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Federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks at a news conference in Mississauga on Wednesday September 3, 2025.

Pierre Poilievre’s call for the Carney government to

permanently scrap the temporary foreign workers program

may well prove to be a winner with voters who agree with the Conservative leader that the Liberals broke the immigration system.

But that doesn’t make it good policy, or even a smart political move in the long run.

Poilievre was accompanied at the announcement by the party’s immigration critic, Michelle Rempel Garner, who is the driving force behind the policy.

She said that young Canadians can’t even think about buying a house or starting a family without a good paying job. Today, they can’t secure those jobs because they can’t find entry-level positions, even with a university degree. Those of us who are parents of young people struggling to launch are all too aware of the cold reality of a

youth unemployment rate of around 15 per cent

.

Rempel Garner said the social contract has been broken and part of the blame lies with the temporary foreign workers program, which has foreigners competing with Canadians for entry-level jobs. The majority of those positions are on farms, in restaurants and in homes as child-care providers. But as the government’s own statistics show, permits are issued for jobs as diverse as graphic designers and comedians.

Poilievre took up the case from there, pointing out that what he calls “generation screwed” is the first generation of Canadians that can’t afford a house.

He said the Liberals brought in “too many (workers), too fast,” and he’s not wrong. After the pandemic, with the job vacancy rate heading towards one million, the government panicked and opened the floodgates by creating a parallel immigration system of temporary workers and international students. Then immigration minister

Sean Fraser ignored warnings by his own department

that allowing a tsunami of foreign students into the country, and allowing them to work off-campus, would lead to “program integrity” concerns.

Instead, he listened to employers who warned that the economy would seize up without hundreds of thousands of new workers.

In the event, the number of temporary workers increased 88 per cent and the number of international students by 126 per cent between 2019 and 2023. Work-permit–holder numbers rose to 1.58 million, or nearly seven per cent of the workforce.

The changes created a large pool of cheap labour: the Immigration Department’s own figures suggested that 80 per cent of international students were working more than 20 hours a week.

But, as the government was all too aware, the newcomers would be competing with Canadians for work once the economy cooled.

A

paper prepared for the Department of Employment and Social Development in 2023

, concluded that there was a negative correlation between the number of temporary workers employed and the annual earnings of Canadians employed in the same firm at the lowest levels. Not only that, but the number of temporary workers correlated with higher earnings for Canadian workers at the upper end of the firm’s earnings ladder. In other words, it was no wonder employers and bosses wanted more temporary workers: it made them richer.

The public intuited that the government had broken the system, undermining a remarkable consensus in favour of mass immigration.

A Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies last December

concluded that 65 per cent of voters believed Canada was accepting too many legal immigrants, up from just 35 per cent in March 2019.

The Liberals belatedly realized that they’d screwed up, and

reduced targets of temporary workers

to 82,000 a year and foreign students to 286,000 this year and 128,7000 next.

New restrictions ended the policy of allowing visitors to apply for a work permit while in Canada; restricted the work eligibility of spouses; and, brought in new rules that aligned post-graduation work permits to market needs. The goal remains to reduce the number of temporary–work-permit holders to five per cent of the workforce by the end of next year.

But as

then immigration minister Marc Miller admitted last year

: “We didn’t turn the taps down fast enough.”

Poilievre is likely aligned with Canadian public opinion in his criticism of Tim Hortons for increasing its use of temporary workers by 1,135 per cent in the last four years. (Tims said that less than five per cent of its workers are hired through the program, “generally in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available.” Still, that’s around 5,000 jobs.)

“The principle is very simple: Canadian jobs for Canadian workers,” Poilievre said this week. “Temporary foreign workers are not bad people — they are being taken advantage of by Liberal corporate elites who want to drive down wages. The time has come for decisive action.”

But while he has correctly identified the disease, it is less clear he has found the cure.

The Conservative plan would create a standalone program for seasonal agricultural workers and the food processing industry.

But ending the issuance of new permits cold turkey is likely to result in a completely different set of unintended consequences than the ill-advised policy that caused the problem in the first place.

The program should return to its original intent of allowing firms to hire foreign workers when qualified Canadians are not available, gradually reducing the number of temporary foreign workers as a share of the low-skill workforce.

That is what the Liberal reforms are trying to do, although as Poilievre pointed out, it looks like the government won’t hit its target in 2025.

However, a hard stop to the program is likely to give labour markets whiplash.

From a political perspective, it’s not an obvious win for Poilievre, even if the public is sympathetic to the intent.

His critics cite this as another example of him fighting the culture wars. That’s unfair: he was clear he was not demonizing foreign workers or regular immigrants.

But it is undoubtedly a hardening of the party’s position from the 2025 platform, which talked about dramatically reducing the number of temporary foreign workers and international students.

Poilievre seems to be more concerned about his leadership review in January than winning votes from people who didn’t vote for him last time.

This — and other immigration-reform positions to come — are Rempel Garner’s work and it should have been her show. There are many able Conservative MPs who have been reduced to bobbleheads by the leader and that must change.

Scrapping the temporary foreign worker program is a valid, if misguided, response to the crisis in youth unemployment.

But the risk for Poilievre is that he’s shrinking, not expanding, his pool of available voters.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca


Liberal MP Anthony Housefather

Leadership in the fight against antisemitism is measured not by words, but by action. This week, Quebec MP Anthony Housefather and 31 of his Liberal colleagues signed a statement on “the deplorable rise of antisemitism in Canada.”

