National Post (Opinions) Archives - Page 21 of 338

Competition is the lifeblood of a capitalist economy, giving consumers greater freedom of choice and forcing businesses to offer the best products at the lowest prices. But by trying to force greater competition in the high-speed internet market, Ottawa is reducing the incentive for companies to build out and improve the telecommunications networks that now power our entire economy and virtually every aspect of our daily lives.

Picture this: You slave away at your job for years, trying to save up enough money to realize your dream of starting your own burger joint. You reinvest your profits and eventually your business grows into a chain of restaurants, some of which serve areas that don’t even have a McDonald’s.

Then, the government comes in and says that, in order to increase competition in the fast-food space, you have to open your kitchen to competitors, so they can resell your burgers. Suddenly, other restaurants open up, selling your food at a lower, state-mandated price. McDonald’s also steps in and begins offering your burgers under its globally recognized brand.

This example may seem far-fetched, but it’s essentially what the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is doing.

The regulator’s controversial

new policy

, which was announced a couple years ago and

upheld

by Industry Minister Mélanie Joly last week, will force large network providers, like Telus and Bell, to provide their competitors with wholesale access to their fibre-optic networks at regulated rates.

This idea in itself is not particularly novel. For more than two decades, the CRTC has forced large internet service providers (ISPs) to grant small competitors access to their networks, in order to increase competition in a market that has historically been dominated by Canada’s large cable and telephone providers. But that policy was always designed to make it easier for small businesses to enter the market given the immense cost of laying new cables.

Now, the CRTC is allowing Canada’s Big Three telecommunications companies to resell fibre-optic access to each other’s networks. Canadians should not be fooled into thinking this policy was born out of Ottawa’s altruistic desire to reduce their monthly internet bills. It largely came about as a result of Telus’ desire to expand into Central Canada without spending the billions of dollars that would be required to build a fibre-optic network to compete with Bell and Rogers.

The move has angered other network providers, both big and small. Regional players, like Quebec’s Cogeco and Nova Scotia’s Eastlink, are upset because it will allow larger telcos, like Telus, to compete against them by piggybacking on their own networks and bundling that service with their existing offerings.

Bell is also aggrieved because it says it has invested over

$18 billion

in the past five years to bring fibre to three-million homes and businesses in Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, and will no longer receive the rate of return it once expected.

Already, Cogeco and Eastlink

have announced

that they are “suspending further planned upgrades to many smaller communities across Canada,” and Bell says it has reduced capital expenditures by $1.2 billion since the CRTC made its initial decision in late 2023.

While it’s possible that these companies are simply posturing to make a political point, reduced investment is exactly what should be expected when governments introduce policies that reduce the rate of return companies can expect from their investments.

Last year, the CRTC noted that two expert reports found that the policy would “negatively impact the business case for deploying fibre to areas that have not yet received” it, and admitted that the finding was “credible.”

Yet the regulator thinks it can mitigate this risk by properly setting prices — something central planners have never been successful at — and by “delaying competitor access to any newly deployed fibre until 2029.” That will give network operators five years to recoup the cost of new infrastructure, but will not alleviate the disincentive to expand or maintain those networks in the future.

Like many telecommunications policies crafted or backed by our Liberal government, this one appears to be designed to solve a problem that may no longer exist in the near future. Twenty years ago it was absolutely the case that Canada’s big telecommunications companies had a natural monopoly over internet service, providing it over existing telephone and cable networks.

But nowadays, cellular networks are ubiquitous and can provide

peak speeds

that are at least theoretically comparable to fibre. Meanwhile, companies like Starlink are offering satellite-based internet that’s available from

virtually anywhere

and offer

speeds

that are perfectly adequate for most personal and business uses at increasingly competitive prices.

The Carney government was elected on a promise that it would do things differently, and that excessive regulation would not be allowed to stand in the way of attracting investment and building a more productive and resilient economy.

If it were at all interested in attracting investment, increasing competition and building the types of high-speed networks that are essential components of the digital economy, it would have removed foreign ownership restrictions. This would have allowed foreign companies that can afford to build their own networks to compete in the Canadian marketplace.

By instead backing the CRTC’s new policy, the Liberals have sent the message that it’s business as usual in Ottawa — and that Canada is not a safe place to invest.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

Whatever happened in the Trump-Putin meeting, just after this column was written, we are finally getting close to the only satisfactory end to the awful Ukraine war. President Donald Trump deserves credit for being the only western statesman who audibly made the point that the West had two objectives in this war. Of course, Russia could not be permitted to occupy and reabsorb Ukraine. If it had done so, it would in one stroke have regained the largest single piece of what it had lost in its total defeat in the Cold War, which caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of international communism, (and the realignment of the left of the world as spontaneous environmental militants attacking capitalism from a new angle in the name of saving the planet). Ukraine is next to Russia itself the largest and most strategically important component of the former USSR. Apart from being a strategic disaster and a terrible injustice to Ukraine, the Russian conquest of Ukraine would have exposed the Western Alliance as a paper tiger that no aggressive state need take seriously.

The other Western objective, which Trump alone among Western leaders has recognized, is to assist Ukraine in a way that avoids such a profound humiliation of Russia that it settles durably into the potentially lethal embrace of China. Russia is no longer a particularly powerful country: its GDP is smaller than Canada’s and its standard of living has fallen as its population shrinks and it has never had enlightened or well-functioning political institutions. Its government is a corrupt despotism to which not the slightest credence can be attached in any context. The Russian army has been exposed in Ukraine as a shower; Russia has failed to take more than about 19 per cent of the country of barely a quarter of its own population and Russia has suffered over a million casualties and more than 50,000 deserters and has been propped up by North Korean and gangster mercenaries and drones from Iran (hardly the great arsenals of tyranny).

