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Friday marked the fourth anniversary of the sacking of the Egerton Ryerson monument that stood at the heart of Ryerson University in downtown Toronto. The impressive statue was pulled down, its head was hacked off and thrown into Lake Ontario. The head later showed up on a pike in the community of Six Nations of the Grand River near Caledonia, Ont.

The desecration of the statue was in reaction to the declaration made in Kamloops, B.C., that human remains were found on the site of a local residential school. No bodies have since been found there, despite millions spent by the federal government.

The statue, an artistically significant achievement by the illustrious Hamilton MacCarthy, an immigrant from Great Britain, had long been a significant part of the streetscape. For 134 years, it stood high above the heads of students, faculty and staff on a plinth of stone and marble.

It had been erected as a result of a fundraising drive that had started in 1882, immediately after Ryerson’s death, to honour the founder of a great achievement: the Toronto Normal School.

Following the riot, the university’s president announced that the statue would not be restored. But it should be. All the pieces should be returned to the Government of Ontario, which should restore it and re-erect the statue in its rightful place at Queen’s Park.

Egerton Ryerson was not simply the creator of a teacher’s school. Born in Charlotteville, Upper Canada, in 1803, Ryerson drew attention as a journalist and as a preacher. Raised in an Anglican household, he converted to Methodism in his teenage years but grew into a passionate humanist who was devoted to building bridges across all of Upper Canada’s divides.

He served as a missionary to the Mississauga of the Credit, a largely Christian community, and encouraged the work of translating the bible into Ojibwe, a language he learned to speak (he also spoke a more than passable Latin). He helped launch a newspaper, the Christian Guardian, and a publishing house, and became a loud voice protesting the domination of the Anglican Church in Upper Canada.

When the Methodists decided to create their own university, Victoria College, they called on Ryerson to lead it. It eventually became part of the University of Toronto. When the government of the Province of Canada wanted to make education a priority, it named Ryerson chief superintendent of education.

He would lead a revolution in that sphere over the next 30 years, creating a system that guaranteed a basic education to every child with free textbooks. A profound Methodist all his life, he accommodated the needs of Catholics and was particularly sensitive to the desires of the fledgling French-speaking population.

He took giant steps and was known to be creative and practical. In 1846, he was asked for advice about what the best model would be to educate Indigenous children. His five-page response was that the model of industrial schools, which unites technical and theoretical knowledge, would be best.

He was never in charge of Indigenous schooling — he merely gave some advice as a window was opening to make progress on the education of the Indigenous children. For that small accident of history, his memory has been condemned.

In fact, Ryerson was an extraordinary humanist, a man who was universally respected in his province. Of course, he had his detractors who were sometimes opposed to his drive for centralization and strict standard-setting. But Ryerson was a man who opened the doors of the western world to Ontario.

In his many travels to Europe, he met monarchs, prime ministers, key politicians and no less than Pope Pius IX, who was dazzled by the knowledge and culture of that intellectual from Upper Canada.

But Ryerson was far more than a superintendent. Beyond his achievements in setting education policy were the founding of schools for teachers, the construction of a public library system and the country’s first publicly funded museum.

In sum, Egerton Ryerson embodied the best of his generation and today must be recognized as the founder of our K-12 school system, our impressive public library system, along with the Ontario Institute for Education Studies and the Royal Ontario Museum. His influence has radiated across Canada.

His achievements deserve to be recognized and his monument (and his good name) must be restored in the public eye. His monument should be restored at Queen’s Park, among the giants who shaped our society and our country.

National Post

Patrice Dutil is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. His latest book is “Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election.”

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Sean Fraser —

the federal Liberals’ supposed master communicator

who

did a bad job as immigration minister

and then a bad job as housing minister

, and then

said he wasn’t running again to spend time with his family, and then opportunistically changed his mind

and was rewarded with the justice and attorney general portfolio — laid his first dog’s egg of the Mark Carney era this week.

Fraser said Indigenous groups don’t have a “complete veto”

over natural-resource projects or any other government decisions — but that wasn’t the turd in question, because it was absolutely true.

The turd came later, apparently after getting his ears boxed by Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse: Fraser disavowed his entirely truthful statement.

“I think even accepting the premise of the question that was put to me (about a ‘veto’) really made people feel like there may be an attempt by the government to work unilaterally, not in partnership (with First Nations),”

Fraser told reporters

in a public apology.

“Despite innocent intentions, I think my comments actually caused hurt and potentially eroded a very precarious trust that has been built up over many years to respect the rights of Indigenous people in this country,” he said.

Coming up on 500 years since Jacques Cartier first set foot here and named it Canada, and 150-plus years after the Crown concluded the first treaties with First Nations, and with President Donald Trump suddenly bringing our crippling dependence on the United States into very sharp focus, if we can’t even speak the plain truth to each other in plain language, we might be in even bigger trouble than we realized.

