On the morning of September 11, 2001, my biggest problem was a permission slip.

I was 12 years old and in Grade 7 at PS 89 in Tribeca, about a block from the World Trade Center. My class was supposed to go on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo that morning. When my humanities teacher, Mrs. Garvey, asked everyone to bring their signed permission slips to the front of the classroom, my stomach sank.

I had forgotten to get my mother’s signature.

I asked to be excused and went downstairs to the school office to call her. My mother, a single parent, worked for American Express at 3 World Financial Center, directly across from the World Trade Center.

I asked her to come over and sign my permission slip. She said she would.

What I didn’t know was that my mother had been heading toward the underground shopping complex beneath the World Trade Center to run an errand before work. My call brought her back toward my school. By the time she left, she decided to skip the errand and head directly to her office at American Express.

On the way, she noticed an airplane flying alarmingly low over Lower Manhattan. She wondered whether a movie was being filmed.

Then she watched it strike one of the Twin Towers.

She initially thought she had witnessed some kind of movie stunt or a horrific accident. Then she saw a second plane strike the other tower and realized it wasn’t an accident.

Inside my classroom, we didn’t know what had happened. I remember the room shaking and pencils falling from desks. I thought perhaps one of the custodians had dropped a heavy cleaning cart on the floor above us.

Then we felt another violent shake.

Our classroom windows faced Stuyvesant High School, so we couldn’t see the World Trade Center. Eventually an announcement came over the PA system. As I remember it, we were told there had been a “minor accident” at the World Trade Center. Teachers were instructed to take us downstairs to the cafeteria to be picked up by our parents.

I didn’t go directly to the cafeteria.

I was a curious 12-year-old who needed to know what was happening. I slipped away and took another staircase toward the schoolyard.

What I saw outside has remained with me for 25 years.

Manhattan had stopped moving.

Growing up in New York, I had never seen anything like it. People were standing motionless on the sidewalk, staring upward. For a moment, my 12-year-old mind couldn’t make sense of what could cause an entire street of New Yorkers to stop at once. I remember wondering if there had been some kind of alien landing.

Then I followed their eyes.

I saw the World Trade Center burning.

Smoke poured from the tower. Tiny objects appeared to be falling from high above. At that age, I assumed I was watching debris. Only later did I understand that some of what I saw may not have been debris at all.

I returned to the cafeteria. One of my classmates was crying because she, too, had someone close to her who worked at the World Trade Center.

I didn’t know where my mother was.

There were no smartphones showing someone’s location on a map. I couldn’t text her and ask if she was safe. I could only wait.

Eventually, she appeared. She hugged me, and we left.

Outside, my mother encountered a colleague who had also made it out. They stopped to talk. I don’t remember much of their conversation, but I remember becoming anxious.

I tugged on my mother’s coat and told her we needed to leave.

Not long afterward, I watched one of the towers collapse.

Then we ran.

We fled north through Lower Manhattan with thousands of others. The subways downtown were inaccessible, and returning home to Brooklyn wasn’t an option. Eventually, we reached Midtown and stayed with one of my mother’s friends.

We were extraordinarily fortunate. My mother survived. I survived.

For 25 years, I have occasionally wondered about that unsigned permission slip.

Had I remembered to get my mother’s signature the night before, I would never have needed to call her from school that morning. She might have continued with her errand beneath the World Trade Center instead of turning back toward me.

I will never know whether, by forgetting that permission slip, I inadvertently saved my mother’s life.

I only know that forgetting it changed where my mother was that morning.

Others around us were not so fortunate.

My Grade 6 social studies teacher, Mr. Lee, was one of the people who made history fascinating to me. I remember him telling our class that his brother had been killed aboard one of the hijacked aircraft.

After September 11, I remember seeing the effect that loss had on him. The energetic teacher I had known seemed changed.

That morning didn’t end for us when the smoke cleared. My school was displaced. My mother’s workplace at 3 World Financial Center was damaged, and her job was temporarily relocated to New Jersey.

I was a child. I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand everything I had witnessed.

I do now.

That is why, 25 years later and now living in Toronto, I was stunned to read reports that internal CBC guidance instructed its journalists not to independently describe September 11 as a “terrorist attack.”

CBC has since changed that guidance, allowing its journalists to directly describe September 11 as a terrorist attack. That was the right decision.

Twenty-five years later, September 11 is increasingly history rather than living memory. Millions of adults today weren’t alive when the towers fell. For them, what happened that morning will increasingly be something they learn about rather than remember.

The words we use to describe it matter.

Nineteen al-Qaida hijackers seized four civilian airliners in a co-ordinated attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The terror wasn’t an incidental consequence. It was the point.

I remember the classroom shaking and pencils falling.

I remember being told there had been an accident.

I remember walking into the schoolyard and seeing Manhattan standing still.

I remember looking up.

I remember waiting for my mother.

I remember tugging on her coat.

I remember watching a tower collapse.

And I remember running.

Twenty-five years later, we should be able to examine the history and consequences of September 11 without losing sight of the simplest truth about what happened that morning.

It was a terrorist attack.

I was 12 years old.

I was there.

Special to National Post

Jay Nyandak is a University of Toronto graduate and an IT Systems Administrator in Toronto who grew up in New York City.

For political observers, the Toronto mayoral election has been going on for months. But for the general public, the race gets underway this week.

Voters will cast their ballots in a little over six weeks, deciding whether to give incumbent Mayor Olivia Chow another term or opt for one of the main challengers: Councillor Brad Bradford or former federal minister Chris Alexander, a last-minute addition to the race.

Before they can make that decision, however, they will need to consider both Chow’s record and what she is promising for a second term as mayor.

One reason the race is only firing up now is that the period from May (when registrations opened) to October is a long campaign. People tune out during the summer. It’s natural to consider the stretch after Labour Day the real campaign, with the earlier months serving as a warm-up act.