But the one serious problem that Russia could inflict upon the West is to agree to the relocation by China of 30 or 40 million of its surplus population to Siberia with the right to exploit the resources of that vast territory which Russia has never been able to do, apart from oil, in exchange for a royalty payment to the Kremlin to keep it afloat politically. This would formalize Russia’s vassalage to China and it would for the first time make China a resources-rich country and a significantly more serious rival to the West and particularly to the China-containment group that is gradually taking shape around the United States, Japan, India, South Korea and Australia. Ultimately, while Vladimir Putin must not be allowed to creep in increments back into the borders of Russia from Peter the Great to Brezhnev, it is a distinguished Western civilization that occupies an immense landmass in Eurasia and we want it in the West.

All talk of China surpassing the U.S. economy ended shortly after Trump was inaugurated president for the first time in 2017. The principal geopolitical contest now underway is for the continued expansion of the Western world. In the 1930s, the genuine West was really the United States, France, Great Britain and the advanced members of the British Commonwealth including Canada, and a few of the smaller and more prosperous European countries. It now includes most of Europe, the Americas, much of the Far East, Australasia and part of the Middle East. But until the end of the Cold War, the eastern frontier of the Western world in Europe was only about 150 miles east of the Rhine at the East German border. It advanced in a mighty bound nearly a thousand miles to the eastern border of Poland at the end of the Cold War and is about to advance another 800 miles to the revised eastern border of Ukraine. This is not imperialism; it is benign cultural Darwinism and Western civilization, for all its vulgarity and other failings is the most advanced in the world. We legitimately aspire to have the West extend between Vladivostok and Vancouver, westwards as well as eastwards.

To be fair, Russia has some legitimate partial claim on Ukraine. It was formally established as a jurisdiction by Lenin after the First World War. It was a contested zone between Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and Tartars, and while it has now demonstrated an unconquerable will to exist as a sovereign country and must be allowed to do so, it has in political terms essentially been a failed state for most of its 34 years in that role. Crimea was part of Russia until Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in the 1950s and while even the approximately 17 per cent of Ukrainians who speak Russian as a first language appear to be patriotic Ukrainians, some compromise on borders is not unreasonable, both in recognition of realities on the ground and of historic facts, as well as in the Western interest to protect and strengthen Ukraine without antagonizing Russia to the point that it becomes a permanent client state of China. If Trump can accomplish his double-objective, this could be done in the context of a non-aggression agreement between NATO and Russia, with a general guaranty of Ukraine’s revised borders. These could not be the fake guaranties given when Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up the nuclear weapons they had inherited from the USSR in 1993 and 1996.

Putin has bungled this war diplomatically as badly as he has militarily. If he had made serious peace overtures on the basis of what he might now be able to achieve, the war would have ended years ago at much reduced cost in blood, treasure and prestige to Russia. Trump went to such lengths to dangle an unembarrassing peace in front of him that he was widely reviled as being mesmerized by Putin, including by the Trump-deranged media of Canada. Now that Trump has transformed NATO from the flabby “alliance of the willing” in which everyone graciously accepted an American military guarantee but almost nobody, including Canada, contributed anything significant to their self-defence, into a serious strategic force, NATO can be much more helpful to Ukraine. Trump can now sell the most advanced military hardware in the world to its allies without stirring up his isolationist followers, and the NATO allies can give it on to Ukraine which can make the vagaries of war as well-known to the Russians as they have become to the Ukrainians. And Trump’s secondary sanctions will, as his tariffs have done, demonstrate what a matter of commercial life and death access to the U.S. market is to almost every country. Putin has to take what Trump offers and if he doesn’t the penalty he will pay will sharply increase every week, commercially and militarily.

When Trump last met Putin in Helsinki in 2018, former CIA director John Brennan called it ”treasonous” for not pressing hard enough on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. We now know that collusion and most of the charges against Russia were a partisan fiction. Now former director John Brennan is finally under criminal investigation for corrupting the CIA and assisting in putting a pastiche of lies and defamations (the Steele Dossier) as supposedly authentic intelligence into the 2016 election campaign, as well as for lying under oath to the Congress. In the jungle of the United States, justice is unreliable, but it is coming now, in America as in Ukraine.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

Last week, while visiting the U.K., United States Vice-President JD Vance warned Foreign Secretary David Lammy that his country’s government shouldn’t proceed down the “
very dark path
” of restricting speech. This week, the U.S. State Department released its
latest reports on human rights practices
around the world, calling out several European countries, particularly
France
,
Germany
, and the
U.K.
, for “serious restrictions on freedom of expression” as well as growing antisemitic violence.

While the U.S. has always had strong protections for speech, the focus on Europe’s censorious laws is, at first glance a little surprising. That is, it’s surprising until you realize the continent’s dependence on (and legal power over) American technology threaten freedom of expression around the world.

During his recent visit with Lammy, with whom he has a cordial relationship, Vance was relatively restrained in his criticism. He
charged
the West in general, including the Biden administration that preceded Donald Trump’s presidency, of being “a little too comfortable with censoring rather than engaging with a diverse array of opinions.”

But, in February, the vice-president was more pointed. While acknowledging that what Britons do in their own country is up to them,
he said
there have been infringements on free speech that “also affect American technology companies and by extension, American citizens.”

Vance’s comments prompted immediate pushback from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but the vice-president is hardly alone in his criticism of the U.K. and European countries.

The U.S.-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been
harshly critical
of the U.K.’s
censorious path
. It
suggests
the government there should look to “alternatives to censorship” including “more speech.” More broadly, FIRE Senior Scholar Sarah McLaughlin
notes
that “restrictions on speech — including online speech — in countries like the United Kingdom and Germany in recent years have been alarming.”

