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Anti-Israel protesters during the UJA’s Annual Walk With Israel event in Toronto, Sunday May 25, 2025.

This past week, The Abraham Global Peace Initiative hosted a powerful and inspiring gala at Toronto’s historic Casa Loma. The keynote speaker, former Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan, addressed a sold-out crowd made up of proud Canadians — many of them children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. They gathered to counter hate, intolerance and to promote human rights and peace in the Middle East. But outside, a dangerous scene unfolded: a mob of radicalized agitators, emboldened and hateful, hurled slurs and threats at our guests simply for being Jewish.

I implore every Canadian to take the time to understand what is happening on our streets. There are men and women (and even children) dressed in full military fatigues. They wear keffiyehs over their faces (same as Hamas, ISIS or al-Qaida) to hide their identities and terrorize. They shout death threats at Jewish people — and at others who simply happen to be walking by. They block roads, sidewalks, and disrupt entire neighbourhoods. You need to know about this—and stop looking away as if its not your problem.

Some attendees, deeply shaken, said the hatred reminded them of the stories their families told about Europe in the 1930s. It started the same way: mobs denouncing Jews, attempting to isolate them from public life, striking fear into their hearts. This isn’t a page from a history book. It is happening at Jewish events every day on Canadian soil.

But you wouldn’t know about it because Canadian media (except for the National Post) isn’t reporting about this homeland support for terrorism. Our media broadcasters are keeping this threat hidden from Canadians, failing to critically analyze the hate infesting our streets. Just the other day, for the first time in history, Israel elevated its global threat alert for Canada to its highest level — warning Israelis about travel to this country. Canada’s mainstream media was largely silent.

Across the country, Jewish Canadians face increasing threats — from schoolyards to university campuses, from synagogues to charity galas. Demonstrators chant for violence, wave terrorist symbols, and show no fear of law enforcement. In fact, they often shout at and shove the very officers trying to protect us.

Yes, our police services are doing their best. To their credit and leadership, the Toronto Police comes out in force. I cannot believe the abuse they take. They are shoved, spat at, sworn at and yelled at with megaphones. Our own police service members should not be treated this way. Why are Canadians not speaking out?

Both our federal and provincial political leaders are shamefully silent. In fact, this latest hardening of hateful protests is a direct result of the Liberal government’s latest salvo at Israel, in which it threatened the Jewish state with concrete actions. Words have consequences on our streets. They legitimize and embolden these haters who have a strategic objective to terrorize the Jewish community.

Canada urgently needs a special Homeland Security Task Force — dedicated exclusively to identifying, monitoring, and disrupting homegrown terror threats before they escalate. Where is CSIS? Where is the RCMP’s anti-terrorism unit? The task force must be empowered to act decisively and stand between supporters of terrorism and the Jewish community. Its mission must be the protection of Jewish communities and institutions across the country.

The government’s responsibility is to secure its citizens. Otherwise, what we are now seeing is tacit state-sponsored antisemitism. Our neighbours — our fellow Canadians — must come together to defend what is right. We need you to form protection circles around our events. To create visible, peaceful buffers against the hate. To stand as living shields of solidarity. To say clearly: this is not who we are. If you are a concerned faith leader, why not rally your congregation to reach out to the Jewish community and offer help?

Where are today’s Oskar Schindlers, Raoul Wallenbergs, and Chiune Sugiharas — the righteous among the nations? We don’t ask for risk today — we ask for presence, courage, and moral clarity. We ask our Christian friends, our interfaith allies, and all Canadians of conscience: stand with us now. Walk with us. Speak out. Help protect us.

Because this is not just a Jewish issue — it is a Canadian issue. It is about the values we hold dear: democracy, peace, and human dignity. And when hate is allowed to fester in one corner of society, it eventually infects the whole.

Over the years, we have defended every victimized group — Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Indigenous peoples, Syrians, and refugees. Now, it’s our turn.

Despite everything, our guests demonstrated resilience and a heart of courage. They attended our gala in full solidarity and commitment to standing up to hate. On one occasion during Ambassador Erdan’s speech we heard a faint shout from the street. “Don’t worry” Erdan said, “I can shout a lot louder.” That captured the spirit of our evening.

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

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks at the PDAC mining conference at Toronto’s Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Monday March 3, 2025.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford wants to break up the status quo of process, endless consultation and delay that has bogged down major infrastructure project approvals in the province. It’s about time.

Ford’s Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, aims to speed things up by

creating “special economic zones”

that would exempt big projects from many municipal and provincial rules. The bill would allow cabinet to designate those zones and decide what rules apply.

It can take a big club to break up the status quo. Bill 5 is certainly such a club, and no one swings one quite like Ford. This is his “Get It Done” mantra in action.

