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TOP STORY

The Senate, not normally a hub of political intrigue, has recently witnessed a sudden tide of defections to the Conservative caucus. So far this month, three Senators — two of whom were appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — have announced that they will henceforth be sitting as Conservatives.

It’s been an unexpected reprieve for a caucus that was increasingly lurching towards extinction. As of this writing, 85 of 105 Canadian Senators were appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Before the recent floor-crossings, one third of the 11 remaining Tories were set to reach mandatory retirement age within the next two years.

As to why this is happening, the new Tory senators all cited different reasons, ranging from a generalized horror with regards to the state of the country, to a desire to “build bridges” on Indigenous reconciliation.  

Below, Canada’s first new Conservative senators since 2013, and why they went blue.

Mary Jane McCallum

Mary Jane McCallum, a veteran dentist and member of the Barren Lands First Nation in Manitoba, is the only member of the Senate to have been sent to an Indian residential school. From age 5 to 16, she attended Guy Hill Residential School. In Senate testimony, she has described her main emotions during that period as “overwhelming loneliness” and a “bewildering feeling of abandonment.”

Indigenous issues and reconciliation have come up often in her Senate work. In just the last couple of weeks, McCallum tabled legislation that would

bind the RCMP

to follow “First Nations laws,” and

another bill

that would allow the prosecution of First Nations laws by Crown lawyers.  On June 3, she said

she would be asking for a Senate probe

into whether Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people constituted “a crime against humanity and a genocide.”

As to why McCallum decided to join the Conservative caucus, in

a Tuesday statement

she framed it as a way towards “building bridges.”

“Our communities have long sought opportunities for greater collaboration and mutual understanding,” she said. “By joining the Senate Conservative Caucus I hope to help broaden the conversation and ensure Indigenous perspectives are reflected across the full political spectrum.”

BREAKING 🚨 DERNIÈRE HEURE

Senator Mary Jane McCallum Joins Senate Conservative Caucus
La sénatrice Mary Jane McCallum rejoint le caucus conservateur au Sénat pic.twitter.com/N7VnKLixlg

— Senator Leo Housakos (@SenatorHousakos) June 10, 2025

David Richards

A novelist and playwright before he was appointed to the Senate by Trudeau in 2017, David Richards has been a vocal critic of the Liberal government for some time now.

This was most notable in 2023, when Richards delivered a scathing critique of the Online Streaming Act, the bill that gave broad powers to the CRTC to impose content quotas on streaming platforms such as YouTube and Netflix.

“I think it’s censorship passing as national inclusion,” he said in a Senate soliloquy that mentioned George Orwell, Cicero, the East German Stasi and the censorship regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

“I think, overall, we have lately become a land of scapegoaters and finger pointers, offering accusations and shame while believing we are a woke society,” he said, concluding “this law will be one of scapegoating all those who do not fit into what our bureaucrats think Canada should be.”

Richards’ first Senate statements since the reopening of Parliament have stuck to the same general themes. On June 5, he asked Marc Gold, the government’s representative in the Senate, if he could “admit that much of the policy that the former government promoted in this chamber has bled in many ways into the horrible calamities that this country finds itself in today?”

Larry Smith

Larry Smith is the least surprising of the three to sit under the Conservative banner, given that he was appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has always identified as a conservative and was a candidate for the Conservative Party multiple times.

Nevertheless, it was only three years ago that Smith decided to leave the Senate Conservative caucus in order to join the Canadian Senators Group, a non-partisan caucus formed mostly of Liberal appointees.

It wasn’t a clean break with his Tory ties, but the move was interpreted as a note of dissatisfaction with the more populist direction of the Conservative Party, a course that was best highlighted by the events of Freedom Convoy, which saw factions of the Tories either support or denounce the anti-mandate blockades. Notably, Smith opposed Pierre Poilievre’s bid for the Conservative leadership, favouring Jean Charest instead.

In a statement

announcing his return

, Smith didn’t detail what had changed, but said “it’s great to be back with the team” and that he looked forward to contributing to a “constructive, focused Conservative voice in the Senate.”