But I think we

can

speak the plain truth to each other in plain language, so long as we rightly marginalize fringe and unreasonable voices. While apologizing for speaking the truth, Fraser also accurately pointed to “a frankly dangerous trope that paints a false picture of Indigenous peoples as being anti-development.”

And there, surely, is the rub.

The 2021 Census recorded 1.8 million Indigenous Canadians

— five per cent of the Canadian population, give or take. No one would ascribe monolithic opinions like “supports/doesn’t support resource development” to any other ethnic five per cent of the Canadian population. Yet most Canadian media reliably frame these issues as “First Nations versus the colonialist menace.”

Media mostly portrayed

the Ktunaxa Nation case, which wound up at the Supreme Court in 2017

, as a matter of Indigenous people opposing the proposed Jumbo ski resort in eastern British Columbia on religious grounds: They felt the development would chase a spirit bear from their traditional lands. Receiving much less attention was the fact that

the equally interested local Shuswap Nation supported the project

, believing their concerns had been properly addressed and being eager to reap the financial benefits.

Courts exist, ideally, to strike a balance or decide between such competing interests and claims to rights.

Similarly, media coverage of the

nationwide protests against the Coastal GasLink project, which were ostensibly in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation in B.C

., tended to ignore evidence that the rank-and-file members of that nation, as opposed to the hereditary chiefs, were broadly in support of the project — on account of needing jobs and paycheques just like settler colonialists do. (Curiously, the Canadian left are generally very suspicious of hereditary leadership in every context

except

First Nations … that is, when they agree with that hereditary leadership.)

Buying Christmas presents for Indigenous kids costs the same as buying Christmas presents for every other kid. Same goes for groceries, bicycles, hockey equipment, car payments, summer vacations … everything, really. They’re pretty much just like everyone else!

And because Indigenous people are pretty much like everyone else, and their governments are a lot like everyone else’s, they often find themselves in conflict, including in court: On

the question of residency rights on First Nations

, notably, but on lots of other issues besides. This isn’t a problem; it’s what we have courts for. It’s what we have a civil society for!

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations doesn’t speak for all Indigenous peoples in Canada. The justice minister shouldn’t be implying that she does, or walking back factual statements because she is upset. For all he knows, the majority of Indigenous Canadians agreed with his original proposal: That no small group should be able to stand in the way of prosperity for the whole.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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It is not conceivable that Canadians are happy with the increasingly hostile treatment of Jews in this country and the reputation that Canada is acquiring as a woke, trendy, antisemitic country. I’ve written here before of the antics of the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) and its drooling hostility to Israel. The latest development on that very depressing subject was the association’s vote on May 8 demanding that the university pension plan divest of any securities issued by almost any company that trades with Israel. It is utterly scandalous that Israel should be singled out in this way, especially given the unrelievedly horrifying history of modern antisemitism. It is distressing to think the leadership of a faculty association in one of the principal universities of this country could go to the lengths that it has to adopt such a repulsive measure against such a much-wronged people.

Canadians cannot be completely blasé about the fact that Israel has recently issued a cautionary travel advisory to avoid Canada as a place now unsafe for Jews because of the frequency and violence of antisemitic demonstrations. All of my life, it has been an article of faith and of pride of all Canadians that this country was a haven of toleration where any discrimination or orchestrated hostility to any ethnic or sectarian group was condemned by public opinion and doomed in advance to backfire on its perpetrators. Such sentiments were particularly anathema in academic circles, where the long- vanished tradition was that the university was the last bastion of open minded fairness of debate and condemnation of the victimization of minorities. UTFA called a meeting to hear and vote on a demand for a boycott by the university pension plans against investment in a broad swath of companies dealing with Israel. The meeting was called on short notice, with no minimum threshold of turn-out, and the motion to require disinvestment gave a much fuller hearing to its advocates than to its opponents, and the time window for voting was narrowed down to a few minutes from the normal several days, even though many UTFA members were already on holiday.

Various procedural shortcuts were employed to cut off debate and ensure that the supporters of the boycott resolution had much greater exposure than its opponents. Ultimately, only about 20 per cent of the membership voted in favour of a resolution to about 16 per cent opposed, and a couple of per cent deliberately abstaining. No civilized organization, particularly after such short notice and one-sided procedure, would accept this as a mandate to do anything. When UTFA rams through discriminatory measures with less decorum than a meeting of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and in approximately the same racist spirit, it is not only time to worry, but time to take counter-measures as is happening in the United States. There we have seen the presidents of leading universities sacked for an inability to condemn incitement to violence against Jews, and we have seen the tax-free paradise of over-endowed, corrupt academic centres of hypocrisy challenged, and university administrations put under substantial pressure to oppose racism, and to assure a reasonable variety of opinion in the academic milieu. The need for such intervention is just as great in this country, but all of our governments at every level hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, and in all of this voluntary ignorance, foment evil.