Ford aims to use the new rules to get development started in the Ring of Fire, a promising mining area in the Hudson’s Bay lowlands that occupies about 5,000 square kilometres and is rich in nickel, chromite, platinum, palladium and copper. The land is a combination of federal and provincial Crown land and Indigenous reserve land.

Naturally, the idea of government approving anything expeditiously is strange and shocking to some Ontarians. Ford’s plan to develop the area without years of additional study and consultation has

enraged environmental and certain Indigenous groups

, who fundamentally oppose anything that would alter the natural world. The provincial NDP and Liberal parties are also furious.

Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation is predicting “conflict on the ground” with actions that will land protesters in jail. The Chiefs of Ontario, representing the province’s 133 First Nations, says the bill should be killed and the process should start with consultation with Indigenous Peoples.

New Democrat MPP Sol Mamakwa, who represents the mining area, anticipates blockages of mines and roads. NDP Leader Marit Stiles wants the whole bill scrapped, and Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie calls it a “power grab.”

To these groups, Bill 5 is another Doug Ford outrage, and yet Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he will introduce federal legislation that is remarkably similar to Ford’s. It will offer fast-tracked approval in two years and reduced regulations for major infrastructure projects like Ontario’s Ring of Fire, which Ford has identified as his top priority for the new federal approach.

The issue in Ontario, if there is one, is that the first version of the bill did not explicitly cite Indigenous People’s constitutional right to consultation, a shortcoming that has since been remedied.

Unfortunately, when it comes to some Indigenous groups, consultation has become a tool to delay a project until it is abandoned. It

has already happened in the Ring of Fire, twice.

In 2011, the provincial and federal governments had ambitious plans to quickly develop the mineral-rich area, sharing resource revenue with Indigenous people. By 2012, the company that was prepared to spend $3 billion on the project had pulled out, citing delays caused by the province and Indigenous groups.

In 2013, the process was restarted, but it got nowhere again. In 2019, the Ford government abandoned the mining plan, citing the lengthy delays. Now, the government’s plan is to pass the special economic zone legislation, then consult on the details of its implementation. The plan includes $3 billion in loans for First Nations partnerships.

Given the history, the consultation will not produce anything surprising. People who choose to live on traditional lands in the north are unlikely to welcome mining. That doesn’t mean they should be able to veto it. That’s a right they do not have.

The Ring of Fire development would bring jobs, electricity and road access to a remote area of the province. Ontario’s Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford said this week that “It’s about creating an opportunity for First Nations communities who for too long have lived in the kind of socio-economic conditions that are completely unacceptable.”

In effect, the Ford government is inviting northern Ontario First Nations to join the 21

st

century and become real participants in the economy. Some Indigenous groups get this. Three support the Ring of Fire development. In the West, some

Indigenous leaders are asking Carney

to push liquefied natural gas development at the upcoming G7 leaders’ summit in Alberta.

Before the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people had a long history of self-sufficiency. Since Canada was formed, many have become dependent on the government. It’s an arrangement that doesn’t work well for either side.

According to a

Fraser Institute report last year

, between 2015 and 2025, federal government spending on Indigenous people increased from $11 billion a year to $32 billion a year, but living standards on reserves increased only marginally.

Ontario needs to make the most of its mineral wealth to boost its lagging economy. Doing so will benefit all Ontarians, but for Indigenous people it’s a shot at financial independence. The Ford government is right to finally push ahead on the Ring of Fire.

National Post

randalldenley1@gmail.com

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Britain's King Charles III delivers the Speech from the Throne next to Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney during the opening the first session of the 45th Parliament of Canada at the Senate of Canada in Ottawa on May 27, 2025.

The whole point of bringing King Charles III over to deliver a

throne speech

was to assert Canadian sovereignty, so it’s curious that some of the first words out of his mouth denigrated Canada’s legitimacy.

“I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people,” said the King in his opening remarks to Parliament on Tuesday. His words were largely written by the government, but he

can tell

the government that he’s not comfortable reading them. Whether he did, well, we’ll never know.

He continued: “This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.”

Well, at least he referred to one nation, that being Canada. But he also spoke of territory, that is “unceded,” that belongs to the Anishinaabe, which somewhat puts that first label of “nation” into question. If they never gave it up, and it still belongs to them, then are they not sovereign? Of course, the matter of sovereignty in the Ottawa region is more complex than that, but the King left himself open to that interpretation.

Which isn’t ideal, since the bedrock of our nation as a concept and legal entity — Crown ownership of all land and holder of ultimate jurisdiction within its boundaries — has been under attack for some years. Yes, many people own their own estates within Canada’s territory, but the fundamental holder of all title is the Crown. At least, that’s how it should commonly be understood, because that’s the reality of the situation.