In May, Jacob Mchangama, the head of The Future of Free Speech think-tank at Vanderbilt University,
commented
, “in Europe free speech has been in steep decline for years, but there’s no real public outcry, no mainstream concern about democratic backsliding.” He accused the old world of being in a “state of delusional ‘Censorship Denial.’”

And Yascha Mounk, a German-born international studies professor at Johns Hopkins University,
wrote in April
that “by American standards, Germany’s limits on free speech have long been shockingly restrictive” and that matters are getting worse. He harbours similar concerns about the United Kingdom.

But a lot of countries have authoritarian laws and practices that other governments overlook except for the occasional pro forma protest. Vance’s comments about the impact of British censorship on American companies and citizens offers a strong hint as to why the U.S. government is paying attention to policies in the democratic and still relatively free countries of Europe.

That fact is that Europe is exceptionally good at producing rules and regulations, but has lost ground when it comes to entrepreneurship, innovation, and producing wealth. Belatedly, European national governments and the European Union bureaucracy have recognized the problem. The European Commission’s
Competitiveness Compass
commits the body to “simplifying rules and laws” and “creating a friendly environment for young companies to start and expand.” But Europe is playing catch-up with the U.S. and China and relies on American services.

This month, a
report
by the Swiss company Proton warns that Europe is highly dependent on American technology after decades of neglecting home-grown innovation. According to the report, three-quarters of publicly listed European companies depend on U.S.-based technology companies.

That means, when European governments apply censorship laws to tech platforms, that inevitably implicates American companies like Facebook and X. Last year, former EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton
raised civil libertarian eyebrows
around the world when he threatened X chief Elon Musk with legal action if American political content considered objectionable in Europe was made accessible through the platform to people living in the EU.

The problem is often referred to as “
the Brussels Effect
.” Europeans might be better at producing red tape than they are at starting companies or creating technologies, but the sheer size of the European market and the threat of draconian penalties or exclusion from the continent mean that rules generated by the EU have an impact on people everywhere.

Writing in 2023 for the Cato Institute, Senior Fellow Jennifer Huddleston
pointed out
that “many companies find it easier to have a single set of standards around issues — such as content moderation — rather than have specific rules for each country of operation.” It’s safer for these companies to adopt the more restrictive speech rules of European countries than more permissive American ones, since they don’t get penalized for censoring speech, only for allowing greater freedom of expression.

FIRE has also warned that other countries’ censorship laws “
might affect what readers see in the U.S.
“ as tech platforms try to accommodate incompatible laws and default to the most restrictive ones.

And, of course, officials including the EU’s Breton,
Brazil’s Supreme Court
, and
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner
claim the right to punish speech published outside their jurisdictions if the platforms over which that speech is transmitted have a presence in their countries. American tech companies are everywhere and so vulnerable to the world’s censors if they respect U.S. free speech standards at home.

None of this means that the U.S. government has a pristine record when it comes to respecting free speech. The Biden administration infamously leaned on social media companies to suppress criticism of the administration and of public health policies in what one judge called an “
Orwellian
” scheme.

And FIRE opposes the Trump administration’s
misuse of legal clout to muzzle media criticism
. It’s
suing the administration
for punishing noncitizens over their public comments. As the group points out, the First Amendment applies to everybody within the U.S.

But U.S. officials have good reason to worry that foreign censorship will metastasize around the world and endanger Americans’ speech. They’re right to speak out for greater freedom of expression.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

Mark Carney has been Canada’s Prime Minister for slightly over

100 days.

Yet, he still hasn’t done the one thing his predecessors did in short order: open a constituency office.

MPs of different parties often don’t have constituency offices for short periods of time. The reasons are usually straightforward and completely understandable, including moving locations and hiring new staff members. The matter is typically resolved quickly.

This hasn’t been the case with Carney in his riding of Nepean.

An Aug. 12

column

in the Ottawa Citizen focused on a local constituent, John Van de Brook, and his concerns about a rat infestation occurring in Barrhaven. He had apparently already reached out to his municipal councillor, and decided to contact Carney to ensure that all bases were covered. According to Bruce Deachman, “it wasn’t so many months ago that his then-MP, Chandra Arya, helped solve a problem that Van de Brook’s wife was having with her permanent resident card. Who knows, he figured, maybe Carney could help with this?”

When Van de Brook tried to look up Carney’s constituency office, he discovered that it didn’t exist. “I was disappointed,” he told Deachman, “he should have one.” Two other local residents, Elaine and Lyndsay, also expressed their disappointment that Carney had no local presence in Nepean. “You might see something on Facebook telling you to contact your MP,” the latter said in part. “When I see that, my first thought is that, technically, we have an MP, but we have nowhere to contact an MP. And, because of the role of our MP, it doesn’t feel like there’s someone representing our riding.”

Is this a party-based issue or delay? Doesn’t seem like it. Two newly-elected Liberal MPs in the area, Giovanna Mingarelli and Bruce Fanjoy, reportedly have their constituency offices up and running.

Deachman contacted the PMO about this matter. While he recognized that Carney is “the prime minister and has more important things to worry about,” he also correctly pointed out “constituency offices aren’t simply a quaint tradition or something going out of style.” What did the PMO reportedly tell him? “We’ll have more to share on that shortly. Be in touch.”

Really? That’s pretty out of touch, if you ask me.

While the history of constituency offices doesn’t date back to the time of Confederation, the current configuration has existed since the 1960s and 1970s. Will Stos, the editor of

Canadian Parliamentary Review,

wrote in the Winter 2024 issue that they were established “as a response to frustrations with bureaucracy and as necessary infrastructure for parliamentarians who did not have access to private office space.” Stos also pointed out “the main motive behind all this work is undoubtedly to be of service to constituents. Some politicians may do this work with utter selflessness and have no ulterior motives. But, it’s easy to see how a well-served potential voter could benefit a parliamentarian who is planning to run again at the next general election. Whether this constituent actively offers positive word-of-mouth promotion that bolsters the parliamentarian’s standing in the community or silently reflects on the value of this personalised help when next at the ballot box, effective constituency work likely contributes, in part, to the well-established ‘incumbency bonus’ at the polls.”

