National Post (Opinions) Archives - Page 25 of 339

The recent

by the Ontario Superior Court rendering the removal of Toronto’s bike lanes unconstitutional recalls the great Dr. Seuss book

Oh, The Thinks You Can Think

. Just think how we could change Canada if we take the logic of this ruling and keep going.

Oh, the thinks we could think.

The case, Cycle Toronto et al. v. Ontario, parsed the Ford government’s decision to close bike lanes on several Toronto streets. A group of cycling activists protested the closure, claiming that closing the bike lanes would not improve traffic congestion (as claimed by the government) and, most importantly, that it would harm cyclists.

This last point was key as it was central to the cyclists’ argument that the removal of bike lanes would infringe their Section 7 Charter right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”

Justice Paul Schabas sided with the cycling activists. He didn’t state that bike lanes were a right, rather, that removing bike lanes would violate the rights of cyclists, as their evidence showed that they would be more likely to be injured and or killed on roads without separated bike lanes.

On the messy question of balancing interests between cyclists and drivers, and the different priorities of government, the judge seems to have simply relied on the expert testimony provided to him on road safety and traffic congestion — as well as his own wise opinion on how to interpret it all.

Reading the ruling takes me back to my university political theory days and to Plato’s Republic with its philosopher kings. But here it’s made modern — a vision of government via technocratic expertise, refracted through judicial wisdom.

Imagine what other controversial political questions could be answered by experts and judges without the messy interference of politicians and democracy.

How about Premier Doug Ford’s choice to

raise

the speed limits on some highways? Experts have already

warned

that higher speed limits lead to more traffic fatalities. This initiative might be considered unconstitutional if we apply the reasoning in the Cycle Toronto ruling.

But why stop there? Let’s go to federal politics. The Carney government has said that it isn’t going to expand pharmacare. But won’t this damage Canadians’ health? Couldn’t this, too, be said to infringe upon our wildly expanded notion of Section 7 rights to “life, liberty and security of the person”?

Perhaps Ford shouldn’t have been allowed to

let alcohol be sold

in Ontario’s grocery stores and convenience stores. If this leads to higher rates of alcohol use, especially among youth, and we know that alcohol is bad for our health, then this policy can be said to have harmful effects.

If you really wanted to think big about our Section 7 rights, even Canada’s national defence policy can be considered harmful to Canadians. Too much spending might risk a greater chance of war and harm. Or, it could be that not enough spending risks conflict. It’s hard to know. Luckily, according to the logic of the Cycle Toronto ruling, we don’t need to worry. We can just rely on the expert class — overseen by a benevolent judge — to decide for us.

This ruling doesn’t come out of nowhere, of course. The debate on judicial activism is longstanding in our post-Charter Canada — on how much or how little deference judges should give to parliaments.

But it’s worth noting that the judges and the experts who testify before them don’t come out of a vacuum. These are real people with individual political preferences. We already know the lopsided, left-leaning world of the university from which our “experts” emerge. This kind of political skew misshapes peer review and undermines the expertise that judges rely on in court.

Law schools are, sadly, no different. Law schools like the one at Queen’s led the way in

erasing

John A. Macdonald from its building a few years ago. And before he became a judge, Justice Schabas himself

led the charge

to modernize and decolonize the Law Society of Upper Canada by switching its name to the Law Society of Ontario. He was also

involved

in mandating Ontario lawyers to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

It would be a lot easier to trust judicial oversight if it were, in fact, neutral. But rulings like Cycle Toronto show how a judge can work politics through the back door of judicial activism. In the process, they wildly inflate the notion of rights far beyond anything that was imagined back when the Charter was created in 1982.

Journalist Andrew Coyne

recently said

that he is a critic of the “notwithstanding clause,” that section of the 1982 Constitution that allows governments to temporarily override Charter rights. He says he much prefers Section 1 of the Charter, the “reasonable limits clause,” which requires that judges place reasonable limits on Charter rights. The clause would ideally safeguard us from rights-based extremism in the courts, which could prevent society and government from functioning collectively.

This is an entirely defensible position. But it depends on judges having a cautious approach to new rights claims. It depends on judges realizing that overriding policy set in the courts should be the very last resort. It depends on a ruling like Cycle Toronto being overturned and being seen as the political overreach that it very clearly is.

National Post

Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University.

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Shame. There used to be more of it and that was a good thing. Nowadays, a lack of shame runs rampant as people gaslight the world in the hopes no one will check up on them. In British Columbia, our current gaslighter-in-chief is Randene Neill, the minister of water, land and resource stewardship.

In a lengthy Aug. 1

Facebook post

, Neill addressed recent changes to land use planning in B.C., which she claimed had been “misunderstood.”

The province first tried to overhaul land use planning earlier in 2024 with changes to the Land Act. The

proposed changes

to the act would have given decision-making powers to First Nations over public lands. However, the

government continually claimed the changes were far less impactful

than they would have been. At the time, the opportunity for public engagement on these enormous amendments was released in a low-key posting on the government website with little fanfare. The government did not want the public involved, but got caught when veteran journalist Vaughn Palmer began following the issue and

brought it to the public’s attention

In the face of the public reaction due to Palmer’s reporting, the government backed down on its amendments to the Land Act, but not on its idea to transfer decision-making power to First Nations by other means.

In August 2024, the NDP

agreed to transfer

six square kilometres of public land to the Shishalh Nation, in a deal that was only made public in January 2025. Neill, who was just elected in October, wasn’t made aware of this until after the 2024 provincial election.

This summer, the government is following the same playbook. On June 3, the government

announced

consultations for land use planning in northwestern B.C., which covers

nearly a third

of the entire province. Few people would have seen the opportunity for engagement or been aware of the vast changes underway.

While not explicitly hidden by the government, changes of this magnitude require a far, far more concerted effort to raise public awareness on the full impact of proposed land use changes. This takes years, not weeks or a few short months as with the current government timelines.