 

IN OTHER NEWS

According to

reporting by The Economis

t on the state of an emerging Canada-U.S. trade pact, the deal could result in an unprecedented situation in which the

United States is given first dibs on any resource exported by Canada.

“People briefed on the negotiations say the United States would be guaranteed first right of refusal on Canadian resources,” reads the story. It’s not really the kind of policy that exists between sovereign nations, which is why The Economist made a point of highlighting it. And the publication doesn’t miss the irony that such a measure is apparently being entertained by a Canadian government that was only recently declaring that U.S. President Donald Trump intended to “break us, so that America can own us.”

Last December, the Trudeau government announced the last in a series of surprise gun bans, with 324 models of firearm suddenly becoming prohibited. Overnight, any Canadian who used one of the listed firearms for hunting or target practice was suddenly required to keep it locked up at all times lest they risk criminal prosecution. But the strangest aspect of the ban was the claim that the firearms would eventually be seized by Ottawa in a buyback and turned over to Ukrainian military. It was always a tenuous claim; the list was filled with low-power “plinker” rifles that would be useless on a battlefield. This week,

the CBC confirmed that Canada has not, in fact, sent any of the prohibited firearms to Ukraine.
According to earlier reporting by Postmedia,

Ukraine did indeed send over a list of used weapons it would be interested in, but it was almost entirely for arms far more powerful than anything in the hands of Canadian gun owners, such as grenade launchers.

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• Chris Selley: Our supreme court’s chief justice is a busted flush. What will we do about it?
• ‘It’s unacceptable’: Brother of Jagmeet Singh says Canadians warned about risk to their life deserve protection

In case you were still wondering whether the federal government’s attitude has changed under its new leadership — well, it hasn’t.

In a House of Commons debate earlier this week, the new Liberal immigration minister, Lena Diab, evaded questions, defended her government’s record of over-immigration and finger-wagged the Opposition for drawing a connection between housing shortages and steep population growth.

Diab had to face questions during parliamentary proceedings on the country’s main estimates. She simply refused to answer many of them, deflecting to her colleagues in other departments.

How many people have been removed from the country since December? That was a question for the public safety minister,

she said

. As for the plan to get them to go: “We have rules in this country, and we expect people to follow those rules.”

Immigration officials

estimated

in April 2024 that there were up to 500,000 people living in Canada illegally, noting that, “There are no accurate figures representing the number or composition of undocumented immigrants residing in Canada.” If only there existed a minister who could rejig the system to better track that information …

Alas, the questioning continued. Why bring in hundreds of thousands of people when

millions

of Canadians can’t find a family doctor? That’s a question for the health minister,

said Diab

, the primary person responsible for intake numbers.

Should non-permanent residents be deported if they’re charged with a crime? That’s the

business

of public safety and border services. What was the colour of MP Melissa Lantsman’s shirt, which was observable from across the aisle? Diab wouldn’t even answer that, stating only that, “The member would probably know more than me the colour of her shirt. She is wearing it.”

Diab is, at least, armed with the Liberals’ “2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan,” which attracted hopeful applause when it was released in the fall. That plan is aimed at achieving a relative reduction in new entrants in the coming years, and thus Diab pointed to it as evidence of the government regaining control over the situation.

The overall

goal

for 2025, according to the plan, is to shrink Canada’s population by 0.2 per cent, but onlookers don’t believe it: CIBC, for example,

estimates

that we’re headed for another year 1.1 per cent growth — or roughly 460,000 more people, by my calculation — in part because many people with expiring visas are expected to stay.

Hence a

question

from Saskatoon MP Brad Redekopp: “How can you set immigration targets, minister, if you do not know how many people have left the country.” The reply: border services and the public safety department are responsible for exit numbers. It’s as if Diab views immigration as a force of nature rather than a completely human-controlled process, under the complete responsibility of elected officials in Ottawa.