Having volunteered for a few summers

then-Progressive Conservative MP Barbara McDougall’s constituency office in St. Paul’s (now Toronto-St. Paul’s), I can confirm the value and importance of having this link between politicians and local residents in place. The former will be able to build personal relationships with individual constituents and neighbourhood businesses – and, in some cases, establish political relationships that lead to votes and financial donations. The latter will hopefully feel represented in the riding and know they can contact their local politician or staff members if they need help with an issue. It won’t always result in a perfect conclusion, but it’s an important lifeline that exists in politics and society — and must continue to exist in spite of the shift from personal to online forms of communication.

All politics is local, as the old saying goes. Carney, who thinks more on a global level, doesn’t seem to recognize this.

Yes, most prime ministers don’t spend much time in their constituency offices because they don’t have a lot of time to spare. Carney would be no different in this respect. At the same time, it’s the role of his constituency assistants, or paid staff, to field all phone calls, emails, texts and physical visits from constituents who don’t have set appointments. That’s what they’re hired to do. And while safety and security issues are more pressing concerns in this day and age, the prime minister’s protective detail, which

operates

under the PCMP’s umbrella, provides 24/7 security for Carney.

There’s no excuse for Carney not to have a constituency office in Nepean after 100 days as PM. It makes him look like an out-of-touch elite who can’t be bothered to speak to the common people and has no interest in their day-to-day issues, concerns and problems. Which has been an often-cited criticism of this prime minister since his first day on the job.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

The Korean War’s fighting ended in 1953 without a formal treaty — one of the original “frozen conflicts.” Its end, after years of bloody stalemate, came through exhaustion and with the spectre of nuclear war.

The conflict in Ukraine will be a similarly frozen one — Koreanized. A semi-permanent pause, probably without a meaningful concluding treaty, and like Korea, an enduring geopolitical sore that could turn “hot” again at any moment.

U.S. President Trump has been on something of a roll with “peace” agreements recently. He’s concluded them with Vietnam and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Ukraine continues to elude him.

Stephen Kotkin, the preeminent Russian historian and Stalin biographer, wrote in 2016: “Someday, Russia’s leaders may come to terms with the glaring limits of standing up to the West and seeking to dominate Eurasia. Until then, Russia will remain not another necessary crusade to be won but a problem to be managed.”

Trump doesn’t face Mao and Stalin as Eisenhower did, but a man in Vladimir Putin who deludes that Russia can recreate itself as a Eurasian power even as its demographic, economic and technological decline increases its own status as supplicant to China. Just like North Korea.

As Trump seeks the cherry on the cake of his application for a Nobel Peace prize in Anchorage on Friday, the West remains divided on how to manage the “problem.”

The U.S. doesn’t want to be seen to have lost in Ukraine, but as JD Vance has just restated, it doesn’t want to pay the bill to win either. Europe, with its failure of statecraft, complacently ignored Russia’s renewed contestation in Europe from 2007, dithered after his brazen annexation of Crimea in 2014, and only started to confront its new geopolitical reality after the full invasion in 2022.

While it has stumped up plenty of cash to support Ukraine, it still lacks credibility as a realistic military force, which is why Trump circumvents them.

A deal on Friday will mean nothing much really changes for Putin. No Russian troops will be leaving Crimea. Or the Donbas. None will be leaving the Crimea land-bridge regions of Zaporizhzhia or Kherson.

Putin could give up some token Russian gains so that Trump can declare a ceasefire or the hope for more negotiations that will resolve little. While Ukraine will never willingly give up land, its exhausted and knows it can’t evict Russia from the 20 per cent of Ukraine it occupies even as Putin pushes for a few final, cynical gains.

It is a tragedy that peoples and territories of a sovereign country will have to accept de facto annexation by a revisionist, backward looking and declining Great Power. But that’s already happened. Ukraine will, like Korea, end up being split and frozen because there’s no better alternative, no prospect of victory for either side that doesn’t escalate to nuclear conflict.

Putin believes the U.S. is mentally already on its way out of Europe, even if its nuclear umbrella stays intact. A ceasefire could give him time to rearm and reequip to try and test Europe’s resolve again in a few years. By then there might be a real crisis in the Taiwan strait that leaves little scope for U.S. attention in Europe. This would be a very dangerous situation.

Trump and Vice-President JD Vance’s frustration with Europe’s lack of military heft forgets that Europe was never meant to be able to protect itself after 1945 because that would have meant another hegemonic continental power. The fear of a revived Germany dominated U.S. and western strategy during the Cold War as much as the fear of the Soviet Union — ask Margaret Thatcher who believed German reunification was a mistake.

With the U.S. now likely moving to a purely “offshore balancer of power,” in Europe, perhaps it can show how an economically integrated but militarily loose federation of states backed by French and U.K. nuclear deterrents can cobble together enough economic and military power to deter and deny Russia.

But they’re going to have to move fast. Poland, Finland, Sweden and the Baltics are already doing all the heavy lifting. Those five per cent NATO commitments west of the Danube are going to need to meaningfully translate into material hard power — not just raising depleted military wages and pension pots.

It’s also going to mean developing a fully integrated defence structure to manage its Eastern flank that has potency. Without the U.S., this also means losing scale in delivering precision guided munitions (PGMs) through space-based reconnaissance strike complexes (RSCs).

Putin has largely kept the war away from his own cities. Europe must quickly develop a credible deterrence with precision long-range munitions at scale through an anti-access, area denial (A2AD) strategy that makes Putin think twice about the price he, his rear areas, and his cities would pay for renewed aggression. They’ve got 3 years to do it.