The other reason, though, is that the incumbent has declined to campaign until now. While Chow registered for re-election at the end of May to make her intentions known, she’s so far done little to no campaigning.

She only launched her campaign Wednesday night. Before then, there were no policy announcements or campaign events. And her campaign website offers no substance.

This contrasts with Bradford, who has been vigorously campaigning since registering in May. Opinion polls have consistently shown Chow in the lead with Bradford in a close second. But what will they show now that she’s ramping things up?

Once she starts campaigning, everything changes. The question is how. Chow’s lead could significantly widen. Or, if she fails to meet the moment and doesn’t read the electorate’s pulse, she could fall behind.

The other month, I watched Chow deliver a speech to Scarborough Business Association members that was clearly designed to test out campaign themes.

The mayor focused on reducing 911 response times and keeping taxes low. These aren’t themes you’d expect from a longstanding NDP politician, especially one who has spent the past three years raising property taxes significantly higher than inflation .

Chow has since confirmed that lower tax increases will be her goal for a second term, arguing that the first round of larger increases was necessary to fix the budget and that lower rates can now be enjoyed.

This is the municipal version of how provincial and federal leaders always manage to drum up a balanced budget right when re-election time comes around. Let’s see if the voters buy it.

Chow is no political novice. She was first elected to public office over 40 years ago as a school board trustee. Long before her late husband Jack Layton was federal NDP leader, he ran for mayor of Toronto in 1991, and Chow won a council seat that year.

Chow’s mayoralty didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s been decades in the making and the prize is not something she and her team will give up easily.

Her campaign slogan, unveiled Wednesday , is a “caring, affordable, and safe city.” The re-election strategy may not be complicated. It could just be to pivot to the centre, say little and lean into the incumbent advantage.

After all, Bradford’s aggressive campaign to unseat Chow goes against what has become a local political truism in Toronto — that an incumbent mayor can’t be beat.

Chow was elected just over three years ago in a by-election triggered by John Tory’s sudden resignation. That campaign lasted three months and about 10 major candidates sought the leadership of the country’s largest city.

One reason so many candidates put forward serious campaigns was that, without an incumbent, the race was anyone’s to win.

Recent Toronto political history shows that, since megacity amalgamation in the 1990s, few serious candidates have stepped forward to challenge an incumbent mayor.

When Tory ran for re-election in 2018, the only serious challenger came in second with 24 per cent of the vote. Then when he ran for his third term in 2022, he was virtually unopposed. This pattern wasn’t unique to Tory; similar scenarios played out during the re-elections of the right-leaning Mel Lastman and the left-leaning David Miller.

From now until the election, I look forward to offering regular dispatches examining the campaign’s issues, personalities and themes.

My first regular gig with the National Post was covering the iconic 2010 election won by Rob Ford and then I experienced the 2023 mayoral election as one of the leading candidates, so this is familiar terrain.

National Post

Anthony Furey is a former journalist and past Toronto mayoral candidate who now works in corporate consulting.

It was the day after Christmas, 2024, and nine-year-old Victoria Desjardins was riding in the car as her mom drove through the Calgary intersection of Southland Drive and Macleod Trail when a Dodge Caravan came careening towards her at 170 kilometres per hour through a red light. The driver, repeat criminal Duane Nepoose, was high on meth and probably also adrenaline — he had just violently robbed the car from its owner and was now evading police. The impact was so brutal that Desjardins couldn’t survive her injuries; Nepoose, however, lived.

He was sentenced to 10 years’ jail at the end of August , having pleaded guilty to robbery, fleeing police, dangerous driving causing death and three counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm (Desjardins’ mother and sister were seriously injured, as was another woman in a different vehicle). Six total charges, down from the initial 11 . But the sentencing decision wasn’t solely a condemnation of Nepoose’s crimes: the judge also admonished the Crown prosecutor for allowing the victims too much leeway to express their loss.

Justice Indra Maharaj wrote that the victim impact statements filed in this case were “unusual number, breadth, scope, and content.” Twenty-two were submitted, and of those, 18 were presented to the court. Nine of these, she said, came from direct victims and the parents of one victim, and these were useful. Seven statements came from “aunts, uncles, and cousins of the direct victims,” which she said were less useful. And several more statements were given by “friends of the family,” portions of which had to be disregarded by the court because they “recounted dramatized details of the hospital scene or memorialized the deceased.”

For the most part, the judge didn’t list specific concerns with specific victim impact statements, but it was implied that at least some broke the rules.

The law sets out that victim impact statements must not mention the offender in a way that isn’t relevant to the writer’s loss, must not make unproven allegations, must not make comments about offences for which the offender wasn’t convicted, must not complain about others involved in the investigation or prosecution, and must not suggest a sentence. Courts can ignore parts of victim impact statements that violate these rules.

These limits are indeed important. If everyone tangentially affected by any crime had unlimited airtime to vent their thoughts about the criminal in court, the process would be bogged down with lengthy, largely legally irrelevant hearings that get in the way of other trials that need the courtroom space. And the court does indeed have a role in cooling the human tendency towards mob justice, which would be inflamed if everyone was allowed to show up, say, and call for an offender’s death.

In sentencing Nepoose, the judge explained that the Crown prosecutor must ensure that victim impact statements comply with the law: presumably, if someone strays outside the boundaries, the Crown’s job is to remind them of the rules and require that the writer edit the statement before it’s tendered in court. “Material that is irrelevant, inflammatory, prejudicial, or otherwise (outside Criminal Code bounds) should be removed or excluded before the statement is presented to the sentencing court,” Maharaj wrote.

But Maharaj went even further by admonishing the Crown for not ordering Desjardins’ grieving cousins to condense their victim impact statements into one.

“Three of the cousins of Miss Victoria Desjardins, very young children themselves, presented statements speaking, in their own age-appropriate manner, about the loss of their cousin. While it is clear that they have been impacted, it was also clearly very difficult, and concerning to this Court, for them to present their victim impact statements in such a foreign and adult environment as an open court proceeding,” wrote Maharaj.

