Universities are back in session across the country. Students are finding their way to their classes, meeting their teachers and co-students, participating in frosh activities, joining campus groups and being presented with free student handbooks meant to serve as study planners featuring important dates for the academic year. These are all normal activities for Canadian university students, unless you attend Concordia University in Montreal.

By now, most students will have received the campuses latest iteration of Concordia’s handbook, produced by its student union and paid for with student fees, which features a manifesto that suggests universities are not what they seem, disparages the West, Canada and Quebec, suggests electoral participation may be less worthy than direct action, including constructing an alternative policing system and encourages students to mobilize to free Palestinian prisoners arrested in connection with terrorism.

The cover of the 2026-2027 Concordia student handbook is red and white, features a collage of images including a police officer with his back turned, three signs with the phrases; “transnational solidarity,” “who do the police protect?” and another, posing the question: “Concordia: hotbed of activist activity?” and then in much smaller print, “why you should get involved in campus causes.” Centred on the cover is the image of what appears to be a man dressed in black wearing a keffiyeh over this face and raising his arm to hold up a smartphone to record something.

Underneath 2026-2027, is a declaration: “made for students, by students.”

The handbook opens with a “manifesto for the people’s university.” Most Canadians probably think that a university education prepares citizens to become valuable, contributing and law-abiding members of society. Not so, according to the manifesto. Students, it says, are essentially “cash cows,” educated with the purpose of driving the economy, and they are informed that the university’s “primary function” is “to serve the extracative settler colonial project of so-called Canada.”

The manifesto seems to suggest to these students that they have just signed up for a misleading and immoral illusion. It tells them they need to be able to “see through… every university in the so-called Global North” as selling “the possibility of future comfort at the cost of participating in the genocidal and ecocidal death march of the status quo.”

It paints university administrators as seeking to immediately delegitimize action on campus “that even remotely threatens to disrupt campus life as usual.” It then suggests to these same students that they are “the only legitimate political actor in these negotiations.” It appears to object to Canada’s law and order, telling these new young minds on campuses that it “refuses the insistence that safety and protection necessitate policing and criminalization.” It suggests the university boardroom decisions are not legitimate because the university should instead be governed “by and for the people.” The manifesto ends by encouraging students to “abandon the university as it stands” and “create a People’s University in (their) own image.”

Under a section titled, All about Concordia,” the handbook tells students that the board of governors is the university’s “highest authority,” which it implies is against them. The handbook tells students: “It’s clear that a board composed of the wealthy and powerful serves the interests of investors and not Concordia’s workers or students.”

Instead of ensuring that new and returning Concordia students feel comfortable about contacting Concordia’s campus security for protection, a section called, “Security, surveillance, and the cats,” suggests to students that campus security may not be trustworthy, because they may be policing, profiling and politically repressing them, despite the fact that they seem friendly because they sometimes allow students to pet their dogs.

The handbook refers to the next part of the handbook as its “Survival Guide.” The first section is titled, “Ni Canada, ni Quebec” (neither Canada, nor Quebec). It criticizes Prime Minister Mark Carney of evoking Canada’s “glorified settler colonial past” in his recent forward guidance video, and accuses the Liberals’ of passing a “massive anti-immigration bill giving the state powers to abandon due legal process and to cancel immigration status for migrants at will.”

The handbook also has strong words for two Quebec political parties. It complains that both the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) and Parti Québécois (PQ) parties in Quebec are moving toward more right-wing policies, including the CAQ’s banning prayer in public institutions and the PQ’s call for a referendum. It also complains that: “The Quiet Revolution-era promise of a Québcois welfare state and shared prosperity for all is now more or less a thing of the past, abandoned in favour of xenophobic rhetoric and the so-called “defence of Quebecois and Western culture and values.”

The federal government doesn’t escape the handbook’s criticism either. The handbook tells students that the federal government is only more tolerant of minorities than Quebec “on the surface,” and frames the plight of migrants as one in which they are required to accept that “money rules the land, that you’ll be blamed for the political and economic failures of the government, and that your immigration status can be revoked at any time, resulting in your deportation, especially if you protest in solidarity with Palestine.”