If Europe can manage that, and with the U.S. otherwise distracted or disinterested, a Koreanized Ukraine with an uneasy peace held together by fear and mutual distrust is about the best we can hope for.

David Oliver is a geopolitical strategy expert and founder of Minerva Group. Othón León is the managing director of the Canadian Centre for Strategic Studies.

Click here for more Canada

In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States. It was, territory-wise, a historically big, beautiful real estate deal.

Alaska is thus a most suitable place for an ambitious real estate developer to touch down for a summit with Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is not as big as Alaska, and not even President Donald Trump is inclined to give it over entirely to Putin. As land deals go, there is more territory in Ukraine — including prime waterfront, as the president recently noted admiringly — to barter with than, for example, Trump Gaza.

The Alaska summit could well be a big, beautiful Black Sea betrayal.

President Putin should have invited his American counterpart to Yalta. Trump likes resorts, which Yalta was in 1945 and is now. Along with the rest of Crimea, Putin seized and illegally annexed it from Ukraine in 2014. Yalta would provide a fitting locale to discuss with Trump how much more of Ukraine the American president will support him seizing now.

Trump promised Europeans on Wednesday that he would not negotiate borders with Putin in Alaska. But just last week he mused about land swaps. He now

claims

to be going to Alaska only for the ceasefire he demanded weeks ago. Putin refused and was rewarded with a summit.

It is possible that Trump sincerely desires a just peace in Ukraine. Unlikely though, as justice does not animate the Trump worldview. It is possible he sincerely desires peace, understood as a permanent ceasefire, independent of whether it is just or not. But Trump speaks more often of a “deal” rather than “peace.” What he indisputably wants is for the fighting to end and to take credit for it. Insofar as Putin — and Ukraine and the whole world — knows that, Ukrainians are right to be very anxious.

Eighty years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) and Churchill met with Stalin at Yalta to discuss the postwar future of Europe. In February 1945, Americans, Brits and Canadians were relentlessly pursuing the Nazis from the west; Stalin’s troops were already driving them out of Poland from the east. The allies would meet soon enough in Germany. Would they then leave? And if so, when?

FDR and Churchill were more trusting of Stalin than they should have been, but they were not naïve as to his imperial ambitions. Yet, they were in a difficult position, weaker than they would have preferred. The Soviet Red Army was too strong to drive out of Poland and Eastern Europe, and FDR was keen to have Soviet support to finish the war against Japan.

Stalin made promises to respect the sovereignty of Poland, and to permit elections there — promises he did not intend to keep. Already in May 1945, Churchill, distressed that Poland was being fed to the Russian bear, ordered military plans for Operation Unthinkable, a British attack on Soviet troops in Germany with the goal of driving them back over the Poland-Ukrainian border. The name gave it away. Operation Unthinkable was never going to happen. The result of Yalta was that the Second World War lasted another forty-five years in Poland and East Germany.

Trump is in a much stronger position now than FDR was in 1945. But Trump’s weakness is that he desperately wants his “deal,” and as every master negotiator knows, the more desperate party in a negotiation usually ends up on the wrong side of the deal. Thus, Trump vis-à-vis Russia is strategically strong, but is weaker in character, calculation and constancy.

Consider Trump’s recent trade deals as examples of the negotiator at work. He has — given the supine nature of the American Congress — the power to raise taxes on American importers, manufacturers and consumers. He does so gleefully with his tariffs. This hurts Americans, as well as those who export to the United States, including Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan. There is nothing any of them can do to prevent Trump from raising taxes on Americans if he wants to do so. In the “deals” done with Japan and Europe, they have declined to raise taxes (tariffs) on their own people.

In order to “prevent” Trump from further raising taxes on Americans, Europe and Japan have promised to buy American energy and invest in the United States at a level that is completely implausible. That’s why these “deals” are social media announcements, not actually signed accords. It is media manipulation masquerading as a masterful negotiation.

Putin will have noted well that Trump will accept a “deal” with promises that no one has the intention of keeping, or even the capacity to do so. He will promise Trump whatever shiny baubles he figures will attract attention. Putin will allow Trump to brag that Russia has promised to respect whatever shrinking borders they agree upon

—

just as Russia promised in 1994 (Budapest Memorandum) and in 2014 (Minsk I) and 2015 (Minsk II). And Trump is likely to fall for it, as he did in trade negotiations with Japan and Europe.

The Alaska summit may well be convivial. Trump and Putin share a similar imperialist view; the former speaks of Canada and Greenland in the same way that the latter speaks of Ukraine and Belarus. They will find it easy to agree on the terms of a Ukrainian surrender.

Trump has long favoured a Ukrainian surrender. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejects that and, in any case, does not need the help of the United States to surrender to Russia. Hence the Trump/Vance

temper tantrum

at the White House last February.

Putin will get a much warmer welcome than did Zelenskyy. Tsar Alexander II insisted that the United States pay for Alaska in 1867. Trump will not make the same demands of Putin in offering him Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

National Post

Click here for more United States

For pacifists, the answer is clear: since any deliberate killing is wrong, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 was wrong about two hundred thousand times over. Which rather complicates any celebration of Victory over Japan Day.

But that clear answer generates further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?

Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence; on the contrary, it excited their lust for domination and they fed upon it. No one who has watched the dreadful beating to death of an Australian POW in the tv dramatization of Richard Flanagan’s

The Narrow Road to the Deep North can doubt it.

On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified, might judge that the mass killing of civilians by the atomic bombs was, simply by its massive extent, indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But there are two problems here. The first is that the vast majority of people — certainly in Anglo-Saxon countries such as Canada, Britain, and the U.S.A — regard the war against Hitler and his allies as morally justified, notwithstanding the fact that it cost between 60 and 80 million deaths, well over half of them civilian.