Indigenous sovereigntists — who consist of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who don’t recognize Canada as the legal owner of Canadian lands — believe that the fundamental holders of Canadian territory are the Indigenous people. Usually, they misunderstand the numbered treaties, which were land cessation agreements, as international treaties with sovereign nations. They deny any conquest of Canada occurred. They view Canadian land as a product of theft against these sovereign nations.

And their solution involves restoring Indigenous sovereignty, bit by bit, by extracting greater rents from more parts of the Canadian economy, returning more government powers and responsibilities to Indigenous groups, and shifting public opinion to be amenable to these changes.

The land acknowledgement plays a big part in that last one: it’s the recitation of a creed that holds Canada to not be the ultimate authority in these lands, often made by officials in a position of power over the general public.

The past several years have seen land acknowledgements go from a brief few words to

open

Indigenous-related government or government-adjacent announcements to

reverent

paragraphs recited during

industry consultations

with the Canada Energy Regulator,

meetings

of veterans’ affairs policy groups,

webinars

explaining benefit payments to new immigrants and even RCMP

news conferences

about missing children. For good measure, they’re also pasted into

nuclear safety site reports

,

government reports about tuberculosis

and various other webpages. And now, King’s speeches.

And that’s just at the federal level. In Alberta, the provincial court’s 2024 Indigenous Justice Strategy

promises

to install land acknowledgement plaques in court foyers. Such plaques have been

placed

in some B.C. schools. Scroll to the bottom of any major university’s homepage and you’re likely to find one. The

Ontario privacy commissioner

has one. Through sheer memetic power, they’ve colonized our public institutions.

They normalize the idea that Canada is illegitimate, and that its non-Indigenous citizens are occupants of lands to which they don’t belong. It becomes such a regular feature of life that when B.C.

decides to restrict

provincial park entry by race (for more than a quarter of the year, in the case of Joffre Lakes Provincial Park) and overhaul its mining industry rules, it’s shrugged off by enough people that the provincial government faces no consequences.

The same goes for the Canadian fisheries, which are increasingly subject to race-based quotas and marred by apparent illegal fishing by individuals who claim their catch is covered by treaty rights. In Nova Scotia last year, federal officials

said

they didn’t know how much lobster was being harvested anymore. The province, which is becoming

world-famous

for its

lobster wars

, seems unperturbed: in the last federal election, it voted mostly Liberal, a nod in favour of the status quo.

Resources in the ground are made artificially hard-to-get, too. It’s no surprise when pipeline proposals are

killed by courts

, even when they’re informed by extensive consultations with Indigenous people. It seems these processes need to be lengthy, cumbersome and costly if they’re ever to satisfy a court. At the same time, they make us poorer.

And at this point, we’re lucky if they even make it to court. B.C. folded like a house of cards when Indigenous stakeholders challenged its mining claim system for not being consultative enough (instead of appealing the court decision in question, the NDP simply

rewrote the law

, adding red tape to an already lengthy process). A similar challenge is

underway

in Saskatchewan, at least.

Prime Minister Mark Carney supposedly invited King Charles to open Parliament as a display of sovereignty directed at United States President Donald Trump, who

continues

to express interest at the thought of acquiring Canada. But it’s the Liberal government that led the retreat of Canadian authority and allowed a void of chaos to take its place where order is needed most, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and in the path of essential

never-to-be-built pipelines

.

Now, even the man who personifies our nation can be perceived as being unsure as to whose land it really is, just like our decolonial bureaucrats and busybody school administrators.

National Post

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Ostriches eat their feed at the Universal Ostrich Farms in Edgewood, B.C., on Saturday, May 17, 2024.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

An anti-government standoff over the fate of 400 B.C. ostriches has now become an international incident — and has even featured a mysterious midnight shooting under investigation by the RCMP.

For the last two weeks, Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood, B.C., has featured a permanent encampment of protesters intending to block a court-ordered cull of the farms’ 400 ostriches.

The long-necked birds were struck by an outbreak of H5N1 virus over the winter, and thus became slated for destruction under containment rules enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

Last week, farm spokeswoman Katie Pasitney reported that one of the ostriches had been shot and killed in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances.

“We have had one of our biggest, beautiful roosters that has been shot,” she said in a video. The RCMP told local media they are investigating the killing.

Beginning in December, Universal Ostrich Farms saw 69 of its birds killed by an outbreak of the H5N1 virus, prompting a quarantine and cull order by the CFIA.

But the farm’s owners have argued that the 400 surviving ostriches recovered from the flu, and are thus no longer a threat.

This was the tack taken by U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy last week when he issued a two-page letter calling on the CFIA to spare the ostriches, citing their value as research specimens.

“The flock is a controlled environment that enables longitudinal studies of the natural history status post H5N1 infection. Ostriches can live up to 50 years, providing the opportunity for future insights into immune longevity associated with H5N1 virus,” it read.