Then, on June 26, the government

signed a new land use agreement

with the Squamish Nation, updating their

2007 deal

In the new deal, the province and the First Nation agreed on the boundaries of Squamish Nation “areas of importance,” which are candidate sites for protection “based on various cultural, spiritual and other interests.” These areas, says the deal, are a “high priority to develop management direction for claim staking, subsurface resource exploration and development that protects the integrity of Squamish Nation’s cultural and other interests.”

Some of the Squamish Nation’s areas of importance are substantially within “municipal jurisdiction or private lands,” including parts of Vancouver. Regarding these zones, the deal stipulates that B.C. “agrees to, at the request of Squamish Nation, participate in future discussions, including with a local government or third party, focused on protecting or resolving Squamish Nation interests….”

It’s possible that private lands will be affected down the road, but we don’t know for sure. In any case, no government releases news like that just prior to a long weekend unless it desperately wants to avoid any scrutiny about a secretive process that affects public access to public (and possibly private) lands.

The government then remained quiet about land use planning until Neill’s Aug. 1 Facebook post. There, she announced that online feedback surveys had been open since June 3 and would close Aug. 8. These surveys were not mentioned in the minister’s initial news release and

X announcement

in June.

On Facebook, Neill assured that land use plans “do not, and will not, apply to private land.”

“If you own private property within a planning area, your land is not included in the plan and your rights as a property owner remain the same,” she continued. “The planning process is transparent and requires extensive public engagement to identify the values that people care about in the planning area, from industrial and agricultural to recreation and conservation uses.”

This reeks of a government doing its best to achieve its desired Land Act changes under the guise of multiple one-off deals with First Nations without meaningful public engagement. It is being done on extremely tight timelines during the summer when, rather than reading obscure government news releases, British Columbians are outside enjoying the public lands they could soon not have full access to if Neill and Premier David Eby get their way.

B.C.’s NDP government has done nothing to earn public trust when it comes to land use. It has a track record of obfuscation, secrecy and silence when it comes to communicating its plans to the public, which is unacceptable considering that 94 per cent of the province belongs to the citizens of British Columbia.

Neill, Eby and the NDP are derelict in their democratic responsibility to the public interest by their rushed and secret land use actions. Shame on them.

National Post

Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business and sits on the board of B.C.’s Public Land Use Society.

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is running in a federal by-election in the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot. Advance voting

begins

on Friday, and he should

win

quite comfortably on Aug. 18.

What will columnists and political commentators be keeping an eye on?

The Longest Ballot Committee

’s impact in the Battle River Crowfoot by-election, or lack thereof?

The Longest Ballot Committee has

attempted

to flood ballots in seven targeted federal ridings (and one Ontario riding) since 2019. This activist movement is

critical

of Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, and has signed up candidates to defend a

single issue

: why Canada should shift to a more fair and balanced political

model

of proportional representation.

Has this campaign worked? They claim it has. In reality, its impact bas been negligible at best.

The Longest Ballot Committee, through its

association

with the now-defunct Rhinoceros Party,

attempted

to set a Guinness World Record during the 2019 election with the “longest ballot papers in history.” They targeted then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle. It was a failure: Scheer earned over 63 per cent of the vote, and only two of the eight candidates were aligned with them.

Other attempts to disrupt elections haven’t fared much better.

The Longest Ballot Committee had 15 of the 21 candidates running in St. Boniface-St. Vital (2021 election), 33 of 40 candidates in Mississauga-Lakeshore (2022 by-election) and 42 of 48 candidates in Winnipeg South Centre (2023 by-election), but the Liberals held all three seats. It also

flooded

two 2024 by-elections in Toronto-St. Paul’s (77 of 84 candidates) and LaSalle-Émard-Verdun (79 of 91 candidates). The voters shifted to a Conservative and Bloc Quebecois candidate, respectively, for reasons that had nothing to do with proportional representation, however.

Nevertheless, this movement has

suggested

it played a pivotal role in Poilievre losing his seat in Carleton in this year’s election. “This one-of-a-kind campaign has been a whole lot of fun and we want to thank again all of the volunteers, candidates, and supporters who made this year’s longest ballot possible,” spokesman Tomas Szuchewycz told the Canadian Press on April 30. “It’s been a success,” said one candidate, Mark Moutter, who went off on a tangent and remarked, “I’ve never seen people looking more optimistically at electoral reform, ever.”

Is this true? No.

The Longest Ballot Committee was

represented

by 85 of the 91 candidates in Carleton, but only

took

a cumulative 824 votes out of 86,060 cast on April 28. That’s roughly 0.01 per cent of the total vote. As a comparison, Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy took 43,846 votes, or 50.95 per cent, while Poilievre earned 39,333 votes, or 45.7 per cent. The difference between them was 4.25 per cent, meaning Poilievre would have still lost even if the Longest Ballot Committee hadn’t participated.

What about electoral reform? There’s some appetite for it in Canada. A January 2025 poll conducted by EKOS Research for Fair Vote Canada

revealed

that “two-thirds of Canadians (68 per cent) support moving towards a system of proportional representation.” Then again, the large number of candidates in Carleton running on a pro-proportional representation platform were wiped out. It’s a mixed bag at best.

The Longest Ballot Committee likely had little to nothing to do with Poilievre’s loss in Carleton. (His loss was more likely a result of U.S. President Donald Trump and tariffs, as I’ve

written

before.)

While they’re

flooding

his Battle River-Crowfoot by-election in record numbers — 204

out of

214 candidates — lightning won’t strike twice. It’s one of the safest Conservative ridings in Canada. Damien Kurek, the three-term Conservative MP who stepped aside so Poilievre could run,

earned

85.5 percent, 71.3 percent and 82.84 percent of the vote in the 2019, 2021 and 2025 elections, respectively.

