A Saskatchewan employer has been fined $5,000 in one of the first successful convictions obtained as part of a provincial effort to crack down on foreign worker exploitation.

On Tuesday, representatives for Dyan Jeny Enterprises pleaded guilty in a Moose Jaw, Sask. court to demanding $12,000 from an employee as a condition of maintaining his Canadian work permit.

Parth Patel, a foreign national working at Moose Jaw’s Guac Mexi Grill, was told that he would lose his job and potentially his immigration status unless he paid $12,000 to his employers.

In addition to the $5,000 fine, Dyan Jeny Enterprises was also ordered to repay the $12,000.

According to a report on the case by DiscoverMooseJaw , Provincial Court Judge Steven Schiefner questioned whether a $5,000 fine was sufficient deterrence for such a clear case of worker exploitation.

“I find the conduct of Dyan Jeny Enterprises and its principals to be atrocious,” Schiefner told the court.

Notably, the court would hear that illegally charging fees to foreign workers was considered common practice in Saskatchewan.

Last October, the charges against Dyan Jeny Enterprises were touted by the Saskatchewan government as the first prosecution pursued under a new provincial law intended to prevent the exploitation of foreign workers.

The Immigration Services Act, which became law in July, 2024, was announced as “the most comprehensive program integrity framework in the nation, including the highest fines for violation in the country.”

When first tabled before the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly, a statement by the province’s Immigration and Career Training Ministry said it was part of their overall program to obtain “autonomy over immigration” and to grow the province’s population to 1.4 million by 2030.

Under the new law, individual violators can be slapped with fines of up to $750,000, as well as imprisonment of up to two years. Corporations can face fines of up to $1,250,000.

In addition, if the infraction affects “more than one foreign national,” each victim is counted as a separate offence.

However, since the alleged Dyan Jeny Enterprise infractions all occurred before the Immigration Services Act was proclaimed into law, the charges ultimately had to be pursued under the more lenient 2013 legislation that the Immigration Services Act had replaced.

As a result, the stricter consequences of the new law never ended up applying.

In addition, most of the charges laid in October were eventually withdrawn, including a charge that Patel’s employers had taken “unfair advantage of a foreign national’s trust or exploit a foreign national’s fear or lack of experience or knowledge.”

The Moose Jaw decision occurs shortly after another landmark Saskatchewan case involving foreign labour.

Just last week, two Saskatchewan men, Mohammed Masum, 44, and Sohel Haider, 55, were convicted of human trafficking in the case of a Bangladeshi woman first brought to the province as a foreign worker. Prosecutors said it was the first case of labour human trafficking ever heard by a Saskatchewan court.

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Sometimes I am just awestruck at the glorious feast future historians will have as they try to decipher White House decision-making from the time of U.S. President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, the U.S. newspapers were full of amazement at the weird series of events that happened on the tarmac at Ankara Esenboga Airport in Turkey on July 8. Shortly before departing a NATO summit in the Turkish capital, the president announced that he would be flying out to the United Kingdom on the old Air Force One (a VC-25, i.e., a modified Boeing 747) instead of the new Qatari gift plane (a 747-8) that has just come into occasional use.

He muttered that he was using the older aircraft for “old time’s sake,” eventually boarded it … and was secretly hustled into a catering truck that transferred him to a third aircraft, a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-32A. It was this tricked-out 757 that ended up taking Trump, along with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, to Britain.

Reports suggest that U.S. intelligence officials were concerned about an Iranian missile attack on the old Air Force One, but that didn’t stop the older plane from taking off, effectively serving as a decoy, with other cabinet secretaries, dozens of reporters and plenty of executive-branch staff members aboard. When the president was asked how he could expose those people to a danger he avoided, he claimed that, “The (third) plane I flew on was at greater risk,” which raises the question why he (and the military-intelligence establishment) bothered with the little switcheroo at all.

The aircraft shell game induced a lot of chuckles on social media as people imagined Trump being shuffled between planes inside a drinks cart. But, as the national-security historian Garrett Graff observed in an article published on Wednesday, the incident raises several questions of high seriousness.

Why was the Qatari plane avoided in the first place? The answer seems to be, “It’s not yet actually fit for the purpose of secure presidential travel,” although Trump has already flown on it in safer regions. And why was the press corps not told of Trump’s switch? In the past, Graff notes, the media has sometimes been misled by the Secret Service for security purposes, but at least a few trusted reporters were always kept up to date on the president’s whereabouts. This has heavy implications: Trump was, for a while, aboard a mystery plane over foreign soil, with the secretary of defence, and almost nobody knew a thing about it.

