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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.

National Post


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.

National Post

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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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President Donald Trump says it would cost Canada US$61 billion to participate in America's Golden Dome missile defence system as a  “separate, but unequal, nation,

Everything is golden in official Washington these days. The Oval Office is a study in decorative touches direct from pre-revolutionary France. The frames around the portraits are golden, as is the gilt around the ceiling. The flourishes on the fireplace and the knick-knacks on the mantel — maybe the president’s latest golf trophies? — are as well.

The skip-the-line immigration

visas

Donald Trump is peddling at US$5 million a pop are known as “gold cards” because that’s the colour they come in. Naturally, they bear a photo of the president as well.

Which is all fine if your design taste runs to over-the-top knock-offs of 18th-century Versailles. For Mark Carney, whose tastes appear somewhat more sober, it adds another layer of complexity as the prime minister seeks to negotiate a new relationship with America’s president while avoiding entanglement in his burgeoning megalomania.

Among other things, Carney needs to address the president’s enthusiasm for a defence system he’s labelled … what else? … the Golden Dome. Names shouldn’t really matter when it comes to what is, in fact, a serious matter. It’s no longer possible to pretend that Canada is immune to the risk of some addled tyrant deciding it’s a good idea to launch a missile or two in the direction of the U.S., with geography dictating that the quickest route would take it across Canada. Some means of detecting, intercepting and destroying any such mad attempt is not a ridiculous idea.

It doesn’t help, however, when the overwhelming impetus behind the project comes in the form of Donald Trump. The president is easily infatuated by anything he deems “big” and “beautiful” and that covers a lot of real estate — gifts of free luxury airliners from Middle East potentates for example. The protective shield he envisions for America qualifies in spades.

Whether it’s practical, affordable or even possible are other questions, though not the sort that ordinarily preoccupy the current White House. Trump wants the dome built in three years at a cost he identifies as US$175 billion, both of which seem unlikely, the space-based aspects alone having been calculated by the Congressional Budget Office at US$550 billion. But it wouldn’t be wise for Carney to tell him as much at a time when Ottawa is entering talks aimed at diluting the numerous tax, tariff and other damaging measures Trump has already sent Canada’s way.

This is especially so given Carney’s pledge to rebuild the country’s military and send a message to the world that, at long last, Canada takes its national defence seriously. The Liberal campaign platform

committed

to everything from new submarines and icebreakers to the creation of an account to “end the chronic lapsing of defence spending.” Previous governments have pledged similar plans to elevate the military from its slide into impoverishment to little effect, but for the first time in decades Canadians seem to accept the need for the country to possess a respectable military.

It was entirely sensible, then, for the prime minister to carefully avoid greeting Trump’s Golden Dome with the sort of derision Liberals have been quick to dish out to previous renditions of spaced-based defence proposals. Projects mooted under presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were rejected at least partly from Liberal fears of  being associated with Republican leaders unpopular with progressives.

Dislike of U.S. presidents is fair enough, and this one in particular, but shouldn’t be used to reject proposals that might actually be in Canada’s interest. There is nothing absurd about a system that detects approaching threats so that they can be met before arrival, any more now than when Britain

erected

the first ground-based radar system against approaching German aircraft at the outbreak of World War Two.

The Trump version,

predictably

, goes far beyond anything tried elsewhere and is accompanied by the usual outpouring of flamboyant verbosity. Israel’s Iron Dome protects just a fraction of the territory the U.S. is considering, while the notion of turning space into just another arena for warfare is a new and frightening step for a planet that already dances too often with means of self-destruction. That defence firm Lockheed Martin calls Trump’s dream “a Manhattan Project-scale mission” is hardly reassuring given the horrors that atomic weaponry unleashed.

Deploring the reality of threats from Russia, China, North Korea or others does nothing to remove them, however. Canada can either let our defence capability continue to wither, hoping potential dangers never materialize or that the U.S. will save us, or we play what part we can in making clear to potential adversaries the futility of any act of aggression.

The far north is Canada’s most vulnerable region. Joint warning systems already

exist

under Norad, the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Ottawa has pledged $38.6 billion to upgrading and modernizing Canada’s part in the network. In March, Carney announced a joint

project

with Australia for the development of Over-the-Horizon Radar technology, to “provide advanced early warning and long-range surveillance, enabling faster CAF detection and tracking of a wide range of threats in our Northern air and maritime approaches.”

Unfortunately, we’ve let our defences erode for so long that playing catch-up is that much tougher a task. Ottawa is pledging a serious effort to reach NATO’s defence spending benchmark of 2.0 per cent of gross domestic product just as the alliance is preparing to

raise

it to 5.0 per cent. Whether the dome needs to be a part of the build-up remains to be seen, but Carney will have to convince America’s volatile president that Canada is giving the question honest consideration. That would include ensuring his caucus and cabinet are aware of the need to treat it that way, in public and otherwise.

