused by Islamic prayers in public, that those demonstrations are meant to provoke, that they disturb public order and that Islamists are seeking to impose their way of life in the province. Each of those arguments can be reasonably replied to, but in Quebec, when Islam is concerned, people don’t listen to reason.
 

Understandably, in a province that has thrown Catholicism overboard decades ago, public religious manifestations cause a deep malaise. But unease is not a sufficient reason to infringe on a minority’s fundamental rights. 
 

Yes, some of the demonstrations, tied as they are to the war in Gaza, are provocations. The demonstrators want to shock the public in the hopes of raising awareness to their cause. This is exactly the kind of unpopular behaviour that is protected by freedom of expression, as long as the demonstrators do not break the law, for instance by blocking traffic or intimidating others. If they cross those lines, the police already possess all the tools necessary to remedy the situation. An all-encompassing ban on prayers in public spaces is neither necessary nor reasonable.
 
 

Separatist intellectual Mathieu Bock-Côté, who inspired many of the CAQ’s nationalist policies,
wrote

in Le Journal de Montréal

that Islamic street players are “symbolic aggressions”: “We are talking about a conquering Islam, that is to say, an Islam shaped by Islamism and carried by waves of migration that are transforming the demographic composition of our societies.” However, Islamists are in no position to “transform the demographic composition” of Quebec, where Muslims represent
a mere five per cent
of the population, compared to 54 per cent for Catholics and 27 per cent for those who have no religion. 
 

For make no mistake: as with bill 21 banning the wearing of religious symbols by teachers, only one religion, Islam, is being targeted here. Other religious groups, including Catholics, have held ceremonies in public in Quebec for decades without anyone challenging their right to do so.  
 

The promised legislation will very probably violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. It is not yet known for certain if the Legault government will pre-emptively invoke the charters’ notwithstanding clause, but we do know that they have done so for two previous pieces of legislation, bill 21, already mentioned, and bill 96 strengthening the protection of the French language. This abuse of the notwithstanding clause is extremely serious, for in effect it deprives Quebecers of the right to challenge rights-infringing measures adopted by the state. Citizens are left with no means of defence, as if the charters did not exist.
 

And so it is that Quebecers’ fundamental rights are being slowly but surely eroded. Sadly, that worrisome trend is met with an immense collective shrug. 
 

André Pratte is a communications consultant and a former senator.

• Leslie Roberts: Quebec calls street prayer what it is — intimidation
• Matthew Lau: The unrelenting growth of Canada’s wealth-destroying public service

The federal government spent

$71.1 billion

on personnel costs in fiscal year 2024-25, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has estimated, up from $69.6 billion the year before. Unfortunately, even though the number of public service jobs fell by about three per cent in 2025, the count of full-time equivalents, which accounts for whether those jobs were full-time or part-time, continued to grow, helping drive the cost increase. And despite the slight decline in the count of public servants in 2025, last year still capped off a decade of significant growth: from 257,034 in 2015, the federal public service

expanded

by more than 100,000, or over 39 per cent, to 357,965 by 2025.

For the high and increasing costs Canadian taxpayers pay for federal public servants, is there at least a good return? Are the federal public servants working diligently and efficiently to provide better services and a better-run federal government?

The PBO

report

gives no opinion on this, but its contents still give readers an indication. Published on Aug. 28, the report provides a cost estimate for personnel costs in fiscal 2024-25, which ended on March 31. Why is it an estimate? Because even five months after the federal government’s fiscal year-end, the actual number is not available: the federal government still has not published its 2024-25 public accounts.

In fact, last year’s public accounts for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024 were not

tabled

in the House of Commons until December 16. For comparison, Canada’s publicly traded banks have an Oct. 31 year-end and publish their annual financial statements in the first week of December. To repeat, even though Canadian banks have a fiscal year-end that is seven months later than the federal government’s, last year they published their financial statements earlier, because the banks took approximately one month to publish their financial statements, but the federal government took over eight.

That the federal government takes eight times as long as the private sector standard to complete a routine task does not inspire confidence in the federal public service’s efficiency and productivity. To be fair, financial reporting timelines may not be representative of federal government activities as a whole. A rule of thumb, notably

applied

by

Milton Friedman

among other economists, is that government generally spends about twice as much as private companies in a competitive environment would need to accomplish the same thing.

Consuming twice the resources to achieve the same result is not as bad as eight times. On the other hand, it is not good, either. It suggests Canada’s 357,965 federal public servants are doing work that could instead by done by 178,982 workers. The approximately $71.1 billion taxpayers spent on federal public servants last fiscal year probably should have been $35.5 billion instead. And taxpayers should have been able to see the reported actual cost of those public servants by the first week of May, as opposed to being provided PBO estimates five months after the fiscal year-end.