It was a clear, moral and necessary acknowledgement of the hatred that is endangering Jewish-Canadians. The statement recognized that a Jewish woman was stabbed in Ottawa solely because she was Jewish; that synagogues, schools and Jewish-owned businesses are under threat; that monuments have been defaced; and that this reality has become chillingly normalized in our country.

It drew a link between October 7 and the rising tide of antisemitism, while also pointing to statistics showing that the Jewish community, representing just one per cent of the Canadian population, is the target of 70 per cent of hate crimes. The MPs are correct: antisemitism is a spreading plague that demands action.

And yet, the deafening silence in response spoke louder than the statement itself. Out of 169 Liberal members of Parliament, only 31 joined Housefather in signing the statement. Of those, at least five are Jewish.

In other words, just 26 non-Jewish Liberal MPs supported a document that did not advance a political agenda, but simply condemned hate against Jews. Worse, around 80 per cent of the governing caucus could not even bring themselves to sign a straightforward denunciation of antisemitism. The absence of signatures exposed a void of moral courage at the very heart of our government.

This is not new in Canada. Our history is littered with examples where political leaders failed the test of moral courage, only to apologize decades later. Ottawa has formally apologized for the horrors of the residential school system, the internment of Japanese-Canadians, the internment of Italian-Canadians, the head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants, the shameful Komagata Maru incident, the systemic racism faced by the No. 2 Construction Battalion, the mistreatment of LGBT citizens and the turning away of the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

The pattern is painfully familiar: when minorities are in crisis, political leaders lack the clarity of vision to defend them in real time. Decades later, apologies are offered, but the damage is irreparable. Something is deeply broken in our system when the protection of minorities depends on political expediency rather than enduring moral principles.

What makes this even more troubling is that these MPs are not calling on an abstract body to act — they’re calling out their own government. Their statement appealed to law enforcement, schools and institutions, but the government is not a bystander in this crisis. It has the power to legislate and to enforce. And yet, 137 of Housefather’s own colleagues failed to answer that call.

This failure matters. It’s a signal to antisemites that even in the face of violence, even when a Jewish woman is stabbed in public, condemnation is not unanimous, not resolute and not bipartisan.

My hope is that this fall, Parliament will table and pass serious hate crime legislation that addresses the new realities of social media and extremist networks. But even that will not be enough. A picture is building of a government failing to rally against antisemitism, while siding with Hamas and declaring it will recognize a Palestinian state, even though such a state currently does not exist by any reasonable definition.

Foreign policy is being driven not by logic but by internal demographics, and by an instinct to appease rather than to lead on principle. A system of government that bows to shifting demographics rather than moral clarity will always fail the most vulnerable.

Housefather’s letter, though admirable and probably meant to appease his constituents, would have carried greater weight had it been backed by more Liberals (including the prime minister) and by MPs from other parties. This would have sent a message that the fight against antisemitism transcends politics. The abysmal response to this statement did more harm than good, proving why the Jewish community and its allies are losing faith in this government.

If the Liberal party was once based on equity and inclusivity, this exercise has proven otherwise. Housefather’s letter will stand as historic evidence of who stood up to antisemitism and who was silent and complicit.

National Post

Avi Benlolo is the chairman and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.


Job seekers line up outside a youth hiring fair in Calgary, March 2025.

Youth unemployment

stands at 14.6 per cent

, according to Statistics Canada’s latest release. That’s the highest non-pandemic July figure since 2009 (15.9 per cent), at the nadir of the Great Recession. It makes nothing but good sense that

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would position himself, as he did on Wednesday

, foursquare athwart bringing in any more temporary foreign workers to fill positions that certain employers swear blind they cannot fill with younger Canadians at any conceivable price.

“Why is (the government) shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?” Poilievre asked, rhetorically, on Wednesday. By rights it ought to be a solid populist pitch to Canadians, and no-brainer policy besides.

Companies who use TFWs will insist it’s not about finding “cheaper” help, but about finding

any

help. Tim Hortons defended itself Wednesday noting that less than five per cent of its national workforce were TFWs — which seems like

a very high number

, right? It’s not just me? — and those hires tended to be clustered “in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available.”

But an odd sort of small town or community, surely, that can’t live without a Timmy’s, but that doesn’t have enough people to work at it. And it’s an odd sort of remedial program, surely, to bring in employees not from other parts of Canada but rather from halfway around the world. Especially since groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) swear blind they’re

not

after an hourly wage discount, just anyone who’s willing and able to fill the position. It was certainly

a very odd kind of fishing resort

, it struck me, that claimed this summer it couldn’t find any Canadian employees and needed the TFW program instead.

Didn’t kids used to flock en masse cross-country to take outdoorsy jobs every summer? Have I not read 150 tiresome baby-boomer op-eds on the topic?

The special pleading sometimes beggars belief. And unemployed young Canadians aren’t free to you and me, after all — whoever’s fault it is, if anyone’s, they’re an anchor on the economy.

A Deloitte study commissioned by the King’s Trust Canada

, published in November, estimated “that under the right conditions, overall real GDP could increase by $18.5 billion by 2034 — more than Canada’s entire arts, entertainment and recreation sector — and (Canada could) add an additional 228,000 jobs in the process” if “youth engagement in the workforce” significantly increased.

I have no polling, and hardly even any anecdote, to back this up, but my sense is that many Canadians came around

during Alberta’s oil boom of the 2000s

to the silliness of the “business case” for imported workers toasting bagels, ringing up groceries and making beds in hotels because it was impossible to find homegrown help at any price “the market could bear.” As if a $12 hamburger combo or a $150 room at a midrange hotel chain were obvious market failures, even as wages and incomes of people who ate and stayed in the area soared nearly across the board.

