A new study is adding some important context to the debate around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies: specifically, the cost of these policies. The National Post’s Rob Breakenridge is joined by University of Buckingham professor and Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Eric Kaufmann to discuss his new study, “The Equity-Excellence Trade-Off: A Study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program.” Kaufmann argues that the aggressive push within academia for DEI targets has come with significant and measurable costs to research. According to the study, groups that benefit from DEI policies tend to have the lowest research impact. Kaufmann says his research also points to a growing emphasis on “scholarly activism,” particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We’ll find out more about what the study found, and what sort of reform is necessary to address these problems. Watch the full video below.

While Canadians remain broadly supportive of “holding firm” in a trade war with the United States, a new poll finds that this support drops off a cliff the moment Canadians are asked to pay for it.

The survey conducted by the think tank Build Canada found a clear majority said they would not support any trade strategy that threatened their retirement savings, risked the job of someone close to them, or incurred even a moderate increase to their taxes.

When asked if they would pay an extra $500 per year to hold the line in the current trade war, 56 per cent called this “unacceptable.”

The extra cost would work out to an overall tax increase of about one per cent, given that the average Canadian household pays about $48,000 in annual taxes.

Respondents were even less unwilling to risk any kind of employment consequence, with 68 per cent calling it “unacceptable” for Ottawa’s trade war prosecution to come at the cost of “increased household job-loss risk.”

Both sentiments seemed to differ from the number of respondents calling for Canada to “hold firm” on its trade policy with the U.S.; just 20 per cent said Canada should “make concessions” in order to maintain its trade access to the U.S.

“These results reveal tension between Canada’s preferred negotiating position and Canadians’ acceptance of its potential economic consequences,” read an accompanying analysis by Build Canada.

Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected a deal that could have normalized U.S. trade relations after months of tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

In response, the U.S. launched a new round of 50 per cent tariffs on an estimated $27.6 billion in Canadian imports. Starting on Tuesday, the Carney government retaliated with a package of 639 counter-tariffs on U.S. exports to Canada.

The new tariffs range from a 50 per cent tax on U.S.-manufactured toilet paper, to a 25 per cent tax on U.S.-made industrial lawnmowers.

Thus far, Ottawa has not indicated any intention to return to the negotiating table, with Carney suggesting they are planning to maintain the status quo until at least the end of Trump’s current term in 2029.

At an Aug. 24 announcement regarding a trade war subsidy package, Carney said “we will support these businesses for as long as it takes, in other words, beyond the life of this U.S. administration.”

In a video address released Tuesday , Carney warned that there would be economic consequences as his government pursued a longer-term strategy of reducing Canadian ties to the U.S. market.

“That pivot will come at a cost. There’s always a cost to action. But it doesn’t come close to the cost of standing still,” he said.

The new poll is the first ever published by Build Canada, a think tank launched in February 2025 with support from the Canadian tech sector. Daniel Debow, a former VP with Shopify, serves on its board.

The non-profit has previously launched an interactive “outcome tracker” tracing the results of 603 individual promises made by the Carney government. As per the tracker’s most recent tally, 182 were completed, 287 remained “in progress” and five were marked as “broken.”

The new poll on trade war costs is not the first time that Canadians’ support for a policy has differed sharply from their willingness to pay for it.

In 2019, just before the introduction of a federal carbon tax, a CBC-commissioned poll found that while respondents saw climate change as one of Canada’s most pressing political issues, a majority were unwilling to pay more than $100 per year to address it.

Just four years later — when Canadians were now paying 14 cents of carbon tax on every litre of gasoline — a Postmedia-Leger poll found blanket opposition to the tax, with criticism particularly concentrated among Atlantic Canadians who had only just started paying it.

Andrew Enns, executive vice-president with Leger, noted at the time that all this opposition was coming from people who had previously been quite bullish on strategies to mitigate carbon emissions.

“When you just ask people, ‘Hey do you support all these great things?’ they’re tripping over themselves to say yes,” he said.

The Build Canada poll also found sharp partisan divides between those who thought Canada should “make concessions” to U.S. trade demands.

A mere three per cent of respondents who had voted Liberal in the last federal election took the concessions approach, while this described a majority of Conservatives (50 per cent to 41 per cent).

“The survey does not establish whether these differences reflect political preferences, economic circumstances, or a combination of factors,” it said.