“While I accept that these young relatives were genuinely affected, their statements largely addressed the broader family and community impact of the death. In my respectful opinion, that material could have been more appropriately and efficiently presented through a community impact statement by an adult.”

A statement by a babysitter “was also heartfelt but tended toward a memorial,” added the judge, and it “could have properly formed part of a community statement by the extended family.”

Quotes from the actual statements weren’t included in the sentencing decision, so it’s difficult to personally judge, but the judge’s comments raise questions regardless. Why shouldn’t children have the opportunity to express themselves in court when a relative is violently killed by a criminal’s intentional dangerous act? Why shouldn’t a babysitter be able to explain firsthand their devastation in the wake of losing a ward? If the hospital scene still traumatizes the family to this day, why shouldn’t they say so? Concerns about whether the content of a victim impact statement goes outside the rules are one thing, but it’s another to suggest that certain people affected by a senseless loss should have to compile their emotions into one omnibus statement. The Criminal Code doesn’t require it, after all.

The justice system is right to handle sentencing in a rational, careful manner, but it shouldn’t work to downplay the loss of victims, either. Victoria Desjardins was an outgoing, creative girl who loved the outdoors, and she had a lot of family members who were inevitably shaken to the core by the tragedy. The fact that so many people were moved to file victim statements should have been taken as a natural consequence of the devastation Nepoose inflicted upon an entire community. It shouldn’t have been treated as an annoyance.

National Post

It’s been 25 years since 19 terrorists hijacked four airplanes and smashed into two skyscrapers in New York City as well as the Pentagon, and caused the fourth plane to plunge into a Pennsylvania field after brave passengers fought back against the hijackers, who likely intended to hit the White House .

I remember well September 11, 2001. I was living in Victoria and was the B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. In the early hours, a producer from a Vancouver radio station, where I was scheduled for an interview later that morning, left a cryptic phone message: “Given what’s happened this morning, we obviously need to cancel this interview.”

Mystified, I turned on the television to see repeating video footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Anyone old enough to recall 9/11 will remember the horrific images: People jumping from the Trade Center towers to escape the flames; people fleeing lower Manhattan to escape the two towers before and after their collapse; firefighters, police, and a Franciscan friar who perished, carried away by those who survived.

9/11 marked a definitive end to the 20th-century belief that only economic battles mattered — the postwar idea contest between free enterprisers and Marxists about which economic system could best deliver the goods.

What 9/11 did was dramatically end the assumption that every outcome has a material cause, i.e., that poverty is always the cause for terrorism and that if only people were prosperous, revolutionary discontent might be muted. This belief was most famously articulated by Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, who wrote of the “end of history,” in a famous 1989 essay and later in a 1992 book .

Fukuyama’s claim was not that conflict would cease in the future, but that significant challengers to western liberalism, democracy and market economies seemed to be mostly absent with the collapse of communism. Fukuyama theorized that because western liberalism addressed the need for “recognition,” meaning participatory democracy for the individual, and because free markets were the best engine for prosperity, new challengers to liberalism and capitalism were unlikely to arise in the West or anywhere else. “Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism,” wrote Fukuyama in his 1992 book .

In that book, Fukuyama cited radical Islam as one potential counter to the West, but quickly moved on to other thoughts about the world we lived in. In short, even though there were early warning signs — including the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, terror attacks albeit mostly outside of the West, and the first (1993) attack on the World Trade Center — significant challenges to western civilization seemed few, and most of us were blissfully unaware.

Then 9/11 happened and the 19 men who attacked the symbols of the West were deeply committed fundamentalist Islamic radicals who possessed a worldview distinctly different than that which developed in the West. Many came from Saudi Arabia , a mostly prosperous nation; the chief architect behind 9/11 was Osama bin Laden, who himself came from a wealthy Saudi family .

And it didn’t matter that Americans had even funded Islamic Mujahideen resistance to Soviet communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s (of which bin Laden might have been a beneficiary). Bin Laden had a grudge against the West for his own reasons and his own ends.

In other words, we naïve Westerners encountered people who could not be bought off by material progress or even by our early alliance against Soviet Marxists. The 9/11 terrorists and others before and since have their own unique grievances which were not economic in origin. They possessed a distinct view of how the world should be ordered. It was and is a civilizational challenge traceable even back to early Islamic conquests starting in the seventh century.

In the decades since 9/11, much analysis of terrorism has occurred and with significant contributions from Canadian political scientists, two of whom are senior fellows at the Aristotle Foundation . Waller Newell, professor emeritus at Carleton University, wrote an insightful 2016 book, Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice and Terror . Newell guided the reader on a three-millennium ride through history’s Caesars, emperors, Kaisers, dictators, tyrants and terrorists to help properly understand the modern adversaries we face, and deal with them effectively to preserve our freedom.

One type of tyrant/terrorist to watch out for: the millenarian, whose ambition is to effect the wholesale transformation of society — the revolutionary utopian. In the 19th century such terrorists were anarchists and nationalists ; in the 20th century they were Marxists and Nazis (before and after taking power in Germany). In the later 20th century and now the 21st they are often Islamists with sponsors in Iran and Qatar .

Newell pointed out that while today’s terrorists and tyrants may claim to represent a pure form of Islam, they in fact undermine their own faith because, similar to the other two Abrahamic faiths, all three faiths assume “human beings are servants of God and powerless to do good without him.”

Put differently, the crude revolutionary project of Islamists attempts to create heaven on Earth. But that, as Newell wrote, is an assertion of “man’s absolute control over his own destiny.” That’s akin to challenging God’s authority, the elevation of man’s politics and power above divine power – blasphemy.