Mehmet Oz, the former T.V. doctor who now serves as administrator for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has also weighed in on the controversy. He

offered the ostriches sanctuary

at his Florida ranch, but was turned down by Universal Ostrich Farms.

“It’s not like we’re looking at transporting our ostriches anywhere,” Pasitney told The Canadian Press.

CFIA has maintained throughout that the ostriches should be treated no differently than the millions of pigeons, turkeys, chickens and ducks that have been ordered destroyed under similar H5N1 culls.

“We have a duty to protect Canadians from the serious potential risks that avian influenza presents to our people and our economy,” the CFIA wrote in a public statement earlier this month.

CFIA rules are particularly strict when it comes to avian flu, and it is a rare calendar year that doesn’t see the agency order some kind of mass cull in response to a viral outbreak.

A 2004 avian flu outbreak prompted the agency to

order the cull of 19 million birds

across Canada.

Since 2022, the H5N1 virus has prompted the culling of eight million birds

in B.C. alone

. A dedicated CFIA webpage on the current outbreak says that 520 farms have been designated as “infected premises,” with nearly half of those (237) in B.C.

In

a May 13 decision

, the Federal Court sided with the CFIA, ruling that the “stamping-out” policy which ordered the ostriches’ deaths was reasonable given the economic and public health risks of H5N1.

It was not a “whimsical punishment,” reads the decision.

In an appeal filed before the Federal Court on Monday, the farm said CFIA had taken an “unduly narrow interpretation” of their mandate in both denying an exemption, and refusing to consider additional testing as to whether the birds “continued to shed the avian influenza virus.”

Three Independent MLAs have publicly sided with Universal Ostrich Farms

, all of them former MLAs with the Conservative Party of B.C.

The three became independents in March due to a controversy in which party leader John Rustad sanctioned caucus member Dallas Brodie for saying that “zero” child burials had been confirmed at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Brodie is among the three. In a statement she called on the CFIA “to spare these 400 healthy ostriches from senseless slaughter? This is NOT ok.”

Canada’s new federal agriculture minister, Heath MacDonald, has said only that the CFIA is following “due process” in regards to the ostriches.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Prime Minister Mark Carney was faced with his first question period on Wednesday … and that’s his first-ever question period, since he’s only been an MP for a month. The Conservatives pressed him on why he hadn’t tabled a budget and whether he was planning to fast-track any oil pipelines; on the latter question Carney could unilaterally speed up the process by removing projects from consideration under the red tape-heavy Impact Assessment Act. They didn’t really receive satisfying answers to either question. Carney replied that the Tories probably wouldn’t have had a budget ready if they’d won the election, and said he was otherwise busy with “nation-building projects.”

It emerged last week that Canada was considering joining “Golden Dome,” the U.S. plan for a continental missile defence system. On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that it

would cost us “$61 Billion Dollars,”

but ZERO DOLLARS if

we submitted to annexation

. This isn’t entirely true, given that the U.S. military is traditionally funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, which Canadians would presumably be paying under statehood. Also, $61 billion could well be a bargain considering the total estimated cost of Golden Dome

 may run to $831 billion

, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This chart, via the Angus Reid Institute, sums up what Canadians thoughts about King Charles III flying over to deliver the speech from the throne on Tuesday. Nobody cared.

Canada Post could still go on strike any day now. But it

looks like another fiscally troubled Crown Corporation with chronically low public usership could be joining them.

This week, 2,500 Via Rail workers represented by Unifor 

voted overwhelmingly for a strike mandate

.

The last time U2 frontman Bono weighed in on Canadian politics, it was in the final days of the government of Stephen Harper, when he declared during a visit to Ottawa that “the world needs more Canada.” He’s at it again, telling Global’s The Morning Show that the world is “in awe” of Canada for “not electing a populist.” PHOTO BY PHOTO BY LEWIS JOLY/INVISION/AP

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People gather to light candles in a makeshift memorial to honour Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who were killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., during a candlelight vigil outside of the White House in Washington, on May 22.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jews throughout North America have been confronting a resurgence of antisemitism and violent threats. Last week, we saw the results of that cauldron of hate.

While leaving an event at Washington’s Jewish museum, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were fatally shot at point-blank range. Upon his arrest, it was revealed that the alleged attacker chanted “free, free Palestine” and told police, “I did it for Gaza,” leaving no ambiguity about his motives. Court documents reveal how he allegedly took time to reload and fire additional shots at Milgrim as she struggled on the ground, attempting to escape.

For more than 19 months, Canada and the United States have regularly witnessed protests featuring calls for violence against Jews. Protest organizers have been conducting a largely unimpeded campaign of open-air radicalization, in which crowds are regularly whipped up with incendiary rhetoric.