Elections Canada also decided to use special ballots in this byelection. Voters will

write in

the candidate’s name in a blank space, and “as long as your intention is clear, your vote will be counted, even if you misspell” it, as some undoubtedly will.

Nevertheless, Poilievre recently called for a

bill

to be introduced in the fall to change the election rules and prevent what he’s called the “longest ballot scam” from happening again. He suggested adjusting the number of signatures required by nominees from 100 to 0.05 per cent of a riding’s population, electors only being allowed to sign one nomination form and official agents only representing one candidate.

Is this really the answer? The Longest Ballot Committee’s strategy is annoying and wasteful in terms of time and resources, but I wouldn’t go as far to describe it either as undemocratic or something that needs to be eliminated by Elections Canada. There are small parties, one-issue candidates and joke candidates that occasionally run in elections. If we grant them that freedom, which is the hallmark of a parliamentary democracy like Canada, then the Longest Ballot Committee must be afforded that freedom, too.

It’s therefore up to political parties and politicians to come up with strategies to combat and negate this nuisance in Canadian politics. Based on the fact the Longest Ballot Committee hasn’t yet changed the course of a single riding, has vastly overinflated its importance thus far, and is a protest vote that barely amounts to a political whisper, it’ll be easy to swat them away. That’s what Poilievre should do when he returns to Ottawa in the fall.

National Post

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Technology was supposed to scatter power. Early internet visionaries hoped that the digital revolution would empower individuals to break free from ignorance, poverty and tyranny. And, for a while at least, it did. But today, ever-smarter algorithms are learning to predict — and shape — our every choice, enabling unprecedentedly effective forms of centralized, unaccountable surveillance and control. The coming AI revolution may even render closed political systems more stable than open ones — where transparency, pluralism, checks and balances, and other key democratic features could prove liabilities in an age of exponential change. If openness long gave democracies their edge, could it be their undoing tomorrow?

Two decades ago I sketched the “J-curve,” which links a country’s openness to its stability: mature democracies are stable because they are open, consolidated autocracies are stable because they are closed and countries stuck in the messy middle tend to crack under stress.

But this relationship isn’t static; it’s shaped by technology. Back then, the world was riding a decentralizing telecommunications and internet revolution that connected people everywhere and armed them with more information than they’d ever had access to before, tipping the scales toward citizens and open political systems. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union to the colour revolutions in eastern Europe and the Arab Spring in the Middle East, global liberalization appeared inexorable.

That momentum has since slammed into reverse. The decentralizing information and communications technology revolution gave way to a centralizing data revolution built on network effects, digital surveillance and algorithmic nudging. Instead of diffusing power, this technology concentrated it, handing the small number of actors who control the largest datasets — whether governments or technology companies — the ability to shape what billions see, do and believe.

As citizens were turned from principal agents to objects of technological filters and data collection, closed systems gained ground. And so, the gains made by the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring were reversed. Hungary and Turkey have muzzled their free press and politicized their independent judiciaries. Chinese President Xi Jinping has consolidated power and reversed two decades of Chinese economic opening. Most dramatically, the United States has turned from the world’s leading exporter of democracy — however inconsistently and hypocritically — to the leading exporter of the tools that undermine it.

The explosion of artificial intelligence capabilities is about to supercharge these trends. Models trained on our individual private data will soon “know” us better than we know ourselves, programming humans faster than we can program them and transferring even more power to the handful of actors who control the data and algorithms.

Here, the J-curve warps. As AI spreads, both tightly closed and hyper-open societies grow fragile, bending the curve into a U. Over time, as the technology improves and control over the most advanced models becomes consolidated, AI could harden autocracies and fray democracies, flipping the shape back toward an inverted J whose stable slope now favours closed systems.

In this world, the Chinese Communist Party converts its vast data troves, state control of the economy and existing surveillance apparatus into a durable political advantage. The United States drifts toward a more top-down, kleptocratic, technopolar system where a small club of tech titans exerts growing influence over public life in pursuit of private interests. Both systems become similarly centralized — and dominant — at the expense of citizens, with countries like India and the Gulf states heading the same way while Europe and Japan risk geopolitical irrelevance (or worse, internal instability) as they fall behind in the race for AI supremacy.

Is there any escape from this dystopian future? Perhaps, if decentralized open-source AI models end up on top. In Taiwan, engineers and activists are crowdsourcing an open-source model built on DeepSeek, hoping to keep advanced AI in civic rather than corporate or state hands. Success could restore some of the decentralization the early internet once promised — though it could also lower the barrier for malicious actors to deploy harmful capabilities. For now, however, momentum lies with closed models centralizing power.

History offers at least a sliver of hope. Every previous technological revolution — the printing press, railroads, broadcast media — first destabilized politics, then forced new norms and institutions that eventually restored balance between openness and stability. The question is whether democracies can adapt once again before AI writes them out of the script.

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NEW YORK CITY — It is a welcome and humane gesture amidst the inhumanity of war.

Last month, the only Catholic church in Gaza, which has served as a refuge for hundreds during the Israel-Hamas war, was damaged by Israeli fire. Shrapnel flew throughout the complex, killing three people and injuring the parish priest. The tiny Catholic community in Gaza has been the subject of special concern for Catholic leadership; the late Pope Francis would call every evening to check in with the pastor.

The Israel Defence Forces said the bombing was a mistake, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Pope Leo XIV to explain what happened. Israeli diplomats throughout the world got in touch with local Catholic leaders to offer regrets and apologies for the misfire. But the growing international atmosphere of distrust over Israeli policy and intentions in Gaza made the accidental bombing another point of friction.

Thus when New York’s American Jewish Committee (AJC)

announced a donation

of US$25,000 (C$34,400) to repair the damaged Holy Family Church, it was most welcome. The funds will be conveyed through the Archdiocese of New York.