Perhaps our recent experiences with inflation, the likes of which my generation and younger hadn’t really dealt with before, have injected a dose of reality into this conversation: Suddenly a $12 hamburger combo doesn’t seem so unreasonable. Maybe a $50,000 income to make hamburger combos shouldn’t be unreasonable either.

Not to sound churlish, but the other obvious advantage here for Poilievre’s Conservatives is Mark Carney’s Liberals. They’ll happily make up three dozen unlikely solutions to problems, put them in a platform, and do bugger all about them (or do the opposite) after they win the election. But they also have this terrible habit of nuancing things that really don’t need nuance — of trying to find “balance” between two positions that don’t need balancing.

Positions like “we should be filling Canadian jobs with Canadian people” strike many Liberals as, quite simply, too unfancy to be of any conceivable worth. And so adamant is their belief in Conservative perfidy, of the party’s ill-intent toward Canada as a whole, that some will tell you cutting back on temporary foreign workers is really about cutting back on immigration period, because Conservatives don’t like immigrants … even as the

Liberals

claim to be cutting down on immigration, including TFWs, as well!

Uber-Liberal pollster Bruce Anderson took up the gauntlet this time around on X: “Watching the Conservative attack on foreign workers in the past few weeks has brought to mind more their culture war efforts … than practical economic policy,” he wrote. In other words: Cutting immigration literally isn’t the same thing when Liberals do it.

Anderson later deleted his missive, perhaps having been told how stupid and insulting to the average voter it was. “Sure, maybe your kid can’t find a summer job for the third consecutive summer, or at all post-graduation, but surely you’re not going to let this low-born clod Poilievre govern you

just for that?

Prime Minister Carney is much smarter than all that, to my eye, but many of the people around him are certainly not. Many are much dumber. This is an excellent opportunity for Poilievre to get policy right, in what should be his ideological and political wheelhouse, and make his primary opponent look a bit silly in the offing.

Who’s going to argue with Canadian jobs for Canadian kids? Other than a cornered Liberal, I mean?

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com


Ontario Premier Doug Ford empties a Crown Royal bottle of whisky at a press conference in Kitchener, Ont., on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025.

Strong leadership or political theatre? Ontario Premier

Doug Ford’s attack Tuesday

on international booze corporation Diageo can be seen either way.

The premier was in a fury over the company’s plan to eliminate a Crown Royal whisky bottling plant in Amherstburg, Ont. at the cost of about 200 local jobs, most of them unionized.

Ford certainly created a media moment when he poured out a bottle of Crown Royal at a press conference and threatened the company by saying, “You hurt my people, I’m gonna hurt you.” The company was “as dumb as a bag of hammers” for making the decision, Ford added

It was an elbows-up response that offered a sharp contrast to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s policy of making concessions to the U.S. government in exchange for nothing.

The problem is Diageo’s move seems to be about

corporate efficiency, not tariffs

, although the Amherstburg jobs will be going to the U.S.

Diageo is an international company headquartered in London, England and it will still produce and warehouse Crown Royal in Canada. Whisky for the Canadian market will be bottled in Canada; whisky for the American market will be bottled in the U.S.

Ford’s rant this week is reminiscent of a similar one in August when he

went after the CEO of Stelco’s American parent company

, Lourenco Goncalves, for supporting U.S. steel tariffs. “I got a problem with that guy,” Ford said. “He doesn’t give two hoots about his workers at Stelco.”

Ford said he expected to get a phone call from Goncalves, and if so, Ford would “blast him” for favouring the company’s U.S. interests over its Canadian ones. We don’t know if he ever did get that phone call.

Ford’s sending a bad message about his province when he attacks business people for acting like business people. As a guy who comes from the business world himself, Ford knows — even if, as premier, he won’t say it — that the main obligation of companies like Diageo and Stelco’s owner, Cleveland-Cliffs, is to their shareholders, not their workers.

Cleveland-Cliffs has been losing money. It’s no surprise that its CEO loves U.S. President Donald Trump’s big steel tariffs. Stelco only represents $2.9 billion of Cleveland-Cliffs $19.2 billion in sales. High U.S. tariffs will benefit the company more than hurt it.

Meantime, Diageo has seen a decline in profits recently. Finding spending efficiencies is the CEO’s job and the smart thing to do. The Ford government boasts about doing the same.

Ford’s futile attacks on the leaders of big international corporations are unlikely to benefit Ontario, and his reaction reveals the weakness of his government’s economic approach.

Too often, the Ford government treats jobs as something to be bought with public money, not something created by companies with good ideas and their own money. Ford asked Diageo “

Is there any incentive I can give you to stay here, to save these jobs?

” Thankfully, the company said no. When Ford didn’t get what he wanted from Stelco, he

mused about the province buying the steel company

, which sold to Cleveland-Cliffs for $3.4 billion last year. Let’s not mention the Ford government’s multi-billion-dollar “investment” in electric car battery plants that looks increasingly ill-fated.

Ford is almost certainly sincere in his concern for workers losing their jobs, but his pandering to unions is purely political. Unions are an important part of Ford’s voting coalition and their support is key to keeping the other two parties in the political cellar. The workers at Diageo plant and Stelco are unionized.

This week, the premier even went so far as to say, “Thank you to my brothers and sisters at Unifor over at Crown Royal, I got your backs. We’re gonna be there to help you.” Unifor is the largest private sector union in the country.