Another Canadian political scientist who has also spent time and intellectual effort understanding terrorism is University of Calgary political science professor Barry Cooper. In his 2004 book, New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, Cooper argued that there was a “spiritual motivation” that was central to the actions of terrorists today.

By “spiritual,” Cooper did not mean that in narrow religious terms but in opposition to material explanations for terror, as in assuming poverty is a “root cause” for terrorism.

While such dynamics sometimes exist, Cooper wrote that “a more conceptually adequate approach is provided by (political scientist) Eric Voegelin’s term “pneumopathology” — a disease of the spirit. Cooper then made a further distinction: “While terrorism has been used throughout the ages as a weapon in political struggles, there is an essential difference between groups who use these tactics for more or less rational political goals and those seeking more apocalyptic ends.”

As the publisher’s summary of New Political Religions described it, “Cooper argues that today’s terrorists have a spiritual perversity that causes them to place greater significance on killing than on exploiting political grievances.” Cooper gave two examples, Aum Shinrikyo, the terrorist organization that poisoned thousands of Tokyo subway riders in 1995, and al-Qaida, the group that launched the 9/11 terror attacks.

Cooper points out that this “spiritual perversity enables a human being, imagining himself empowered by God, to go on a campaign of mass destruction.” As evidence that Cooper was on to something, his book, New Political Religions was later found in Osama bin Laden’s library when U.S. special forces raided his lair and killed him in 2011.

As Cooper has written in National Post previously , “It is certainly true that most Muslims are not terrorists,” but the issue for Muslims and everyone else is that many “terrorists today not only claim to be Muslims, but to be ‘original’ Muslims, Salafis, genuine, true, ‘pure’ Muslims. Those claims are not just a problem for Islam, but for all of us.”

September 11 was a marker for a civilizational struggle that is ongoing. On one side of the struggle are western-origin notions of the rights and freedoms of the individual. They include individual-rights assumptions for freedom of inquiry, speech and criticism (including opposition to theocratic rule but critiques of faith itself if one so chooses). They also include assumptions about equal rights for women, among others.

Importantly, these assumptions are no longer purely “western” ones, given how attention to individual rights has spread worldwide in the past century including in Latin America, East Asian democracies, and a plethora of other nations including in Africa.

On the other side exists a collectivist view — in this case, driven by an extreme, fundamentalist version of Islam (and one that plenty of Muslims do not share, it should be noted).

At its core, the struggle is between those who prefer civilizations with an individual-focused rights system versus the collectivists. The latter are Islamist theocrats in charge of Iran, Afghanistan, and Hamas-controlled Gaza, and their sympathizers elsewhere in the world.

Lastly, even nations less enthralled with individual rights in a westen sense oppose radicals, theocrats and terrorists. That includes Muslims and others in the Arab world, such as the stern opposition to lslamists in the United Arab Emirates , and dissidents in and from Iran.

That individual-versus-collectivist fault line, with extreme religious dogma nourishing the latter in the 21st century, is what 9/11 revealed.

National Post

Mark Milke is the president and founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

• Terry Glavin: 25 years after 9/11, the West has given up
• Colby Cosh: Canada’s secret meeting with the Chinese military

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) has released another in its series of decisions that punish and publicly humiliate those who disagree with gender ideology.

The latest: a family physician who declined to administer a single injection of a puberty-blocking drug to a 14-year-old transgender-identifying patient was found guilty of discrimination and ordered to pay $20,000 for “compensation for injury to … dignity, feelings and self-respect,” plus $8,100 for the cost of the claimant’s “expert report” and — most outrageously — was instructed to “cease the contraventions and refrain from committing the same or similar contraventions.”

Note that I do not include the physician’s name, as he wished to protect his professional reputation with a publication ban on his identity. The BCHRT refused to do this.

At the request of the claimant’s mother, the physician referred the claimant, who’s referred to in the ruling as “Child Q,” to the Gender Clinic at B.C. Children’s Hospital in 2020, where Lupron, an injection used to suppress puberty, was prescribed. The teen did not wish to self-administer the drug and instead preferred that a physician do it. Administrative staff at the doctor’s office booked an appointment for one of the injections without the physician’s knowledge. When he realized what the appointment was for, he declined to administer the drug.

The doctor “was learning for the first time that the purpose of Child Q’s appointment was to receive a Lupron injection. He understood — wrongly — that this was part of a process for ‘gender reassignment therapy.’ He says that he had never had any experience with that branch of medicine. He testified that, because of his religion, he finds it ‘conflicting and difficult’ to be involved in any part of ‘gender reassignment,’ ” reads the ruling. In other words, the adjudicator claimed that puberty blockers don’t count as “gender-assignment therapy.” The physician testified that the patient’s mother “stormed out of the room” before he could offer any alternative. The child received the injection at a walk-in clinic later that day.

The family subsequently filed complaints with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. (CPSBC) and the BCHRT. In 2023, the CPSBC reprimanded the physician for “refusing to provide care related to gender transition to a patient on the basis of conscientious objection, without offering assistance to this patient in order that they could receive this care from another provider.”

The claimant was seeking $50,000 for the professed purpose of “making discrimination against transgender children in health care expensive.” The claimant also wanted the BCHRT decision to be “prominently” posted, in perpetuity, anywhere the physician works. Surprisingly, Devyn Cousineau, who wrote the decision, agreed with the impugned physician that this “would serve no purpose other than to punish him.” (Apparently publishing his name, fining him and demanding that he provide “gender-affirming care” in the future, under legal threat, was punishment enough.)

The claimant’s lawyer was non-binary-identifying trans activist Adrienne Smith, who also chaired the federal NDP convention last spring. Videos of Smith explaining the NDP’s equity card system, which allowed for delegates to jockey for speaking priority based on gender identity, skin colour or disability status, was criticized and mocked worldwide. Cousineau, meanwhile, is the same tribunal member who oversaw Canada’s infamous testicle-waxing discrimination cases. At the time, Cousineau notoriously wrote in a procedural ruling that transwomen receiving testicle waxing can constitute “critical gender-affirming care.”