I live in a prosperous suburb of Toronto inhabited by people of many ethnicities, including a significant percentage of Jewish families. It has apparently become a routine event where cars are left in the driveway of nearby residences and there are mezuzahs by the doors of those residences, for the windows of the cars to be smashed. This happened to many neighbours last week. They have discovered from experience that nothing useful is achieved by calling the police. Nothing like this should be happening to anyone or any group anywhere in this country and it must be possible to conduct some sort of a follow-up given the profusion of security cameras. This doesn’t directly affect me but it is disturbing and outrageous that this, or any neighbourhood in this country is plagued by such problems.

I commented in this space two weeks ago about the Canadian government joining with the governments of the United Kingdom and France in condemning Israel for conducting its offensive in Gaza. This all appears to be of a piece with the implicit and profoundly mistaken theory that what is going on in Gaza is a disproportionate response to a border skirmish. On October 7, 2023, Israel was invaded and assaulted and more Jews were killed on that day than at any time since the liberation of the death camps in Europe in 1945. The attack was intended to be, was, and has been replied to as an act of war that created a state of war. In wars there is no discussion of proportionality. The bombing of Dresden, like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and innumerable actions of our enemies were disproportionate, but wars have nothing to do with proportion and are conducted until a comfort level has been achieved that the act that began the war will not be repeated.

Now, the RCMP, an organization that has appeared to be incapable of anything more challenging than a musical ride for the last 50 years, has been tasked with a “structural investigation” (which we are told is quite distinguishable from a criminal investigation) into alleged war crimes committed in the Israel-Gaza war. It is difficult to imagine a more unpromising and redundant mission. Does the RCMP imagine that it possesses the ability to assess what goes on in Gaza and by what standard will a Canadian police force purport to judge the conduct of armed forces engaged in mortal combat in the Middle East? This has all the dreary ear-marks of more pandering to the not overly numerous but ever-more noisy and obnoxious Jew-baiters in our society.

I believe most Canadians remain tolerant and civilized, as they have always been. But leaders at all levels of government throughout the country have failed in all of these related areas. The former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, acquiesced in this country falsely labelling it as genocidal because of historic treatment of the Indigenous, which had many failings, but no aspects of genocide. The government of Quebec has been actively engaged for decades in trying to exterminate the English language in that province, often with the passive cooperation of the federal government. This is an outage that is only made less obvious because of the comparative prosperity and ability of the English-speaking population of Quebec to manage its own affairs, despite blunderbuss official suppression from the so-called National Assembly of Quebec.

Now we are clambering aboard the tawdry bandwagon of antisemitism, the most ancient, contemptible, and frequently wicked of all forms of collective hate and persecution. Where are our leaders while the national mission of “peace, order, and good government” is mocked? And where is the solid, sensible, decent majority of Canadians when our leaders have so conspicuously and cravenly failed us, with the complicity of much of our painfully inadequate media? Answer, comes there, none.

National Post

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Roger Foley is a leading activist for the rights of the disabled, including his own. A hero to associations for the disabled, he is often considered a thorn in the side of health bureaucrats. Recently, an account of his case — emanating more sympathy for the bureaucrats than for Foley, alas — was

prominently featured

in these pages.

Foley suffers from a grave neurodegenerative affliction, spinocerebellar ataxia, which renders him almost completely physically dependent on caregivers. Cognitively normal and technologically skilled, he enjoys a rich life of the mind. In spite of what most Canadians would consider the grimmest of circumstances — which shamefully includes persistent reminders from carers that he has a right to euthanasia, which he just as persistently rebuffs — Foley remains life-affirming and bullish in pursuit of more humane and empowering care conditions.

Foley has been a resident for nine years at

London Health Sciences Centre’s

(LHSC) Victoria Hospital as an “alternate level of care” patient, who doesn’t require the acute care Victoria is designed to provide, or, more pejoratively, a “bed-blocker.” The LHSC wants him transferred to a long-term care facility. Foley refuses this option. He yearns to return to his apartment as an integrated member of his community, surrounded by friends and family.

The years-long

clash

over Foley’s future has been mapped in litigation. Additionally, he recently filed a complaint against the LHSC with Ontario’s human rights tribunal because his hospital replaced the special lighting in his room, which he needs because his disease causes extreme photosensitivity, with ordinary lighting. This has, according to emails from Foley and his legal adviser Michael Alexander, caused serious debilitating reactions he fears may prove fatal.

Foley wants to live at home, supported by what is known as self-directed funding (SDF) (or

individualized funding

) for 70 hours a week. SDF, in which home care money follows the person and allows them to hire their own carers, is quite a different program from typical agency-controlled home care, which in the past proved unsuitable for Foley. In fact, several life-threatening mishaps during his home-care tenure were what drove him to the hospital.

With SDF, Foley could choose

registered nurse

carers with a specific interest in and deep knowledge about his condition and pay them at a higher hourly rate than uncredentialed agency support workers. Motivated for long-term service, carers interested in Foley’s affliction would also, in effect, be choosing him. Such carers serve a maximum of 3 to 4 clients, while agency-provided home care support workers may serve up to 20 patients and are unlikely to have special expertise with spinocerebellar ataxia.