These union members are not the premier’s brothers and sisters. They are people looking out for their own interests, as are their corporate bosses. Ford’s job is to focus on the entire economy, not work himself into a fit because of a couple of hundred jobs at a bottling plant.

In his enthusiasm for unions, Ford is losing sight of the big picture: Corporation create jobs; unions and governments don’t.

Ford’s government can’t look forward if it spends too much time and public money trying to “protect” jobs. The economy is always dynamic. Jobs come and jobs go as economic conditions change. Ford can’t prevent job losses.

Behind the rhetoric, Ford seems to get that. He recently announced

$70 million in support for retraining workers

affected by U.S. tariffs, which could include Stelco employees. That’s an acknowledgement that workers and the government need to adapt.

While Ford’s fuming might not benefit the economy, his tough talk is a political hit. A recent

Abacus Data poll

shows that Ford’s government has 53 per cent support, up 10 points since the March election.

Unfortunately, leadership involves more than leading in the polls. It requires a plan for the province’s future, not clinging to the past.

National Post

randalldenley1@gmail.com


A woman at an anti-Israel protest ahead of the opening ceremony of the 82nd Venice Film Festival at Venice Lido on August 27, 2025. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

Several major media outlets reported this week that an association of leading genocide scholars had passed

a resolution

condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. Yet, online sleuths

quickly discovered

that the story was a sham, as the organization has no real membership requirements and seemingly torqued its processes to reach a preordained conclusion.

The resolution, which declared that Israel’s actions “meet the legal definition of genocide,” was passed on Sunday by the

International Association of Genocide Scholars

(IAGS), a roughly 500-member organization that produces

peer-reviewed research

and biennial conferences related to the history and prevention of genocide.

Only 129 individuals participated in the vote, representing approximately 28 per cent of the IAGS’s members and barely meeting the quorum requirements established by its

bylaws

. Of those who voted, 86 per cent were in favour of labelling Israel’s actions genocidal.

The story was immediately and enthusiastically amplified.

The Washington Post, for example,

published an article

claiming that the world’s “oldest and largest association of genocide scholars” had added their voice to “a growing chorus from human rights organizations and academics concluding that Israel is committing genocide.” The Guardian

similarly published

an article claiming that the “world’s leading genocide scholars” had deemed Israel guilty of the crime, while

BBC’s headline

read: “Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s leading experts say.”

Reuters, too, produced a

syndicated report

on how the “world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars” had condemned Israel’s actions. “This is a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide,” said the associations president, Melanie O’Brien, in that piece.

The majority of this reporting failed to acknowledge the fact that membership participation in the vote had been dismal. The Guardian erroneously claimed, for example, that an “overwhelmingly majority of members” had supported the resolution, while The Washington Post misleadingly quoted an IAGS board member in a manner that suggested organization-wide consensus on Israel.

In a

filmed interview with ABC

(an Australian channel) on Tuesday, O’Brien said that the low participation rate was “quite standard,” and claimed that the IAGS’s members “mainly consist of people who are academics, so scholarly experts, but our membership is also made up of people who come from different communities within the field of genocide prevention, education, and punishment.”

That evening, Honest Reporting, an organization dedicated to exposing anti-Israel media bias, decided to test the credibility of O’Brien’s claims about her organization’s expertise.

They discovered that, although the IAGS presents itself as an collection of “experts in the field of genocide studies,” it actually

has no membership requirements

. For as little as $30, anyone can join and call themselves a “genocide scholar.” Furthermore, Iraq, a country that produces a negligible amount of genocide scholarship, was inexplicably overrepresented in the membership list, with 80 individuals hailing from the country (including five faceless profiles who appeared to come from the same family).

After these findings were made public, the IAGS was inundated with

new applications

, many of them satirical. To the internet’s amusement, the organization’s roster of “genocide experts” grew to include

Adolf Hitler

, Emperor Palpatine (the Star Wars villain) and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster wearing a Hamas headband.

The IAGS

responded

by shutting down its X profile, deactivating at least some of these new accounts and removing the membership list from public view.

It seems that, not only that IAGS members may be far less credentialed than claimed, its status as the world’s oldest and largest association of genocide scholars may not actually be that impressive. While there are a

handful of organizations

that deal with genocide education across the globe, only two position themselves as scholarly entities: the IAGS and

International Network of Genocide Scholars

(the latter was founded in 2005).

The framing used by some major media outlets over the past week has given the impression that the IAGS is an eminent leader in a well-populated field of competitors. In reality, it is the “oldest” and “largest” organization in a niche of two.

Further undermining the IAGS’s credibility, one longtime member, Sara Brown, published

a thread on X

this week claiming that the process behind the Israel resolution had been “a disaster from start to finish.” Brown, who has a PhD in genocide studies and

wrote a book on Rwanda

, claimed that members who opposed the resolution “tried to submit our concerns for discussion but were blocked by the leadership.”

She said that critics “were promised a town hall, which is a common practice for controversial resolutions,” only for the president (O’Brien) to reverse this. According to Brown, the association refused to disclose the resolution’s authors, which frustrated her as the document was “poorly cited,” included “unsubstantiated claims” and perpetuated “intentionally distorted” analysis. “Anyone who considers themself a genocide scholar should feel embarrassed by this vote,” she wrote.

An article

written by O’Brien earlier this year for Opinio Juris, an international law blog, confirms that the president passionately believes that Israel has been committing genocide – a perspective she also alluded to in her recent ABC interview.

For now, none of the major media outlets which promoted the IAGS’s resolution have issued updates or corrections, addressing the organization’s non-existent membership standards. Thanks to this reckless journalism, many readers will be given the impression that a consensus on Israel exists among genocide scholars, when, in fact, it does not.