Who would have thought that in downtown Toronto, we would hear

crowds calling for

more Houthi missile attacks on commercial shipping? Or that in Ottawa, a crowd would gather outside

a seniors’ residence

(home to several Holocaust survivors) and chant “go back to Europe” and “we want bullets and missiles”?

As we witnessed in Washington, the idealization of violence within the pro-Palestinian movement is setting the stage for violent actions. Here in Canada, we have seen at least

six terrorist plots

disrupted since October 7, some of which explicitly targeted Jewish sites.

This is a ticking time bomb . Strongly worded statements from our public officials won’t put a stop to it. We need concrete actions to safeguard Canadians.

The Canadian Jewish community is resilient and willing to take ownership of our security. Throughout the country, Jewish families have become used to seeing security guards and police while dropping off their kids at school or attending synagogue.

Jewish organizations regularly avoid publicizing the location of events and programs. When guests arrive, airport-style security screening has become the norm. These measures are, sadly, increasingly necessary.

Canada currently provides grants to various faith and cultural institutions to upgrade security. The Carney

government has pledged

to increase this funding, move forward with previous commitments on combating antisemitism and make it illegal to purposely block access to houses of worship, schools and community centres.

In addition to these important measures, what’s needed is a new partnership with on-the-ground Jewish security agencies, which have been developed to work with police and provide centralized co-ordination, planning and daily support for synagogues, schools and other community facilities.

In the United Kingdom and Australia, governments invest significantly in such a partnership with the Jewish community. It’s time for our federal government to follow suit by modernizing the Canada Community Security Program to integrate community security agencies as core program delivery partners.

This strategy has the potential to save lives when incidents occur. But we also need our government to take a proactive approach that not only treats the symptom — the targeting of Jewish community gatherings — but addresses the sources of hate. This begins by cracking down on those who openly call for violence in our streets.

While incitement is illegal, it is a highly limited legal measure that applies only when one is clearly targeting an identifiable group. Those promoting terrorism often use Hamas symbols and slogans — like “resistance is justified” and “globalize the intifada” — which can easily inspire lone-wolf attackers while avoiding accusations of explicit incitement.

The Criminal Code outlaws providing material support or participating in the activities of terrorist groups like Hamas. However, unlike the U.K., Canada does not have a law banning the glorification of terrorism. It is a failure of public policy to have a law that bans a $10 donation to Hamas but permits organizing a pro-Hamas rally for 10,000 people. Our new Parliament should move quickly to pass legislation that will close this loophole.

What a society chooses to accept is a testament to its core values. If we accept that freedom of expression includes the “freedom” to instigate violence, then we can expect tragic consequences like we saw in Washington.

At this pivotal moment, all Canadians should rally around the principle that hate must never be normalized — and every community has a right to live in safety. This can only happen with secure facilities, strong laws and consistent enforcement to hold those who are fanning the flames of extremism accountable.

National Post

Noah Shack is interim president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

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(Watch the full video directly below. (If using the National Post iPhone app, the video is at the top of the post.)

There was a lot for conservatives to like in King Charles III’s throne speech, but as Prime Minister Mark Carney has noted, it’s one thing to have slogans, what we need now is concrete action to back up the government’s ambitious goals, argues political strategist Anthony Koch, in an interview with the National Post’s Terry Newman.

Koch and Newman also discuss whether the King’s trip to Canada made any progress in fending off threats from the United States, along with the reaction to the throne speech from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and U.S. President Donald Trump.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney, right, signs a document at the end of a meeting of the federal cabinet, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 14.

Complacency is returning to the Canadian consciousness. The election is over and Canadians have made their choice for change — though not too much change. The new prime minister has chosen his cabinet. The House is sitting for the next few weeks, and Canadians are starting to forget about politics and look forward to the summer. But this is not the time to take our eyes off the ball.

There was little outrage over the ridiculous statements made by some new ministers. Steven Guilbeault, newly appointed as minister of Canadian identity and culture, falsely stated that pipelines are not being used to their full capacity, and that demand for oil will peak in a few years. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand showed tacit support for Hamas.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne declared that there would be no budget, only to be corrected by Prime Minister Mark Carney. And one of the most egregious cabinet appointments, Housing Minister Gregor Robertson, stated that house prices do not need to come down.

Evidently, the prime minister has difficulty disciplining his cabinet. Carney should have made an example of Guilbeault and fired him “pour encourager les autres.” If the prime minister absolutely wanted to keep him, he could have had Guilbeault stand beside him in front of the media to retract his statement.

But no matter. We Canadians now have the government we deserve. That’s democracy. Many of the old faces are back: those above, plus Mélanie Joly, Dominic LeBlanc, Sean Fraser and others. Time will tell if the old Liberal team will change its extremist progressive approach to virtually every issue, or if, as the saying goes, “the deception is exposed, the mask falls off and their true colours emerge.”