Foley has recorded statements by hospital personnel telling him he costs Victoria Hospital more than $1,500 per day, which adds up to at least $548,000 per year. Home care by personal support workers would cost $38 per hour for 10 hours per day, based on a figure Foley says he received from home-care company Gotcare. This would total $138,700 annually. Home care by a registered practical nurse, at $45 per hour for 10 hours a day, would cost $164,000 a year. (For emergencies, Gotcare can provide area caregivers rapidly through an app.)

How many disabled people choose MAiD because their will to live is sapped by the infantilizing strictures of institutional life or forced transfer to a care home

far from loved ones

, even though a cheaper and empowering alternative is available? It is to Foley’s immense credit that he has bent his muscular will to insisting upon self-directed care, which is already a right in many western countries, such as

and

It almost became a right in Canada too. In 2015, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care introduced

“Patients First: A Roadmap to Strengthen Home and Community Care,”

a plan which outlined the province’s intent to introduce a self-directed care option to patients.

“Putting patients first means giving clients and caregivers greater say in choosing a provider and how that provider delivers services,” read the

report

. “Over the next two years, we will begin to offer a self-directed care option, in which clients and their caregivers are given funds to hire their own provider or purchase services from a provider of their choice.” Unfortunately, it never really got off the ground and was “paused” in 2016, according to a local health network briefing obtained by Foley, which he shared with me.

Since SDF would offer immeasurably better quality of life for Foley, free up a bed in the hospital and save LHSC a great deal of money, I’m hard-pressed to see the downside here. C.D. Howe Institute associate director of research Rosalie Wyonch provides additional support for my perspective. Patients like Foley, she

told

Postmedia earlier this week, “take up more patient bed capacity than all the top 10 surgeries combined…. It’s probably the single-biggest hospital capacity issue. If we were to fix it, we would essentially no longer be at risk of acute care bed shortages.”

Euthanasia, for those who want it, is considered a human right in Canada. Self-directed care for those disabled Canadians who do not want MAiD should also be considered a human right.

Foley is only 49 years old, and hopefully has many years of productivity and social pleasure in prospect. Compassion, reason and morality are in accord: Let him go home on his own terms.

National Post

kaybarb@gamil.com

X: @BarbaraRKay

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Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home’s private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police?

These questions are not hypotheticals; they are real live issues in Canadian law. We are living in the mass surveillance era. But many Canadians do not have a thorough understanding of how far surveillance goes, or what the limits on it are, or whether our legal protections are adequate.

The

police in Kingston

, Ont., are ticketing drivers at red lights for merely touching or holding their cellphones based on evidence collected by a drone. The Supreme Court

recently heard

a case about police entering a private driveway and not just looking in a truck window, but opening the door and collecting evidence — all without a warrant. The Alberta Court of Kings Bench

just considered

a case involving the facial recognition technology of Clearview AI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government was tracking the cellphone location data of

33 million Canadians

. After the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, the government ordered the freezing of bank accounts of a police-compiled

“blacklist”

of demonstrators, which was distributed by the government to a variety of financial institutions and even lobby groups.

What these cases are demonstrating is that we have entered the era of mass surveillance, and Canada’s legal protections are inadequate.

First, Canada’s privacy legislation is outdated. Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne has said we are at a “

pivotal time

” for privacy rights in Canada. Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has also

called for

updates to Canadian privacy laws, “so they apply to all data, including anonymized data.” Much has changed since the current federal privacy legislation was drafted in the early 2000s, but efforts to modernize this law died when Parliament was prorogued.

Second, when it comes to state intrusions, the concept of privacy may be inadequate. Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has interpreted this right to mean the protection of a person’s “reasonable expectations of privacy” against state intrusions. The notion of “reasonable expectations of privacy” has become a mantra in Section 8 jurisprudence. But some academics have said that in the era of mass surveillance, this guiding principle is an inadequate gatekeeper.

In a lecture for the Canadian Constitution Foundation’s new

free course on privacy rights

, Osgoode Hall Law professor François Tanguay-Renaud proposes a thought experiment that reveals the inadequacy of “privacy” as an organizing principle. What if the police were recording people on the street, with drones following people and recording their movements as they went about their day, zooming in on their cellphones and recording their conversations? In such a scenario, where people are in plain view, privacy is an inadequate concept to limit what we all see intuitively as oppressive state conduct.

At one time, this hypothetical might have been considered far-fetched. Today it is eerily similar to the Kingston police drone scenario. In Kingston, police are using a drone to take aerial images peering into cars and zooming in on cellphones. Those drivers do have reasonable expectations of privacy inside their cars, but what would limit this police conduct if they surveilled citizens on sidewalks or parks, where they were in plain view without those privacy expectations? A principled line must be drawn between things done in plain sight that police can view and constant surveillance using enhanced technology. It may not be possible to draw that line on the basis of  the existence or not of “reasonable expectations of privacy.”