Build Canada surveyed a random sample of 1,696 Canadian residents between Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 and the data were weighted to reflect the 2021 census. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

• Canada was founded with the clear goal of not being the United States
• The worst-case scenario for the U.S.-Canada trade war

The federal Liberals’ policy of joining allies in punishing Israel, without providing any constructive solutions for bringing peace to the Middle East, continued apace on Tuesday, when Foreign Minister Anita Anand, along with her counterparts from several European countries, issued a joint statement pledging to “bring forward national measures to ban trade” in goods originating from Israeli settlements.

The fact that the announcement came a mere seven weeks before Israelis head to the polls — and as their leaders, courts and police show signs that they are beginning to take the issue of settler violence seriously — exposes it for what it is: a feeble attempt at election interference and a profound disrespect for the Jewish state’s liberal-democratic institutions.

The statement — issued by Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom — justified the new measures by claiming that the situation in the West Bank is “rapidly deteriorating amid unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion, including the unacceptable decision to publish tenders for the E1 settlement project,” and called on the Israeli government to “immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence and investigate allegations against Israeli forces.”

There’s no question that settler violence in the West Bank has been a growing problem since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, and that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not taken the problem seriously. Yet that appears to be changing following a brazen attack on the Palestinian village of Qusra on Aug. 29, in which settlers allegedly laid siege to a home with a Palestinian family inside.

Later that day, Netanyahu issued a rare condemnation of the “rioters … causing a huge injustice to the law-abiding settler public, hindering the IDF in fulfilling its missions and harming Israel’s standing in the world.”

A statement from a spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, Doron Spielman, acknowledged that there “is still more work to do” to prevent further attacks on Palestinians, while pledging that Israel will do it “with determination and without hesitation.” Israel, he said, “is a nation of laws and we will not tolerate vigilantism of any kind by any one.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by Israeli President Isaac Herzog , who called extremist settlers a “shame on the face of Israel,” and claimed that a “major effort” is underway to “undermine these activities and bring people to justice.”

The proof, of course, is in the pudding, and since that time, four settlers , including a soldier, have been arrested, as police continue their investigation. The military is also investigating an incident on Saturday, in which soldiers allegedly threw a Palestinian man out the back of a vehicle.

Separately, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a ruling on Sunday over a case brought by residents of three buildings in the besieged Palestinian village of Jalud. The court admonished the IDF, Israel Police and the defence minister, saying that settler violence is “a completely unacceptable phenomenon that stands in contrast to the basic values and moral principles of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and in contrast to the principles of liberty, fairness and justice.”

It ordered authorities to provide the residents with safe passage back to their homes within 14 days and issued a conditional order for the IDF and police to prove they follow through on the judgment.

Numerous recent news reports have also indicated that Netanyahu has ordered the dismantling of around 100 illegal outposts in Areas A and B of the West Bank, which the Oslo Accords place under varying degrees of Palestinian Authority control.

Taken together, these developments show that, while the current Israeli government can be criticized for allowing this problem to fester for so long, it is an issue that Israel’s liberal-democratic institutions are more than capable of handling on their own.

Canada and it allies have essentially proposed using an economic tool commonly reserved for despotic human-rights violators on a friendly country with the rule of law and an independent judiciary. What makes Tuesday’s announcement even more galling is that it comes just weeks before Israelis head to the polls, in what is shaping up to be a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.

The Oct. 27 vote has become a contest between the current prime minister and the centrist anti-Netanyahu bloc, led by Yashar Leader Gadi Eisenkot, who has spent weeks criticizing the government for its E1 settlement plan and allowing the West Bank to descend into “ anarchy .”

A Monday poll had the opposition leading with 57 seats, compared to 52 for the pro-Netanyahu bloc. But Tuesday’s sanctions announcement, along with U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s fiery anti-Israel speech in the British House of Commons, could change the calculus, prompting Israelis to either vote for the leader who has come out against the current government’s policies, or coalesce around a prime minister who has treated the international community’s concerns with flagrant disregard over the past three years.

Either way, it’s a risky gambit that’s hard to dismiss as anything other than election interference intended to put pressure on the government, given its timing. Nor is it likely to produce the desired result of changing Israeli policy.

Netanyahu’s order to remove illegal outposts was reportedly done at the behest of Washington, which has maintained friendly relations with Jerusalem and has well-established lines of communication with, and sway over, the government. The same cannot be said of the U.K., whose Jerusalem Consulate will reportedly be shuttered in response to Tuesday’s announcement — or of Canada, which hasn’t let any opportunity to criticize Israel go to waste for the past three years.