Canadians thought Mark Carney would be the better leader to deal with Trump, but that is yet to be evident. The Oval Office meeting between the two in front of the media can be looked at in two ways: did the prime minister stand up to the president or was he too obsequious?

Carney’s line about having consulted the “owners of Canada” was a good one, and he did remind Trump that some real estate is never for sale. At least we didn’t see the obvious disdain for the prime minister that we saw when Trump was dealing with Justin Trudeau.

Aside from dealing with Trump, all the issues that were put on the table by the Conservatives during the election still need to be dealt with. In fact, the best way to deal with the United States is to fix our own country first, in order to foster Canadian confidence and strength.

Top of mind should be the economy. When the budget is released in the fall, we’ll see what the plan is. Whatever it might be, a $60-billion deficit will not help redress our financial ailments or reduce the horrendous debt we are financing. Our productivity needs to be dealt with, and our energy and other resources need to be exploited to make Canadians richer.

Will the previous government’s obsession with climate change continue, or will there be a reasonable approach to building pipelines to get our energy to market and help other countries deal with their emissions while supporting our energy sector? The speech from the throne did not give details other than a reiteration of promises made during the campaign.

Can the new prime minister give hope to young people: hope that they will be able to one day buy a home, afford groceries and live in safe neighbourhoods? How will Carney deal with antisemitism in our country? Certainly, berating Israel and being thanked by Hamas is not the way to show moral clarity. How will he deal with the opioid crisis and the separatist resurgence?

The return of Canada as a leader in the world community will require a huge effort to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) into an effective force. It needs to be able to defend our country with warriors: men and women willing to serve their country, in sufficient numbers, with the best equipment possible, the best training and the right priorities.

Once the requirement to defend our country is met, the CAF needs the ability to uphold our values internationally and participate in allied operations. There should be no more social experiments that take away from operational capability.

At this point, all of us should be watching our government closely. The challenges are enormous. This is not a time to return to business as usual, and this is not a time for a return to complacency.

It is time for action, a time for all of us to be vocal, for us to have an opinion and make it heard, a time to use our own leadership and our service to our country to return Canada to its rightful place in the world as a strong, confident, patriotic and united nation. Let’s see if our leaders can lead us there.

National Post

Lt.-Gen. (retd.) Michel Maisonneuve spent 45 years in service to Canada. He was honoured to command the funeral of the unknown soldier 25 years ago this week. His book, “In Defence of Canada: Reflections of a Patriot,” was published in October 2024 by Sutherland House.

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No one — conservatives, least of all — should be cheering for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s promise to introduce government standards for age-appropriate school library books.

There is zero question that the sexually explicit books found in Alberta public schools, both elementary and high schools, were not acceptable. It is also not accurate of critics to frame Smith’s move as “book banning,” since the content being removed — which includes graphic depictions of oral sex and molestation, among other things — is so grossly and evidently inappropriate for minors.

If a stash of Playboys made it into a grade school classroom, no one could reasonably frame their removal as “book banning,” and nor should we in this current situation. However, what is also not acceptable is putting the government in charge of setting moral standards, or of regulating content. And make no mistake: it’s likely that any policy or legislation that defines “age appropriateness” is going to do just that — whether intentionally or not, now or in the years to come.

Smith’s government

announced this week

that it is “conducting a public engagement to collect feedback on the creation of consistent standards to ensure the age-appropriateness of materials available to students in school libraries.” An

online survey

is open until June 6. The government hasn’t announced whether the new rules will be set by legislation, or by changing regulations.

“While the province provides voluntary guidelines for learning and teaching resources, Alberta currently does not have a consistent provincewide standard for school boards when selecting age-appropriate school library materials,” reads the government’s press release. It explains that the new standards will be mandatory for the upcoming school year.

It goes without saying that this public engagement can only discover the opinions of survey respondents. No doubt the survey will also attract responses from indiscriminately disapproving puritans, roused by the prospect of having their moral austerity considered, at last, by policymakers.

We do not need this data to tell us that the already discovered sexually explicit materials are not appropriate for school-aged children. It is unclear, then, why the public’s opinion is needed at all — unless any resultant policy will be broader, or applied more restrictively, than what is required to remove

the offending material

. The whole thing is suspicious.

Conservatives who favour smaller and less interventionist government should be skeptical. Whatever policy or legislation the Alberta government implements may well invite censorship by a future government, which could lead to real book bans, not just the removal of content that is pornographic, or pornography adjacent. Is it worth the risk?

Instead, the government should seek to find out who put the inappropriate books into children’s libraries in the first place, determine if those people should be teaching minors and have the schools remove the books. Any educator refusing to pull the ghastly material off the shelves would have their ability to teach children called into question.