There are other values that could serve as guiding or informing principles for Section 8. There is nothing in the text of Section 8 that mandates the gatekeeper of the right be “reasonable expectations of privacy” rather than another interest, like dignity, liberty, security, anonymity, public confidence in the administration of justice, and many more. Indeed, American jurisprudence has been moving away from the concept of “reasonable expectations of privacy” as the sole guiding principle for their 4th Amendment.

To meet the challenges of the surveillance era, it is well past time for Parliament and the provincial legislatures to update privacy laws. But as recent police conduct shows, it’s time for our Section 8 jurisprudence to be revisited as well, to meet the emerging challenges of the surveillance state.

National Post

Christine Van Geyn is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitutional Foundation.

Canadians who want to learn more about their privacy rights in Canada can sign up for the Canadian Constitution Foundation’s free course at theCCF.ca/learn/

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On Sunday the

New York Times Magazine

published

a feature about Canada’s legal regime for assisted suicide

, wrapping large volumes of reporting on law, ethics and medicine around the individual story of Paula Ritchie, an Ontario woman who sought and received “MAiD” after an unhappy life full of pain and misery.

Katie Engelhart’s story plays pretty fair with an explosive social issue that is of increasing global concern. She knows the

NYT

’s world audience is aware of Canada’s avant-garde experiment with the facilitation of medical suicide for patients who don’t have terminal illnesses, and she doesn’t stack the deck either way.

She’s not under any fanciful illusions about the quality of Canadian medicine or Canadian welfare, specifically describing how mere administrative mistakes can lead to intolerable suffering for which the Canadian state now provides a fatal exit. She acknowledges that there was nothing demonstrably wrong with Ritchie apart from mental illness and ill-specified “functional disorders”; there is some accounting of times she refused potentially helpful treatments out of sheer despair.

At the end of the story, as Ritchie is put to death like a sick pet with friends and family around her, one can’t help thinking she might be better off — and one can’t help wondering whether we are playing with fire. That very uncertainty is the whole problem with MAiD, of course. Because it is an experiment, we’re left trying to extrapolate the second-order social effects of a legal regime over which nobody has complete political control. (MAiD is, to say the least, not the only social problem of this nature.)

Canadian law doesn’t yet theoretically allow for MAiD for mental illness alone without some accompanying physical diagnosis. But a diagnosis is a label, and there is a myriad of labels available for those “functional disorders” and chronic-pain syndromes whether or not there is any observable biological signature. If you want desperately to die with a doctor’s help, as Ritchie did, you can probably find one who has an extreme ideological commitment to total patient autonomy, as Ritchie did, and get him to sign off, as Ritchie did.

I don’t know of any case where a doctor gave MAiD to anybody who didn’t have a clear, emphatically expressed desire to die. And, as Engelhart points out, there is not

yet

any apparent epidemic of “Track 2” assisted suicides not involving terminal or irresolvable physical illness. But her story hints uneasily that Canada may simply be turning euthanasia into just another medical specialty, or indeed turning some doctors into vending machines for lethal poisons. They’re being asked, in Track 2 cases, to approve and facilitate suicide, or to refuse to do so, after assessing a patient’s purely subjective suffering. One uneasy physician interviewee asks: “If you want to allow people to end their lives when they want to, then put suicide kits in hardware stores, right?”

Well, what’s the answer to that?

Both

sides of the MAiD argument seem to agree that physician expertise becomes useless in socially complicated Track 2 cases. Is the legal requirement for a health professional’s involvement thus just a ritual aspect of MAiD, a superstition left over from a less stoical age? The doctor who approved Ritchie’s application, Matt Wonnacott, tells Engelhart he “learned to stop” trying to apply medical criteria to MAiD cases and asks, “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?”

To which the only reasonable answer, obviously, is “You’re the guy with the keys to the poison cabinet.” We’re not told how he would answer the hardware-store question, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if he said, “Go right ahead.”

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Mark Carney isn’t interested in being prime minister of Canada. Sure, he may like the title, the presumed prestige that comes with it, as well as meetings with Donald Trump, but when it comes down to the authority the federal government possesses, he’d rather defer to the provinces. He doesn’t want to be the leader of the sovereign nation of Canada, he wants to be a project manager for B.C., Quebec and Ontario.

At a

news conference

Friday to discuss his One Canadian Economy legislation, Carney claimed it would streamline the approval of projects deemed in the “national interest,” and said it was a “bill that meets this hinge moment” with “urgency” and “determination.” The prime minister spoke of how “it’s become much too difficult to build in this country” and that the “federal government” will “identify and expedite nation building projects.”

Except by “urgency” and “determination” Carney means not a streamlined process, but another regulatory regime on top of all the others. And, crucially, when Carney talks about “nation building” and the “national interest,” he doesn’t mean anything that would be in Canada’s interests but would, instead, cede power to the provinces, giving them a veto over infrastructure projects.