I mention it because the AJC’s gesture, though small, showed a humanity that the Israeli government has struggled to manifest to the world. I first engaged in Israeli advocacy more than 20 years ago, and never in that time have the very motives and good intentions of an Israeli government been so questioned by its longtime friends.

a scathing essay

this week on antisemitism, Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States (2009-2013), argued that the late Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed last year by Israeli forces in Gaza, gambled that “the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy and lustful for the blood of innocents and children” would work to the advantage of Hamas, even as it lost military battles.

“In betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot,” writes Oren, noting the explosion of antisemitism worldwide, including in Canada.

In light of the ongoing food crisis in Gaza, Oren adds words that are painful for Israel’s friends to read, namely that Israel’s current government has “enhanced the Palestinians’ ability to tap into western prejudice.”

He continues: “Undoubtedly, there are many hungry people in Gaza and numbers of them may have starved during this war. Israel’s erratic policy of supplying, then denying, then again supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza, often in woefully insufficient amounts and by inefficient means, surely exacerbated the food shortage. And Israel’s failure to explain and defend its policies has been nothing short of monumental. All that, combined with settler violence, the racist remarks of prominent government ministers and the selfie videos of soldiers rejoicing over Gaza’s demolition, heighten the odds that Sinwar’s bet paid off.”

Such comments are not hard to find among Israel’s stalwart defenders — Oren is one — in Israel and abroad. The conclusion has been reached, by a significant number of Israelis, and by a wide consensus of Israel’s longstanding friends, that the Netanyahu government’s policies, and perhaps even disposition, are inhumane. All Israeli advocates make the distinction between support for Israel’s existence and security in general and the particular policies of any specific government, but it is lamentable that the current government has so damaged Israel’s standing.

We have arrived then at the 30-year and 20-year consequences of that most consequential figure, Benjamin Netanyahu. Next year, astonishingly, he will mark the 30th anniversary his first election as prime minister, an opponent, then and now, of a Palestinian state, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a step towards that. Twenty years ago this week, he resigned as finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, objecting to the Gaza withdrawal policy executed that summer.

Along the way, Netanyahu has won many arguments and achieved strategic and military victories, as even his political opponents would concede. Yet now he is losing friends even more quickly than he is defeating enemies.

This week, 20 years to the day after his 2005 resignation from cabinet, he announced that Israel would retake all of Gaza, fully occupying the territory. At what cost in Israeli and Palestinian lives he cannot know.

Twenty years ago Sharon withdrew from Gaza on the grounds that the continued Israeli presence could not justify the cost in material, security and international esteem. Netanyahu is now back, bigger than ever, willing to bear higher costs in material, security and international esteem.

Israel’s military leadership and most Israelis disagree, but Netanyahu is determined to vindicate his position of 20 years ago. This time there is no danger that the finance minister will resign. Bezalel Smotrich has made little secret of

his desire

to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. Just this week, he posed in front of a “

Death to Arabs

” graffito — which he disavowed after it was widely criticized.

Thus Netanyahu plans on a more intense war and a more intense crisis of displacement and hunger, to achieve goals that the previous 22 months of war, displacement and hunger have not completely achieved.

Israel’s friends praised Sharon’s withdrawal in 2005. Israel’s friends oppose Netanyahu’s pulverization strategy now. The prime minister is convinced that they were wrong then, and are wrong now.

National Post

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Montreal – An identifiably Jewish man was walking with his family in a quiet Montreal neighbourhood where a large Hasidic Jewish community makes its home, when he was violently attacked on Friday afternoon. He was repeatedly punched to the ground, his kippah ripped from his head and thrown into a splash pad.

The assault, caught on video and widely shared on social media, shows his young daughter clutching his arm as it unfolded. He ended up in hospital. His attacker fled.

The incident should have sparked an immediate and forceful response from our political leaders, police, and community officials.

On social media, at least, there has been some action — mostly from Jewish organizations and a handful of mostly conservative politicians.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) called the attack “a shocking act of antisemitic violence in broad daylight” and demanded “an unequivocal response from police, political leaders, and civic society.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said: “No family should have to live in fear in Canada. We must stop the antisemitism that has exploded in our communities.”

Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman was even more blunt: “Revolting.”

Shame on every single politician who has emboldens these thugs with the confidence to spew their venomous antisemitism without consequence. Shame on those who are silent and indifferent — or worse, hollow with yet another empty condemnation. This guy should face real consequences and those in power need to realize what they are allowing in Canada.

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said: “I am troubled by the violent and unacceptable attack on a father from the Jewish community. My thoughts are with the victim and their loved ones. The Montreal police will shed full light on this disturbing incident.”

Was this attack intentional — motivated by antisemitism — or was it the act of someone with untreated mental illness? We don’t yet know. But we do know it happened in an environment where intimidation, harassment, and violence against Jews have been steadily escalating — and where condemnation from those in power has been hesitant at best.

In recent days and weeks, protesters have shown up outside Mélanie Joly’s private home and Anita Anand’s constituency office, forcing staff to work remotely.

Canada’s oldest continuously open synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, has been desecrated. A Montreal4Palestine protester scrawled “Only Good Cop is a Dead Cop” on the pavement. And at “Wild Pride,” a pro-Palestinian Pride event in Montreal, organizers hosted an “Intifada on the Dance Floor” party while posting antisemitic tropes and “Death to the IDF” online.

This is not political debate — it’s the normalization of intimidation and, in some cases, the celebration of violence.

On August 6, Hamas, itself, urged supporters to “intensify popular pressure in all cities, capitals, and public squares” over the coming weekend — in both Arabic and English. That call is not abstract. It’s happening here.

It has been said more than once that eventually someone’s going to get hurt. Is this that incident? We don’t have to answer that question. We know what happened was enough to take further action. And yet here we are — same milquetoast response from authorities as everything else.

The graffiti, the threats, the marches. What’s it going to take for someone in a position of authority to end this campaign against the Jewish community? Where are the fellow Montrealers asking what has happened to our city — let alone Toronto, B.C., and the rest of the country?