In this latest ruling, Cousineau rejected the physician’s defence that administering puberty blockers was a violation of his religious beliefs or outside of his expertise or scope of practice. She also refused to admit the physician’s expert witness, Prof. Gary Goldsand, who specializes in medical ethics and intended to speak to the concept of conscientious objection in medicine. Cousineau wrote that she “can just as readily make findings of fact and draw inferences and conclusions without assistance from Prof. Goldsand.” She did, however, admit the claimant’s expert witness, Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, the director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Nursing. (Who also happens to have been called as an expert to testify against me in my free speech hearing with the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives. It’s a small world, after all.)

Cousineau’s ruling is fraught with several inaccuracies. First, she claims to have not required expert testimony on conscientious objection, when she clearly did. Health-care providers refuse to participate in or administer care all the time, typically related to euthanasia or abortion. This is explicitly permitted by health regulators and employers, including the CPSBC , which says that “licensees may make a personal choice not to provide a treatment or procedure based on their values and beliefs.”

The reason the CPSBC reprimanded the physician in this case was over his failure to have “any formal process in place” to refer patients like the claimant to another provider, if he conscientiously objected to providing care. Cousineau, on the other hand, found the physician guilty of discrimination merely for refusing to give the injection (though her ruling went on to discuss his failure to refer “for the sake of completeness”). She ordered the physician to “cease the contraventions and refrain from committing the same or similar contraventions” — in other words, to act against his conscience in the future.

Cousineau either doesn’t understand conscientious objection, or has imbued herself (and the BCHRT) with the authority to rescind this critical ethical right from health-care providers in the context of the “gender-affirming care” scandal. The message this sends to all health-care providers in B.C. is clear: provide trans health care to minors — or suffer the consequences.

Second, Cousineau misunderstands the concept of “scope of practice.” All health-care providers have a legislated scope that defines what they are legally allowed to perform in their roles. This scope is limited (among other factors) by an individual practitioner’s personal assessment of his or her competence to perform a given task. In the case of the Lupron injection refusal, Cousineau disagreed with the physician that he could not administer the drug because he is not familiar with, and does not provide, gender care. She minimized the treatment as a mere “intramuscular injection,” and wrote that, “The injection was not a specialized procedure or outside the everyday services of a family doctor.”

Using this logic, Cousineau could also argue that a physician must administer an abortion drug, or any of the intravenous medications used to euthanize Canadians via MAID. She also dismissively wrote that the physician “was not asked to prescribe the medication, or monitor its effects.” What she fails to understand is that health-care providers are legally responsible for the treatments they provide, no matter who prescribed it. “It was prescribed by someone else” is not an excuse for legal liability: providers are responsible for the drugs they administer and whatever effects those drugs produce.

Thirdly, Cousineau wrote that the physician’s “conduct was based on his misunderstanding that Lupron was for ‘gender assignment therapy’ and that it required him to have experience in that branch of medicine. In fact, although Lupron was part of gender affirming care for Child Q, it was not a treatment for ‘gender assignment.’ ” Cousineau made a distinction without a difference: we know from scientific data that around 98 per cent of children put on puberty-blocking drugs will go on to take opposite-sex hormones. Once children are set on the path of gender medicalization, they seldom get off it.

The claimant’s family physician had both the legal and ethical right to refuse to inject a child with “gender-affirming” puberty blockers. It is unconscionable that he has been punished for his refusal to participate in a known medical scandal , for religious reasons or otherwise.

In light of this and other rulings, including the grotesque $750,000 fine levied against former school trustee Barry Neufeld, the BCHRT seems to have taken up trans activism as its raison d’être. Undoubtedly, the BCHRT will continue to wield its power to bring financial and reputational ruin to its ideological opponents, until enough of us speak out. The question is: how much further are we willing to let this go?

National Post

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• FIRST READING: Canada one of the world’s last holdouts on medically transing children

For those of us who are old enough to remember where we were on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it is hard to believe that 25 years have passed. On this anniversary, I can’t help but wonder what Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind those infamous terrorist attacks, would make of the world today.

West’s inward turn

Bin Laden knew he could not defeat the United States by conventional military means, but he could terrorize, demoralize and try to persuade the West that it did not deserve to win. In his 2002 “ Letter to the American People ,” alongside the expected demands about Muslim lands and Israel, he attacked Americans for usury, drugs, gambling and sexual licence, blamed them for AIDS, denounced corporate money in election campaigns, condemned the atomic bombing of Japan and reproached Washington for refusing to sign the Kyoto accord.

As the Hudson Institute’s Paul Marshall has observed , bin Laden had spent a decade issuing statements that mentioned none of these things. But in this letter, bin Laden submerged his theology and borrowed the West’s own case against itself, attempting to appeal to western audiences through their own grievances. The gambit failed in 2002. But 25 years after 9/11, we seem to have become much more receptive to the case bin Laden was trying to make against the West.

The West now instructs its own children to hold it in contempt. Its classrooms, newsrooms and cultural institutions run a permanent seminar on western sin, while non-western societies whose conduct is immeasurably worse are treated as victims and granted a standing exemption from judgment.

Hudson Institute researcher Zineb Riboua calls this ideology “Third-Worldism”: the belief that world politics is fundamentally divided between a dominating North and a dominated South, with conflicts understood through the binary of colonizer and colonized. The categories carry their own moral verdict: those assigned the status of oppressed are granted legitimacy, while those deemed powerful are presumed guilty, regardless of who is actually exercising power or perpetuating oppression in a particular conflict.