When asked by a reporter about whether pipelines would be approved over objections from B.C. or Quebec, Carney responded as if Ottawa didn’t have the clear authority to do so. “No. Simply no, we must have a consensus of all the provinces and the Indigenous people,” he said. If that wasn’t clear, Carney added, “if a province doesn’t want it, it’s impossible.”

To drive home an apparent ignorance of Canada’s

constitution

, Carney also said, “It is not the choice of the federal government.”

However, this is incorrect. While the Liberals may choose to not exercise their constitutional powers, it is most definitely Ottawa’s “choice.” Section 92 (10) of the Constitution explicitly grants the federal government power over “Works and Undertakings connecting” a province “with any other or others of the Provinces, or extending beyond the Limits of the Province.” Ottawa also has authority over any projects “declared by the Parliament of Canada to be for the general Advantage of Canada or for the Advantage of Two or more of the Provinces,” even if such projects exist entirely within a single province.

What this means is that if Ottawa wants a pipeline that crosses provincial borders, it is entirely within its rights to approve it, even over the objection of provincial obstructionists, be they in B.C. or Quebec. It is a power that could not be more clear and it is one that has been backed up by the courts. In 2019, for example, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled against the provincial government, which was seeking a reference on whether it had the power to put conditions on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which exports heavy oil from Alberta, through, B.C. and to the West coast. The ruling

stated

that this was “not within the authority of the Legislature.”

In siding with Ottawa, the court noted that the pipeline didn’t just affect B.C., meaning it was not simply a local matter, but rather a project that “affects the country as a whole, and falls to be regulated taking into account the interests of the country as a whole.” If such a case, where the “basic principle,” as the court put it, of the division of powers were to be litigated now, would Carney defend Ottawa’s own authority?

For the prime minister to say there “must be a consensus,” to give the provinces a veto is clearly political, and not rooted in any legal precedent. If the prime minister was indeed concerned with projects in the “national interest” intended for “nation building,” ceding such power to Victoria, Quebec City or Queen’s Park, is entirely counterproductive. If a pipeline, or another project was truly in the national interest, then the federal government should be prepared to approve it over the objections of any of the provinces.

Alas, Ottawa constantly meddles in provincial jurisdiction, whether in health care, or in the regulation of electricity, or the taxing of natural resources, but it refuses to assert its own powers.

Prime ministers, particularly Liberal ones, have always preferred the positive feedback loop they get from social spending programs. The sometimes complicated exercise of the federal government government’s own power turns them off. But if Canada is truly to become “one economy, not 13,” then this is a fear Carney would need to get over quickly, otherwise, what is the purpose of Ottawa?

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We are deeply disappointed by the

joint statement

, co-signed by Canada, France, and Britain on “the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.” This call rewards Hamas for the torture and murder of 1,200 innocent civilians on October 7 and the kidnapping of 250 others. We note that these are the same Western powers that bombed Raqqa and Mosul into rubble to eliminate ISIS, yet now invoke humanitarian concern to shield Hamas from the consequences of their own atrocities.

Hamas started this war, and Israel has every right to defend itself against terrorists. One wonders what Canadian authorities would do if these Hamas atrocities had targeted Canadian citizens on Canadian soil.

From the outset of the war, Hamas has hijacked international aid, diverting food, fuel, and medical supplies to sell on the black market. The proceeds—

estimated

at up to half a billion dollars — have eﬀectively been a war subsidy, funding the recruitment and arming of more terrorists.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, aid restrictions are entirely lawful when there is a risk that the aid will be diverted to enemy combatants. Every truck that Hamas seizes is a reward for terrorism and an incentive to repeat their strategy. In spite of this, Israel ensured there was enough aid in Gaza to last months, with

25,000 aid trucks entering Gaza during the 42-day ceasefire

. Indeed deliveries of aid have re-started, and a new mechanism has been put in place to ensure that aid is distributed to the needy, rather than diverted and stolen by Hamas.

Meanwhile Hamas still holds

58 hostages

in inhumane conditions underground — starving, torturing, and sometimes murdering them.

The conflict in Gaza could end tomorrow if Hamas laid down its arms and released the hostages. This is the path to peace. Hamas has never accepted Israel’s right to exist. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas did not build a state; they built terror tunnels and stockpiled rockets, planning for October 7. To believe that a Palestinian state can be negotiated with a group that rejects the very existence of Israel is a dangerous and naïve fantasy.

Every ceasefire gives Hamas time to regroup and plan the next massacre. This is the unbearable dilemma Israel faces. Unless Hamas is defeated, this war will not end — it will merely pause, until the next October 7. If Western leaders enable this cycle, they will bear responsibility for the bloodshed to come — on both sides.

We are also concerned for the Jewish and Israeli people in Canada. Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Aﬀairs

upgraded its travel alert for Canada

to Level 2 due to rising threats against Israelis and Jews, following

multiple recent attacks

on Jewish institutions and a rise in hostile rhetoric. Israelis in Canada were urged to

avoid public displays of Jewish/Israeli identity

. Leaders of nations should be mindful of how their pubic statements (or lack thereof) might correlate with a rise in antisemitic attacks.