Was the nuclear chain of command back in the U.S. fully aware of the switch, and of the use of the old Air Force One as a decoy? Graff reminds us of a fresh outrage that got lost amid the unending chaos and the endless stream of nonsensical Trumpian verbiage last month: the president posted a message on his Truth Social site suggesting that he had given “orders” for Iran to be destroyed by “1000 missiles” in the event of his assassination. Whether or not such a “dead man’s switch” is a good idea strategically — and let’s face it: the person of the president is protected internationally by the implied threat of overwhelming retaliation — it is plainly illegal . Nuclear and other military command responsibilities would devolve upon the vice-president, along with the presidency itself, the moment the president was dead. Assuming, of course, anybody knew he was dead.

National Post
Twitter.com/colbycosh

• John Ivison: Any trade deal with the U.S. will cost Carney
• Kelly McParland: Iran exploits Trump’s lack of interest in war

One of the laziest tropes about governance is that tragedies should not be politicized. Generally speaking, the ones who relay that silly maxim are the ones who must reckon with the tragedy and don’t want the headache or their rightful share of the blame.

There is no question that lightning strikes are not partisan occurrences. They can strike at any time and produce unpredictable effects, such as sparking a wildfire in the hinterland of British Columbia.

However, the choice not to expand airborne firefighting capacity, the treatment of wildfire fuels, and post-fire reconstruction are all political choices. If the Okanagan is going to burn, taking beloved homes and lives with it, there is responsibility that must be assigned. In fact, accountability in these situations is the decent thing.

The 2026 wildfire season in B.C. has been horrific, to put it mildly. By Tuesday, there were 904 fires burning, and nearly 400,000 hectares had burned, which is roughly the same size as the American state of Rhode Island. The especially dreadful Bald Range fire near Summerland has burned 17,800 hectares and forced roughly 20,000 people to flee their homes. An 80-year-old woman who failed to escape has been identified as the first casualty .

A state of emergency is in effect in B.C., having been declared on Aug. 8. That was four days after Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene said that such extraordinary tools were not yet justified. Conditions and political calculations have apparently flipped with equally terrifying and infuriating speed. It was precisely this volatility and danger that the B.C. NDP government claimed it was preparing for months ago.

Back in March, the province assured British Columbians that it was “ready” for the wildfire season, boasting more than 600 full-time positions, 1,300 firefighters, 28 airtankers, and more. This is not an insignificant arsenal, and absolutely nobody should be placing a single shred of blame on the firefighters themselves, whether they are local or flown in from Mexico as reinforcements. We are all deeply grateful to all of them.

Now, as for the government, if only its preparations could have been made adequate through the bravado of a press release. The only way to assess the province’s capacity for combating wildfires is by examining the results.

Considering the mass evacuations, international assistance, and federal aid that had to be requested once the fires were underway, it is clear that the NDP fell short of its own expectations.

Not every hill, patch of grassland, and knoll can be manned by a crew. Nor can the government shield the surface of the Earth from electrical storms or identify every lunatic firebug who drops a lit match. Still, the NDP has been in office for nine years and has yet to produce a transformative wildfire response strategy, despite escalating disasters throughout its tenure.

Changes in the climate, wind patterns, and snowfall can help us understand why the fires keep getting worse, but they do not explain the government’s ongoing preference for improvisation.

In 2026, the B.C. NDP government’s forward budgeting shows that funding for fire preparedness is set to be cut by 2028–29, as is funding for fire management. Despite the destruction of the Fraser Canyon town of Lytton and the solidification of the nickname “Smokanagan” amid the seemingly endless clouds of smoke that blanket B.C.’s wine country, it is clear that a modernized wildfire response is not on the books.

The B.C. NDP is running a $ 13.3 billion deficit, with funds being directed toward what the government deems more important to its political success and hold on power. These include boutique grants, bureaucratic experiments, ideological rebranding of institutions, and all the sleazy sinecures that come with modern left-wing governance. What about larger permanent crews, advanced nighttime operations, aggressive fuel reduction, or enhanced aerial capacity?

Why is the protection of life and property less important than the political baubles the government dangles before itself and its allies?

