British Columbia’s

transportation minister claimed Friday

that buying new ferries from European shipyards would have cost roughly $1.2 billion more than buying them from

a Chinese government-owned shipyard in Weihai, Shandong province

, which is a city roughly the size of Montreal that I had never heard of until this week. China knows how to build cities. They burst into existence from nothing, like popcorn. China also knows how to build ships, and highways, and high-speed rail, and just about anything else you would care to name, better and more efficiently than the Canadian public service can realistically comprehend.

The four ships B.C. Ferries is fixing to replace, of 1960s and 1970s vintage, were built at Seaspan in North Vancouver (which is an active shipyard), at the Victoria Machinery Depot (which is no longer an active shipyard), and at the Burrard Dry Dock (which is also defunct). Canada’s shipyards, for better or worse —

certainly for expensive!

— are very busy building things for the navy.

B.C. Ferries has plenty of experience with foreign-built vessels. Its current fleet includes ships built in Romania, Poland, Germany and Greece. Other than the Baynes Sound cable ferry on Vancouver Island —

which is not especially popular

 —  the Crown corporation’s newest Canadian-built boat went into service in 1997. So “foreign” obviously isn’t the problem.

But China is China, and that’s legitimately another thing. China is not a Canadian ally. They try to screw with our democracy, and most other democracies by the sounds of it. And right now we are in a profoundly protectionist moment: Across the political spectrum, mostly because of President Donald Trump, “buy Canadian” is the only philosophy really on offer.

But does that make sense? We should pay over the odds for ferries … because of Trump? There wasn’t half of all this foofaraw when

Marine Atlantic on the East Coast bought its newest ferry from Weihai.

 Since last year it has safely been shepherding Canadians between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, without a whisper of controversy in the Rest of Canada.

But this is 2025. So on Tuesday during question period in Ottawa,

Conservative MP Jeff Kibble assailed the government

for allowing this purchase go forward, as opposed to handing the contract to a “proven Canadian shipbuilder such as Seaspan.”

“The Liberals are set to hand over $30 million (in subsidies) to B.C. Ferries, while B.C. Ferries hands over critical jobs and investment in industry to China,” Kibble kvetched. “Will the Liberals attach a common-sense condition of buying Canadian-built ships to B.C. Ferries in order to receive its $30-million subsidy?

Kibble, you will not be surprised to learn, is a British Columbia MP whose riding has coastline. More notable is that he’s a 28-year veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy, yet still somehow has faith in Canadian shipyards and Canada-first procurement policies.

Seaspan started cutting steel for HMCS Protecteur, a Navy supply vessel, in 2018.

Plans for two such vessels date from 2010.
The Protecteur was “ceremonially” launched in December last year

. It is still being fitted out.

Ships don’t need to take that long to design, build and fit out in normal countries that aspire to have navies. They just don’t.

Chrystia Freeland, our newly minted federal minister of transport, said she “shared (Kibble’s) concerns,” because “now is a time when we need to support Canadian workers and Canadian industries.” But she also quite reasonably noted that this “was not a federal government project.” And thank goodness for that.

No question, buying big things from China needs to come with serious due diligence. It’s not my vendor of choice either. But at the end of the day, we

are

just talking about ferries. We’ll need to check the buffet for bugs and the onboard navigation system for malware, but I can’t imagine a lot of very game-changing geopolitical conversations happen on the way to Swartz Bay.

“If there is, for instance, a confrontation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, one of the things that China will do is try to sow social chaos,” Royal Military College professor Christian Leuprecht

told National Post this week

. “One obvious way to do that in B.C. is to take out its most important ferry route.”

A legitimate concern, certainly. But B.C. Ferries

seems to be pretty good at taking out its most important ferry routes all on its own

with technical and mechanical difficulties. Turning down the best, quickest bids on new ships certainly isn’t going to make life better for people who rely on their service. If China wants to build us seaworthy ferries at a reasonable cost, it absolutely escapes me why we shouldn’t let them.

And yet, the consensus is complete — from the Conservative Party of Canada to Liberal Party of Canada to the New Democrats, Greens, and Big Labour. “B.C. Ferries defended itself by saying 60 per cent of major ships in the world are built in China,” the B.C. Federation of Labour posted on social media this week. “Wrong-headed decisions like this are the reason why.”

We don’t have to build ships. There are lots of things Canada doesn’t build. Trump should be an opportunity for Canada to look at the wider world, not straight into its own bunghole.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

• Chris Selley: Our supreme court’s chief justice is a busted flush. What will we do about it?
• Chris Selley: Job one for Canada in this scary new world is to stop being stupid

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No one knows how the second Trump administration will ultimately turn out for the U.S. and for the wider world. Perhaps it will end with foreign dictators humbled, America resurgent, and the long march of the left through the institutions finally in reverse. But so far, the new Trump ascendancy could easily leave conservatism discredited. Certainly, it’s already been a key factor in the defeat of conservative parties in Canada and Australia. Hence the question: how should conservative political parties respond to the Trump phenomenon in order to keep their character while maximizing their chances of electoral success?