As a born-and-bred Montrealer, I feel we’ve let some of our Jewish neighbours, friends and family feel alone and unsupported. History will judge us for that, and so much more.

Whether the Montreal attacker was motivated by ideology or mental illness, it is clear the broader climate is making such attacks more likely.

Hate crimes thrive in an environment where they are minimized, dismissed and ignored. Our leaders have a choice: to speak out, clearly and unequivocally, against all forms of hate and political violence — or to tacitly allow these acts to become part of our new normal.

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This week, Nova Scotia announced that it was banning people from the wilderness as part of its anti-wildfire measures. While authorities will routinely ban campfires, fireworks, off-roading and other spark-heavy activities during fire season, there’s not a lot of precedent for simply sealing Canadians off from the natural world altogether.

Until at least October, the mere act of hiking on public land in Nova Scotia could attract fines of up to $25,000. And even on private land, if a landowner hosts guests in the vicinity of a forest, that’s also a potential $25,000 fine.

In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of the Nova Scotia wilderness ban.

Monday

I like to look at society as like a large school classroom. When students are quiet, orderly and devoted to their task, a classroom is an ideal environment for civic betterment. But when chaos and delinquency are allowed free reign, it becomes a vortex of destruction and wasted potential.

It is reasonable that these principles should also apply in the macro sense. If Nova Scotians remain selfishly devoted to inherently flammable activities such as fishing, camping and walking in the general presence of trees, then corrective action is in order.

Tuesday

Even when human activity is successfully purged from a wilderness environment, there is still the risk that fires can be ignited by human activity. An abandoned glass bottle can concentrate the sun’s rays in the same way as a magnifying glass, causing a pinpoint of light exceeding 200 degrees Celsius. A nine-volt battery can spontaneously spark without any humans present. We must even assume that an unattended laptop could feasibly be stolen by deer, bears, crows or other wildlife and employed in such a way as to combust the machine’s internal lithium-ion battery.

Thus, until we can receive a significant amount of rain, beverages will be limited to plastic and/or metallic drinking vessels, standard cell batteries will need to be surrendered to the nearest peace officer and public usage of laptops, mobile phones or other devices will be strictly prohibited. Violators can expect fines of up to $40,000.

If you see something that looks like a violation of the burn ban or woods restrictions, please report it to us by calling 1-800-565-2224. Please remember that some people will have travel permits to go into the woods, primarily to work. pic.twitter.com/wn3gyjcJrS

— Natural Resources (@NS_DNR) August 6, 2025

Wednesday

The Government of Nova Scotia appreciates the public’s cooperation with these measures, and remains devoted to the various guarantees enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

With that said, these remain extraordinary emergency circumstances, and the normal guarantees of free association and other such civil liberties do not apply in instances of restricted travel zones being invoked under the Forest Act (see Section 25).

Until hot, dry conditions can subside, we will be prohibiting any further discussion of this matter, as well as mentions of the words “liberty,” “freedom” or “autonomy.” The penalty for violating these restrictions is a $50,000 fine and/or a jail term not to exceed five years.

Thursday

Despite this government’s extremely reasonable measures taken to preserve the integrity and safety of our forested areas, we continue to receive reports of violations. In one particularly corrosive excuse, these violators asserted that “this is Canada, it’s literally all forest, and you’re probably going to have to enter the forest at some point if you’re doing almost anything.”

Clearly we are up against an unreasonable cultural expectation of forests and outdoor areas generally. But outside is a privilege, not a right. As a temporary measure until temperatures can cool sufficiently, we will be prohibiting movies, music and other media products inclined to tempt Nova Scotians towards such actions. This will include an immediate ban on radio plays of Take Me Home Country Roads, Patio Lanterns and all post-1966 cover versions of Going Up the Country.

Violators can expect fines of $100,000 and a mandatory 15 years of hard labour.

Friday

This crisis will not alleviate until we flatten the curve on water usage and the basic human use of fire, both of which now clearly stand as existential threats to our way of life. If Nova Scotia does not take drastic action now, the entire province will become a mass of charred carbon where no signs of life will exist for at least 1,000 years.

In observance of extreme drought conditions, Nova Scotians will be limited to 300 ml of water, per person, per day. Water contained within food will be deducted from the daily total at an officer’s discretion. Any private employment of fire in any capacity is now banned; this includes recreational use of electricity without a prior permit. Permits are also banned, as they require the employment of highly flammable paper.

Violators to any of the above will received one (1) consecutive life sentence for each violation and a fine of at least $76 billion.

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It is difficult for an outsider to get a clear idea of how the Canada-U.S. trade discussions are developing. As frequent readers may recall, I was seriously embarrassed at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hokey election masquerade as Winston Churchill translating the Scarborough Bluffs into the White Cliffs of Dover and shaking his righteous Canadian fist at the much-maligned U.S. President Donald Trump on the farther shore “trying to break us.” He all but promised to fight in the fields and hills (and wine cellars of Rockcliffe and billiard rooms of Westmount and the indoor swimming pools of Rosedale). My civic disappointment was tempered by my longstanding opinion that in politics, anything that works, no matter how outlandish, is acceptable if it isn’t illegal. The vapid farce of Carney’s “finest hour” narrowly passed that test, even if it reflected no credit on him or his voters.

President Trump’s tariff initiatives have been overwhelmingly successful and were based on his correct view that it was outrageous for the United States to be running a trade deficit of over US$1 trillion (C$1.4 trillion), the byproduct of indulgent Cold War trade practices that were used as bribes to fragile allies and nonaligned countries not to get too close to the Soviet bloc. As I had the honour of saying to President Trump, the United States has no real grievance with Canada. We are a fair-trading country and the United States does not have a trade deficit with us if energy is excluded, and much of the energy that it buys is at a knockdown price, which it then sells to third parties at a sizable profit. The Americans were right to complain about the absurdity of our supply management system and its associated tariffs on certain agricultural products, as the best way to raise farm income would be through specific income supplements to farmers, not overcharging the whole country for food. The prime minister appeared to be encouraging us to think that this anomaly would be addressed but it has not been.