Changing sympathies towards Israel is where the growing Third-Worldism is easiest to see. For most of this century, Americans overwhelmingly sympathized with Israel over Palestinians: according to Gallup , between 2001 and 2018, “Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies, with the gap averaging 43 points.” Today, a plurality of Americans sympathize with the Palestinians. Among Democrats, 65 per cent now sympathize with the Palestinians and just 17 per cent with Israel. And independents have crossed over, too. Last year, they favoured Israel by eight points; today they favour the Palestinians by 11.

But Riboua’s point is that the argument does not stop there. Anyone persuaded that Israel is a colonial imposition has already accepted the premise that convicts the United States, Canada and every other western country. Israel is simply the first stop.

For bin Laden, a worldview that cast his enemies as oppressors and their adversaries as victims would have been an extraordinary gift.

Antisemitism normalized

Jew-hatred is foundational to Islamist ideology, and bin Laden did not conceal it. The fatwa he issued in February 1998, three years before the attacks, was titled “ Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders .” It ruled that killing Americans and their allies, civilian and military, was a duty for every Muslim able to do it, anywhere in the world, “in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque (Mecca) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

It is not hard to imagine that bin Laden would have loved the October 7 attacks in Israel and the world’s reaction to it. Around 6,000 Gazans invaded the Israeli border, resulting in the rapes, kidnappings and murders of Jewish families in their homes and at a music festival. And the celebrations in western cities came within hours.

Antisemitism has permeated western life. The J7 task force , covering seven countries that contain the majority of the Jewish diaspora, documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025. In comparison to 2021, the number of total antisemitic incidents had risen 137 per cent, while violent incidents rose 78 per cent.

America’s enemies understand the power of this hatred better than we do. As Eliana Aiken, a policy fellow at Defense Technology Alliance, has documented , Russia, Iran and China have found since October 7 that antisemitism is an especially effective weapon for weakening the United States from within, through information warfare aimed at American opinion .

Antisemitism works so well because it can be attached to almost any grievance, offering people across the political spectrum a single culprit for otherwise unrelated frustrations. It is therefore effective on the far right and the far left, particularly among people who feel the American system has failed them and are looking for a convenient scapegoat.

The scale is industrial. In the month after October 7, Kremlin-linked Telegram channels posted about the Israel-Gaza war 9,000 times and drew 865-million views, according to Aiken. At its peak, Israel-related content on American TikTok was 98.6 per cent anti-Israel. The strategic goal need not even be hatred for its own sake, as long as America no longer trusts its institutions, no longer believes its power abroad is legitimate and no longer coheres enough to defend anything. Aiken’s warning is ultimately strategic: if Americans can be turned against one another, America’s adversaries can prevail without confronting it militarily.

Bin Laden needed 19 men and four aircraft to weaken the West. His successors need only our credulity.

We don’t talk about Islamism

The western commitment to tolerance and multiculturalism, noble in its origins, has hardened into a reluctance to do anything that might be mistaken for prejudice. CSIS actively avoids calling Islamist terrorism by name, instead labelling it “religiously motivated violent extremism.”

The United Kingdom’s commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross, reviewed Britain’s Prevent program, a counter-radicalization initiative that relies on individuals in education, health care, criminal justice agencies and police to report those in danger of becoming radicalized. His research found that there was a “cultural timidity” and an “institutional hesitancy” to confront Islamism for fear of accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity.

Many media outlets appear to have adopted the same nervous approach to naming Islamist terror. When a man drove a van into Berlin’s Pride parade in July, killing a woman and injuring 29 others, the New York Times informed its readers that a car had plowed through a park. British commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray argues that in stories involving an Islamist perpetrator, the vehicle is always granted a will of its own. The Pride organizers held a press conference at which one female participant acknowledged having hoped the perpetrator would turn out to be a white Christian man.

The West cannot properly confront a threat it will not name, and bin Laden’s successors are the beneficiaries.

The rotten apple

The Twin Towers, destroyed on 9/11, were symbols of American capitalism in a city that stands for western liberalism. That fateful day, New York’s police officers and firefighters were storybook heroes. Less than 25 years later, the city elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Having spent his life, as Murray puts it, marinating in postcolonial politics, Third-Worldism and anti-Zionism, Mamdani is hostile to capitalism, campaigned on the destruction of Israel’s legitimacy and wrote in 2020 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety. At the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2023 national convention, he told delegates that to make people care about Israel, they had to make the issues hyper-local , such as telling New Yorkers that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it has been laced by the Israel Defence Forces.

On his first day in office, he revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and the ban on city officials boycotting or divesting from Israel. He appointed as the city’s chief counsel Ramzi Kassem, who served as lead counsel to Ahmed al-Darbi, the al-Qaida operative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to his role in the 2002 bombing of the oil tanker MV Limburg. In July, he issued an official video denouncing Israel’s prime minister as the “architect of a horrific genocide,” on the strength of casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

Bin Laden would surely vote for Mamdani, if he could.

Post-truth era

In 2000, American historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt won her case against Holocaust denier David Irving in a London courtroom, and the verdict held because the machinery that establishes fact still worked: archives, expert testimony, a judge and a press that reported the outcome.

British historian Niall Ferguson and AI futurist and essayist John-Clark Levin argue that this machinery is now useless. Falsehood is no longer the work of a few cranks who can be met with evidence. It is produced deliberately, by states and by the proxies they fund, seeded into social media, amplified by algorithms that pay for fury and multiplied by accounts that are not humans.

This ideological interference is working. The right has been influenced heavily by Russian propaganda and the left by Islamist propaganda. In both cases, isolationism is advancing on both flanks of American politics, each version encouraged by messaging that serves a foreign government’s purposes. The premise, which bin Laden spent his life promoting, is that American power abroad is illegitimate and should be withdrawn.

The various accusations against Israel are case studies of the weakening of truth. On the accusation of genocide, conflict researcher Andrew Fox notes that, “Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7-million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.”