And the second problem is that the ethical tradition of “just war” thinking doesn’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says that we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the possible or probable deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted, provided that the objective is sufficiently important, militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to avoid or minimize the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances just war would be impossible to prosecute otherwise.

So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to destroy vital military or military-related targets, and if there was no more discriminate way of achieving that end, then the bombing was morally justified. It was deeply, deeply tragic — but nevertheless just.

If, however, the intention in dropping the bombs was to slaughter Japanese people indiscriminately out of sheer vengeance, then that would be clearly immoral — since the motive of vengeance is always forbidden. Also immoral would be the use of the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians to terrorize the Japanese government into surrender. Why? Because if it’s morally OK to use non-combatant civilians in such a “terroristic” fashion, then no limits remain upon what we may do in war.

Which of these hypotheses best fits the facts of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a matter of historiographical controversy. When I last wrote on this topic — to mark the 70th anniversary in 2015 — I said this: “For what it’s worth, my own amateur impression is that … the intention in dropping the bombs was more ‘political’ (or terroristic) than military. If that is so, then they shouldn’t have been dropped.” Now, however, having read Evan Thomas’ detailed account of the decision-making processes in both Washington and Tokyo (Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II [London: Elliott & Thompson, 2023]), I’ve changed my mind.

Vengeance had nothing to do with it. The overriding motive of the U.S. government was the desire to save the lives of war-weary Americans by bringing the war to a swift end, through forcing the Japanese government to surrender. Two weeks before the first bomb was dropped, President Truman wrote: “My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children of Japan”.

The problem facing the president and his colleagues was that, even as the Japanese were forced back onto their home territory, they showed no sign of giving up the fight. They still had about five million troops in and out of uniform all over Asia. In Japan, all men aged 15-60 and women aged 17-40 had been enlisted in a National Volunteer Corps, armed with muskets, spears, and pitchforks. The Japanese were intent on bleeding the Americans dry as they invaded.

In July U.S. casualties (dead and wounded) while invading the outlying island of Okinawa were 50,000 and rising. Truman’s military advisors estimated that the invasion of the Japanese mainland in November would cost up to 1 million casualties (dead and wounded). One alternative was to blockade Japan, but that would have entailed starving the civilian population. It would also have taken a long time and General Carl Spaatz, the U.S. Army Air Force commander, was keen not to prolong the firebombing of Japanese cities, which had killed at least 85,000 people in Tokyo, most of them civilian, in March.

Therefore, the U.S. government decided on the only other alternative: to use the newly developed atomic bombs to intimidate the Japanese into surrender. The possibility of a “demonstration” drop onto some sparsely populated desert or island was considered, but it was rejected because, at the time, the Americans only had two bombs and had never dropped such things from the air before. If the demonstration failed to have the desired political effect and the follow-up went awry and proved a dud, there would be no bombs left. So, the decision was made to bomb cities.

What considerations were involved in deciding which cities to bomb? Was the size of population one? No. The focus was on military and economic objectives. The historic city of Kyoto was ruled out by Henry Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war, since it was sacred to the Japanese and its destruction would have excited such bitterness as to impede postwar reconciliation. Hiroshima, on the other hand, was known as a “military city” by the Japanese themselves. It housed the army headquarters for forces defending Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan, which was the first target of U.S. invasion. It also had several small shipyards, supply depots, and some industry on the periphery. Nagasaki was a port town with munitions factories.

Tragically, precise targeting was not an option. Due partly to technological limitations and partly to persistent cloud-cover, U.S. attempts at the precision-bombing of factories and industrial targets in Japan had generally failed. Moreover, those sites were often widely dispersed in residential districts. Therefore, Truman’s Target Committee decided to aim at Hiroshima’s city-centre, not least because there was a prominent bridge there that would be easiest to spot from 30,000 feet. The result? 70,000 people were killed directly, with a further 70,000 indirectly.

But was it really necessary to drop a second bomb? Yes, it was. The atomic explosion in Hiroshima failed to persuade Japan’s government to surrender. So, three days later, on Aug. 9, another U.S. bombing mission took to the air. Its intended target was in fact Kokura, whose centre hosted an enormous arsenal. In the event, however, Kokura was obscured by cloud-cover, so the bomber proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki. For reasons that remain unclear — the city was not hidden by cloud — it dropped its bomb over two miles from the city-centre and hit a Mitsubishi armaments plant. Nevertheless, 40,000 people were killed.

Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese war minister, General Korechika Anami, was still arguing in favour of fighting on to the bitter end. “We will find life out of death,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be beautiful?” Fortunately, his counsel didn’t prevail. Finally— eighty years ago today, on Aug. 15 — the Japanese government decided to surrender.

In the light of these facts, what should our moral assessment be? We can certainly say that the two atomic bombs were not dropped to wreak indiscriminate vengeance upon the Japanese people. On the contrary, they were dropped to bring the war to a swift end, thereby saving American (and Allied) lives primarily, and Japanese lives secondarily. That was the ultimate intention.

But what about the proximate one? Was the mass killing of civilians intended as the means of terrorizing the Japanese government into surrender? I don’t think so. The likely number of civilian casualties does not seem to have been a reason for the bombing. Desert and island targets, entirely or largely unpopulated, were considered. And they were set aside, not on principle, but for prudential reasons. The reasons for the choice of the eventual targets were military and economic. Had it been possible to hit discrete military and industrial sites of sufficient importance, without endangering civilian life, those, I believe, would have been preferred. But it just wasn’t possible.

Therefore, tragically and dreadfully, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally necessary.

Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and author of

In Defence of War

(2013).

Click here for more World

It’s one of those weeks when a refresher on the meaning of antisemitism feels necessary.

In Montreal, an Orthodox Jewish man walking with his three young children

was viciously beaten.