Sanctioning Israeli settlements is little more than a performative move designed to placate a segment of western society that views the world’s only Jewish state, and the only western-style democracy in the Middle East, as the root of all evil. If Canada and its allies hope to bring about a two-state solution, as they say, this is not the way to go about it.

National Post
jkline@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/accessd

• Raymond J. de Souza: The growing problem of settler violence in the West Bank
• Matthew Taub: Ottawa threatens sanctions on Israeli settlements without testing them legally

The departure of Doug Guzman as the chief executive officer of the new Defence Investment Agency is taken as a matter of fact in Ottawa.

It was first reported in the Globe and Mail that Guzman, a former deputy chair of the Royal Bank of Canada, is expected to leave the agency after growing frustrated with the slow pace of government defence procurement.

The story was not denied by the Prime Minister’s Office and is now reported as a fait accompli.

Except, defence industry and former military contacts I spoke with have told me Guzman is not going anywhere for the moment.

“Apparently, the government convinced him to stay. But who knows what that looks like?” said one senior veteran.

I reached out to a senior official in the Carney government who said Guzman is not quitting, though his role could “evolve.” It has been suggested that Guzman may want to join the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank that Canada is backing and hosting.

“His golden parachute is into that bank. It’s just a question of when and under what circumstances,” said one source, although this was denied by the official I spoke with.

My sense is that the story of Guzman’s departure is premature, rather than inaccurate.

What no one is denying is that the bureaucracy is struggling to match the prime minister’s ambition.

It would be a first in government if a senior executive from the private sector joined the public sector and was not frustrated at a manner of operating that fixates on process, not outcomes.

The story is important because it goes beyond the career path of one man: it is at the core of the Carney government’s economic plan.

Last February, the government released its defence industrial strategy, at the heart of which was the Defence Investment Agency.

The plan proposed to increase the share of defence acquisitions made in Canada to 70 per cent from 30 per cent; to increase defence industry revenues by 240 per cent; and defence exports by 50 per cent.

These were ambitious targets, but they were accompanied by a dramatic rise in the planned defence budget: an additional $80 billion over five years, with a targeted expenditure of 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence activities by 2035. That’s an effective tripling of spending to around $132 billion a year in today’s dollars.

That is considered by most observers to be an impractical outlay, given it would be close to what Ottawa spends on transfers to other levels of government, unless the surge in spending results in a significant multiplier effect on the broader economy. For the plan to pay for itself, the C.D. Howe Institute estimated nominal GDP growth would have to be around 6.3 per cent every year, far in excess of the forecasts in the last budget of 3.7 per cent over the next five years.

To have any chance of success, the new investment agency has to overcome what Guzman referred to as “the triangle of inertia” — the Department of National Defence; Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED); and Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), which have managed military equipment purchases to this point.

As the Parliamentary Budget Office noted, between 2017-18 and 2023-24, Ottawa failed to spend an average $2.68 billion of its procurement budget every year, raising questions about its capacity to manage such a huge increase in capital allocation.

Eugene Lang, a former chief of staff to two Liberal defence ministers and now an associate professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, wrote recently that it is one of Ottawa’s worst-kept secrets that many in the public service and the military bureaucracy do not share the Carney government’s enthusiasm for reforming procurement.

If Guzman had reached the conclusion that busting up the old model was not feasible, it would be a major blow to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s grand design, and it would not commend the job to future applicants.

We are not at that point yet. But things are clearly not going smoothly. The legislation to create the Defence Investment Agency, Bill C-31, remains mired in the House of Commons legislative process.

The new agency has set up shop in government offices at Kent and Laurier streets in Ottawa, cramming hundreds of staff from PSPC’s defence and marine branch alongside dozens from ISED’s Industrial and Technical Benefits Department and some dedicated workers who were hired by the agency. By all accounts, it is not a particularly happy marriage and certainly not a union that is living up to Carney’s mantra of “building with greater speed and ambition.”

“(The Defence Investment Agency) is still stuck trying to manage the legacy structure, the same authorities and processes that led to this problem in the first place,” said one senior former soldier.

He said the hope is that the obstacles are temporary and will ease once the legislation passes and the organization beds in.

“We have come further than anything I’ve seen in my career. We’re definitely on the right track, and anyone who thought this could be fixed in 12 to 18 months was being incredibly naive to begin with. I don’t think the success of this is dependent on one individual,” he said.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

Over the weekend, a thunderbolt reverberated through German politics as the right-wing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took home a thumping victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, receiving 43.8 per cent of the vote. Its next-closest rival, the centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU), came in a distant second at 17.2 per cent. Notable were the vote differences from 2021: the AfD’s share went up 23 points, while the CDU lost nearly 20 points.