Whatever reservations conservatives might have had about his character, Donald Trump’s re-election was an energizing moment for conservative political movements. And the new administration’s domestic program: controlling the border, making government more efficient, repudiating “wokery”, and continuing the use of fossil fuels is a robustly conservative one. But the new administration’s foreign agenda: imposing punitive tariffs on Canada and Mexico, claiming that Ukraine had somehow “started” the war with Russia, and seemingly wanting to do “deals” with dictators, has not only been at odds with America’s global “brand” as the benign superpower, and deeply unsettling to America’s allies; but also jarred with the general conservative view that alliances are to be nurtured and that the Anglosphere is “family.”

The first time the president called then-Canadian prime minister “Governor Trudeau,” it was the kind of crude quasi-humour that’s become a Trump trademark towards political opponents. Even referring to Canada as the 51st state might have worked once or twice as commentary on how much better-off Canadians could be if their politics has been less consistently centre-left. But the constant demeaning references to Canada, coupled with the threats to seize Greenland, were not only deeply offensive to Canadians, in particular, but made the president look little better than a hemispheric Putin, in wanting to coerce all his neighbours, only not by force.

Then there were the tariffs. These made sense against communist China, America’s great geo-strategic challenger, that’s been exploiting freer trade in order to de-industrialize the West. But against Canada and Mexico, one a NATO ally, and both parties to the revised NAFTA deal, that Trump 1.0 had described as the “best ever”; against Britain, America’s number one security partner; and against Australia, America’s number two security partner, and a free trade partner under a deal finalized in 2004, the Trump tariffs, even if on-again, off-again as some kind of bargaining tactic, looked irrational, even malignant. The idea that trade is a zero-sum game and that trade deficits are somehow a sign that your country is being ripped-off is simplistic nonsense.

If the president wanted Canada to spend more on defence, he should have said so behind closed doors and made a public statement against security free-riders. If he wanted Australia to end bans on U.S. beef imports, he should have said so behind closed doors and made a public statement that Australia preaches free trade but doesn’t always practise it. Instead, there were a series of capricious rhetorical escalations and de-escalations, that Australia’s prime minister said, mildly enough under the circumstances, were “not the action of a friend.”

As a consequence of the Trump tariff wars, Canada’s conservative opposition leader went from being 20 points ahead in the polls to a narrow loss in April’s election. And Australia’s conservative opposition leader went from being competitive in the polls to a massive defeat last month. Despite Pierre Poilievre’s fierce repudiation of the insults against Canada, and despite Peter Dutton’s insistence that he would prevent U.S. tariffs against Australia, voters saw both as guilty by association. Donald Trump was a right-winger, many voters’ reasoning ran; Poilievre and Dutton were right-wingers, therefore both were somehow “mini-Trumps” who might be just as erratic should they gain office. Naturally, the Liberals in Canada, and Labor in Australia, revelled in attacking their “Trump-like” opponents.

Conservative leaders’ best response to the president’s “America first,” verging on “everyone else last,” foreign policy is to declare that their first duty, likewise, is to their own country. After all, seeing one’s own country as a “shining city on a hill” and even as “the last best hope of mankind,” to use Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric, is the hallmark of conservative leaders. A deep patriotism is at the heart of all conservative thinking.

A key difference between this president and his predecessors is that his love of America does not so readily extend to an embrace of America’s like-minded allies; or to using American soft and hard power to extend American values throughout the world. Loyalty, sentiment, high-mindedness, and a “love that pays the price” count for little with a transactional administration, even though it’s America’s readiness, up till now, to keep the world safe for democracy that’s made it so widely admired.

A smart move by conservatives would be to push for much deeper cooperation between the other members of the Anglosphere. After all, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the CANZUK countries) are all members of the Five Eyes security partnership and are all now members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal. If America’s security guarantees are weakening, there’s a strong argument for Britain, supported by Canada and Australia, to step up; especially if the wider world is to continue to reflect the long Anglo-American ascendancy rather than a new Chinese one. And there’s every reason to think that the current centre-left British, Canadian and Australian governments would be amenable to working more closely together on global issues if Trump’s America is starting to go missing.

It was always a mistake to see Reagan-Thatcher conservatism as exclusively, or even mainly, economic. Those two conservative titans respected freer markets as the best means of securing individual prosperity and national strength, not as ends in themselves. They supported smaller government and greater freedom because it’s strong citizens rather than a nanny state that creates the best society. They saw love of country, a commitment to excellence, and personal responsibility as the key to a strong social fabric; much more so than “equalizing” taxes and over-generous, incentive-sapping social welfare. Their record was freer trade with like-minded democracies, rather than with geo-political rivals; and of boosting local industry via robust competition and domestic deregulation rather than government subsidy.