Article 34.6 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement stipulates that that agreement runs until 2036 unless a party gives six months’ notice of termination, so there should be time to work something out. Mark Carney appears to be confining his Churchillian shtick to domestic audiences while being rather mousy in Washington. President Trump has made comments about a U.S.-Canadian union because it seemed to him that since we were not seriously paying for our own defence and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said the proposed tariffs would cause the collapse of the Canadian economy, it might be a favour to Canadians to confederate the countries. I had the occasion to say to him that it was very unjust to liken Canada to Mexico, which is not only severely complicit in a quasi-invasion of the United States by swarms of desperate people, but was also engaged in the systematic enticement of American manufacturing to Mexico with the benefit of cheap Mexican labour and subsidized factory construction, to export back into the United States fabricated parts from Chinese companies under the free-trade agreement. Trump said: “You have a point.” It is not impossible to deal with Donald Trump. Canadians are waiting to see if our leader wishes to make love or war — and if, in this case, he is competent enough to do either.

The prime minister has admirably agreed to devote five per cent of GDP to national defence, an area that has been scandalously ignored since the retirement of former prime minister Brian Mulroney more than 30 years ago, even if much of that funding can be spent on projects that are only marginally connected to defence. As I’ve written here and elsewhere ad nauseam for decades, defence is the most economically productive form of public investment as it assists high technology manufacturing and research and the per capita personnel costs are relatively modest, and it is the most efficient adult education opportunity for the members of the Armed Forces. But five per cent of Canadian GDP is over $100 billion in a country overloaded with debt and taxes and running a chronic annual federal deficit.

The prime minister is conducting a rather prudish flirtation with pipelines, trying to reconcile the absolute necessity of increasing Canada’s national income by satisfying some of the world’s raging appetite for our oil and gas with years of his mad green jeremiads and fantasies, producing such inspired nostrums as Carney’s concept of the carbon-neutral pipeline, as if it was proposed to deliver rosewater by pipeline to export markets or eastern Canada. There has been no hint of where the prime minister is leaning in budgetary terms but some hard choices are going to have to be made soon.

The closest he has come to an executive decision so far is his shameful nonsense of threatening to recognize a Palestinian state run by the corrupt, enfeebled, completely inept, mistrusted and totally unrepresentative Palestinian Authority. It’s quavering leader, 89-year-old longtime terrorist supporter Mahmoud Abbas, has made a lot of completely implausible claims of democratizing the bloodstained regime he inherited from Yasser Arafat, which has still not delivered anything of what it promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993, for which Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Hamas invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of Oct. 7, 2023, was intended to be, and was received as, an act of war, and Israel has largely won that war. There can be no peace until the Arab leaders in Gaza and the West Bank are prepared to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields and steals their food, and Israel has achieved a relatively low ratio for urban counter-guerrilla warfare of civilian-to-terrorist casualties. It was an error to have reduced food imports to Gaza between March and May that has now been corrected, but the Hamas terrorist operation must be exterminated to provide any possibility of peace for the Arabs or the Jews. Carney has done us no favours by tagging along behind the impotent posturing of the French and British, who,

ever since the British promised the same territory to the Jews and Arabs at the same time in the Balfour Declaration of 1917

, have never had any policy in the region except to await American initiatives and then posture as being better disposed to the Arabs.

Mark Carney was elected on a false though imaginatively histrionic premise of imminent national danger from the United States. He took over the government that ran this great and rich country into a ditch of capital outflows, declining relative prosperity, slow growth, an unsustainably large public sector, an almost collapsed health-care system and a state of national defence so anemic we would have trouble fending off an attack from angry Greenlanders. Canada is a treasure house with a talented and motivated population and political institutions that have been generally successful though they’re in need of renovation. Carney has been given a great opportunity and a great challenge, and it’s almost show time. On his thin record, we are entitled to hope, but also to fear the worst.

National Post

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Will an Alberta separation referendum spark a massive unity rally, or a mighty pan-Canadian caravan converging on Calgary or Edmonton? After all, that’s what happened in 1995, when Quebecers looked like they were voting to leave Canada and thousands

flocked

to Montreal’s Place du Canada for a “Great Love-in.”

Albertans aren’t holding their breath. Clearly Central Canada views Quebec’s possible separation as an existential threat, while the West’s concerns are mere “grievances.” Those of us born and raised “back east,” but transplanted West, who’ve lived both sides of the divide, experiencing firsthand the disparate treatment of the two regions, can perhaps help explain it.

Central Canadian ignorance regarding the West is indeed vast, and my own was a veritable Marianas Trench of stupidity. With limited prospects back home, you could not only find a job but build a life in what turned out not to be a vast cow pasture. For Quebecers, who were used to constant political strife and real terrorism, western life was transformatively calming, like stopping beating your head against the wall.

Calgary’s 600,000 inhabitants in 1980, disproportionately young and highly educated, were a diverse mix of people — westerners who’d survived the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, eastern transplants, Americans and Europeans on work assignments, an increasing number of new Canadians. Many self-selected by leaving home to find opportunity, creating an unusually enterprising, forward-looking citizenry. The lack of burdensome convention, bureaucracy and corruption, of “this is how we’ve always done it,” was liberating.

The land itself reinforced the spirit of the population — limitless sky and horizon, broad vistas of the plains and forbidding cordillera — suggesting that opportunity and achievement were limited only by one’s energy and imagination. It also fed a, if not classically conservative, at least free-market worldview, wary of the arbitrary shackles of government.