In a section titled “Against electoral politics,” the handbook paints the democratic process of voting for candidates as “limited” in terms of its possibility to affect change. While this section claims it isn’t arguing for political disengagement, it turns around and asks them if voting is actually “worth” their energy. Instead, it appears to try to sell students on participating in community actions, suggesting they have been successful in halting pipelines, resisting deportations and constructing “alternatives to policing through collective direct action.”

Perhaps most disturbing is the section that asks Concordia students to mobilize to have Palestinian prisoners, including some who have either been involved in or have perpetrated acts of terrorism against Israelis, released. This section suggests that Hussam Abu Safiya, who was arrested in 2024 by the IDF under suspicion of terrorist activity and for being a colonel in Hamas’s medical military services, and Walid Daqqa, who was arrested in 1986 for having commanded a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine cell that killed an Israeli soldier. Daqqa died of cancer in prison. The handbook features a poem he wrote to an unborn daughter, meant to tug at heartstrings.

This isn’t the first time a Concordia handbook has raised eyebrows. Last year, the handbook was bizarrely absent of Canadian holidays, including Christmas. Instead, it featured Nakba Day, May 15, 1948 — the day that the Arab-Israeli war began as a result of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon invading Israel in response to it declaring its independence the day before. It commemorated pro-Palestinian events, including 45,000 students going on “strike” for Palestine in 2024 and swapped New Year’s to commemorate the 1959 Cuban Revolution, calling it “victorious.” It also normalized masked demonstrations, blocking classrooms and confrontations with campus security, and featured a “strike guide” that broke Concordia’s rules. This later iteration is similar, with the exception of the fact that the “strike guide” appears to have been reworded and softened in a way that avoids breaking Concordia’s rules.

It’s hard to know how many Concordia students agree with the sentiment that this handbook was made for them, but it appears to serve the interests of a narrow group that would like the university’s students to become disillusioned with their entire academic experience, nihilistic about democracy and harnessed in support of anti-Israel Palestinian objectives.

National Post

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On Sept. 20, Yom Kippur eve, the holiest night of the Jewish year, Const. Jeff Smith put his life on the line to save Jews in Canada. Bravely, decisively and without indifferent delay or hateful rationalization, he placed himself in harm’s way, sustaining significant injury, to prevent the loss of innocent lives. At considerable cost to himself, Smith acted and averted the tragedy of Bondi Beach in Australia.

The shooting and armed confrontation at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ont. was not, of course, the first of its kind for Canada, nor did it occur in a vacuum. It was just the latest hate crime in the inflation of such events to their highest level since recorded statistics in Canada. In the past year alone, 70 per cent of all religiously motivated hate crimes, nearly 800 incidents, were directed against the Canadian Jewish Community.

For the Belleville synagogue, it remains to be seen if Israel and anti-Zionism, the most common excuse for such events, will emerge as cause or attempted justification. This is of no small concern, considering that the overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews support their right to self-determination in their ancestral land of Israel, what Zionism is. Anti-Zionism has become Canada’s new Jew hatred, antisemitism evolved for this digital age of disinformation and artificial realities. New tools have been applied and old libels resurrected to be heated by virtue-signaling, ignorance and malevolence into a drug to which the world has become addicted.

These issues are foremost for Jews in Canada and everywhere as we observe the most solemn period of the Jewish New-Year and as we contemplate the year gone by and the year to come. We ask questions and we search for answers and like many others my mind turns to the event one year ago to this date. One year ago, on Sept. 21, 2025, Canada became the first free democracy to announce on the international stage that it would “post-conditionally” condone and reward the proceeds of terror with recognition. To Canada’s Jews and Jews everywhere Canada had broadcast to the world that it had chosen Palestinian self-determination over self-determination for Israel and the Jews.

Formal recognition of one group committed to the destruction of the other. Condemnation of a free democracy, the one-and-only Jewish homeland and the majority of Jewish Canadians who support it. It sent the message that Canada’s values are extremist values, and in the year that has followed Canadian rhetoric if not policy has continued to single out and expose the one-and-only Jewish state to this double-standard of condemnation. Appeasement and capitulation to terror did not yield dividends of peace for Canada’s Jews or the Middle East. And despite Canadian leadership’s claim that recognition does not legitimize terrorism, in Canada and reinforced by inaction, it has permitted, emboldened and tacitly condoned rising violence against its Jews. The floodgates of hatred have opened upon Canadian Jewry of all walks of life, in public and in private, across institutions and in some places, at all levels of government.