And while the new plan projects less extreme inflows than the post-COVID years, they’re still uncomfortably high. It

aims

, for example, to issue 437,000 study permits in 2025. That’s more than twice the number of new international students who came to Canada in 2017 (196,400), and quadruple that of 2012 (106,250), per

Statistics Canada

.

For permanent residents, the target number for this year is now 395,000 — better than the previous 485,000, but still

vastly greater

than 2014’s 260,000. And yes, the Liberals are now looking to close some asylum-seeker loopholes with the proposed Bill C-2, but to actually pull off meaningful change, they

will need

a minister who’s actually willing to say “no.”

Whether Diab has that capacity, we’ve yet to see. Her words are little consolation for those who are currently feeling the most heat due to Canada’s rapid population growth: last year, banks were

warning

that youth unemployment was under pressure from large inflows of unskilled workers; now, even the Bank of Canada

admits

that high immigration from low-income countries has depressed wages.

“Does the minister believe that the large influx of foreign workers is depressing wages for young Canadians?” asked Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan MP Garnett Genuis. “Immigration is our strength,” responded Diab.

Quebec MP Bernard Généreux noted the nationwide housing shortage in a question, which was met with

moralizing

from the minister. “Once again, it is not the fault of immigrants,” Diab said, attempting to malign the observation that immigration is linked to housing pressures.

In 2023, the country saw 240,000 housing starts — relative to 1.2 million newcomers, per the

Aristotle Foundation

. That’s one house for every five newcomers. Back in 2015, we built one home for every two-or-so new entrants. Anyone with a basic awareness of the real estate and rental markets will know that there have been real, painful consequences to this widening ratio.

Even the Liberals are aware: Diab’s department was warning in 2022 that immigration was

outpacing

construction, to the detriment of affordability, and their latest immigration plan explicitly aims to reduce the housing shortage. There’s nothing wrong with understanding the critical, and obvious, link between these two factors.

It may well be that Diab manages to fix the immigration system and bring population increases down to a more manageable level in the coming years, but we best keep our expectations low. From an attitude perspective, at least, we have more of the same.

National Post

• Terry Glavin: We’re not Los Angeles yet, but it might be coming
• Jamie Sarkonak: Carney’s border bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to curb immigration

“I don’t know who paid for that, so how can there be a conflict of interest?”

That hall-of-fame, mic-drop Canadian quote,

delivered to National Post’s Christopher Nardi this week

, came from no less an authority than the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Richard Wagner.

The thing Wagner supposedly doesn’t know who paid for is

a hideous bronze bust of himself

that sits in the entrance hall of the Supreme Court building, where it breaks at least two longstanding traditions: one, that only former chief justices get publicly busted; and two, that the busts indicate their provenance.

Let us pause here to consider the proposition Canada’s most senior jurist has placed before us, in public, as if he thought he was defending himself effectively.

We are to believe he just showed up to work one morning to find himself immortalized in bronze in the lobby of his office, and not only did he not know where this bronze bust came from, but at no point in the many months since it showed up has he bothered to

inquire

where it came from.

“The Chief Justice’s bust was donated to the Court by a donor who specifically asked to remain anonymous. For this reason, the plaque bears no mention of the donor. We have no information on the cost of the bust,” the Supreme Court’s executive legal officer Stéphanie Bachand told National Post last year. “Neither the Chief Justice nor the court’s administration know about the donor’s identity.”

If you believe that — and far be it from me to suggest you should doubt the word of a fine, upstanding, Jesuit-educated judge such as Wagner — then isn’t that a bit of a problem in itself? Canada’s decider-in-chief wasn’t even a bit curious? Can anyone just donate a grotesque likeness of a Supreme Court justice, FedEx it to the Supreme Court, and expect it to be prominently on display when they show up a week later?

It’s not as though Wagner doesn’t take ownership of the court’s other general affairs. At the same press conference Wednesday where he disavowed any knowledge of how the unexpected statuary arrived, he updated reporters on the renovation schedule for the Supreme Court building, and confirmed the court would be hearing cases in Halifax in 2027. He also wants new robes for the justices, because that was definitely the squeaky wheel that needed greasing.