Passing legislation, or making policy changes, shifts the focus from the most concerning aspect of this scandal: Did adults intentionally place this graphic content in school libraries for minors to read? And if so, what were their motivations? As it stands, whoever ordered these books for Alberta schoolchildren seems to be enjoying a complete lack of scrutiny.

Because the explicit materials were found in

LGBTQ+ graphic novels

, Smith’s announcement has, predictably, morphed into a new front of the culture war. This has enabled the improper sexual content to become secondary in the discussion.

The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), for instance, issued

a press release

that floats the idea that Smith might be attempting to target the LGBTQ+ community with content bans. (A better question: why is there so much sexually explicit content in LGBTQ+ books?)

As ridiculous as the ATA’s accusation is, Smith will have a difficult time defending herself from it. That’s because she is making a mistake: no government, including hers, should get involved in content regulation for its citizens. That is a slope just waiting to be slipped on. My unsolicited advice to Smith: leave this one to the librarians.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement about the Golden Dome missile defence shield, in the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 20.

It’s hard to feel anything but pity for Pete Hoekstra, the United States ambassador to Canada. I mean, yes, it’s hard to feel anything else about any diplomatic representative of the new Napoleon-model United States. You go into a job like that expecting, or just hoping, to be able to carry out the careful instructions of a professional foreign service. To speak and act on behalf of an enduring vision of your country, and in pursuit of an established grand strategy.

Then the people put a gorilla in the White House, re-electing a TV star who loves to blab and improvise and threaten, and you’re left with nothing but a series of damage-control efforts, most of them completely futile. It’s gotta be hell, or hell with slightly nicer parties.

It just strikes me that Hoekstra’s predicament must be particularly harsh, since he’s not somebody who was flung into some distant warm country as a political favour. He’s from a part of Michigan that has relations with Canada for which the word “intimate” doesn’t suffice, the curling-and-hockey part of the mitten. He understands and likes Canada: in

last week’s interview

with CBC News, he showed that he had a pretty decent grasp of why the King visited us this week and what a throne speech is all about.

Unfortunately, he also made the mistake of telling Canadians to “move on” from his president’s endless “51st state” catcalls and menaces, insisting that all the contrived contention over Canadian sovereignty was “over” and that U.S. President Donald Trump “is not talking about it.” Yesterday, as if on cue,

Trump posted

to social media that, “I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!”

The “Golden Dome” system is an ill-defined missile-defence project that President Trump made a show of signing off on last week. Trump told reporters the “Dome,” which is basically a 2.0 version of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), would be ready in three years and would cost $175 billion. I’m no defence expert, but I think I can promise that deadline won’t be hit. From a game-theory standpoint, the important part of the announcement was that Trump is ready to spend cartoon sums on orbital missile defence — and the Republicans in Congress are prepared to begin allocating billions for it, without too much squawking from the taxpayer.

During the Cold War, Reagan’s SDI (reflexively lampooned as “Star Wars” by the mass media) ran up against a credible strategic objection. Yes, critics acknowledged, it might be possible to use space-borne sensors and weapons to knock out intercontinental ballistic missiles of the kind owned in large numbers by the Soviet Union. But if knocking out one warhead was a lot more costly to you than building one was to your adversary, you would just intensify the existing arms race, mostly at your own expense. Russia would simply build ever-large amounts of new weapons to get through your more expensive defence screen.

“Simply,” they said. At the time, any clown with a calculator could and would tell you that the SDI math couldn’t work, because having NASA launch and maintain satellites was much too expensive. Nevertheless, Reagan’s embrace of SDI, by itself, helped contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It turned out that the U.S. might have to outspend the U.S.S.R. enormously in a re-intensified arms race, but the U.S. could quite easily do this after 60-plus years of Russian communism. And now that Elon Musk has shown up on the stage of history, putting small inter-operating satellites in orbit is a matter of millions of dollars, not billions.

This probably doesn’t have much to do with Trump. The number of nuclear-armed states is not ever likely to dwindle, and the U.S. no longer faces one primary strategic adversary covered like a hedgehog with ICBM silos. That means it can’t strengthen continental security very much by making bilateral bargains with Russia. Several hostile countries are fooling with sophisticated new missile tech, and since they’re all otherwise dirt-poor, they may be tempted to engage in tactical or demonstrative anti-American nuclear strikes that wouldn’t necessarily attract the assured genocidal response that was a security premise of the Cold War. At least that’s the

Heritage Foundation’s theory

, which is the one Trump’s probably listening to if he’s listening to anybody at all.

This is part of what our politicians are really talking about when they natter about a “complicated” and “more multi-polar” world. Their/our real anxiety relates to the possibility that the United States will acquire a terrifying all-new level of military supremacy — total, truly instantaneous power to identify and crush any threat to the U.S. that manifests anywhere on the earth’s surface. And do we go along with this, as our old defence minister Bill Blair suggested we might before he was supplanted?