National Post


The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald covered at Queen's Park in Toronto.

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TOP STORY

In one of the first major reversals of Canada’s nationwide purge of historic figures and names, Ontario announced Tuesday it will dismantle a wooden box enshrouding their official statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister.

Since 2020, an 1893 statue of Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislative Assembly has been covered by an impromptu plywood box ostensibly to protect the structure from vandalism or even outright mob destruction.

On Tuesday, Ontario’s Board of Internal Economy, which controls the grounds around the legislative assembly, announced that the structure would be removed and Macdonald would be restored to public view.

Ontario Speaker Donna Skelly 

told The Trillium

 on Tuesday that she could say with “guaranteed” certainty that the boards would be removed by the summer.

Over the past five years, Canada has experienced a wave of name changes and statue removals unlike anything seen since the First World War, when anti-German sentiment fuelled a purge of Germanic names and symbols.

The trend began in earnest in 2020 as Canadian cities were hit by “defund the police” protests inspired by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

It then became supercharged in the summer of 2021, following a B.C. First Nation’s announcement that 

215 anomalies

 turned up in a radar survey of the former Kamloops Indian Residential school were the unmarked graves of children.

A running Wikipedia list catalogues 

13 Canadian statues

 that have been destroyed by mobs or removed by civic order since 2020.

Seven of those are of Sir John A. Macdonald, included an 1895 memorial in Montreal that was destroyed in 2020 by a defund the police protest. A Macdonald memorial in Hamilton, Ont. was destroyed under similar circumstances the next year, albeit by demonstrators fresh from a Hamilton Indigenous unity rally.

The period has also been marked by dozens of renamings of streets, schools and civic buildings.

In 2023, for instance, Ottawa’s Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway was renamed to Kichi Zībī Mīkan, an Algonquin word roughly meaning “river path.”

Toronto renamed its iconic Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square in 2024, citing namesake Henry Dundas’s association to slavery. Although Dundas was an abolitionist and a key figure in an 18th century British push to abolish the slave trade, activists criticized him for 

not doing it fast enough

.

Ryerson University renamed itself as Toronto Metropolitan University in 2022, over connections to the Indian Residential School system.

Although Egerton Ryerson was long dead before the establishment of the first Indian residential school, he 

had advocated a program

 of Indigenous children being taught “industry and sobriety” at boarding schools located far from their home communities.

Indian residential schools have also largely characterized the push to remove symbols of Sir John A. Macdonald. Although Macdonald was the singular figure who stitched together Canada’s current form, his record on Indigenous affairs was 

controversial even in his own time

.

The renaming trend has slowed to a trickle of late, particularly amidst a wave off flag-waving patriotism sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Canada, and repeated annexation threats. An ongoing Toronto District School Board 

renaming push

 remains one of the only such programs underway at a governmental level.

But the announced unboxing of Ontario Legislative Assembly’s Macdonald statue represents one of the first times that a government will be reversing a sanction imposed against a Canadian historical symbol over the past five years.

It occurs amid a recent debate in Wilmot, Ont., to similarly restore a Macdonald statue that was placed into storage after being splashed with red paint in 2020. Beginning last year, the community 

began consultations

 on a possible re-installation of the statue, which depicts Macdonald holding two chairs, a symbol of his bringing together of rival camps in the negotiations that created Canada.

 

IN OTHER NEWS

Tuesday’s

speech from the throne

, read by King Charles III, is actually one of the few ways to divine what the Carney government intends to do, since they’ve dispensed with the usual indicators such as a budget or specific mandate letters.

It may also be notable for what it

didn’t

contain:

  • Woke stuff. As noted by National Post’s John Ivison, the speech is entirely free of the culture war beats that defined so much of the Trudeau era. As recently as 2021, the Speech from the Throne was laden with lines like “fighting systemic racism, sexism, discrimination, misconduct and abuse, including in our core institutions will remain a priority.”
  • Any mention whatsoever of oil and gas. Or pipelines, for that matter. All it does is repeat a Liberal campaign pledge to make Canada the “world’s leading energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy.”

 King Charles III’s Speech from the Throne represented the first instance of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turning up in public following his March resignation. Anyway, here’s the shoes he wore.

It was only six months ago that the Liberal Party was polling at historic lows due in large part to the refusal of then prime minister Justin Trudeau to resign. As was frequently noted at the time, the Liberals could have easily swapped out their unpopular leader much earlier if only they’d bothered to sign on to the Reform Act, a piece of legislation that gives the caucus enhanced powers to trigger a leadership review. With the start of a new Parliament, the Liberals had a fresh opportunity to subscribe to the terms of the Reform Act and avoid any future debacles with leaders who refuse to leave.

They decided “no.”

A source told National Post that

a “large majority” Liberal MPs voted against holding Prime Minister Mark Carney to the terms of the Reform Act.   