This past June at a Toronto synagogue, Canada’s prime minister quietly failed to address the demonization of Israel in the evolution of rising anti-Zionist Jew-hate and violence in his country. While his predecessor had stated publicly that he is a Zionist, this prime minister will not publicly mention the country’s name. Jewish concerns are instead relegated and displaced for placation through funding and partial-promises taken from a pre-existing Senate report. Israel, the root excuse and false justification for anti-Zionist Jew-hate, was absent from the prime minister’s prepared statement. This did not go unnoticed by Canadian Jews or by their haters. And in the wake of this event, silence has continued to breed ascent and inaction has provided permission to target Canadian Jews.

And what have become of the “post-conditions” for recognition laid out by Canada’s leadership? Have these conditions been met? No, they have not. The condition of general elections to be held in 2026 where Hamas plays no role has not been met. Democratic governance changes, and demilitarization of the future state, did not occur. The regime has instead announced increased funding and recommitted to the future of their pay-for-slay terror program. Canadian leadership statements that recognition does not compromise its support for Israel’s security, but rather empowers those seeking peaceful coexistence and the end of Hamas, have instead been met with the resurgence of Hamas and political support for those seeking the destruction of Israel.

With Canada often at the lead, Israel has been uniquely and repeatedly singled out for condemnation and delegitimization. While Countries like Finland have ceased financial support for UNRWA following proof of ongoing terrorist activity, funding from Canada continues. Canada has joined an international coalition which is attempting to force a statehood solution on Israel that Israel has already categorically rejected. Just this week the Canadian prime minister co-chaired a United Nations forum dedicated to economic sanction intended to coerce this outcome. In statements made, he referred to generations of Canadian leaders who supported a two-state solution without recognizing at the same time their support, or adding his support, for the Zionist Jewish homeland. Recent events have shown us that not only Israel, but Canadian Jews suffer dark dividends from such lop-sided transactional politics. Canada’s leadership would do well to consider to that to sanction the one-and-only Jewish homeland is to sanction the overwhelming majority Canadian Jews.

Perhaps Canada’s leadership at all levels should learn from the example of Const. Smith who at the time of this writing remains listed in hospital in critical condition. If Canada’s leadership is truly accountable to Canadian values at home and on the international stage, it must do so in word and in deed. It must send a message and follow with actions: Extremist values are not Canadian values, Const. Smith’s values are Canadian values. Canada must emulate and praise the heroism of those like Smith, rather than cower and reward violence and terror at home and abroad. We wish Const. Smith, and Canada, a full and speedy recovery.

Iddo Moed is Israel ambassador to Canada.

On Sept. 6, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne released a statement condemning Iran’s destabilizing actions in the Middle East: “its continued threats to vessels seeking to transit the Strait of Hormuz, its pursuit of illicit nuclear activities and its support for regional proxy groups.”

Crucially, they remained silent on human rights abuses, executions and detainees. Just four days later, Human Rights Watch reported that Iranian authorities had executed 59 men on “politically motivated and vague national security charges” since March.

This weekend, Canada will present its national statement at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. That statement will tell us whether the Sept. 6 omission was merely a drafting oversight or the beginning of a major policy pivot. For Canada, this question matters more deeply than it does for most of our allies, because we hold a position on this file that took over 20 years to build — and which could be lost in a single year of complacency.

For over two decades, Canada has carried the annual UN General Assembly resolution on the human rights situation in Iran. Canada’s support for the resolution — which began in 2022 , according to Global Affairs Canada — gained extra prominence in 2003, when Iranian authorities tortured and killed the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi. No other country has owned a UN human rights file with the kind of deep integration that Canada possesses.

This commitment remains vital. The most recent text, introduced by Canada with the support by over two dozen co-sponsors, was adopted by the General Assembly in December 2025 by a vote of 78-27 (with 64 abstentions). The United States co-sponsored the resolution and, in its vote explanation , specifically thanked Canada for its sustained leadership. Canadian diplomats spend countless autumn months keeping that coalition intact — and the margin of success is a direct return on their investment.