Whether it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome or the almost equally prevalent Trump Fascination Syndrome, the U.S. president’s out-sized political personality is denying oxygen to everyone and everything that’s not referencing him. Because America matters, and because the president has so much sway over what America does, the wild ride will continue. But what counts, in the end, is less what someone else does, that’s up to him; and more what we do, that’s up to us. Conservatives should respectfully dissent from any rogue actions by the current administration, while remembering that there will be a new one within four years. Donald Trump is just one manifestation of American conservatism, not the embodiment of it. And in the meantime, conservative leaders should get on with devising a credible policy agenda for their own countries and relentlessly making the case for change with their own voters.

Tony Abbott was prime minister of Australia from 2013-15.

• Jesse Kline: Did Anita Anand get ChatGPT to write her Israel-Iran tweet?
• Raymond J. de Souza: Time is running short for peace in the Mideast

Attack sirens wailed in every corner of Israel at 3 am on Friday morning, including the isolated kibbutz in the south where I live. This was followed immediately by an ear-splitting screech that overrode every Israeli cell phone. It was followed by a message from the Home Front Command. The screech and message were unprecedented. It did the trick and grabbed the attention of this war-weary nation.

We were urged to shelter in place. Something about a major attack. I honestly cannot remember the precise wording and it doesn’t really matter. The point was sharp and understood.

Subsequent messages clarified that Israel had just launched a massive attack on Iran. Retaliation could be swift and devastating. Within seconds of the siren and Home Front message, tens of thousands of reservists received call-up notices to present at their bases immediately. As in. Right now.

Again. Unprecedented.

If you are fortunate to have a safe room in your home, like me, then you seal it shut and ensure that there are adequate supplies of fresh water, food, emergency batteries and the kind of things you will need if locked in there for hours, or days, on end.

You check on loved ones. They check on you. And then, you wait.

It did not take long for initial reports to pour in. We now know that Israel has unleashed a brilliantly planned attack on the Iranian war leadership and operational capability. Dozens of precision strikes were carried out, assassinating top officials in their apartments, leaving a gaping hole in a building while the rest was largely untouched. It is believed that the top echelons of Iranian military, air force and civilian leadership has been wiped out. The impact on decision making and chain of command is devastating. Scientists who were instrumental in developing and enhancing Iran’s nuclear capabilities were also targeted. Within minutes a regime was decimated.

These attacks were unceasing. Wave after wave. After the leadership came the military and nuclear sites themselves. The targets span the vast territory of Iran. Many key nuclear sites are ablaze with massive secondary explosions being reported. Thus far there are no reports of radioactive material leaking.

Early reports of swarms of drones launched towards Israel from inside Iran and Iraqi territory led to heightened concerns. Most Iranian drones take seven hours to reach Israeli territory but there is a ballistic missile capability that can reach its target within two hours. Several drones reportedly landed in Israel earlier Friday but military authorities requested that people refrain from posting the locations of impact because such knowledge may assist the enemy in calibrating future attacks more precisely.

As I write this at 7:45pm, local time in Israel, we are told that missile fire from Yemen has been detected. As with all of the Iranian drones and other weapons aimed at Israel earlier, most will likely be intercepted before reaching their destination.

A huge concern for the IDF was a repeat of the experience of April 13 to 14, 2024, when Iran barraged Israel with hundreds of drones and missilesFr in swarms. American, UK, French, Saudi and Emirati air forces collaborated to intercept and were successful in downing approximately 95 per cent. Had Israel been left to manage the threat on its own, the outcome would have been catastrophic. Its air defence systems would have been overwhelmed. Lesson learned.

After that Iranian attack Israel degraded Iranian air defence capabilities in a series of retaliatory raids but it was believed that Iran had partially restored its defensive capacity since that time, with Russian support. For Israel to neutralize whatever air defence capabilities remained in Iran it was deemed necessary first to remove the individuals who made decisions. Commanders. Absolutely brilliant.

And so the first wave of attacks did just that: targeted critical leadership.

Air defence systems in Iran — if they remain at all effective — have been inactive. Israel, effectively, controls the skies over Iran, a huge country. Furthermore, operationally this is a very complex mission. The distance from Israel to Iran is so great that it requires that jets refuel in flight.

All day, I have been bombarded with dozens of messages in various chat groups and from news sources. “Keeping up” is impossible, so we all become masters in filtering. And of note in the current dispatches is one warning people living in a certain area of Israel to expect to hear gunfire and explosions throughout the evening due to significant military operations. Friday night at sundown through Saturday is the sabbath, a day of rest for those who are religiously observant. The notice continues with what is labelled an “Important Reminder,” which is very rarely seen: “All gatherings, including synagogue services and public assemblies, are strictly forbidden at this time. Residents are urged to keep at least one phone on in every household to receive real-time alerts. It is also recommended to keep a radio tuned to an open emergency frequency.”