National Post


Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell regrets not pushing back against the trans mania of 2022.

A question that is about to break like a tsunami over social media:

wait, did Malcolm Gladwell really say that?

On Tuesday, the renowned Ontarian journalist, podcaster and former youth track star

appeared on the Real Science of Sport podcast

, and you would have to say he immediately established a hell of a pace.

Co-host Mike Finch observed at the outset of the 108-minute video chat that his colleague, South African sports scientist Ross Tucker, had previously met Gladwell in 2022 at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Tucker had appeared

on a panel

about “the inclusion of transgender athletes in sports,” representing the position that biological-male physical advantages in women’s athletic competitions are fundamental, incorrigible and incompatible with the entire concept of a women’s competition. Gladwell had served as moderator.

As soon as Tucker mentioned the panel on the podcast, Gladwell observed that it had clearly been “stacked” against him. “My recollection of it,” said a chuckling Tucker, “was that everything I said was met with deathly silence, and everything the other (panellists) said got cheered.” Gladwell attested that 2022 “was a particular moment, which has passed. If we did a replay of that exact panel at the Sloan Conference this coming March, it runs in exactly the opposite direction. And it would be, I suspect, near-unanimity in the room that trans athletes have no place in the female category. I don’t think there’s any question.”

“I’m ashamed of my performance at that panel,” Gladwell added, “because I share your position

a hundred per cent

, and I was cowed. The idea of saying anything on this issue … I believe, in retrospect, I was objective (as a panel moderator) in a dishonest way. I let a lot of howlers pass.” Gladwell further explained that the discussion itself was a moment of dawning for him: in real time he saw the old trans-inclusion arguments that there is no meaningful male advantage give way suddenly to the attitude that, in the words of a trans athlete on the panel with Tucker, “you have to let us win.”

Gladwell — who, remember, was a genuinely elite 1,500-metre and mile track competitor as a teenager — then spent about 10 minutes talking with Tucker about the plain preposterousness of allowing biological men and boys to compete in women’s and girls’ sport. He emphasized his own cowardice in a way that has already

infuriated some commentators

who upheld the sane position all along. (Tucker, it should be said, is not among the infuriated:

he tweeted on Tuesday about his own memory of the 2022 Sloan panel

, describing it as a “car crash,” but doesn’t think Gladwell did a bad job.)

Asked how he accounts for the great force of the now-receding moral mania surrounding trans athletes, Gladwell said: “I think in retrospect we will look back on the COVID period as a period of profound cultural destabilization. I think we all went crazy. And, I think, for understandable reasons! It was a crazy period! … There was just a kind of discontinuity that lasted for about two-and-a-half, three years. And what we’ve done is, we’ve, in some sense, returned to normal.”

Gladwell adds that “it’s harder and harder and harder to make a naïve argument about trans participation; the evidence is now mounting, so that even the advocates are now having to shift their feet and make a different claim.” I.e., an unconditional demand for inclusion at all costs, rather than contrived reassurance that the innate male athletic advantage can be mitigated.

If it needs saying, Malcolm Gladwell is a big deal. He is thought to have sold 23 million books in North America, and is probably one of the top five bestselling Canadian authors who have ever lived. His brand of anecdotal pop social-science has been applauded and condemned, sometimes by the same people at different moments, and he has a gift for making provocative, even radical-sounding utterances without escaping the political boundaries of polite liberal consensus.

He is probably well aware of the abuse and threats J.K. Rowling has experienced for having sinful opinions about exclusive social spaces for women and girls. He is bound to know, or will find out by the end of the week, that he is painting a target on himself. Some critics will find “COVID drove everybody crazy” to be an insufficient or superficial excuse, despite the self-evident element of accuracy in it, and some of those people, of course, actually did stand up against a moral stampede while it was still in progress. But if Gladwell is more culpable because he is rich and famous and successful, surely he has to be given greater credit for the risk he is taking now.

National Post


Quebec Premier Francois Legault: Doesn't believe everything is racist.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

The Quebec government has rejected a package of race-based federal funding, declaring that they don’t accept the notion of “systemic racism” underlying it.

Starting in 2021, the government of then prime minister Justin Trudeau earmarked $6.64 million for a new federal program for Impact of Race and Culture Assessments. These were reports designed to secure lighter sentences for Black criminals in order to counteract “systemic racism in the criminal justice system,” as a federal backgrounder put it.

But Quebec’s justice department has consistently sent back its share of the funding, and told The Canadian Press in an email this week that “Quebec doesn’t subscribe to the approach on which the funding program is based, namely systemic racism.”

Since at least 2020, the Government of Canada has repeatedly endorsed the idea that the country’s institutions are all fundamentally racist.

Although discriminatory codes haven’t been a feature of Canadian law for decades, “systemic racism” is premised on the idea that any inequality of outcome is itself evidence of racism.

If the racial mix of any group does not match the racial mix of the wider population, this is inferred as the consequence of embedded discrimination.

As Canada’s official “anti-racism lexicon” puts it, systemic racism exists in the form of practices that “appear neutral on the surface but, nevertheless, have an exclusionary impact on racialized persons.”

The concept of systemic racism has been using to justify everything from race-based hiring quotas to federal grants that are available only for “equity-deserving” races.

But the notion has been particularly embraced by the Department of Justice, where any racial overrepresentation among offenders has been framed as the direct result of racist courts and racist law enforcement.

“Systemic racism in the criminal justice system has resulted in the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians and members of marginalized communities,” the Department of Justice declared in 2021, before vowing to “root out systemic racism.”