Moreover, Canada utilized that very text last year to break new ground: it was, to my knowledge, the first time transnational repression — the concerted efforts undertaken abroad to harm, silence or intimidate government opponents, including targeting their relatives inside Iran — was addressed. That language exists because Canada dared to put it there.

Canada did not take this on in the first place out of an abstract sense of idealism. It was Kazemi along with the 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents killed aboard Flight PS752 in 2020 that spurred Ottawa to action. It is an issue that has been woven into the Canadian fabric.

The 2021 census recorded 213,160 Canadian residents born in Iran, and just over 200,000 individuals claiming Iranian ethnic or cultural heritage. Members of this community face threats on Canadian soil, and relatives still trapped in Iran have been interrogated or denied travel based on things said in Toronto or Vancouver. Transnational repression is not a theoretical foreign policy concept for Canada.

That reality sets the standard against which the next Canadian statement on Iran must be judged, because the conduct being condemned has accelerated sharply. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 29 of the 59 men who were executed between March 18 and the end of August were arrested in connection with the protests in December and January. Five were subjected to public executions.

In 16 of those 29 cases, the capital charges involved no allegation that the accused had killed anyone; the alleged activity was property damage or trespass. Bahar Saba, the organization’s senior Iran researcher, cautioned that the proceedings were often “too short to establish a defendant’s guilt even for a minor offence, let alone for capital charges.”

Meanwhile, on Sept. 16, Amnesty International released a report naming 87 Iranian officials who it says should face criminal investigations for crimes against humanity during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, including 62 security commanders (33 from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and 27 from the police), plus 25 Ministry of Interior officials.

Tehran has made its direction painfully clear. In March, Iran’s police chief, Brig.-Gen. Ahmad-Reza Radan, warned that protesters acting “in line with the wishes of the enemy” would no longer be viewed as mere protesters: “we will see them as an enemy … and we will do to them what we do to an enemy.” This month, Radan claimed that he has so far arrested over 6,000 protesters, though human rights groups think the number may exceeded 60,000 .

Currently, nobody high-profile is saying these things to Tehran. UN Secretary General António Guterres met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Sept. 1, but the discussion appears to have centred on the humanitarian and economic fallout of the conflict with the United States and navigational rights in the Strait of Hormuz. A readout of the meeting mentioned nothing about executions, detainees or protests.

That silence is Canada’s current opportunity, and it is exactly the kind of posture Canada has historically excelled at maintaining. In this regard, there are three things that Canada must do.

First, Ottawa must update last year’s resolution and table it again. The 2025 text predates both the December protests and this year’s executions. A resolution in 2026 must document the specific pattern that Human Rights Watch has uncovered: capital sentences where no killing occurred, and trials conducted within weeks of arrest. It must demand an immediate moratorium on executions in protest-related cases.

Second, Anand should name individuals from the podium. Canada already does this. It sanctioned seven Iranian officials in June 2023 — most were Revolutionary Court judges — for “their role in gross and systematic human rights violations in Iran’s criminal justice system,” and added four more December 2025.

There is also a gap Canada is perfectly positioned to fill: Iran has no ability to hold those involved in its criminal justice system to account because, as Amnesty notes, cases against security personnel are handled by military courts staffed from the security services. In January, Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, declared that, “All the offenders in this matter are waging war against God.” He is not on Canada’s sanctions list.

Finally, Ottawa should commit to prosecuting foreign individuals who commit crimes against humanity. Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act has resulted in just two prosecutions in 26 years, both concerning the 1994 genocide in Rwanda — and only one conviction.

Yet both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty now urge states to launch extraterritorial investigations. An investigation focused on gathering and preserving evidence from witnesses and participants residing in Canada would be relatively inexpensive and would send a strong message.

Every tranche of Canadian sanctions this year have targeted criminal networks, weapons procurement or navigation rights. None have touched on executions. The Sept. 6 statement followed this same pattern. This drift follows a certain logic: the Strait of Hormuz is a quantifiable Canadian economic interest, and the human rights file is not.