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many others have indicated throughout the day, this is just the beginning. And the outcome of this very volatile conflict is uncertain, of course. There are the extremes — as identified by New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman.  A positive and extreme outcome, Friedman opines, would result in the fall of the vicious regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. Another extreme would see the region descend into chaos, which would likely spread globally. But he offers a hopeful middle ground possibility, which would be best for all. A negotiated solution. As Friedman writes:

“President Trump has deftly used the Israeli attack to, in effect, say to the Iranians: ‘I am still ready to negotiate a peaceful end to your nuclear program and you might want to go there fast — because my friend Bibi is C-R-A-Z-Y. I am waiting for your call.’”

The irony of

Thomas Friedman

— a staunchly anti-Trump and anti-Bibi pundit — in effect praising both men is nothing short of surreal.

And with that – it is 8:05 pm and my telephone just screeched at me — and ten million others in Israel — to stay close to a shelter.

Shortly after hunkering down in the safe room, scores of missiles slammed into homes and buildings in central Tel Aviv and other towns in Israel. No deaths have been reported thus far but there are dozens injured. Waves of additional missiles are expected to continue. We are at the beginning of what may be a very long metaphorical night.

National Post

Vivian Bercovici is a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and the founder of the State of Tel Aviv.

On Wednesday, Richard Wagner, the chief justice of Canada, gave his annual press conference, intending to talk at length about his manifold achievements throughout the year. But he became visibly uncomfortable when National Post reporter Christopher Nardi

asked

him why the Supreme Court refuses disclose the identity of the donor of a bust of Wagner that is on display in the lobby of the Supreme Court.

The head of

what is supposedly

“one of the world’s most transparent and accessible apex courts” said that he had no idea who paid for the bust, and claimed that it was put on public display before his retirement at the artist’s request (the sculptor has

denied this

).

When pressed on his non-answer, he began to ramble about the pens and ties he’s received as token gifts from foreign judges, instead of his bust, which cost around $18,000. Pressed again, he denied even knowing whether the bust was a gift or not. “I don’t know who paid for that, so how can there be a conflict of interest?” he finally said with a contemptuous shrug, his customary bonhomie having all but vanished.

Wagner’s evident discomfort at the question is understandable. Putting aside the obvious conflicts of interest and ethical problems involved, it is both unprecedented and deeply vulgar for a sitting Canadian judge to have a sculpture of himself in his court’s lobby, a decision he must have personally endorsed, and which, as far as I know, has no parallel in any other court in the common law world.

Nor is the bust the only instance of the chief justice’s seemingly insatiable appetite for personal publicity. Until recently, next to the bust in the lobby was

a display

featuring documents and photos of his time as administrator of the Government of Canada (the chief justice stands in when there is no governor general), a non-job that Wagner appears determined to publicly memorialize. And visitors to the court’s

new website

are welcomed with a large picture of Wagner, almost three times as big as the one on the old website.

These lapses in taste and judgment might be forgivable if Wagner was too busy with legal work to investigate the identity of his secret admirer. But in 2024, he wrote exactly three sets of reasons (one of them co-written), a pathetic performance even adjusting for the ever-shrinking number of cases the Supreme Court now hears. In contrast, in 2017, the year of her retirement, Wagner’s predecessor, Beverley McLachlin, wrote 14 sets of reasons.

The lack of productivity is even more astonishing when one considers the fact that each Supreme Court justice is provided with several law clerks to help them with research, which often means ghost-writing their opinions. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s report for 2024 features the likeness of the chief justice no fewer than 18 times, to assure Canadians that he is hard at work for us, at the rate of one opinion per six pictorial depictions.

But as Wagner’s judicial output was plumbing to new lows, he found the time to undertake official trips to Brazil, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, among others.

He also

travelled to Albania

to attend a meeting of the Association of Francophone Constitutional Courts (one per cent of Albania’s population is francophone, and its constitutional court functions in Albanian). Then, in April, Wagner inexplicably attended Pope Francis’ funeral as part of Canada’s official delegation, even though both the Governor General and the Speaker of the Senate were already representing Canada there (among the 164 delegations in attendance, Canada’s was the only one that included a judge).

The Canadian Judicial Council

admonishes judges that

, “The primary obligation of judges is the discharge of judicial duties in the jurisdiction in which they are appointed,” and advises them to refrain from going to international junkets if it “would interfere with their duty to diligently fulfill their judicial obligations.” But mere rules do not seem to apply to the chief justice, who is the chairman of the council ex officio.

In addition to jetting off for “international engagement,” Wagner has embarked on a program of institutional aggrandizement, designed to heighten the prestige of his court. The Supreme Court of Canada now boasts its own flag, which is accorded the same honours as the Canadian one (

Wagner claimed

the new flag was necessary to demonstrate judicial independence) and coat of arms, lest anyone confuse it with the other, more vulgar, democratic parts of the government.

This year is the Supreme Court’s 150th anniversary, and for the occasion, Wagner has laid on a vast program of celebration. In addition to set-piece public events, the judges will shed their traditional robes, which date to the very beginnings of the common law, for new ones that are guaranteed to be as tasteless as the display in the court’s lobby.