Indeed, he often seems more preoccupied with the court’s general affairs and public image, both international and domestic, than he does with deciding cases.

From 2015 to 2019, the Court heard an average of 63 appeals per year

. In 2024 it heard 39.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 “Year in Review” document

delves into the court’s “outreach initiatives aimed at the public, students and educators, and legal professionals,” which efforts are apparently “essential to strengthening trust in the judicial process.”

Headings include “Inspiring elementary and secondary students,” and “Supporting judicial education in Canada and around the world.” Readers learn of the justices’ various overseas trips, including to the Association of Francophone Constitutional Courts conference in Albania, which is about as francophone as Calgary.

Wagner has no compunction about weighing in on political matters (while obviously insisting he would never do such a thing). “In an era where misinformation and disinformation are so pervasive, judges and courts must do everything they can to explain who they are and what they do. Trust in our institutions depends on it,” the court’s 2024 Year In Review document avers.

Good God, man, no it doesn’t. Most Canadians don’t know who you are, and they don’t want to. “What you do” — in theory; less, alas, in practice — is hear cases and decide them based on a coherent legal framework that can be explained to a normal Canadian human being.

So not saying, for example, that sentencing Alexandre Bissonnette to a lifetime in prison without parole for slaughtering six parishioners at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City would

“bring the administration of justice into disrepute,”

when it would do precisely the opposite.

This isn’t a partisan thing. Conservative former prime minister Stephen Harper appointed Wagner to the Court. Liberal former prime minister Justin Trudeau made him chief justice. It was a group error. How do we fix it?

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

• Chris Selley: Job one for Canada in this scary new world is to stop being stupid
• Chris Selley: Earth to Liberals — First Nations are not an anti-development monolith

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This week, Canada’s National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa was desecrated — its walls graffitied with the words “Feed me,” presumably a reference to Gaza and likely scrawled by a pro-Hamas activist.

I vividly recall the day the monument was unveiled. As I walked through it for the first time, I remember the pride, the emotion and the sacred responsibility felt by the Holocaust survivors and their descendants who worked tirelessly to ensure Canada would have a solemn space to remember the six-million Jews who were murdered.

But the monument was never intended to be just a structure of stone and steel. It was meant to be a living reminder of what unchecked antisemitism can lead to. It was meant to warn future generations of the consequences of silence, complicity and hate. And yet, here we are.

The defacement of this sacred site shocked the nation. But what shocked me more was the ease with which political leaders rushed to condemn it. Statements flowed swiftly and predictably. Everyone, it seems, is passionate and eager to stand up for dead Jews. But us live ones are calling and no one is answering.

I appreciated Prime Minister

Mark Carney’s tweet

that he is “appalled by the National Holocaust Memorial being vandalized by graffiti.” Two days prior, after visiting the Nova Exhibition in Toronto — a powerful tribute to the victims of October 7 —

Carney wrote

, “We can’t look away from this hate, or from the rise in antisemitism we’ve seen in Canada since. We will fight to protect Jewish communities at home.”

Both the Holocaust monument and the Nova exhibit are a warning to humanity. We refuse to be future statistics. We are living Jews here and now — and on behalf of our community, I am still waiting for a reply to my personal letter to the prime minister sent on May 29, just two days after an antisemitic riot broke out outside our organization’s benefit event in Toronto.

In that letter, I described the very hatred he now condemns: “Some attendees, deeply shaken, said the hatred reminded them of the stories their families told about Europe in the 1930s. It started the same way: mobs denouncing Jews, attempting to isolate them from public life, striking fear into their hearts. This isn’t a page from a history book. It is happening at Jewish events every day on Canadian soil.”

A close friend of mine, William Friedman, a prominent lawyer who contributed so much to this nation, and the child of Holocaust survivors, also wrote to Carney. His letter was deeply personal: “My parents survived Auschwitz. My baby sister, just a toddler, did not.… I have always been a proud Jewish-Canadian — until now. For the first time in my life, I am afraid for what it means to be a Jew in Canada.”