Albertans were down-to-earth and welcoming, and the West was a palpably “high trust” society. These various elements combined into what was later dubbed the “Alberta Advantage.” Far more than lower taxes and pro-business governance, it was rich in social capital — a younger, dynamic population, creating an unmistakable common “spirit.”

Meanwhile, easterners viewed the West as essentially a real-life version of the 1960s sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Albertans, while out hunting squirrels, could just shoot into the ground and up would come the bubblin’ crude. This was convenient shorthand, accounting for Alberta’s transformation from rural backwater to rich, economically vibrant backwater. After Imperial Oil’s Leduc discovery near Edmonton in 1947, royalties soon funded almost half the provincial government’s expenditures. Alberta’s economic clout grew after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when global prices more than tripled to US$12 per barrel (equivalent to almost US$90 today), and provincial resource royalties represented over 60 per cent of total government revenue in 1980.

Central Canadian bemusement at Alberta’s transformation became envy and resentment. Yeah, so Albertans now had easy money. Weren’t they just “sitting on” all these resources that they just “dug up”? Well, anyone who’s had to interpret subtle seismic readings from 5,000 metres down or land a 3,000-metre horizontal wellbore in a five-metre zone knows that developing oil and gas isn’t like shooting squirrels. It requires hard science, vision and grit, in risky, capital-intensive ventures. Different than, say, damming a river to generate electricity. After all, beavers build dams.

This “accidental” wealth fuelled equalization payments. University of Calgary economist Robert Mansell documents these vast transfers from Alberta to other provinces, mainly Quebec. His

latest work

estimates $611 billion in net transfers from 1961 to 2017, $180 billion in the 2010s alone.

How Quebec uses the money is illuminating. Its confident approach to Confederation is summarized in a

200-page document

released by a Liberal provincial government in 2017. Describing its “way of being Canadian,” equality’s defined as “fiscal autonomy” and “asymmetry” of policies, with Quebec co-operating (only) while upholding its interests. It’s aspirations require independent international relations and using federal institutions to promote its “vision of Canada.” This includes extending “the Canadian francophone space” (while, incidentally,

eliminating

Quebec’s anglophone space). “Leadership in Canada” would be exercised “without interference”, the province remaining “free to make its own choices and … assume its own identity.” The rest of us in turn should “duly recognize” and affirm Quebec’s “strong national identity,” ensuring that Quebecers “see themselves better reflected in Canada.” Was this in the prenup?

Quebec’s interests have been advanced through both constitutional and extra-constitutional means — i.e., separatism, for 60-plus years, often paralyzing the country. It has deftly accumulated special accommodations such a minimum number of seats in the House of Commons, while massive imbalances favour Quebec and eastern provinces in the

unelected Senate

. Its three justices on the Supreme Court of Canada is disproportionate to its share of Canada’s population (~20 per cent). Despite operating predominantly outside Quebec, the headquarters of both CN Rail and Air Canada are required to be in Montreal.

“Asymmetry” means special treatment and numerous carve-outs for Quebec. For example, a 1991 federal-provincial

accord

granted the province exclusive choice in immigration, with

an initial handout

of over $650 million (2025 dollars) for the integration of newcomers. As late as 2007, Quebec received 56 per cent of federal immigrant language training dollars despite welcoming only 16.5 per cent of newcomers. Nice deal.

Quebec’s “distinctiveness” includes its economic model — dirigisme is, after all, a French word. Its public sector is 24 per cent of total

employment

, higher than the

Canadian average

and 20 per cent more than

Alberta’s

. Generous government programs abound, notably Quebec’s famous “

$10-a-day daycare

” and bargain-basement university tuition, which was

frozen

for the better part of 40 years. Indulging its green sensibilities, Quebec blocks energy corridors and leaves its substantial unconventional natural gas reservoirs untapped — reserves that could supply

provincial

foreign markets

for decades.

Given Quebec’s goal to advance its “vision of Canada,” one might question the impact of its, shall we say “ethically challenged”

political culture

. Numerous scandals have plagued La Belle Province, from

tainted burgers

at Expo ’67, breathtakingly

corrupt misspending

for the 1976 Olympics, to the 2004

sponsorship scandal

(which ruined the Paul Martin government) and, most recently, the

Charbonneau Commission

investigating Quebec’s construction industry.

Quebec’s transformation into a linguistic monoculture and distinctly second-tier economy was done consciously and deliberately. A fascinating social experiment, but why are we

subsidizing

it?

Western aspirations unfolded differently. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s

national energy program

mandated below-market energy prices for eastern Canada at the West’s expense. Alberta’s revenue from oil and natural gas fell from about 60 per cent of its budget in 1981 to just over 20 by mid-decade, while unemployment reached 11 per cent, tripling between 1981 and 1983. Tens of thousands lost their homes and businesses as the ’80s became a lost decade. Unfortunately, the large western contingent in Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s 1984 majority failed to change the pattern. Ottawa remained focused on Quebec — notably awarding a massive fighter-jet servicing

contract

to Montreal’s Canadair in 1986, despite Winnipeg-based Bristol Aerospace’s cheaper, superior bid. Chalk up another $3.5 billion (2025 dollars) to Quebec at the West’s expense.

Westerners have responded with repeated calls for change. The Reform party, founded in 1987, had explicitly federalist goals — “The West wants in” — but was

not exactly welcomed

by Central Canada. Subsequently, there was the 2001

“firewall” letter

by Stephen Harper and “Calgary School” academics, followed by then-premier Jason Kenney’s

Fair Deal Panel

(2020) and the

Free Alberta Strategy

. All sought ways to free Alberta from the arbitrary whims of the federal government.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s 2022

Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act

aims to counter unconstitutional federal laws, while her 2025

Alberta Next initiative
kicked off

by demonstrating how myriad Liberal laws and policies cripple Alberta — to the tune of $500 billion in lost investment capital over the last 10 years. With the Mansell numbers, that adds up to $1.1 trillion in economic punishment meted upon one province.