In Victoria,

graffiti

appeared on one of Canada’s oldest synagogues: “Jews are evil because genocide is evil.”

An Ontario psychotherapist shared a post seeking a therapist for a client — on the condition the therapist not be an “anti-Zionist.” And this week, the Toronto International Film Festival

withdrew

a documentary about the October 7 Hamas attacks — apparently because there was no “licensing agreement” with Hamas for footage the terrorists filmed of their own massacre of Jews.

TIFF’s CEO issued a

tepid apology

, referring to October 7 as an event and diluting the issue by inserting “Islamophobia” alongside antisemitism. In my

reply,

I said that “Islamophobia” should never be mentioned in the same breath as “antisemitism” and clearly, Islamophobia has nothing to do with the matter. In fact, it was Palestinians who massacred 1200 Jews and others on October 7 and no, it wasn’t an event. It was an atrocity.

None of these incidents are isolated. Together, they reveal antisemitism surfacing in ways both brazen and insidious, infiltrating public discourse, professional decisions, and cultural institutions.

One of the most troubling dynamics is how our political leaders have set the tone. Over recent months, the federal government has maintained a steady drumbeat of criticism against Israel. A day rarely passes without a senior minister — or the prime minister — commenting negatively about Israel. This constant targeting fuels an environment in which antisemitism seeps into Canadian daily life. Politicians must understand that their words can give implicit permission for hostility on the proverbial Canadian street.

Canada once led in fighting antisemitism — chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and shaping global strategies to combat hate. That leadership now feels absent. Our

envoy

for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and fighting Antisemitism resigned out of frustration. It is not too late to change course, but it will require the will to do so.

What happens in the Middle East should never dictate how we treat one another here at home. Targeting Jews — or any group — because of overseas events undermines Canada’s core values of respect, tolerance, pluralism, and coexistence. This is not simply about foreign policy — it is about the moral climate within our borders.

Antisemitism is an ancient prejudice that adapts to the times. Today, it often hides behind the language of politics, social justice, or criticism of Israel, but its core hostility is unchanged. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition — adopted by Canada and over thirty other countries — makes clear

that antisemitism includes:

Calling for or justifying violence against Jews.

Spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media, finance, or government.

Holding all Jews collectively responsible for the actions of some.

Denying or distorting the Holocaust.

Claiming Israel’s existence is inherently racist.

Applying double standards to Israel not expected of other democratic states.

Using antisemitic imagery to depict Israel or comparing Israeli policy to Nazi Germany.

Why does this matter? Because antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem — it’s a societal toxin. It corrodes safety and belonging for Jews, but history shows it never stops there. Hatred tolerated in one form inevitably spreads, targeting other minorities, dissenters, and anyone outside the dominant ideology.

Confronting antisemitism is therefore a Canadian responsibility. It demands moral clarity and courage: speaking up when antisemitic tropes appear, challenging discriminatory practices, holding institutions accountable, and expecting fair, urgent reporting from the media. It means refusing to accept the casual prejudice creeping into public life.

The physical violence in Montreal and cultural discrimination at TIFF that we have seen in a span of a week should be a wake up call.

Prejudice left unchecked will grow. If we allow antisemitism to take root in our workplaces, schools, politics, and culture, we will have betrayed not only the Jewish community but the promise of Canadian democracy itself.

The Canada we strive for is one where inclusion and dignity are not abstract ideals but lived realities. Protecting that vision begins with the recognition that antisemitism — in all its forms — has no place here.

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

Click here for more Canada

The Post gets results dep’t: Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner announced plans Wednesday to introduce a bill amending the Criminal Code so as to “

restore the value of Canadian citizenship by ending the practice of judges considering a non-citizen’s immigration status in sentencing

.” In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in R. v. Pham that it was legitimate, in some circumstances, to adjust criminal sentences downward to spare convicted non-citizens from deportation or other immigration-related consequences.

our columnist

Jamie Sarkonak

has argued

through tireless accumulation of examples, this has led to a spate of deliberately softened sentences for non-citizens perpetrating odious crimes. Rempel Garner and the Tories hope to explicitly Pham-proof the Code and require judges to ignore immigration status. In a minority Parliament, this idea will put the ball in the Liberal government’s court. Will they co-opt this Conservative idea, or will they sigh and dust off the old playbook of racism accusations and howls of “MAGA!”?

To go back to square one for a moment: Hoang Anh Pham had been given two years in prison on marijuana charges, which, under the terms of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, would have resulted in him losing his right to appeal any subsequent deportation order. The trial judge wasn’t specifically advised that this was a consequence of his sentence, so Pham appealed, asking for a sentence of two years less a day, which wouldn’t cost him his IRPA appeal right. The Crown agreed that the infinitesimally lighter sentence would have been fine, because it was still otherwise appropriate to the offence. Alberta’s appeal court rejected Pham’s plea, but it succeeded at the Supreme Court, winning seven to nil.

The language in the Pham ruling

, delivered by (then-puisne) Justice Wagner, is interesting. The Court accepted an equality-before-the-law argument that obviously has two sides. The concern was that when a non-citizen at risk of deportation is convicted of some crime, giving him the exact sentence a citizen would receive might in practice be much worse for him (or for blameless family members). But, of course, this gives non-citizens an avenue for sentence mitigation that is unavailable to citizens. Which view of equality before the law shall prevail?

The Pham court was careful to say that sentences shouldn’t be reduced to the point of being outside the accepted range; that trial judges were entitled to ignore immigration implications of a sentence as long as they took their existence into account; and, in particular, that soft-hearted judges shouldn’t design “inappropriate and artificial sentences in order to avoid collateral consequences which may flow from a statutory scheme or from other legislation, thus circumventing Parliament’s will.” Oh, no, not that!