The response? A perfunctory note stating that his concerns should be directed to Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand — the same minister who, not long ago, falsely

accused Israel

of using food as a weapon of war. She, too, condemned the desecration of the Holocaust monument. But you cannot condemn antisemitism while also inviting it through false accusations levelled against the Jewish state.

Though their words are appreciated, what we need now is action. This week, the Abraham Global Peace Initiative released a working paper proposing the creation of a homeland security task force — a permanent body headquartered in Ottawa that would be able to deploy rapidly to protect Jewish institutions and events, and work alongside police to ensure real-time security and deterrence.

The idea is not radical. It is common sense. And it is necessary.

The Holocaust monument reminds us where antisemitism can lead if left unchecked. If we ignore the warning signs now, we will fail the very lesson that monument was built to teach. I remain hopeful, because I believe that Canada is better than this. I believe we can rise to the occasion, that we can look beyond politics and remember that the measure of a nation lies in how it protects its most vulnerable.

We must not only remember the past. We must protect the present.

National Post

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

• Avi Benlolo: Carney needs to recognize Canada’s antisemitism problem
• Avi Benlolo: The Jewish community is under attack — will you stand with us?

U.S. President Donald Trump is fortunate in the array of political enemies who have chosen to face him. They managed to turn real stories about over-the-top immigration raids into news reports about anti-American riots, overwhelmed and incompetent officials, and the White House riding to the rescue. Idiots in the streets and those holding office in California transformed a debate over immigration policy into marketing for Trump’s vision of bare-fisted and supercharged law enforcement.

On June 7, after violent protests broke out in Los Angeles against raids by federal agents enforcing the administration’s deportation policy for undocumented immigrants, President Trump signed a

memorandum

claiming “numerous incidents of violence and disorder have recently occurred and threaten to continue in response to the enforcement of Federal law by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other United States Government personnel.” He went on to “call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard” under

10 U.S.C. § 12406

, a law which authorizes such a step in cases of invasion or rebellion. Seven hundred

Marines

will join them in the coming days.

The protests had rapidly degenerated into riots. Writing for the

Los Angeles Times

, Matthew Ormseth and James Queally

described

how “some in the crowd lobbed bottles and fireworks at the LAPD,” “vandals set fire to a row of Waymos,” and “people wearing masks flung chunks of concrete — and even a few electric scooters — at” California Highway Patrol officers. L.A. Police Chief Jim McDonnell conceded his officers were “

overwhelmed

” by the violence.

Tellingly, Ormseth and Queally noted that the riots “diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations — large-scale immigration sweeps.”

That’s too bad. The Trump administration promised to focus its deportation efforts on violent criminals. But ICE has also picked up

day labourers

seeking work,

immigrants trying to pursue the bureaucratic path to legal immigration

, and even

citizens

who were

wrongly detained

by overaggressive federal agents. There’s plenty of room for debate over the wisdom and decency of the Trump administration’s policies.

But the face of opposition to deportation is now rioters and feckless politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Bass

denounced

the deployment of “federalized troops” as a “chaotic escalation.” She then

imposed a curfew

on downtown Los Angeles to curb the rioting, seemingly confirming Trump’s point.

Newsom

huffed

that Trump “commandeered 2,000 of our state’s National Guard members … illegally, and for no reason.” He gave a

glitch-plagued

televised address to criticize Trump’s actions, reaffirming his reputation as incompetent and out of touch, which he

earned during the LA fires

and his state’s COVID response when

he ignored his own restrictions

.

Better people could have made a strong case that it was up to Californians to address the riots. After all, the Guardsmen called up by Trump under emergency powers are assigned to “protect ICE and other United States Government personnel” and “Federal property.” As state troops in their usual capacity, they could be deployed by California officials to augment the LAPD and other local law enforcement.