Quebec, however, has proved the most consistent holdout to the notion that their governing structures are self-evidently racist.

In 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests roiling both U.S. and Canadian cities, Quebec Premier François Legault was one of the only Canadian political leaders to avoid issuing a statement declaring himself to be the head of a government shot through with “systemic racism.”

“I don’t understand why people are trying to stick on one word. I think what is important is to say and all agree that there is some racism in Quebec, and we don’t want that anymore,” he said at the time.

Compare that with Legault’s Ontario counterpart, Doug Ford. In 2020, Ford told the Ontario Legislative Assembly “of course there’s systemic racism in Ontario … there’s systemic racism across this country.”

Legault would reject the systemic racism label again in 2021, following the release of a coroner’s investigation into the failure of Quebec’s child protection services to prevent the death of a seven-year-old girl, Géhane Kamel, at the hands of her stepmother.

Since Kamel was Indigenous, the report included a call for the Quebec government to declare itself guilty of systemic racism.

But Legault refused, even brandishing a Le Petit Robert dictionary at a press conference to read out the definition of “systemic.”

“Le Petit Robert defines ‘systemic’ as: ‘relative to a system in its entirety,’” Legault said in French. “For me, a system is something that comes from above…. Is there something from on high that is communicated everywhere in the health system that says: ‘Be discriminatory in your treatment of Indigenous people’? It’s evident for me, the answer is no.”

At the federal level, the Bloc Québécois has similarly been among the most vocal opponents of an ongoing federal push to normalize the idea that the workings of Canadian governments are clandestinely racist.

In leaders’ debates for the 2021 federal election, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said the term systemic racism had been employed as a club against Quebec. “It became this white society against this other white society. The words became toxic,” he said.

Impact of Race and Culture Assessments (IRCAs) were part of a broad package of federal programs launched in 2021 with the aim of “rooting out systemic racism” across the Canadian federal government.

Among other “anti-racism” plans pursued at the same time as IRCAs was a Trudeau government proposal to end mandatory sentencing for a host of gun crimes on the premise that offenders convicted of the crimes were disproportionately Black and Indigenous. This included “robbery with a firearm,” “discharging firearm with intent” and “weapons trafficking.”

IRCAs are modelled on Gladue reports, a longtime feature of the Canadian court system in which judges must sentence Indigenous offenders only after reading a commissioned report detailing the “systemic or background factors” that may have influenced the crime.
This can include everything from a past ADHD diagnosis, to whether parents or extended relatives had attended an Indian Residential School.

IRCAs simply aimed to extend Gladue sentencing rules to other non-white criminals. As a policy document explained, “IRCAs inform sentencing judges of the disadvantages and systemic racism faced by Black and other racialized Canadians and may recommend alternatives to incarceration and/or culturally appropriate accountability measures within a sentence of incarceration.”

Although Quebec has refused funding for IRCAs, it was just last month that an IRCA reportedly first featured in a Quebec sentencing decision.

Convicted drug trafficker Frank Paris had been facing a 35-month sentence, but Quebec Court Judge Magali Lepage reduced this to 24 months on the basis of an IRCA that, among other things, stated that Paris “ended up getting involved in selling drugs” because he struggled with high school French.

At the time, Quebec’s minister against racism, Christopher Skeete, said he had “concern and worry” over the decision.

“If we live in a society where people are judged by their skin colour, I’m not sure that’s a way forward for us to fight racism,” he told CBC.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

 The Canadian Coast Guard is part of the military now. In a Tuesday statement, the Department of Defence announced “the integration of the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) into the Defence Team.” The most cynical explanation for the change is that it’s an easy way to boost defence spending without actually boosting defence spending. Previously, the Coast Guard was managed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but its $3 billion budget now falls under the purview of DND.

U.S. politicians keep issuing letters blaming Canada for the fact that its forests are catching fire. A group of seven Michigan lawmakers as well as one federal Congressman, all Republicans,

have recently issued statements

demanding that Canada deal with the wildfire smoke now plaguing many border states. “Instead of enjoying family vacations at Michigan’s beautiful lakes and campgrounds … Michiganders are forced to breathe hazardous air as a result of Canada’s failure to prevent and control wildfires,” read one.

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In yet another sign that Canada’s social fabric is unravelling, Montreal police recently

arrested

a 17-year-old boy who’s alleged to have been planning a violent act in the name of the Islamic State.

Cyberspace has emerged as the frontline in the battle against extremist and radical ideologies that endanger Canada’s democracy. Canadian youth, a cohort of society that is especially vulnerable to such indoctrination, have become unwitting casualties in this fight.

B’nai Brith Canada has backed common-sense proposals to rein in the proliferation of extremist content on the internet. But the solution to this problem is offline.

Incidents such as the alleged terrorist plotter who was arrested in Montreal are becoming more common, even though successive governments have raised concerns about the rise of extremist ideologies among Canadian youth. This crisis has accelerated since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel ignited a firestorm of hate targeting Jews around the globe, including in Canada.

In December 2023, the RCMP warned of a growing trend of “terrorist use of the internet” in a press release announcing the arrest of an Ottawa teen on terrorism charges. Two months later, the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre

cited

the Israel-Hamas war as a source of religious and ideological tensions that could spill over into violence.

In September 2024, police apprehended an international student, a Pakistani national, who is alleged to have plotted to kill Jews in New York City. During 2024, terrorist threats such as these surged to an unprecedented level. The RCMP noted a 488 per cent increase in terrorism charges compared to the previous year.