But shipping interests are shared by many other nations, and Canada is not the country they turn to on that issue. The Iranian human rights resolution is different: it is the one file where Canadian sponsorship carries weight. Canada only holds that weight because it has raised the subject in years when raising it was difficult or inconvenient. A resolution tabled by a government that refuses to mention executions in its own statements will inevitably start to lose support.

Many Iranians arrived in Canada because of the very conduct described in Canada’s resolutions. What the Canadian delegation says inside the General Assembly is, for them, the ultimate test of whether those resolutions still hold the meaning they did when Ottawa first put them on the table.

National Post

Avideh Motmaen-Far is the president of the Council of Iranian Canadians, a commentator on Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs and a Macdonald Laurier Institute contributor.

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To give credit where it’s due: finally, after 18 months in office, Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a substantial economic policy change to improve Canada’s business environment. His “Productivity Mega Deduction,” which permanently allows businesses to immediately deduct the cost of new investments on a wide range of machinery, equipment and technology is a meaningful change. The government estimates that the new policy halves Canada’s marginal effective tax rate on new business investments from approximately 13 to 6.4 per cent.

On the other hand, to also assign blame where it’s due, the benefits of cutting taxes on business investment will be limited because Carney chose the wrong policy. As economist Jack Mintz explained in the Financial Post, Carney’s tax change “fails the three criteria for a good tax structure: efficiency, fairness and simplicity. A far better choice would be to reduce corporate income tax rates so as to spur investment in all business activities, not just those chosen by government.”

Carney’s tax deduction gives favourable treatment to certain types of investments but not others, thus giving more favourable tax treatment to certain industries. It also produces unfair situations in which businesses are incentivized to use capital-intensive instead of labour-intensive processes, complicates the tax structure because the deduction is mixed in with other existing investment credits and will likely be of limited effectiveness. Mintz is right: a general corporate tax cut would have been better.

So while moving in the direction of lower business taxes is beneficial — and necessary given the extremely weak investment in Canada in recent years — by choosing the wrong policy, Carney limits the benefits. This is not the first time he has expressed the right sentiments, said the right things, signalled a move to improve Canada’s economic competitiveness after more than a decade of under-performance and then announced a policy that is limited in its effectiveness because it is poorly designed or combined with other harmful policies that largely undo whatever improvement the new initiative might have achieved.

For example, reversing former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s insane electric vehicle mandate, which by 2035 would have banned the sales of conventional automobiles, was a good idea. But instead of just getting rid of the bad policy, Carney restored the federal government’s deeply uneconomical EV consumer subsidies and added his own greenhouse gas emissions standards , with the goal of pushing EV sales to 75 per cent of the market by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040. A 90 per cent government target by 2040 is less harmful than a 100 per cent mandate by 2035. But bad policies that are slightly less harmful than Trudeau’s bad policies are not good enough.

Similarly, Carney’s push to reduce the size of the federal public service was widely applauded — and rightly so. Earlier this year, the Treasury Board reported that the federal workforce shrank by over 12,000 positions in the last fiscal year, or about 3.5 per cent. That is a positive step, but the government’s latest fiscal projection, the spring economic update , has total program expenses excluding net actuarial losses rising from $489.9 billion in 2024-25 to $512.8 billion in 2025-26, and then to $536.1 billion in 2026-27. So whatever savings are being achieved through headcount reductions are being offset by more spending elsewhere.

The Canadian economy badly needs more private enterprise, more private investment and less government control, but Carney has mostly delivered the opposite. Last year, one of his larger initiatives was the Major Projects Office, which allows for projects to receive speedier approvals if they are deemed to be in the “national interest.” The problem is that the government, not the private sector, determines what is in the “national interest” and therefore slants the playing field by giving government-favoured projects preferential regulatory treatment.

Even worse was Carney’s so-called sovereign wealth fund , which is funded by debt instead of wealth and designed to marshal private capital towards political objectives such as fighting global warming. And last week’s Canada Investment Summit, at which Carney announced the Productivity Mega Deduction, placed far too much emphasis on the role of the state in directing investment. The tax deduction itself could have some positive effects and is better than past efforts to increase private investment, but better than disastrous is not good enough. Much better policies are needed to restore Canada’s economy.

National Post

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