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s famine declaration of August 2025 turned out not to be true. As noted in a report from researchers at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, over a million tons of food aid entered Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 17, 2025, more than the United Nations’ and World Food Program’s estimated requirements. Almost none of this has been reported by the outlets that broadcast the original charges. The accusation circles the world; the correction barely leaves the building.

In November 2023, bin Laden’s letter went viral on TikTok, where it was venerated by young westerners .

The Red-Green Alliance

Bin Laden went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and regarded communism as godless. Now the red-green alliance has taken hold in the West. The result is two movements holding irreconcilable views on women, homosexuality and God, allied by the shared conviction that the West and Israel are the authors of the world’s suffering.

The Abraham conundrum

In 2020, four Arab states normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. On July 16, 2026, the Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya aired an interview in which Israel’s president called peace with Riyadh his dream. Bin Laden’s founding grievance was American troops in Saudi Arabia and the willingness of the House of Saud to deal with unbelievers. He would regard any Saudi normalization as a betrayal by his own country.

Documents recovered in Gaza record Yahya Sinwar telling his political bureau on Oct. 2, 2023, that Saudi normalization with Israel was advancing and that an extraordinary act was needed to stop it. Five days later, his men attacked Israel.

Bin Laden would have recognized the reasoning as his own. He also would have found solace in Arab public opinion. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index, a survey of more than 40,000 people across 15 Arab countries conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, found in that 87 per cent of respondents opposed recognizing Israel.

Treaties are signed by governments. Hatred is taught to populations. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, but over the following two decades, the kingdom began dismantling the ideological infrastructure it had spent a fortune exporting. The religious police lost their powers of arrest, the founder of Wahhabism came out of the national curriculum, most references to violent jihad were stripped from the textbooks and Riyadh announced it would stop funding mosques and religious institutions abroad. Critics say the change is narrower than advertised, but no one seriously argues the Saudi state still teaches what it taught in 2001.

This is the work Gaza now faces. As Israeli diplomat and politician Einat Wilf argues , disarming Hamas of its weapons means little without disarming it of its eliminationist ideology: the fiction that Gazans are refugees with a right of return to Israel, the claim to the land from the river to the sea and the refusal to concede that the war against Zionism has been lost. Saudi Arabia began a process of reform after producing most of bin Laden’s hijackers. Gaza has not begun it at all.

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we should look at the world through bin Laden’s eyes, because our enemies already are. The vulnerabilities he would probe are ones we can close. We must name Islamist ideology as an existential threat to the world, recognize antisemitism and anti-Zionism as tools to weaken our societies, insist that a fact remains a fact even after it becomes inconvenient and teach western values with pride. For all the insults and accusations levelled at the West, the traffic runs one way. Millions risk everything to reach our countries. We need to teach liberalism and democracy and be honest about how frightening the alternatives are.

If we strengthen ourselves that way, a bin Laden copycat will meet a West that is resilient and united rather than unsure of itself, divided and weak.

National Post

Sheryl Saperia is a lawyer by training and national security policy strategist. She was a principal drafter of Canadian counter-terrorism legislation, has advised governments and parliamentarians, and is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and CEO of Pearl Strategic Counsel.

• Terry Glavin: 25 years after 9/11, the West has given up
• Joe Adam George: Canada hasn’t learned from the 9/11 attacks how to keep terrorists out

There is a deep rot in this country. In the middle of a trade war with our greatest ally, the United States, our government has also initiated another trade war — this time with one of its historically closest allies in the Middle East, Israel. On Tuesday, the Government of Canada announced, through a series of statements, that it will impose trade restrictions on so-called Israeli settlements. In other words, on Jews.

Canada’s government is failing to work diplomatically, bilaterally and professionally. Instead, it is blowing up decades of positive relations with Israel. This is negligence. Alongside a joint statement issued by Canada, the United Kingdom and several other European countries, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand stated on social media that, “In the coming months, we will introduce restrictions on trade in goods with settlements in the West Bank that are illegal under international law.”

But wait, there’s more ridiculousness. As if Anand’s statement wasn’t clear enough in its attack on the one and only Jewish state, Prime Minister Mark Carney, along with his counterparts in Britain and France, also directed fire at Israel using stronger language: “Canada, France and the U.K. will therefore take steps to ban the importation of goods from settlements and enforce targeted measures against settlements.”

Any casual observer must inquire as to why is our government is relentlessly and disproportionately picking on Israel. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which was adopted by the Government of Canada, states that applying double standards with respect to Israel is antisemitic. Needless to say, boycotts of Israeli companies in the West Bank have proven to harm the livelihoods of Palestinian workers more than Israelis, as they force companies to simply relocate to Israel proper, thus precipitating Palestinian job losses, as was the case with SodaStream .

Israel could fit inside Canada roughly 450 times. But you wouldn’t know it given the outsized criticism Israel gets from our own government. There seems to be a drunken state of hatred not based on rationality and diplomacy, but on some kind of vicious vendetta that is harmful to our own national interests. Let’s be honest here: Canada wants to put down a productive country that is contributing to the world. Israel is producing more economic output per person than is Canada — approximately US$60,300 (C$83,300) per capita compared with US$55,700 in Canada.

Worse, Ottawa’s proposed ban on goods from Israeli settlements raises serious questions about whether they would be legal under the terms of the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. The agreement applies to “the territory where (Israel’s) customs laws are applied” — which has always included the West Bank.

Canada is both claiming to defend a rules-based international order, while potentially disregarding a binding free-trade agreement it freely negotiated with Israel. Our government cites international law to argue against settlements but at the same time, Canada was a proponent of the Oslo Accords , which left the matter of disputed territories to final-status negotiations. Our government, in other words, is attempting to undermine the established accords, which constitute the relevant international law and are the only recognized path toward a genuine two-state solution.

By issuing consecutive statements threatening Israel, our government has demonstrated disproportionate criticism of the Jewish state that borders on antisemitism. It’s not only jeopardizing Canadian business interests but is going against our government’s own legally binding trade agreement with Israel, while further showcasing Ottawa’s misunderstanding of international law vis-à-vis the disputed territories.