There are two other things taxpayers should understand to evaluate whether they are getting good value for their tax dollars. First, the federal public service is not a complete count of jobs that are federally funded. The CBC has

over 7,000 employees

, but as employees of a Crown corporation they are not counted as part of the federal public service. The employees of electric vehicle battery plants receiving billions in taxpayer support are essentially government-funded employees too, even if they are considered private sector workers in the official statistics. And there are many other similar examples.

Second, much of the federal public service is not involved in delivering goods and services that benefit Canadians. Those who take eight times as long as they should to produce financial statements, even if they are inefficient, are doing valuable work; financial reporting is a valuable activity. But many other things the government does destroys value instead of creating it. For example, the approximately 2,000 public servants working in Canada’s regional economic development agencies were not providing valuable public services, but instead were involved in figuring out how to hand out combined corporate welfare payments of over $1 billion annually. Taxpayers have been paying regional economic development bureaucrats to lose their money.

Notably, while the federal public service has grown significantly in the past decade, wasting many billions of dollars, there has been considerably lower growth in the number of private sector workers whose taxes are being wasted. In comparison to the 39 per cent growth in the count of federal public servants from 2015 to 2025, combined private sector

employment

and self-employment in Canada increased only 15 per cent in the same time period.

Is it any wonder Canada is suffering a productivity crisis? The growth of government must be reversed.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer. 

It’s time to disband the Concordia Student Union. This year’s CSU student handbook doesn’t look like a guide to academic life. It looks like a political manifesto. Plastered with slogans such as “Stop Genocide” and “Free Palestine,” it positions Concordia not as a university for all students, but as a staging ground for militant activism. For Jewish students, the message is unmistakable: their presence and perspectives are unwelcome.

In the recap of “What did you miss at Concordia last year?” the guide details protests and clashes, and concludes with: “This is … the many ways Concordia students have mobilized against campus repression and have continued to call for the university to adopt BDS. The legacy of organizing on campus is often too quick to be co-opted by the administration … It is our responsibility to engage in the movement in whatever capacity we can.” This is not neutral reporting — it is an instruction manual for activism, endorsed and distributed by the very body meant to represent all students.

On paper, the student union advocates for affordability, housing, and mental health services. But in recent years it has also led the political charge to “Free Palestine,” demanding Concordia divest from defence industries, sever ties with Israeli universities, and cut partnerships linked to NATO and the police.

These are not student service issues. They are ideological ultimatums designed to force the university into global conflicts. Last November’s strike vote was proof: rather than focus on concrete improvements to campus life, the CSU mobilized students into a two-day shutdown to advance a BDS-style agenda.

Symbolic stunts have followed. Funeral processions were staged on campus to “mourn Palestine,” turning student space into ideological theatre. Demonstrations have spilled into confrontations with pro-Israel peers, at times requiring riot police to intervene. One incident left three people arrested and two suspended. What began as activism has devolved into intimidation.

On its own website, the CSU declares: “Two things are essential: that we are beholden to our membership, and that our funds are used responsibly.” On both counts, it has failed.

A student union’s mandate is to represent all students fairly, to fight for affordable education, and to improve access to essential services. Instead, the CSU has targeted a segment of its membership, weaponized compulsory student fees for international campaigns, and abandoned the principle of inclusivity that justifies its existence.

Student unions are not sovereign political bodies. They exist under the authority of the university. That recognition is not unconditional. It rests on the assumption that a union serves its entire student body, not just the loudest faction. The CSU has violated that trust.

While the Quebec government cannot directly dissolve a student union, it has acknowledged the problem. The Ministry of Higher Education told National Post it is “aware” of the situation and “in contact with the establishments concerned.” That puts Concordia on notice.

The real authority lies with Concordia’s Board of Governors. It is the board that has the power — and the duty — to act. If a student union ceases to fulfill its mandate, the board can revoke recognition, restructure it, or call for new elections. Doing so would not silence student voices. On the contrary, it would restore representation to its rightful purpose: defending the needs of all students — housing, mental health, academic rights — not serving as a megaphone for divisive international politics.

There is nothing wrong with students caring deeply about world affairs. Universities should be spaces of debate and dissent. But there is everything wrong with forcing all students — through mandatory fees and compulsory membership — to bankroll a one-sided campaign rooted in hostility toward Israel and, by extension, Jewish students.

Enough is enough. Concordia’s Board of Governors must step in. Dissolve the CSU in its current form. Rebuild a structure that truly represents the student body. And let this serve as a precedent for other student unions at other universities: higher education is a place for ideas, not a staging ground for hate.

National Post