The private sector is, in fact, outdoing the provincial government. Coulson, a company in Port Alberni that specializes in firefighting, has just conditionally purchased 10 retired Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130H Hercules aircraft and plans to convert them for aerial firefighting. While the deal is not yet final, it is the sort of bet that the provincial government should have emulated long ago. Coulson is planning for the long term while the province is more concerned with damage control.

Has Lytton been forgotten? A fire in 2021 destroyed almost the entire village, killing two people, and the community has yet to be rebuilt. A report from B.C. Premier David Eby’s auditor general placed blame on the tiny municipality for having failed to procure an engineer and for not sufficiently partnering with the local First Nations. A town reduced to ash was supposed to become its own emergency ministry, reconstruction authority, and secretariat for local Indigenous relations.

Browbeating a shattered village for failing to uphold the NDP’s standard of hyper-ideological Indigenous engagement is a scandal. Can Lytton perhaps be forgiven for failing to perform every little procedural ritual that the province demands of it?

However, the NDP cannot pass the blame for the Bald Range fire down to Lytton, eastward to Ottawa, or backward to long-dead B.C. Liberal governments. The NDP has held power since 2017, receiving repeated warnings with every successive fire season. It has no more excuses for failing to modernize B.C.’s wildfire strategy. Flames are not partisan, but the NDP certainly is, as are its decisions within a democratic system.

British Columbians should politicize these wildfires because politicians bear responsibility for preventable failures. David Eby’s government should stop pretending that it did everything possible and own up to the fact that it did not do enough. Then, finally, it might credibly claim to have shown some leadership.

National Post

• Rob Breakenridge: Mark Carney’s (foolish) summer vacation in Italy
• Adam Zivo: The Canadian who helped set the stage for the war against Iran

We’re well into summer in the city of Toronto. With camps, cottages and patios being the priority, it’s no surprise that the work of our city representatives fades into the background. I get that. I also wanted a carefree summer for myself and my young daughter.

But eleven days into July, gun violence erupted at Salsa on St. Clair , a street festival full of strollers and families. Two people died, and four others were injured. One attendee told a reporter that people trampled over each other trying to get out of the area.

And what did we get from Mayor Olivia Chow’s administration? A news conference. Deputy Chief Frank Barredo of the Toronto Police assured reporters that Toronto remains “one of the safest cities in the world.” Thoughts, condolences and a quick pivot back to business as usual.

I’m a mother, so let me to tell you what I actually see when I move through this city with my daughter.

Let’s start with the places built for children and families. The parks and playgrounds where my daughter is supposed to spend her childhood are too often filthy with litter, broken glass and garbage bins overflowing for days. When a city can’t keep a playground clean, what exactly is it managing well? These are the simplest, most visible services a municipal government delivers, and it’s failing.

Walk a little further and you’ll see people suffering from addiction and mental health issues left to survive alone on our streets. Every one of them is someone’s child. A mother somewhere lies awake at night wondering where her kid is sleeping. This city’s answer has been to let them deteriorate in public. Meanwhile, I try to explain why they’ve been left to languish in crisis to my daughter. That’s not compassion. We are failing those who are suffering.

Then there are the young people who did everything right and still can’t build a life here. They study, they work and still, they cannot afford a home in Toronto. Every parent I know is quietly making the same grim calculation of how our children will be able to live this city. What kind of city builds itself a future by pricing out its young people?

And what about safety on the transit system we rely on? A friend’s pre-teen daughter was harassed on a bus on her way home from school. The driver did nothing. She got off well before her stop, alone, because getting off the bus felt safer than staying on it. Sit with that: a young girl decided isolating herself was safer than a city vehicle with a city employee at the wheel. That’s one less kid on transit and one more family that’s stopped trusting the city around them.

Here’s what worries me even more than any single failure: the silence after each one. Under Mayor Chow, this has become the pattern. Something happens and the city grieves or grumbles for a news cycle. City Hall offers sympathy, perhaps deflects to other levels of government and moves on. No plan. No urgency. No one held to account. The message to parents is unmistakable: your safety is not a priority.

There’s a Toronto municipal election coming up on Oct. 26. If the summer pattern holds, and we stay checked out until Labour Day only to tune back in the week before the vote, we will sleepwalk right back into an Olivia Chow-led city council and four more years of sympathy without action.

We need to pay attention now. We need to ask questions now. Why can’t we keep parks and playground clean? What is the plan for the people slowly dying on our streets? Where will our kids live? Why doesn’t a young girl feel safe on a city bus?