Radicals from across the ideological spectrum have used the conflict in the Middle East to amplify their messaging, leveraging novel digital means to reach younger audiences. On the far right, groups such as the Maniac Murder Cult (MKY), a white supremacist network, have influenced Canadian youths to engage in real-world acts of hate.

Police in Manitoba, for instance, charged a teen linked to MKY with terror-related offences earlier this year. The accused allegedly engaged in a spate of depraved vandalism, which included spray-painting racist and antisemitic graffiti.

This alarming trend suggests that the extremist vitriol festering on the internet is seeping into the daily lives of Canadians. It is not relegated to individual, thwarted terrorist attacks. For months, radicalized youths have led and participated in rallies and university encampments across the country, which have often glorified terrorist groups and featured slogans exhorting violence.

Our society must take adequate steps to insulate impressionable Canadians from radical narratives that threaten Canadian values. Governments at all levels cannot divorce what is happening online from the recent terrorism-related threats and the rise in hate, division and incitement on our streets.

Legislation can and should be part of the solution. Any formal review of online harms policies must consider the evolving nature of digital radicalization. This should be paired with changes to the Criminal Code. When radical voices use online platforms to traffic in hate speech or incite violence, they must be held accountable, even if they attempt to justify what they say in the name of protected speech.

Lawmakers must also heed the warnings of Canada’s national security establishment, which has sought greater resources for agencies such as the RCMP and other institutions tasked with confronting the rise of domestic extremism.

Likewise, given the international scale of digital radicalization, Ottawa should amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to strengthen Canada’s capacity to properly vet those with a history of propagating extremist ideologies.

At the same time, the cultural and political dimensions of youth radicalization should not be discounted. As a society, we have a duty to protect the next generation of Canadians from malign influences. In the face of the extremist threat, Canada’s future hinges on its ability to instill Canadian values in Canadian youth.

National Post

Richard Robertson is director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada.


A possible Canada-European Union Digital Trade Agreement could help ensure the ethical, positive and responsible use of AI through reasonable guardrails including the protection of intellectual property rights and fair compensation for news publishers, write Paul Deegan and Wout van Wijk.

Artificial intelligence 

companies are flagrantly scraping and summarizing content directly from published news articles via retrieval-augmented generation. News media is by far the most frequently cited source of current information for large language models (LLMs), which are using news content without authorization or fair compensation. AI overviews combine many sources of unlicensed content to provide an effective substitute to the original source. With the user staying within Big Tech’s increasingly taller walled garden, rather than being pointed electronically to news websites via links, publishers are deprived of audience and their ability to sell advertising and subscriptions is significantly diminished. No clicks mean no cash for news businesses. Yet, AI companies are selling ads against copyrighted (and often paywalled) content as well as subscriptions for their premium products.

AI slop can be harmful to readers

There are plenty of examples of AI overviews serving up slop: inaccurate, irrelevant, out-of-date and even harmful information. That is because the large language models do not adhere to journalistic standards; they cannot perceive reality, truth or facts without (mis-)using the work of human journalists and content creators. According to the

BBC

, “AI assistants have significant issues with basic factual accuracy … The range of errors introduced by AI assistants is wider than just factual inaccuracies. The AI assistants we tested struggled to differentiate between opinion and fact, editorialized, and often failed to include essential context. Even when each statement in a response is accurate, these types of issues can result in responses which are misleading or biased.”

If publishers cannot monetize content, they cannot reinvest in the accurate and authoritative journalism readers rely upon to make informed decisions that empower them to participate effectively in democratic processes.

AI companies are stealing our content and using it to compete against us. They are strip-mining and cannibalizing proprietary content and are free riding on the backs of news publishers while unlawfully enriching themselves. In essence, they are unlicensed news syndicators. That’s unfair. That’s anti-competitive. It runs counter to the interests of the news media and the wider public, while undermining government’s drive to encourage AI development and adoption, as this depends on access to high-quality data and information created by humans.

A possible Canada-European Union Digital Trade Agreement could help scale Canadian and European innovation leaders, while ensuring the ethical, positive and responsible use of AI through reasonable guardrails: First, intellectual property should be protected. Second, platforms should provide fair compensation to publishers. Third, platforms should provide clear attribution to source content. Fourth, publishers should be allowed to opt out of AI overviews without their websites being removed from search engines. Fifth, platforms should not discriminate in the ranking of search results.

In negotiating a possible DTA, we recommend trade negotiators consider the 

Global Principles for Artificial Intelligence

, which were developed in 2023 by 26 organizations around the world, including News Media Canada and News Media Europe. Those principles include:

  • Respecting intellectual property rights, protecting the organizations’ investments in original content
  • Leveraging efficient licensing models that can facilitate innovation through training of trustworthy and high-quality AI systems
  • Providing granular transparency to allow publishers to enforce their rights where their content is included in training datasets
  • Clearly attributing content to the original publishers of the content.

We also encourage Canadian and European negotiators to consider the power imbalance between news publishers and dominant online platforms and services, and to put in place measures to address the massive bargaining imbalance.

The U.S. administration’s

AI Action Plan

seeks “to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” and it does not even mention the word “copyright.” Against that backdrop, Canada and the EU should align through regulatory co-operation to support homegrown, decentralized, fair and responsible tech development, while protecting intellectual property, so that news publishers can continue to invest in fact-based, fact-checked original high-quality news content produced by real journalists.

Real, trustworthy news is an antidote to the proliferation of misinformation online. With a framework backed up by the teeth of enforcement, it contributes to the sustainability of reliable, innovative AI models themselves.