Better people could have pointed out that President Trump bypassed the

Posse Comitatus Act

, which restricts the use of active-duty military for law-enforcement by tendentiously invoking the power to put down rebellions. And that law confers power over the National Guard — not regular military. Tacking on the Marines seems nothing more than an effort to see what the administration can make stick.

“Preemptive nationwide deployment of the military is the very opposite of using the military as a ‘last resort,’”

warns

Elizabeth Goiten of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “It is so wildly out of keeping with how the Insurrection Act and 10 U.S.C. § 12406 have been interpreted and applied that it should be entitled to no deference by the courts.”

But we don’t have better people. We have images of rioters and clips of the mayor and the governor downplaying the violence and clumsily posturing for advantage by courting the worst elements.

“What’s unfolding in California should make it glaringly obvious that Democratic officials aren’t yet ready for a real reckoning with their party’s far left,”

cautions

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira.

Unfortunately for the whole country, Trump’s cavalry-to-the-rescue moment eases the way for his larger law-enforcement agenda. He federalized the National Guard with minimal excuse and threw in Marines because he can, but he also has a plan to supercharge the recent practice of militarizing policing.

In April, well before the smell of burning Waymos filled Los Angeles streets, President Trump issued an

executive order

to “increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement” and to provide cops with military training.

That wasn’t the first time the president talked about empowering police. Last year, he called for giving them

complete immunity from prosecution

. In 2017 he

urged cops to be rough on suspects

.

Nor is Trump the first politician to blur the lines between the military and civilian law enforcement.

“Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement,” Diane Cecelie Weber wrote in a  

Cato Institute briefing paper in 1999

.

In 2007, Radley Balko, then of 

Reason Magazine

, 

told

  the House Subcommittee on Crime that the transfer from the Defense Department to police of “equipment designed for use on the battlefield” was increasing police violence against the public. Balko later wrote 2014’s  

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces

.

Militarized policing increased friction between police and the public. That led to the protests-turned-riots of 2020 which started as calls for reform and ended — as with LA’s immigration protests — in chaos.

With violence, incompetence, and cluelessness, President Trump’s opponents have cleared the way for him to use the military in a law-enforcement capacity. They’ve made it easier for him to reduce and remove restraints on police conduct. Americans will all pay the price.

National Post

• Gavin Newsom’s Trump battle won’t save him from Californians angry at hard-left agenda
• Terry Glavin: We’re not Los Angeles yet, but it might be coming

SDEROT, Israel — On Wednesday morning, as all eyes were on the violence and worsening food shortage in the Gaza Strip, attention in Israel began to shift. Reporting on some of the details would be prohibited by the military censor in Israel. Others are more banal — like the sudden and extreme malfunctioning of navigation apps.

Israelis have witnessed such things before. Often, in the hours or days preceding significant military operations, odd, seemingly unrelated things happen. In retrospect, the connections become apparent.

By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, there were shards of speculation popping up on social media, and rumours swirling throughout Israel. Was Israel — perhaps in tandem with the United States — preparing to attack Iran?

In recent days, U.S. President Donald Trump’s optimism over the prospects of forging a “deal” with Iran has been overtaken by his discussion of much

darker possibilities

.

In

an interview

with the Pod Force One podcast that was recorded on Monday (but not broadcast until Wednesday), Trump spoke explicitly of his waning confidence about coming to an agreement on the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

“I’m less confident now than I would have been a couple of months ago,” he said, speculating that “something happened to them.”

Trump was unequivocal in stating that the United States would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons — period. But it would be best for all, he said, if an agreement could be reached and military action averted.

“It would be nicer to do it without warfare, without people dying,” he said. “But I don’t think I see the same level of enthusiasm (from Iran) for them to make a deal.”

Following threats issued by Iran against American military bases in the region, the United States

issued an order

to evacuate certain personnel from Iraq and take all measures possible to protect American military bases and assets.

Shortly after announcing the Iraq-focused moves, the White House issued a similar directive to all non-essential American military personnel serving on bases in Bahrain and Kuwait (note that Qatar, the ever-slippery “go-between,”

which also hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, was not specifically threatened by Iran

.)