This seems like an open invitation to Parliament to make its will known when it comes to principles of criminal sentencing, not to mention the higher-level political question of what distinctions the law is permitted to make between citizens and non-citizens. There is also the even-higher-level question whether Parliament has

any remaining practical control of criminal sentencing at all

. After all, the accepted sentencing ranges which loom so large in the Pham reasoning are themselves established by judges through an opaque oracular process of vibe-consultation, and they sometimes lead to controversial outcomes.

The Liberals will probably kill Rempel Garner’s bill with as little fuss as they can manage. But the more interesting outcome will arise if they co-opt it, allowing the Criminal Code to be amended. (Whatever your own views on immigration, you cannot reasonably deny that public sentiment has undergone a nightmarishly fast and well-documented change of attitude toward it.) Would the appellate courts then find a way to reject the new directive despite their endless fine talk of deference to legislatures?

I’m afraid the only real question is “How would they go about it?” Think about this month’s Ontario Superior Court decision establishing that a few Toronto bike lanes were protected by the Charter. (You’ve seen various nincompoops complaining in other newspapers that, no, this ruling “didn’t create a right to bike lanes”: readers may enjoy

perusing the uncategorical view offered by the professionals at McCarthy Tetrault

, and in particular the “key takeaways”.)

That bike-lane decision may not survive in the appellate courts, but the judicial procedure that led to it will certainly be available in a context of criminal sentencing. A trial judge confronted with the Conservative-initiated changes to the Criminal Code would almost be bound to accept that Charter rights were implicated, and he could thereby, like enterprising Superior Court Judge Schabas, conduct his own personal re-analysis of Parliament’s decision, deciding whether the people’s representatives had behaved rationally and non-arbitrarily. Thus is the character of our government now: any thought of statutory measures being “passed into law” by “legislators” is itself increasingly obsolete and misleading.

National Post

Click here for more Alberta

Self-awareness is seldom cited as one of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s main characteristics, but can he really not see the hypocrisy of his “We are taxed to death” comment this week? For Ontarians, Ford is one of the people doing the lethal taxing.

Ford apparently thinks high taxes are a problem for someone else to solve. The premier is meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney next week

to urge him to cut taxes

. OK, but Ford hasn’t even kept his own 2018 campaign promises to cut business and income taxes. Carney, by contrast, is cutting personal taxes, if modestly.

Back in 2018, Ford promised a one-point cut to the second personal income tax bracket and a reduction in corporate taxes from 11.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent. Ford still hasn’t implemented either one.

It certainly wasn’t because government revenues were flat. In 2019-20, Ford’s first full year, the tax take was $108.2 billion. The latest update this week says it will be $153.7 billion this year.

The combined federal and provincial top marginal income tax rate in Ontario is 53.53 per cent. That’s

third highest of any jurisdiction

in Canada and the U.S.

Ford would now have you believe that tax cuts are just what the economy needs to combat President Donald Trump’s tariffs. As the premier put it, “It’s economics 101. Put money in the people’s pockets and they are going to go out and spend it. It is as simple as going out to dinner, buying a pair of sneakers, buying a pair of jeans; it stimulates the economy.”

If that’s what the Ontario economy needs, Ford should lead by example and cut some of his own taxes. Eliminating the $3.8 billion land transfer tax would lower housing prices. Paring back the province’s $40 billion sales tax take would certainly stimulate consumer spending. And yet, Ford has done next to nothing on the tax front, fiddling with gas taxes and road tolls.

Despite his own tax track record, Ford seems to think that he can squeeze an additional tax cut out of Carney, even though the Carney government says its income tax cut will cost $27 billion over five years. As well, the Carney government has made expensive defence spending commitments and is likely to face a

$92 billion deficit

this fiscal year.

What does Ford expect to get from the meeting with Carney, except egg on his face?

Ford is desperately searching for something that would help him live up to his election promise to protect Ontario from American tariffs. High tariffs on autos, steel and aluminum will hurt the provincial economy, but the premier has never had the tools to combat them, despite his tough talk during the election.

Wednesday, he announced that the government would

dole out the first $1 billion in loans

from its $5-billion “Protect Ontario Account.” The government will lend businesses money in the hope that it might tide them over until the tariff problem magically disappears.

The Ford government even hopes that businesses would borrow government money to keep workers employed. Why would they, if there isn’t a market for the products or services they produce?

The difficult truth that both Ford and Carney have to face is that Trump’s tariffs are likely to cause long-term damage to some highly visible sectors of the Canadian economy.

It’s easy to talk about diversifying trade to other countries, but harder to do. Without U.S. market access, Ontario’s steel, automobile and aluminum industries will be, at best, much smaller. Trump’s anti-EV approach also makes the federal and provincial “investments” in EV battery plants look like a bad bet.

A politician’s natural instinct is to “protect” endangered jobs with the liberal application of public money as Ford is doing, but all that does is increase business’s dependence on government help. That’s unsustainable. It’s worth noting that e-commerce company Shopify has become Canada’s largest corporation by market capitalization without taking government money.

Ford also wants tax cuts, on someone else’s dime, but broad-based tax cuts to enable more sneaker sales are an ineffective use of money. Right now, American tariffs are a big problem in three sectors. Giving everyone a little bit of money won’t fix that. Ford should have learned that when he spent $3 billion to give almost everyone in Ontario $200.

In truth, both Ford and Carney lack the leverage to really stimulate the economy. Ontario has a $1.1 trillion gross domestic product. Canada’s GDP is nearly $3 trillion. A billion dollars of stimulus here or there is like someone trying to speed up an ocean liner by using a handkerchief as a sail.

Right now, the best thing Ford can do is leave the tariff problem to Carney and concentrate on delivering an effective government with a balanced budget.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: National Post (Opinions)

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more United States

Click here for more World

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Alberta

Click here for more Canada

loonie politics

premium content