A free, independent and pluralistic press is a cornerstone of western democracy. Journalism plays a critical role in holding power to account, informing citizens and providing resilience against the rising tide of information manipulation and state-sponsored propaganda.

But today, the unchecked spread of AI-generated content by platforms and chatbots — delivered without fact-checking, transparency or legal accountability — risks eroding public trust in professional verified editorial sources. When synthetic information is treated as equivalent to journalism, the very foundations of public discourse and democratic decision-making are weakened.

To ensure our free and plural press remains commercially viable, AI providers should not use publishers’ content to build and run their products without consent, credit and compensation.

Special to Postmedia News

Paul Deegan is the CEO of News Media Canada. Wout van Wijk is the Executive Director of News Media Europe.

Reprinted with permission from PressGazette: Future of Media


(FILES) Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Jerome Powell speaks with Lisa Cook, on June 25, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

A chart showing the

value

of Turkey’s currency against Canada’s resembles a very long, slow, but relentless slide down a steep hill.

In 2015 a Canadian dollar was

worth

about 2.3 Turkish lira. Today it takes almost 30 lira to buy a loonie.

According to currency exchange site XE.com, the dollar’s increase over that period totals more than 1200 per cent. Viewed from Ankara, of course, the opposite is true: an extended collapse comprising a

series

of currency crises accompanied by often-ruinous inflation and gyrating interest rates. There was a crisis in 2018, another in 2021, and a third in 2023. This year alone Canada’s dollar — relatively weak against U.S. and E.U. currencies — is up almost 18 per cent against Turkey’s lira.

A 2021 article in Britain’s Financial Times

noted

that that year’s crisis was caused not by economic fundamentals, but “almost entirely reflect the increasingly erratic decision-making of one man and the influence he wields over the supposedly independent Turkish central bank.”

The man in question is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose personal power over the country’s central bank brings nothing to mind more than U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to enforce his will on the U.S. Federal Reserve. Like Trump, Erdogan considers himself smarter than the professional economists, experienced technocrats or financial authorities who have the sort of background and know-how usually deemed necessary for such critical and complex positions.

The results of Erdogan’s manoeuvrings have been disastrous. Fuelled by a set of unorthodox personal economic beliefs, the Turkish leader has seen inflation

reach

as high as 85 per cent, while interest

rates

have risen from eight per cent a decade ago to 50 per cent in 2024. He’s hired and fired central bank governors on a whim — he’s on his fifth in six years — and set off yet another drubbing this year by

arresting

the man expected to stand against him in the next presidential election. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was

accused

of falsifying his university diploma, for which prosecutors reportedly want a penalty of eight years in jail.

Turkey is no U.S. when it comes to the economy. At about US$1 trillion it’s roughly a

third

the size of that of Texas, and still deemed an emerging economy by the International Monetary Fund. But its troubles underline the degree of damage that can be done by the sort of erratic, arbitrary and often unpredictable shifts that are a hallmark of Trump’s approach to government.

Trump has been waging a campaign to oust Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, whose second four-year term doesn’t expire until next May. Last week the president

announced

he was firing Governor Lisa Cook, the first black woman to serve on the Fed’s board, accusing her of mortgage fraud, and potentially opening the way to

appoint

a Trump-aligned replacement. Cook denies the allegations and filed a lawsuit charging that Trump’s attempt is unlawful.

Trump wants Powell to lower interest rates to reduce financial pressures on consumers and reduce the cost of financing the grossly swollen national debt, which has burgeoned from massive deficits under both the Trump and previous Biden administrations. Reports indicate Trump could also make a healthy personal profit, having

added

at least US$100 million of U.S. bonds to his portfolio since taking office. Bond prices go up as interest rates go down.

Trump’s belief in the energizing impact of lower rates at least accords with basic economic theory: the lower the rates the bigger the anticipated boost from increased spending and investment. The danger is that higher spending can also lead to inflation, the fear of which has kept Powell from giving in to White House pressure. Erdogan, on the other hand, believes it’s high rates, not low, that produce inflation, and stuck to his guns for years despite the financial turmoil his policies produced.

Erdogan has ruled Turkey for more than two decades, first as prime minister, then as president, and runs the kind of authoritarian

regime

Trump openly admires. Since coming to power in 2003 he has jailed opponents, clamped down on the press and expanded his own powers, in addition to instituting mass firings and a flood of detentions following a 2016 coup attempt. Upset at what he considered the meagre digs in which he was expected to reside, he built a massive

palace

to himself, three times the size of Versailles, with 1,000 rooms and a cost topping US$600 million.

He’s on his third presidential term under a constitution that allows for only two, amid

suspicion

he aims to alter the rules again in hopes of running for a fourth.

Trump is a fan of the Turkish leader, who he credits with helping oust Syria’s Assad regime from power. He admires Erdogan’s willingness to ignore rules, skip past laws and stomp all over opponents. “He’s a tough guy and he’s very smart,” he told reporters. “I happen to like him, and he likes me.” Erdogan also enjoys congenial

relations

with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump also holds a peculiar soft spot.

The whole point of independent central banks is to remove them from governments keen on manipulating figures, interfering in markets or exerting pressure for self-serving political ends. In most advanced countries, the economy is viewed as too crucial to be exposed to political game-playing. Erdogan’s record in pushing around Turkey’s bankers speaks for itself: a beaten up, threadbare currency; crushing price hikes; roller-coaster inflation and debilitating interest rates.

Don’t expect that to deter Trump, however. He has absolute confidence in his own judgement. It’s easy to think you’re right about everything when you know so little about so much.

National Post