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday as the war of words escalated, Iranian Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh was blunt, warning that Iran would target U.S. military bases in the region if the United States attacked Iran first.

“Some officials on the other side threaten conflict if negotiations don’t come to fruition,”

he said

. “If a conflict is imposed on us … all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them in host countries.”

Nasirzadeh’s threats were reinforced hours later by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who affirmed that Iran had no intention of acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet in the next breath, he lashed out at any country that presumes to dictate what Iran may and may not do.

And then there was the tone set out in a

post on X

by the Iranian mission to the United Nations: “Threats of ‘overwhelming force’ (by the U.S.) won’t change facts: Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon, and U.S. militarism only fuels instability.

“CENTCOM’s legacy of fueling regional instability, through arming aggressors and enabling Israeli crimes, strips it of any credibility to speak on peace or non-proliferation. Diplomacy—not militarism—is the only path forward.”

By Thursday, there was a tsunami of speculation within Israel as to what it all means. It is widely believed that Iran has enough uranium enriched to near-weapon grade to produce an atomic bomb at the time of its choosing.

Both the United States and Israel are in absolute agreement that a nuclear-armed Iran is not something that either country can abide. The Iranian regime is fervently anti-Zionist and has pledged repeatedly over decades to destroy the State of Israel.

Israel and the U.S. take those threats very seriously.

Throughout the day on Thursday, the pace of warnings, evacuations and alarms continued to build.

Meeting in Vienna on Thursday morning, the International Atomic Energy Agency

passed a resolution

criticizing Iran for the first time in 20 years for not complying with its nonproliferation obligations, including its failure to provide information about nuclear material and activities at various locations.

The resolution was supported by the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as Canada.

Within hours of the vote, Iran responded in kind. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran stated that a new

uranium enrichment facility

had already been built and will be equipped soon with new centrifuges — presumably in pursuit of ever greater quantities of enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

Whereas many experts are focused on the readiness of Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear development sites, any such attack would have to be executed with American diplomatic and military support.

It is widely believed that Israel lacks the capability to deal a decisive blow to Iran’s nuclear capabilities by itself, thus necessitating direct American engagement.

Such a military operation is, of course, fraught with risk. It is the type of attack that is done once — with maximum impact. It also has the potential to set of a chain reaction of events that spins out of control.

Seasoned experts caution that the heightened rhetoric may be intended to pressure Iran to finalize an agreement with the United States, but, in this tinderbox, all it takes is one match for everything to go up in flames.

And it is on this precipice that the Middle East — and possibly the world — teeters at the moment. There is an eerie stillness that is all too familiar as we wait.

National Post

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

• Jesse Kline: Israel, U.S. should seize opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program
• Ali Siadatan: The Iranian regime’s apocalyptic worldview

After several days of riots and rabble-rousing in response to the Trump administration’s ham-fisted determination to round up illegal immigrants, downtown Los Angeles was placed under curfew on Tuesday. The disorder has spread to more than a dozen American cities. There have been scores of arrests.

It has all made for great television and amusing political theatre, with Democrats shouting righteously about the rule of law and due process while ignoring their own support for “sanctuary” laws that undermine their own government’s capacity to enforce federal immigration legislation. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump’s Republicans have invoked the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to back their plans for mass deportations. The 1798 law was about pirates.

Despite heartrending accounts of children torn from their parents’ arms, Americans are not generally overwrought about Trump’s hardline remedy to the preposterously intractable American political quagmire involving undocumented workers and border security.

A CBS-YouGov poll

shows Trump is polling better on this file than on the economy or inflation, with 54 per cent of respondents expressing approval.

In the popular imagination, Canadians would not abide such lowbrow measures as mass deportations of illegal immigrants, but in fact we would. Or rather roughly

half of us would

, which is more or less the same as the American polling results. Nearly half the respondents to a Leger poll undertaken for the Association of Canadian Studies last December said mass deportations are necessary to deal with illegal immigration in Canada.