For the youngsters, there is a

children’s book

, lavishly illustrated with drawings of the chief justice (“When I hear a case, I sit in the middle chair,” Wagner reminds the fictional schoolchildren touring the courtroom, lest they forget who their tour guide is).

But it is not even clear why the Supreme Court is bothering to celebrate its 150th anniversary, since the chief justice has expressed contempt for its past work. Last year, justifying his refusal to translate the court’s pre-1970 decisions into French, he told journalists that the decisions have “

minute value

” and that “no one today (would) refer to a precedent from 1892 to support their case.” Soon after, he had the pesky

old decisions deleted

from the court’s website.

Common law is built on case law accumulated across generations; but to Chief Justice Wagner, they are nothing but impediments to be discarded at will by judges pretending to be philosopher kings.

This is to say nothing of Wagner’s consistent lack of judgment in matters big and small. From declaring his pride that the Supreme Court is “the most progressive in the world” (in relation to

Carter v. Canada

, which has led to an untold number of Canadians dying by euthanasia), to commenting extra-judicially on

pending cases

and

politically contentious issues

, to forcing his colleague Russell Brown off the court and then

seemingly misrepresenting

what had transpired.

There is little evidence that Wagner pays any heed to external critics. Indeed, he has conflated criticism of judges with attacks on democracy itself,

accused

the court’s critics of ignorance and characterized legitimate reporting on the court’s work as “disinformation.”

But he is not above engaging in disinformation himself, such as when

he told

American law students that Canada has “no such thing as a political appointment” to the bench (until a few years ago, political staffers used a

Liberal party database

to systematically vet potential judges, and donors to the ruling party are

disproportionately represented

among new judges).

At the heart of Wagner’s public career is a tragic mismatch. What he appears to crave above all else are celebrity and the trappings of power, unconstrained by rules, customs and good taste. Unfortunately, he is a judge, whose professional code requires the exact opposite. If he is not satisfied with his station in life, he should resign before further damaging the reputation of Canada’s judiciary.

National Post

Yuan Yi Zhu is an assistant professor of international relations and international law at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a research associate at the University of British Columbia.

• Chris Selley: Our supreme court’s chief justice is a busted flush. What will we do about it?
• Bruce Pardy: Supreme Court undermined by chief justice condemning freedom convoy

Earlier this month, American gymnastics superstar Simone Biles did what no PR professional, therapist or friend would recommend, even to their own worst enemy: she weighed in on the so-called transgender debate on social media. She did this not just on any platform, but on Elon Musk’s X, where saying “hello” can invite a homicidal response.

Biles did not say “hello.” She said the following, in response to remarks made by Riley Gaines, a former female college swimmer turned prolific critic of transgender participation in sports.

“You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race,” Biles wrote on X, referencing Gaines’ college swim career and her subsequent activism against trans women competing in female sports.

“Straight up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! But instead … You bully them.”

Biles’ outburst at Gaines was a direct response to recent comments Gaines made on X, in which Gaines criticized a Minnesota high school softball league for disabling the comments underneath a post celebrating the winning team in its recent championship. The team in question reportedly has a transgender girl on its roster. It’s likely that the league disabled the comments option underneath the post to prevent an ugly debate from erupting there.

Apparently, an ugly debate is exactly what Gaines wanted. The activist subsequently re-shared, to her 1.5-million followers, a photo of the teenage softball team in which the trans teen is presumably pictured, writing, “Comments off lol. To be expected when your star player is a boy.”

What followed was a torrent of cruel and hateful online commentary about the trans teen that is likely still flowing.

Indeed, this is textbook behaviour for high-profile activists campaigning against transgender participation in sports. Yes, there are militant transgender activists who vilify, sexually harass and dox high-profile women who don’t share their views. But it is only on Gaines’ “gender critical” side of the debate that we see the gleeful bullying of minors who identify as transgender — and sometimes those who don’t.

Last year, a Utah State Board of Education member falsely implied on social media that a high school athlete was trans, leading to threats against the student, who later required police protection. Earlier this year, Maine’s House of Representatives voted to censure Republican lawmaker Laurel Libby after she shared a Facebook post, in which a transgender athlete was identified by face, name and school. According to news reports, the outsized attention prompted the athlete’s high school to ramp up security.

So while it was wrong of Biles to call Gaines names — and in a subsequent post, to make a disparaging remark about Gaines’ appearance — the gymnast was right to call out the bully tactics too often employed by public figures who claim to have the best interests of young people at heart.

One doesn’t have to ascribe to progressive gender ideology to concede that when you serve up a photo of minors to a mocking audience of millions, you’re not acting like a champion of girls and women. You’re acting like a jerk.

This was the point Biles was making, if inelegantly. In fact, the gymnast later apologized to Gaines, stating, “I was not advocating for policies that compromise fairness in women’s sports. My objection is to be singling out children for public scrutiny in ways that feel personal and harmful. Individual athletes — especially kids — should never be the focus of criticism of a flawed system they have no control over.”