I love this city. I am raising my daughter here by choice. I want her to grow up in the Toronto I did: where a summer street festival is the safest place in the world to be, where we don’t abandon our most vulnerable, where a girl can ride the bus home safely, and where a clean park is the bare minimum, not a luxury.

That Toronto is still possible. But it will not be delivered by an administration that answers failure with talking points, and it will not be chosen by a city that isn’t paying attention.

Enjoy your summer. But don’t sleep through it, because come October, what kind of city my child and yours grow up in gets decided, with or without you.

National Post

Kelly Aizicowitz is the executive director for A Better City Toronto, a former advisor to Premier Dalton McGuinty, and a mother raising a young daughter in Toronto.

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Canadians surely don’t begrudge our elected leaders — including even the prime minister — some time off now and then.

A summer vacation, or at least some down time with family, is not something that would be controversial or of concern to most Canadian voters.

However, the when and where do matter. This prime minister, who has shown a surprising amount of political acumen for a rookie prime minister, has failed on both counts with his August Italian getaway.

According to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Mark Carney is “on a reduced schedule in the week of Aug. 10,” and will be in Italy “for personal commitments until Aug. 17.”

Now, in fairness, it is a challenge for a head of government to schedule a vacation. As we’ve seen, crises can arise at any time and there’s no way to know in advance whether an expected quiet week will indeed remain as such.

For the prime minister, it’s always going to be a working vacation to some extent. As the PMO stresses, Carney “is in close contact with his team and officials on several priorities.”

Furthermore, it’s not as though the government grinds to a halt when the prime minister is on vacation. While Carney relaxes in beautiful Tuscany, Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc has been in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with his U.S. counterpart ahead of next week’s tariff deadline.

That deadline of course, did not just suddenly appear out of nowhere this week. And that’s what’s so bizarre and tone-deaf about Carney’s decision here: it flies in the face of his government’s own messaging and framing around some key issues.

As Carney himself has stated, this is a pivotal moment for Canada and for Canada-U.S. relations, specifically. There has been a constant emphasis on just how high the stakes are for our country in navigating and meeting this challenge.

It was July 20 that U.S. President Donald Trump announced new tariffs targeting Canadian imports, which would take effect after 30 days. While Carney might have wished for a quieter summer, those hopes were dashed by Trump’s agenda and this latest curveball.

As a prime minister who has built a political brand as the leader to guide Canada through what he has called a “once-in-a-lifetime crisis,” it’s hard to understand why Carney would see any point within that 30-day window as down time, let alone the final week before the deadline.

On top of that, there’s the questionable optics of leaving the country for this vacation.

“This summer, we choose Canada!” is the proud declaration that greets visitors to the government website for the “Canada Strong Pass.” The pass, of course, was introduced by the Carney government last year in response to Canadians “uniting to find new ways to discover and celebrate our beautiful country.”

As ill-timed and ill-advised as it was to jet off just days before a key moment in Canada-U.S. trade talks, that’s compounded by the decision to very much not “choose Canada.”

It’s not just that Italian vacations are well out of the reach of most Canadian families, it’s the deliberate undermining of the message that Canadian destinations are worthy of attention and in need of support. It’s one thing to see that written on a government website, but it would have been far more powerful and meaningful to see the prime minister leading by example.

The “when” is still a problem here, but the PM and his team whiffed on an easy political win when it comes to the “where.”

Look, obviously Mark Carney was previously in a position where an impromptu summer Tuscan getaway was easy and simple. At some point in the future, he will be in such a position once again.

In the meantime, though, there is some degree of sacrifice that’s required in being the prime minister. That doesn’t mean completely sacrificing summer holidays or family time, but it does mean prioritizing the needs of the country and the responsibilities that come with the job — a job that Carney sought out, let’s not forget.

There is also a political risk this all creates for the prime minister if things go sideways next week or in the weeks ahead. There could be all sorts of factors at play in a scenario where the Canada-U.S. trade relationship erodes even further, but it would be fair to ask if the prime minister did all he could to prevent that.

It would be unfair, of course, to pin any such breakdown solely on this vacation, but it would only serve to reinforce the perception that maybe this wasn’t the wisest move,

In the meantime, Canadians can simply hope that the Italian sunshine refocuses and reenergizes the prime minister. As he has reminded us many times, the stakes are high for Canada in the coming weeks.