We are shaken by the recent murder of two young embassy staﬀ in Washington DC by Elias Rodriguez who

yelled out

, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” We believe months of unfounded or libelous accusations and propaganda against Israel contributed to the conditions that led to their murder.

We declare our support for Israel’s right to defend itself, and we urge the government to demand Hamas release the hostages and commit to a peaceful future. We also urge the government to increase its eﬀorts to protect the Jewish people of Canada.

Hon. Harry S. LaForme O.C & I.P.C., Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, knowledge keeper

Dr. Sheree Trotter, director Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem

Hon. Alfred Ngaro, director Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem

Lynda Prince, envoy North America, Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem, former tribal (grand) chief carrier Sekani Nation

Harvey Yesno, former chief of Eabametoong First Nation (EFN) and former grand chief of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN)

Reggie David Neeposh, former chief Oujé-Bougoumou Cree Nation, Northern Quebec

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Canada’s federal Conservatives are stuck with a dilemma as they consider whether to do anything different in the next two years than they did in the last two.

At the centre of the dilemma are a host of riddles. As in, did they actually lose the last election? Sure, they didn’t win, but did they lose lose? Like, did Canadians actually reject them, or did something else happen that got in the way of the victory they anticipated?

If they did lose, what do they do about it? And if they didn’t lose lose, what do they do about that?

Depending on the answers to those questions is another of equal weight: do they head into the future with the same team of decision-makers who didn’t quite win if they maybe didn’t lose? And how do you answer that question when you don’t know what the future holds, given that one complaint against the current leader is that he didn’t respond effectively enough when the playing field changed?

As far as Pierre Poilievre is concerned, there’s nothing to decide. “We had the biggest vote count in our party’s history, the biggest increase in our party’s history, the biggest vote share since 1988 and we’re going to continue to work to get over the finish line,” he replied when asked. That same argument is on offer from other Conservatives keen on moving past the vote that left them once again in second place.

The “nothing to see here” case goes like this: In any previous election dating back 40 years the Tory results would have put them in power, likely with a majority. The fact this one didn’t was the result of unprecedented exterior factors, specifically, the timing of Justin Trudeau’s departure and the coinciding emergence of a U.S. president even his most fervent detractors didn’t foresee as being quite this nuts. Alarmed and unnerved, voters opted for continuity and incumbency over the very real practical policies they’d been firmly embracing until then.

It’s not a bad argument, but also not entirely convincing. In the Liberal bastion of greater Toronto, it sounds a lot like the local NHL team’s annual excuses for once again failing to deliver the goods. “Hey, at least we did better than our last collapse,” doesn’t quite cut it.

To its credit, the conservative universe isn’t ready to simply roll over and accept the excuses. In this the party shows itself once again to be more independent-minded than the rival Liberals, who — after refusing to give themselves the power to oust Justin Trudeau, and living to regret the fact — made the same

decision

over his replacement. A majority of the caucus voted not to accept the rules of the Reform Act, meaning Prime Minister Mark Carney knows he can rule as he sees fit, safe in the knowledge the minions can’t get rid of him. Would any other party in the democratic world vote to remain minions?

Conservatives not only adopted the Reform rules, but are discussing whether Poilievre should face a leadership review. A decision could be made as early as this month, with a

review

to take place next spring. It’s possible they’ll reject the option, but it would be a mistake. The world a year from now may look a lot different than it does today. Given the level of international uncertainty and the daily madhouse in Washington, it would be a shock if it didn’t. Locking themselves into a recently-defeated leader when circumstances could easily demand an entirely different set of calculations would not be a show of confidence but an act of denial.

Poilievre has shown himself to possess certain definite gifts, but also a ready supply of flaws. He’s identified by defenders as a master communicator, certainly better at reaching ordinary Canadians than either Erin O’Toole or Andrew Scheer, his two most recent predecessors. The vote results show as much, particularly the

healthy

gains in Ontario and British Columbia at Liberal and NDP expense. He knows his mind, he speaks with conviction, he argues convincingly of the need for change.

He also alienates large numbers of people. His personality grates. He comes across as cocksure rather than leaderly. We’re told that Mark Carney “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” but thus far appears able to keep it from annoying the public. Poilievre, in contrast, can be openly rude and dismissive where everyone can see it, and quickly does thanks to social media. He’s a communicator who doesn’t get along with the communications business, who doesn’t let them on his plane, who pens off the people who one way or another will transmit their impressions to millions of Canadians.

He’s similarly weak at wooing allies he’d need if he ever got the chance to act on his agenda. He doesn’t talk to premiers he doesn’t like. He appears to remain committed to key strategist and enforcer Jenni Byrne, whose ability to make enemies is legendary and whose treatment of the Conservative caucus evokes thoughts of the Commanders’ approach to women in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead. Indeed, whether or not Byrne keeps her job will be a telling sign of whether Poilievre’s support for change includes change on his own behalf.