So far, no love from Central Canada. Reaction seems rather to channel the old Liberal adage from the late Keith Davey — “Screw the West, we’ll take the rest.” In 2001, Jean Chrétien

mused

that Alberta’s “fortunate position” was “creating pressure on neighbouring provinces” and that others had “the right to have their share of these opportunities.”

More recently, Justin Trudeau

observed

in 2012 that, “Canada is struggling right now because Albertans are controlling the … social democratic agenda.” Asked whether Canada would be better off with more Quebecers in power than Albertans, Trudeau replied: “I’m a Liberal, so of course I think so.” Recent Donald Trump-fuelled Liberal Maple-Leafism also leaves many westerners cold, given that five minutes ago, Trudeau said Canada was an

irredeemably racist
post-national state

Meanwhile, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet says Alberta’s complaints are

mundanely economic

, and is “not certain that oil and gas qualifies to

define a culture

.” Seemingly, decades of lost livelihoods and unrealized potential are mundane.

Kudos to such multi-generational consistency, from Pierre Trudeau

asking

farmers in Winnipeg, “Why should I sell your wheat?” (1968), to Chrétien and Justin Trudeau, with little sign that the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney will abandon course. Given one party’s 60-year imposition of policies inimical to the West — and that it’s in power more often than not — the question facing Albertans, and westerners more broadly is: will we continue to acquiesce? As Reform party founder Preston Manning said: “I don’t support secession but, if separate, I wouldn’t advocate joining.”

John Weissenberger is a Calgary executive. Born in Montreal, he earned geology degrees in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. A longer version of this article can was published in C2C Journal.

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Sydney Sweeney’s bust is more powerful than I originally thought.

Last year,

I wrote

about it for the Post. I should have known that the story would necessitate a pair of articles. So, here we are.

In March 2024, after hosting

Saturday Night Live

, Sweeney inspired an online discourse on the death of woke. This unrepentant celebration of her beauty — a rare, exclusionary beauty, as I wrote at the time — indicated a cultural awareness about our return to the basic and anti-woke principle that sex, rather than forced tolerance, sells.

That any of us had caved to external demands to worship the asymmetrical, the unlovely, and sometimes, the unsightly, was

destined to be

a self-limiting state of being. We are wired to notice and appreciate beauty. It is as inescapable a human behaviour as our drive to breathe.

And so, following Sweeney’s

Saturday Night Live

exposure, compulsory worship of conventionally unattractive persons was out, and a return to our basal exaltation of some often indescribable yet universally understood standard of beauty was back in. Then, as now, this cultural shift had nothing to do with “whiteness,” as some critics are trying hard to suggest. Why would it?

Sweeney isn’t beautiful because she is white. Sweeney is white and happens to be beautiful. Beauty clearly comes in all shades, and Sydney’s beauty does nothing to suggest otherwise.

Months passed, and the tempest around Sweeny’s bust calmed to a quiver. Then, Donald Trump became the president of the United States.

Trump’s directives to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport illegal migrants from the U.S. (his

government claims

to have “removed 65,682 aliens, including criminals who threaten public safety and national security” in its first 100 days) has, as we know, resulted in massive and

sometimes violent

protests, and accusations of Trump being motivated by “

white supremacy

” or a desire to bring back Jim Crow era racial segregation laws.

America’s Democrats and Republicans have, perhaps, never been so at odds. Their country is deeply politically divided.

Re-enter Sydney Sweeney, from stage capital “R” Right, with an

American Eagle campaign

about her “good jeans.”

“Genes are passed down from parent to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney says demurely, while zipping up a pair of American Eagle jeans and then staring into the camera lens with her blue eyes. Then the words: “SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS” flash on screen. That’s it.

In any political context outside of Nazi Germany, the denim advertisement would, one might think, reasonably be taken as a just that: an attempt to use a beautiful woman to sell some jeans. What happened, instead, is that Sweeney, with her anti-woke weapons of mass destruction, has become the centre of a left-wing, anti anti-woke fury that beggars belief.

Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is being framed as

white supremacist

and

supportive of eugenics

Did you know that Sweeney’s adorable dog is a German Shepherd? Did someone say “German”? Uh oh. People on the internet

have decreed

that the pup is a “Nazi pet,” belonging to one “Swastika Sweeney.” It has also emerged that Sweeney is a

registered Republican voter

. Such horror.

op-ed in Newsweek

argues that the jeans ad is “a modern eugenics movement proudly re-emerging amid a welcoming political climate.” It dubiously links the “rhetoric” of Trump’s administration to entirely imagined and “horrifying thoughts of what may be happening to immigrants currently being detained by ICE.” All inspired by a denim advertisement.

The only useful part of that statement is regarding a “welcoming political climate.” For the current climate does, in fact, welcome this sort of intellectually dishonest, catastrophizing reaction that we are witnessing on the far-left.

The climate enabled using Sweeney as the easy, no-questions-asked target of a jealous and insecure rage towards all things beautiful. It enabled

invocation of Trump’s ICE raids

to justify the emittance of one final (hopefully) extinction-burst like paroxysm over the dying corpse of wokeness in America.

It is a corpse that now lies in Sweeney’s buxom shadow.

American Eagle’s

stock price

is increasing in the aftermath of the outrage. They have not apologized. They don’t need to: it clearly wouldn’t be good for the company’s bottom line.

Instead, American Eagle released the following

statement

about the campaign on their Instagram account: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story… Great jeans look good on everyone.” A cursory glance at their account reveals models of all skin colours in American Eagle jeans. But why let facts get in the way of woke outrage? Times are desperate; particularly when one side is on the precipice of losing a culture war.

Ladies and gentlemen, it turns out that Sweeney’s breasts were indeed the double-D harbingers of the death of woke.

Smother it, Sydney. Show no mercy.

National Post

Source: National Post (Opinions)

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