However, due to Germany’s system of proportional representation, the AfD does not have an absolute majority in the state legislature and will need the support of another party — likely the socially conservative but economically left-leaning Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which received 5.3 per cent — if it is to govern.

Regardless of whether AfD successfully forms a government, it has upended Germany politics and sent waves of panic flooding through the mainstream parties. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the CDU has explicitly ruled out any co-operation with the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt and will work to cobble together a shaky alliance of parties to keep it from power.

The panic has spread well beyond Germany, with other European leaders voicing their concerns about the result. French Finance Minister Roland Lescure said the world must “resist” the “populist wave” sweeping the globe. Independent journalist Tilo Jung went further , asking at an AfD press conference if it saw any parallels between its success over the weekend and 1932, when the then-state of Anhalt elected the first Nazi state president.

That the AfD says distasteful things and has used language uncomfortably close to the rhetoric of Nazi Germany is well documented. However, lost in the insults and panic that surround the AfD is any recognition of why it might be popular and why people are voting for it.

It is both intellectually lazy and dishonest to simply believe that suddenly half of Saxony-Anhalt has found a rekindled love of the Nazis, rather than consider that perhaps voters are fed up with current governments that have not lived up to their promises. These same voters are looking to anyone who might offer something different. In this, the AfD has similarities with U.S. President Donald Trump, whose popularity some still refuse to try to understand.

One of the lightning rods for the AfD’s rise has been immigration. In 2015, in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, then-chancellor Angela Merkel famously said , “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”). What Germany could apparently do was take in 1.2 million migrants from countries like Syria. Even by 2020, it was clear that there were huge problems associated with this move as many immigrants remained poorly integrated and unemployed.

Incidents like the infamous Cologne sex assaults on New Year’s Eve 2016, in which 1,200 women were sexually assaulted by groups of men mostly identified as being of North African or Arab origin, turbocharged the AfD’s message. From 2015 to 2018, the AfD went from four to 18 per cent in the polls on an anti-immigration platform. And that AfD was far less sophisticated and refined than the current version that won in Saxony-Anhalt.

Added to the immigration issues is a sluggish and struggling Germany economy. While the whole country has been hit, some regions have been hit harder than others. One of those is Saxony-Anhalt. It has the lowest per capita GDP in Germany, well below the European average.

Considering those economic numbers, along with a large, poorly integrated immigrant population and a shaky financial outlook, it should not be a surprise to anyone that the voters in Saxony-Anhalt decided that the AfD and its lofty promises of tight borders, national interests and re-industrialization were worth a punt. Politicians who ask German voters to vote for status quo because of what happened in the 1930s, when those same voters are poor and see little prospect of their lot improving, are simply not living in reality.

The AfD, Donald Trump, Reform U.K. and Marine Le Pen in France are all populist movements. Perhaps you personally consider them unsavoury and wish to see them gone. In that case, deriding and dismissing them as “far-right” or “extreme far-right” misses the larger point that voters may be reacting to something more basic: the sense that their lives are not getting better and current governments are ignoring them.

Current governing parties need to take this as a lesson. While it may be difficult for a party like the CDU, which has ruled in Germany on and off for decades, to look itself sharply in the mirror and admit that it’s failing its citizens, that is its only path back to victory.

Ten years ago, the AfD was a canary in the coalmine. It’s now a clear sign that the last decade has not served many Europeans well and if things don’t change quickly, more fire-breathing politicians could get elected throughout the continent.

National Post

• Adam Pankratz: Rise of anti-immigrant AfD a warning to Western progressives
• Fraser Myers: The anti-democratic plot to ban the AfD

Postmedia’s Political Hack team, Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson, join Brian Lilley to assess the political spin contest over the collapse of U.S.-Canada trade talks. Despite the economic damage, they discuss why neither side has an incentive to make a deal. Prime Minister Mark Carney just crushed three byelections, securing his majority and grinding down the Conservatives — and there are several more coming up. And they explain how U.S. President Donald Trump’s strategy is to use the trade war as an excuse to deflect voter discontent in the upcoming congressional midterms, while continuing to divide Canadians. The only question for both is how long they can politically gain from the pain of closed businesses and job losses until voters won’t stand for it anymore. (Recorded Sept. 4, 2026.)