It is for this eminently reasonable statement that Biles has been raked over the coals on social media, and labelled a woke traitor to little girls everywhere. The irony, of course, is that her comments are far from “woke” — at least you’d be hard pressed to find a radical transgender activist who approves of Biles’ initial suggestion to Gaines that transgender athletes compete in their own separate category.

Biles’ comments were not a call to embrace one ideology or another. They were a call to embrace fairness — not in sports, but in a public debate that has none.

Riley Gaines can take the heat. J.K. Rowling can take the heat. Simone Biles can take the heat. Kids shouldn’t have to. Let this be something, at least, that most of us can agree on.

National Post

• Barbara Kay: Transgender sports policies have thrown fair play out the window
• Barbara Kay: Lawsuits could be the answer to unfair, trans-inclusive women’s sports

When Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau as prime minister, he had the aura of a father coming in to clean up his son’s mess, giving many Canadians hope that he would reassert Canada’s influence over global affairs and increase its standing in the world.

But despite jetting off to Europe shortly after taking office and promising to vastly increase defence spending, it’s becoming clear that Canada is still not prepared to lift a finger to support the outcomes we say we want to achieve.

As the Oilers were battling the Panthers in a thrilling come-from-behind overtime victory on Thursday night, Israel launched a series of preemptive strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, along with its senior military leadership.

World leaders quickly scrambled into action. But not our leader. Carney’s

Twitter feed

features not one, but two posts about the Oilers, yet absolutely nothing, as of this writing, about events taking place in the Middle East.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand did

weigh in

on Friday morning. The good news is that we can all sleep soundly knowing that “Canada is closely following the escalation of tensions.” The bad news is that watching events unfold on CNN is about all the Liberals seem prepared to do.

Anand went on to admonish Israel and Iran that, “Further action risks triggering a broader regional conflict with devastating consequences. De-escalation must be the priority. We urge all parties to refrain from actions that further destabilize the region. The protection of civilians must be paramount.”

To be fair, even Israel’s staunchest allies have made boilerplate statements about the need to “deescalate,” but Anand’s lacked any sort of nuance, while her banal prose read like something churned out by a robot (“Danger, Will Robinson, danger in the Middle East!”)

In fact, even though I don’t use artificial intelligence for writing, I asked an AI chatbot to “craft a brief statement given by the foreign minister of a country with friendly diplomatic relations with Israel on the Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear program,” and it spit out the following:

“We are closely monitoring the situation and are concerned about the escalating tensions in the region. While we understand the legitimate security concerns of our friend and ally Israel, we also emphasize the need for a diplomatic solution to address the issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. We urge all parties to exercise restraint and to work towards a peaceful resolution that promotes stability and security in the Middle East.”

Other than the bit about empathizing with Israel’s position, it sounds almost exactly like Anand’s statement.

While Anand did say that Canada “remains deeply concerned by the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program,” she said nothing about Israel’s right to defend itself until she mentioned it, almost as an aside, in an

interview with CBC

that’s set to air on Saturday.

Perhaps she and Carney are just mad that they weren’t invited to the diplomatic party.

While Carney joined the leaders of Britain and France in

strongly opposing

“the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza” on May 19, he was not included in

a call

between British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to discuss the Mideast situation on Friday.

And although Macron joined Canada in criticizing Israel last month, he made clear on Friday that he is not solely focused on demonizing the Jewish state by

condemning

“Iran’s ongoing nuclear program,” affirming “Israel’s right to defend itself and ensure its security” and

saying that

, “Iran bears a very heavy responsibility for the destabilization of the region.”

Macron further pledged that, “France stands ready to work with all its partners to push for deescalation in the Near and Middle East,” and noted that he had also spoken with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the United States. And that was likely before Anand had even rolled out of bed and turned on the news.

German leaders were equally unequivocal in their condemnation of Iran and support for Israel.

In a statement,

Merz said

that Iran’s nuclear program “violates the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and poses a serious threat to the entire region, especially to the State of Israel,” while reaffirming Israel’s “right to defend its existence and the security of its citizens.”

His foreign minister,

Johann Wadephul

, also “strongly condemn(ed)” Iran’s “indiscriminate” drone attack against Israel.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that he

had calls

with U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with Merz and Starmer.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also said that he

had spoken with

“the foreign ministers of India, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Paraguay, Panama, Cyprus and the European Union.”

No one appears to be having any conversations with the Canadian government, or at least conversations they’re keen on admitting publicly. But why would they? Since October 7, our Liberal government, under both Trudeau and Carney, has done nothing but criticize Israel.

Our entire diplomatic strategy appears to consist of little more than a series of strongly worded statements encouraging others to give peace a chance and advocating for a two-state solution. That and $3 will get you a cup of coffee, but it won’t buy Middle East peace.