Some say Canada is meddling in Israel’s elections. I say it’s time for Canada to start acting like a grown-up by re-engaging professionally with Israel rather than acting out and stomping its feet through statements that may appease the Islamists at home, but will have zero impact in Israel.

National Post

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

• Jesse Kline: The Carney Liberals are interfering in Israel’s election
• Alan Baker: Anita Anand’s misguided condemnation of Israel

PARIS — For almost 10 years, the French political establishment has portrayed defeating Marine Le Pen as a duty. Every cycle, they roll out the same rhetoric and warnings about the nationalist right and Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National), and French voters have held their noses and voted for the guardians of a fading European political system.

At next year’s presidential election, there may no longer be a single member of France’s political establishment left to face Le Pen. One of the more likely candidates to challenge her is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a 75-year-old radical left-winger who leads France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). Opposed to traditional French culture and anything else that people recognize as culturally or socially European, Mélenchon is the real French radical, who wishes to even rename the French language.

If Mélenchon runs, French voters are projected to hand Le Pen the presidency by a landslide.

The National Rally has committed itself to the broad themes of French sovereignty, economic independence, and national security, with an emphasis of controlling immigration and protecting France’s cultural identity. Like many other modern European nationalist parties, its economic program is far more to the left of their counterparts in the Anglosphere, with pro-welfare policies and support for “economic fairness.” Regarding the European Union, the Rally wants more power devolved to the bloc’s member states.

Those in France who have preached moderation will have nobody to blame but themselves if they watch the presidential election from the sidelines. Even if a French establishment candidate earns enough votes to face Le Pen in a runoff, that candidate will also face an uphill battle to defeat her. The usual expectation that France’s voters will coalesce against Le Pen is no longer a reliable campaign strategy.

France’s incumbent president, the quintessential liberal technocrat, Emmanuel Macron, has been the strongest bulwark against the National Rally, defeating Le Pen in the runoffs in both 2017 and 2022. Term-limited, Macron cannot try for a trifecta. Even if he could, polling from 2023 showed that a decisive share of French voters regretted choosing Macron in 2022 and would have voted for Le Pen instead. This is not surprising.

When he assumed the presidency in 2017, Macron pledged a rejuvenation of France that would bridge the old political divides. Suffice it to say, he failed.

Macron targeted an unemployment rate of just five per cent by 2027. The rate now hovers closer to 10 per cent. Energy costs have spiked across Europe since 2022, and France is no exception. Growth remains stagnant. There is simply little sign of the opportunities Macron promised to restore.

Having absorbed much of the traditional French right and left into his centrist government over the past decade, Macron’s party has left very little political energy outside Le Pen’s national right and Mélenchon’s extreme leftism.

Indeed, keeping nationalists out of government has been a unifying objective of the European Union’s political establishment. Elections in the bloc have frequently ended with unpopular legacy conservatives , social democrats, liberals and Greens forming disparate coalitions to keep the nationalists at bay.

The nationalists often win a large plurality but cannot find coalition partners to form a parliamentary majority. That might have been a good strategy if those unnatural anti-nationalist alliances could produce effective and transformative governments, but they haven’t. Those rickety governments cannot agree on how to reverse economic stagnation or on taxes, public spending or pensions. All they have in common is the desire to see politicians like Le Pen remain out of power.

The International Monetary Fund reported in April that European Union industrial energy prices were roughly double their pre-2022 levels. Unstable markets and weak productivity have only worsened the situation, especially for younger Europeans who are disproportionately drawn to the nationalists.

In France, for example, one in five young French people is unemployed, and French wage growth stands at less than two per cent annually, well below the European average of 3.4 per cent .

Furthermore, the rising support for Le Pen’s nationalists reflects more than mere frustration. Mass immigration and the resulting cultural changes are celebrated by Mélenchon but condemned by Le Pen and her allies. Every year, public opinion draws closer to the latter.

One of the more vexing realities for the European establishment is that voters simply like the policies of their rivals. A poll from last December found that 52 per cent of French respondents and 57 per cent of German respondents considered even legal immigration to be too high.

The same survey found that majorities across France, Germany and Italy thought most regular immigrants did not share their national values. Questions of character and cohesion are not going away, and the failure of governing coalitions to provide definitive answers is their Achilles’ heel.

These same voters make distinctions between different categories of immigrants, with legally employed doctors enjoying higher levels of acceptance than those who break the rules. Not only do Europeans want lower immigration levels, but they also want those who are admitted to be skilled and useful.

Reluctantly, Europe’s anti-nationalist parties have begun following the trend. Denmark’s progressive government, for example, has become hawkish on assimilation and migration and plans to expel rejected asylum seekers starting in 2027, and the rest of the bloc is starting to follow suit .

Macron’s minister of European affairs, Benjamin Haddad, has declared that French voters will reject “extremism,” and has called on moderates to rally together and defeat Le Pen once again next year.

What is not extreme about the current state of Europe?

Terror attacks have become so normalized that they barely provoke the same outpourings of grief and anger as they did in 2015. In July, a van driven by 21-year-old Abdul Ballout rammed into a Pride parade in Berlin, killing one person and injuring 29. In Canada, there would be state-mandated weeks of mourning, government inquiries, and public memorials. In Europe, it is a statistic.

Many more statistics of decline could be cited to explain the rise of the nationalists who have yet to govern in most EU member states, from terrorism and migration to basic economic factors.

Europeans are not insane, and can realize the futility of choosing the same option over and over without results. Their faith in the politics they were raised with is breaking with good reason.

Most importantly, people across France and Europe are fatigued by a hopelessness from which no bottle of wine or hand-rolled cigarette can distract them anymore.

If Marine Le Pen is elected, perhaps the French will have indeed rejected the extremism of their times.

National Post