• Barry Appleton: Trump’s demands to change our laws must be rejected
• Ben Woodfinden: ‘Blame Canada’ conservatives are no better than woke statue topplers

Among several live linguistic issues in the ongoing Quebec election campaign, the one that seemed to make the biggest dent in anglophone media in recent days was Élections Québec’s announcement that it would only distribute printed election materials, including voter information cards, in French. This is in deference to Bill 96, Quebec’s latest decadent attack on minority-language rights. Among other great democratic feats, the law divides Quebec’s anglophones into those with “acquired rights” to English-language services who have roots in the province, and more recent arrivals who have no language rights.

Quick tangent here: Radio-Canada reported Friday that sales in adult diapers now exceed sales in baby diapers in Quebec. Twenty years ago, there were 36 per cent more births than deaths in Quebec, according to official government statistics. In 2024, there were three per cent more deaths than births. Does that sound like a society that can afford to pick and choose immigrants?

Anyway, Élections Québec asked for an exemption from the law to provide bilingual material to voters. “For us, the right to vote is … fundamental,” Élections Québec spokesperson Julie St-Arnaud Drolet told CTV News. Both the minister and the commissioner responsible for the French language turned them down.

It is petty, pointless, and not the end of the world. The French-language versions come with a QR code that points you to the English-language instructions. (Only certain anglos are entitled to printed elections information, but apparently online is a mad free-for-all.)

But as St-Arnaud says, voting is as fundamental a right as there is. It’s the last thing we should be meddling with for squeaks and giggles. Reasonable people can disagree on ID requirements and such, but unlike a lot of systems in Canada, while very far from perfect , our relatively low-tech elections usually work within acceptable parameters (if not always to newspaper deadlines).

The unilingual voter cards weren’t nearly the pettiest or most disquieting language development on the campaign trail last week, though. That honour goes, not for the first time, to Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. And I feel like this got less notice.

“Under the leadership of the CAQ and Christine Fréchette, every indicator related to the French language has declined,” a PQ press release averred . Among the indicators listed were “mother tongue” and “language spoken at home.”

PSPP is quoted in the release: “In Montreal, the situation is simply catastrophic. Less than half of Montrealers speak French at home.”

Nationalist campaigns have long begged to be asked what Gazette columnist Don Macpherson asked of the PQ way back in 2012: “How are you supposed to change your mother tongue?” It’s a clear tell, as Macpherson said, that for the PQ, “the problem is not one of behaviour, but of identity.”

And “none of your goddamn business if I can and do speak French” is a very fine response to “what language do you speak at home?” But it’s not true, for the record, that less than half of Montrealers speak French at home.

Forty-four per cent was the PQ’s figure; it’s more like 60 per cent, as La Presse reported in December . The PQ omits from the figure roughly 16 per cent of Montrealers who speak French and another language at home. That distinction is another huge tell: The PQ isn’t just concerned with the vitality of the French language; like many in the national-elite class, it doesn’t like bilingualism or multilingualism.

Another quick tangent: PSPP has a law degree from McGill, whose legal faculty requires entrants to be at least somewhat bilingual. He has a certificate in international law from Lund University in Sweden, whose legal faculty teaches in English. And he has an MBA from the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, which is, notoriously, in England. The school’s namesake and benefactor Wafic Saïd, incidentally, is a billionaire Syrian-Saudi businessman and arms broker, and a Canadian citizen who ( as revealed in the Paradise Papers ) established residency here in part by renting a farcically implausible basement apartment in the not-at-all-fancy Montreal neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges.

That’s not to say PSPP should have avoided Oxford. Just saying the world is far more complicated than an election narrative. Any Quebec government, especially one with eyes on sovereignty — assuming it wants to prosper in a global economy and not be chased into the St. Lawrence River by an angry mob — should want bilingualism and multilingualism numbers to rise, not view them as a problem. Far more people speak English in the Netherlands than in Quebec. Dutch is still very much a language.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a Quebec leader quite so bluntly say he cares what language you speak on your own time — including at school , even during recess. The PQ intends to launch a study into the “language of socialization” at French-language public schools in Montreal and Laval, in order to ensure that teenagers don’t divide themselves into identitarian cliques.

That is going to be quite a battle against human nature. I would bet heavily against victory. I would advise against trying. Alas, I wouldn’t put it past either of the parties with a good chance of winning this campaign.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

• Chris Selley: The Parti Québécois’ referendum tilt-a-whirl
• Chris Selley: We could have just ignored Trump’s ‘Lake America’ trolling