Rob Breakenridge is a Calgary-based podcaster and writer. He can be found at robbreakenridge.ca and reached at rob.breakenridge@gmail.com

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Although Canada officially refused to join the United States’ springtime war against Iran, new information suggests that Canadian personnel indirectly assisted the campaign while embedded with American forces. This is nothing to be ashamed of. If anything, Ottawa’s support should have been more fulsome, consistent and overt.

When American bombs began to pummel the Islamic Republic of Iran in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced the campaign as “inconsistent with international law,” and claimed that Canada was “not a party to those actions.”

However, Ottawa and Washington have a longstanding policy of exchanging service members to enhance allied cohesion and intelligence sharing. Through this integration, Canadian personnel have occasionally fought in conflicts that Ottawa is officially uninvolved with — most notably the 2003 Iraq War .

This spring, a handful of media reports suggested that some of these American-embedded Canadians might have been involved in the Iran war. A former senior Canadian general, Denis Thompson, even told the CBC that it was highly likely that some of these personnel helped plan airstrikes against the Islamic Republic.

In response, the Department of National Defence (DND) claimed that American-embedded Canadian service members had been assigned other duties that would keep them out of the conflict, despite otherwise remaining at their posts.

We now know that this statement, even if technically true, was somewhat misleading.

Late last month, the Government of Canada announced it would be awarding a Meritorious Service Cross to Col. David K. Turenne for his “extraordinary leadership and diplomatic skill as director of the Combined Air Operations Center during the Israel-Iran conflict.” He was specifically commended for “synchronizing multinational air operations and enabling the safe evacuation of 10,000 personnel from the Al Udeid Air Base, Doha, Qatar, June 2025.”

The medal, according to its official description, recognizes military deeds “performed in an outstandingly professional manner, according to a rare high standard that brings considerable benefit or great honour to the Canadian Forces.”

This is the first public acknowledgement of Turenne’s involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, although few details of his service are known. When National Post requested more information on what he did to earn his medal, DND failed to provide it and claimed that an interview with him would not be feasible.

To be clear: while Turenne’s award confirms that he was involved in last year’s 12-Day War, no evidence suggests he was involved in this year’s expanded campaign against Iran. His actions do not appear to have contradicted Carney’s claim that American-embedded service members were kept out of the ongoing conflict.

Still, the award illustrates how Canadian talent helped set the stage for the current war, which, in turn, complicates Carney’s moral and political stance.

To understand why this is the case, one needs to understand the significance of the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), which Turenne directed from June to December of 2025.

The CAOC is the U.S. air force’s “nerve centre” in the Middle East. Originally established in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, in 2003 the centre was relocated to the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where it stayed put for roughly two decades as an anchor of America’s regional power.

However, for some time, American military leaders have feared that the base, being located beside Iran, was highly vulnerable to the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile strikes. So they started shifting operations to a base in South Carolina, gradually moving personnel there and operating the two locations in parallel.

These precautions proved prudent. Just before last year’s 12-Day War, the CAOC, under the directorship of Turenne, moved its personnel to South Carolina while maintaining regular operations. Al Udeid, meanwhile, was partially evacuated . When hostilities broke out, Iran launched 14 missiles at the base — one got through and inflicted minor damage , prompting a full evacuation of remaining personnel.

Having learned from this experience, the United States once again evacuated a significant portion of its personnel — including all of the CAOC — from Al Udeid Air Base in January. As predicted, the Iranians subsequently struck the base with ballistic missiles, severely damaging the CAOC’s facilities and rendering them inoperable. The attack had little effect on American co-ordination, though, thanks to the duplicate South Carolina location.

Taking all of this together, it’s clear that, even though Turenne was not directly involved in the join U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, his leadership helped set the stage for the campaign. Not only did he direct the United States’ most crucial “nerve centre” during the 12-Day War, his successful management of the 2025 Al Udeid evacuations likely provided invaluable lessons for this year’s campaign.

While some might want to compartmentalize these two waves of conflict, they are militarily, politically and morally inextricable from one another.

In this light, Carney’s denunciations of the war, and his emphasis on Canada’s non-involvement, ring hollow. Canada cannot publicly condemn the United States and Israel’s pre-emptive wars against Iran while quietly honouring a Canadian colonel for aiding their execution.

Rather than downplaying Turenne’s extraordinary work, the correct position for the Canadian government would have been to publicly laud him, and to use his story to show Canadians that crippling the Islamic Republic is the morally correct thing to do. There is no reason to be ashamed of our heroes, and no reason to be ashamed of any efforts to thwart the Islamic Republic.

National Post

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