Back when the issue was ICBMs, Canadian participation in continental defence was an important sine qua non, and once we started enforcing a territorial taboo on nuclear weapons, co-operation was largely taken for granted even when Canada-U.S. economic and political relationships foundered. We were guardians of the Pole, close enough to Russia to smell the vodka and zakuski. We were geographically essential. If the U.S. pursues the Golden Dome dream — a grid of fast-acting and fast-moving space drones in low orbit everywhere — they’ll be able to take or leave us as a missile-defence partner.

This is, from one point of view, obviously good news for Canada. It means that our annexation by the U.S. isn’t a long-term strategic imperative for the U.S.! It also means that we can’t expect continental protection under the new Star Wars II umbrella as a matter of course. Thus, in a way, Trump’s latest blathering is just a plain statement of likely fact: only American territory will enjoy the protection of Star Wars II by right.

In other words: join up, pay up or shut up. Nuclear disarmament advocates, of course, have always made the argument that a country that refuses nuclear weapons has nothing to ever fear from anybody else’s. We may, soon enough, be making a high-stakes long-term test of that proposition. Whether we want to or not.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney listens to a journalist's question during a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 21, 2025.

Politics is not a zero-sum game where one person’s win is automatically another’s loss. An economy is not a conserved system, so, in theory, it is possible that a government could reduce taxes, increase spending and balance budgets (if, for example, revenues rise).

But it is a theory that is as rare in real life as white peacocks.

The Carney government is

in the process of legislating a $5-billion-a-year middle-class tax cut

, while planning to increase spending on things like the military and housing, and at the same time promising to balance the operating budget in three years.

Yet, the

 Main Estimates, the government’s spending plan

that was released on Tuesday at the same time as the throne speech, shows no signs of the restraint that will be needed if the government is to meet that last target.

This is the first evidence of concrete spending plans since the election and it seems the bureaucracy did not get the memo about the need for fiscal rigour.

The prime minister was critical of his predecessor’s fondness for distributing cash, saying the

Trudeau government spent too much and invested too little

. Mark Carney said his government will limit operating-expense increases to two per cent a year, down from nine per cent a year under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, while preserving transfers to provinces and individuals.

The Main Estimates suggest that message of restraint fell on deaf ears in Ottawa: total budgeted spending is scheduled to rise 7.75 per cent to $486.9 billion this fiscal year across 130 federal organizations (compared to last year’s Main Estimates). The government will ask Parliament to vote on $222.9 billion of spending measures, a 14 per cent increase on last year’s estimates.

The most egregious spending appears to be on consultants. The estimates reveal that 

budgetary expenditure by “standard object”

  — in this case, “professional and special services” — are set to hit $26 billion this year, if departments are granted the approvals they are seeking (the estimates are an “up to” amount; departments could spend less).

These numbers require numerous caveats. They include operating and capital spending, as well as transfer payments and contributions to Crown corporations. To add some perspective, payments to seniors (Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement) swallow up $86 billion of that number. Some people have suggested the only way to make a meaningful dent in the spending picture is to means test OAS, but Carney has already ring-fenced all transfers.

It should also be pointed out that the Main Estimates are not the whole picture. There will be additional “supplementary estimates” over the course of the year that will likely increase spending further in response to events.

To be fair to the government, it has hardly had time to conduct a line-by-line spending review.

But it is bemusing how the bureaucracy could read Carney’s election commitments and conclude it was a good idea to increase spending in just about every department in government. My rough calculation is that 63 departments will see their budgets rise beyond the rate of inflation, compared to the previous year’s Main Estimates, and only 14 will have their budgets cut. To take just one example, the National Capital Commission will see its allocated spending increase to $179 million this year, from $94.7 million in 2024/25, most (but not all) of which is earmarked for capital spending.

Carney has said that he will institute a new system of budgets that separates investments in capital projects from operational spending. To make the operations budget balance, the government could blur the line between the two. For example, the Liberal platform promised $30 billion in new spending for the military, including a pay raise for Forces members and investments in housing on bases. All of that could conceivably be deemed to be an “investment,” though wages are clearly operational.

But there are well-established rules and principles to ensure transparency, and if the government attempts any sleight of hand it will be called out by the auditor general’s office and Parliamentary Budget Office.

In any case, the borrowing requirement will still be there, driving up the cost of servicing the debt, which is scheduled to hit nearly $50 billion this year — far more than the $35.6 billion earmarked for national defence.

The only way to truly hit the mythical trifecta of tax cuts, increased spending and budgetary balance will be by introducing an austere-looking budget later this year that prioritizes spending on housing, policing and defence, but makes meaningful cuts elsewhere.

This is a business-as-usual spending plan from a government that has promised “a fundamentally different approach to governing.”

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

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