There’s no point in pondering what could have been if April’s federal election had gone a different way, but it’s worth noting that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre displayed a moral fortitude that his Liberal opponents seem wholly incapable of.

Tweeting an hour after Anand,

he stated bluntly

: “Israel has the right to defend itself—including by disarming Tehran’s genocidal nuclear program. It cannot wait until the regime has capabilities for a nuclear strike.

“We should all hope that this is the end of the regime’s nuclear program and that the great Persian people can now rise up to reclaim their country from the totalitarian regime.”

Until Carney takes another page from Poilievre’s playbook — which, as we know, he is fond of doing — it appears as though Canada will continue to be sidelined on the world stage, watching events unfold on CNN as the big kids do all the heavy lifting.

National Post

jkline@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/accessd

• Adam Zivo: ‘This is the big war’ — Israelis stoic as Iran counterattacks
• Arsen Ostrovsky: Israel did the West a favour by attacking Iran’s nuclear program

TEL AVIV — Israel launched a
devastating strike
against Iran’s nuclear program early Friday morning, with missiles and drones devastating military targets throughout the country. Although Iran has vowed revenge — and indeed launched missiles on Friday — and already retaliated with more than 100 drones, the mood in Tel Aviv remains remarkably ataraxic.
 

As munitions soared towards Tehran in the middle of the night, a blaring emergency alert was sent to every phone in Israel, warning residents to obey further government instructions “in preparation for a significant threat.”
Rumours had been swirling
in the preceding days that an attack on Iran was imminent, so many recipients immediately understood what was happening, even without confirmation from the government announcements that came shortly afterwards.
 

In the building where I am staying in downtown Tel Aviv, civilians quickly gathered in the staircase: “This is the big war. It’s going to be really big,” said my next door neighbour, a burly man with his hair in a bun, as we descended into the basement bomb shelter. Yet the dingy room was sparsely filled and, of the dozen or so Israelis who had taken refuge there, none seemed particularly scared — anxious and irritated, perhaps. Most of them texted and scrolled on their phones, bleary-eyed.
 

After ten minutes or so, many relocated to an adjacent alleyway, where the air wasn’t stifling and the data reception was better. There, I bumped into two young, female students — Shira and Shivan — who had arrived from a nearby building that had no shelter of its own.
 

“I feel pretty safe. The chance of something really bad happening, like a rocket falling, is very small, usually, because we have an air force and defence system,” said Shivan, an aspiring actress. Hours before, she had been visiting her parents outside Tel Aviv, who had worriedly told her to avoid the city, but she told them, “We have tons of rehearsals, so I cannot miss anything.”
 

After an hour passed and no retaliatory Iranian strike had yet materialized, everyone returned to bed. Meanwhile, the government’s
official safety app
warned that public gatherings, along with most workplace and educational activities, would be prohibited until further notice.
 

The Tel Aviv Pride Parade was
originally supposed to

take place Friday

, but, in lieu of convulsing rainbows and techno, the streets were unsettlingly quiet. Only a few cafes and grocery stores operated throughout the morning, with many customers buying small stockpiles of necessities. Pedestrians were rare and, for the most part, either walking their dogs, rushing to leave the city (miniature luggage in tow) or returning home with full grocery bags.
 

“If we’re going to die, we’d rather die with our friends,” said a beautiful woman, laughing behind her sunglasses, as she and her photogenic boyfriend, who was carrying several bags, prepared to stay with relatives outside the capital.
 

Down the street, three Russian expats sat on a bench, smoking a joint and grinding cannabis. A tattooed woman warned that Iran’s drones were expected to arrive in seven minutes — at 10:30am — and advised that I find a bomb shelter. But the skies remained clear as the deadline passed. The swarm of Iranian drones had
evidently been intercepted
and life returned to the city more fulsomely after that point.
 

There was a crowd of young Israelis cheerfully loitering outside a popular cafe. A young man played guitar, while another bohemian read a book beside him. I asked two young women, who were donned in pastel-coloured leisurewear and gold jewelry, how they were preparing for Iran’s potential retaliatory attack. “Coffee!” they exclaimed. Attacks like this were not new to them: “There’s nothing you can do. The situation is not going to change.”
 

Another young man, Benjamin, described visiting a grocery store at 4:30 am — 90 minutes after the strike on Iran — only to discover that it was swamped with gay tourists who had migrated from the city’s abruptly-shuttered bars and clubs. They were evidently “not sober” and possibly high on drugs.
 

“Do we continue to party? Should we go hide in the shelter? Should we be buying tuna? Is gay pride canceled?” he had wondered to himself. “You’re like, f**k this, I guess I gotta go to bed. And then three hours later, you wake up again to more news. Drones are coming. Drones are not coming. Nobody knows.”
 

At another cafe, 26-year old Yonathan said, in a thick Israeli accent, that Iran’s goal is to “terrorize my mind” so he’d rather stay in bed than go to the bomb shelter: “You know, if I’m dying, I’m dying like that.” He said that his childhood in Jerusalem had been filled with “wars and missiles,” so this was just “a regular morning. I’m sitting here having my beer. You know, chilling.”
 