The presiding argument for retaining Poilievre as leader is that there’s no obvious alternative at the moment. That’s not a good place to be. An organization that seeks to govern the affairs of a serious country should be able to muster more than a single leadership option, and it should be any leader’s responsibility to see that there’s talent in the ranks.

Having failed to react successfully to changed circumstances in the latest election, Conservatives need time to better prepare for the next one. Poilievre’s performance over the next 10-12 months will be critical in assessing his suitability to lead those preparations. He should be given time to prove himself pending a formal review at a party gathering next spring. Requiring as much isn’t a knock on Poilievre but would reflect a party set on deciding its own future.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — More or less on schedule, U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are headed for a steel cage match. The steel will be more expensive now due to tariffs, but spectacles don’t come cheap.

This past week’s Trump-Musk breakup could be dismissed as simply the latest episode of a professional-wrestling-reality-show presidency. The script is as old as baby-oiled wrestlers in the ring and as current as the Axe-body-sprayed young men in the audience.

Two great titans — The World’s Richest Man™ and The World’s Most Powerful Man™ — joined forces to form a fearsome tag-team. Call the alliance The World’s Most Manly Men™, with rotating mouthpiece managers in their corner, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and the like.

The World’s Most Manly Men™ steamroller over weak opponents at first to establish their dominance. Trump-Musk dismantle overseas aid to the poor; Trump-Musk take down funding for Aids prevention and treatment in Africa. Next up, The World’s Most Manly Men™ grapple with stronger opponents, preferably effete and somehow suspect; Trump-Musk battle public broadcasting, then Columbia, then Harvard.

Eventually though, the new tag-team champions run into formidable opponents — the judiciary, the bond market, the American voter’s preference for big government without having to pay for it. Victory is no longer easy nor assured. Will The World’s Most Manly Men™ prevail?

The final step comes as surely as celebrities gather like moths around the pro-wrestling flame. The World’s Most Manly Men™ must turn on each other. The spittle-flecked air is filled with cries of ingratitude, betrayal and treachery. The ambush then comes. The allies turn on each other. A low blow is landed — Trump is a reckless spendthrift! A steel chair is used to devastating effect — Musk’s government subsidies will be cut off!

The erstwhile allies are headed for a showdown. Tickets are sold to the clash of the titans; The World’s Most Manly Men™ will fight each other in a cage match.

That may well suffice as an explanation for the latest melodrama here in Washington, the latest staging of circuses in the declining imperial capital. But it overlooks a deeper division at the heart of the Trump project, a division advertised as brazenly as the golden Trump brand on a failed casino or a skip-the-line visa. It was right there in the name: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Efficiency is what Elon Musk desires, but it runs counter to the heart of the Trump project. Efficiency is what has driven globalization, automation, information technology and open trade, where more efficient production enables cheaper goods and services. Efficiency is the altar at which Musk and the tech-bros worship. Efficiency is the AI future where goods are cheap and services may well be cheaper still; The World’s Most Richest Man™ takes his billions and employment shrinks dramatically.

It was thus a contradiction from the beginning that Trump would embrace efficiency in general, and this particular efficiency czar in particular.

The signs were there early on. Remember that DOGE originally was a dyad, with Musk accompanied by a sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy, the bio-tech entrepreneur who had previously run for president before endorsing Trump.

Before the inauguration, Ramaswamy observed that America needs high-skilled foreign workers because an American culture “which celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

He urged Americans to study hard and work harder, to pursue efficiency and not entertainment. It was time for “more tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall.”

Whatever Trumpism is, it is certainly not about working harder and less TV watching. Trump’s own trajectory has been from the world of business (efficiency) to the world of entertainment. Thus Ramaswamy’s call to get up off the couch did not go down well with the workers to whom Trump promised protection, not opportunity. Ramaswamy was dumped from DOGE before the inauguration. He had called too much attention to the demands that efficiency makes.

The Trump project is not that efficiency — creativity, productivity, innovation and trade — is inherently bad, but that it ought not be the only, or even primary, goal. As JD Vance put it during the campaign, “We believe that a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” Ramaswamy saluted the engineers who designed those processes, and Musk wants to install the toasters, built in entirely worker-free factories, in his cars.

The Vance argument is legitimate. Perhaps America would be better off with more expensive toasters — certainly the aluminum tariffs will see to that. Maybe it would be better if American companies could be less efficient, i.e., be able to survive with more expensive production and labour costs.

Economics is about trade-offs. Efficiency gains are real, but it is perfectly reasonable not to prefer efficiency (inexpensive toasters or cheap goods at Walmart), but protection for workers, towns, local cultures. If toasters cost three times as much, and beer in aluminum cans costs more, and groceries do too when cheap immigrant labour is driven out of agriculture — then that is the price to pay.

Trump appears to be willing for Americans to pay it. Musk never was. The steel cage match is to determine who Americans actually agree with.

National Post

Source: National Post (Opinions)

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