It’s not for lack of evidence that 65 per cent of Canadians say Ottawa’s immigration levels are set too high. That was the view of only 35 per cent of respondents in 2019, and even after the Liberal government’s recent pledges to get its act together and scale back on the annual volume of newcomers, that’s the standpoint of nearly two-thirds of us. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue against it.

Statistics Canada’s “population clock” counted 41,681,71 people who were living in Canada as of Wednesday morning this week, up from 35,851,800 in 2015. This was the biggest spike in immigration in 60 years, contributing to Canada’s rank as the

second-worst country

for housing affordability, after Portugal, in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Despite reassurances from Prime Minister Mark Carney that his government intends to scale back the influx, the numbers keep going up.

StatsCan’s data for the end of the first quarter of this year shows there are 291,165 more

non-permanent residents

in Canada than there were in April of 2024, for a total of slightly more than three million people. Among them are 290,000 foreign students admitted this year. Additionally, asylum claimants numbered 457,000 by April this year, up by nearly 130,000 from 2024.

Then there’s the officially guessed-at number of perhaps 500,000 people

living and working illegally

in Canada.

The 2025 target for new temporary-resident arrivals is 673,650, declining to 543,600 by 2027 — but housing starts in Canada added only 245,000 units in 2024. What all this means is that if we’re extraordinarily lucky, Canada’s housing affordability catastrophe will remain at roughly the same crisis levels for the foreseeable future.

It doesn’t help that Immigration Minister Lena Diab doesn’t seem to know how many undocumented workers there are in Canada, or how many temporary workers leave Canada after their permits expire. Peppered by Opposition immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner in the House of Commons this week, Diab wouldn’t or couldn’t say how many of the million-plus foreign students from 2023 left Canada after their study permits expired. “Anybody whose visa expired is expected to leave,” she said.

Ottawa’s assumption that people simply leave when their visas run out is “a fiction,” according to former federal economist Henry Lotin, founder of the consultancy Integrative Trade and Economics.

Sky-high immigration levels aren’t the only cause of the breakdown in the relationship between average incomes and housing costs in Canada. Zoning rules and the cost of fees and development charges get a lot of headline play, but it is becoming increasingly clear that there’s a lot more going on, most of it involving profiteering and the

ubiquity of investors

in new housing starts.

Across party lines, there is a broad political reluctance to advance any policy that would actually reduce home prices in Canada. Meanwhile, eight in 10 Canadians have concluded that homeownership has become a

luxury for the rich

, and seven in 10 Canadians who don’t own a home say they never expect to own one.

“We are living through a paradigm shift — one in which homes are no longer primarily bought by local families, but by global investors,” says housing analyst John Pasalis. “Housing has become a financial asset unbound from local incomes, and policy has yet to catch up.”

On top of the economic impacts, there’s the matter of Canada’s fraying social fabric.

A huge surge in wealth migration from the People’s Republic of China in recent years has swamped Canada’s long-standing Cantonese communities and introduced grave threats to Canada’s political sovereignty. After all the scandals involving compromised federal politicians and manipulated federal election races, there is still no sign that the Carney government intends to proceed with a foreign influence registry.

With politically active immigrants from the Middle East emerging as a heavy counterweight to Canada’s long-standing affinity with the Jewish state of Israel, profound changes are underway in the formulation of Canada’s foreign policy and Canada’s traditions of religious tolerance.

For all the Liberals’ recent admissions of error, the Trudeau government’s immigration legacy is with us still, and there’s little evidence that a Carney government, despite its reassurances, will be making much of a break with it.

While Toronto has lately adopted an American-style “sanctuary city” policy through its Access T.O. initiative (“Access to City Services for Undocumented Torontonians), this doesn’t mean that Canada is hurtling towards American-style standoffs between federal and local enforcement authorities.

It’s just that while Americans are going through distinctly American convulsions related to immigration, Canada doesn’t have anything to brag about. Canada’s old consensus on immigration has been broken. The public trust in a functioning immigration system has been badly shaken.

It can’t go on like this.

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