Two muscular shirtless men drinking coffee on the patio — Tamir and Daniel — said that they were having a “weird Friday.” Daniel had slept through his mother’s phone calls at 5am, leading her to send him a “very dramatic” message about being at war with Iran. “I assume that there is a personal responsibility to make sure that we have whatever we need if something does happen, but we’ve been here before,” he said, citing October 7. “There’s not much we can do about it,” concurred Tamir.
 
 

A Canadian-Israeli sitting nearby, whose cheeks were painted with rainbows, said that the morning was “pretty chill” and that Iran’s so far weak response had surprised him — but then his friend, a young IDF soldier who had served extensively in Gaza, interrupted him: “Don’t jinx this.”

Turns out that was too late, as Israelis were told, again, to seek shelter Friday evening after Iran fired dozens of missiles.

National Post

Israel has gone to war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided that time is growing very short — short for Iran to build a nuclear bomb, short to cut off American diplomatic efforts, short for an exhausted Israeli population and short for his own government’s survival.

In recent months an emerging intelligence consensus has concluded that Iran is very close to making a nuclear bomb — perhaps weeks or months, but likely within a year. If that is to be ruled out entirely — as both Israel and the United States have declared for decades — then the military option comes into play if diplomacy fails. Whether weeks or months, the diplomatic track was running out of time.

For 20 years, going back to the George W. Bush administration, American policy has been that Iran’s nuclear weapons program would be prevented by diplomatic deals and economic pressure, not military strikes. Partly this was because it was not clear that military strikes could get the job done. If after 20 months of ground forces in Gaza, Israel cannot eliminate the Hamas threat, housed in tunnels, will airstrikes disable nuclear facilities built deep into the sides of mountains?

Israel likely feels strong after its quick decimation of Hezbollah last year in Lebanon, but Iran is rather different in both degree and kind.

President Donald Trump’s actual Secretary of State, his developer buddy Steve Witkoff, was scheduled to continue his Iran talks on Sunday. Real estate moguls make deals, and Trump prides himself on being the moguliest of all moguls, so the Israelis likely feared that Trump and Witkoff would have accepted a bad deal. There is ample reason to think that; the Trump-Witkoff preferred deal in Ukraine was Ukrainian capitulation; Ukraine refused and Trump’s tantrum in the Oval Office indicated how keenly he had wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to surrender.

Netanyahu’s declaration of war is maximum defiance of Trump. Trump makes deals — or at least claims that he does — and proudly claims that he does not make war. Netanyahu’s Iran war scuttles American deal-making and threatens to pull the United States into war-making. If Netanyahu forces Trump into the art of war rather than the art of the deal, it will make manifest that Trump’s second term is as confused and weak in foreign affairs as he is in trade policy.

There is another consideration, too, rather darker but not to be excluded. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states share Israeli opposition to Iran’s nuclear program and have been largely supportive of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. A blow against Iran helps them on long-term strategic and security matters — and generates a fortune in the short term as oil prices spike.

Is it not possible that Israel and its Gulf allies may have concluded that any opposition from Trump could be handled simply by funnelling more money to the Trump family? The extra profits from oil in the next weeks alone would provide more than enough to take care of Trump, who can be bought rather cheaply in Gulf terms. Having just completed his grift tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump has demonstrated that a few hundred million here and there can work wonders.

Time is also running short in Israel. Twenty months into the war against Hamas — begun with the Netanyahu government’s catastrophic failure to prevent the massacres of October 7 — Israel still has not achieved its military goals, whatever they may be. The hostages have not been fully returned, and no one seems to have any plan for how Gaza will be governed when the guns cease. With each passing week the voices in Israel of exhaustion, frustration and exasperation grow. Just this past week Netanyahu’s government narrowly escaped being defeated in the Knesset.

To remain in power after the 2022 election, Netanyahu fashioned a coalition that included extremist parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who became national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who became finance minister. “Extremist” is the term used by the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom, who this week

sanctioned

both ministers, accusing them of “(inciting) extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.”

That Israel’s longtime allies would sanction members of Israel’s cabinet is a diplomatic earthquake, and evidence of how isolated Israel has become under Netanyahu in the past year. Time is running short there, too. Netanyahu has few allies left; he has the shared interest of the Gulf states, and the reluctant, hardly reliable Trump. If they turned on him, Israel would be completely isolated. Thus the imperative to act now.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is unlikely to prevail in next year’s election, weighed down by his manifold failings and burdened with the ugly policies of his coalition partners. He will finish with a bang, not a whimper. Those who care deeply about Israel’s peace and prosperity, safety and security, are right to be worried.

National Post

• IDF intercepts 100-plus Iranian drones beyond Israeli airspace
• Read Benjamin Netanyahu’s full speech to Israelis regarding attack on Iran