 This is an X.com post put out by the official account of Governor General Mary Simon. It’s notable because it flubs a basic detail of what is literally her only job. King Charles III was not here as an emissary of the U.K., as the post seems to imply. He was here as King of Canada (and as Simon’s boss), specifically because Simon’s office had requested he do so.

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Canadians deserve an immigration system that serves the national interest. This is exactly what we once had when most Canadians agreed with the economic and cultural arguments in favour of immigration.

For a long time, Canada avoided the sort of backlash seen in many places abroad. But the economic argument for immigration has collapsed during a time of stagnant wages, housing shortages and high youth unemployment. Likewise, cultural arguments about diversity and multiculturalism have given way to doubts about our ability to integrate newcomers.

Now,

half

of Canadians believe immigration harms the country. And according to

a 2024 survey

by the Environics Institute, 57 per cent of Canadians agree that too many immigrants “are not adopting Canadian values.”

In response, the Trudeau government began to

reduce immigration targets

and tinker with eligibility requirements. It was especially wise to reinstate caps on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which many employers abuse to keep wages artificially low.

But Canada’s immigration system requires fundamental reform, with a sharp eye on integration — both economic and cultural. This reform will become increasingly urgent amidst a backdrop of deglobalization, domestic protectionism and

falling birth rates

.

Other countries will be motivated to hold onto as much of their own populations as they can, so we cannot count on a large and mobile cohort of educated professionals and low-wage workers for much longer. Canada must remain open to immigration, but immigration cannot be our only source of economic and population growth.

The federal government should begin by ending easy access by immigrants to the lower end of our labour market in nearly all sectors of the economy. That means phasing down and eventually eliminating the TFWP, except in limited areas such as seasonal agricultural work. High-wage, high-skill immigration should continue, but in lower numbers.

Meanwhile, governments should use incentives (tax credits, etc.) to encourage businesses to invest in domestic skills training and develop their workforces. Business, government and post-secondary institutions must work together to integrate domestic and international students into a general industrial strategy.

This means creating a pipeline of engineers, researchers and scientists for jobs in areas such as high-end manufacturing, robotics, batteries and advanced engineering. In short, we must gain much better control of immigration and ensure that it serves the national economic interest.

To make it all happen, Ottawa should create a new “population” ministry, formed out of every existing federal ministry and department that deals with immigration, housing, the labour market and family formation (such as Employment and Social Development Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation).

Of course, this is no small task and would take time. But the main policy areas (immigration, housing, labour, parental benefits and population growth) must be viewed as a single system, and a single ministry must be held accountable for the success or failure of future reforms.

In consultation with the provinces, this new ministry would be required to keep immigration at a manageable level, taking into account the state of infrastructure, housing and integration services, along with labour market needs. Artificial Intelligence could be a useful tool in helping predict labour and housing shortages before they happen.

This consolidated ministry would favour high-skill, high-wage immigration above all other categories. And, like some other countries, the ministry would be required to publish total immigration numbers, along with all other relevant population and labour-market information, as part of every federal budget, to ensure maximum transparency.

This ministry would also work with the provinces to develop pro-natal strategies to stabilize or, ideally, reverse the decline in domestic birth rates. This should be informed by successful policies implemented by our peers abroad.

Incentives could include cash bonuses, tax breaks, awards, more generous leave and other signs of public esteem for parenthood. Meanwhile, governments across the country must remove regulatory hurdles and revisit post-war mass production and prefabrication, in order to increase the supply of new housing.

Canada’s immigration policy has failed Canadians. But if properly managed, a new population policy, which includes immigration, can be a powerful force for nation-building and help create and maintain a prosperous and orderly society in an increasingly uncertain world.

National Post

Michael Bonner is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, a former senior policy advisor to a federal immigration minister, former director of policy to four Ontario ministers and the author of “Repairing the Fray: Improving Immigration and Citizenship Policy in Canada.”


Canada's  Prime Minister Mark Carney claps after King Charles III delivered the Speech from the Throne opening the 45th Parliament of Canada on May 27, 2025. (Photo by BLAIR GABLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

When Canadians flip open their phones to learn about the day’s politics and affairs of state, what do they see? Mostly, it is unremarkable men and women in near-identical suits speaking mundane words or mocking each other during Question Period.

This week, however, they saw King Charles III and Queen Camilla visit Canada. The sun was shining as they arrived in Ottawa, where great crowds gathered to catch a glimpse or shake hands with the monarch, who arrived to open the 45th Canadian Parliament.

No prime minister could ever drum up so much interest and excitement with their mere presence. If only for two days, the King’s visit has dramatically elevated public life in Canada into something special.

For monarchists, it is a lively show of historical continuity and cultural dignity that sets Canada apart from most of the world. For republicans, it is an occasion to quibble and seethe. For everybody else, it is a fascinating display of distinction at an uncertain time, which is needed after a bitter federal election.

Politicians naturally alienate people by catering to short-term passions and partisan interests, which contrasts sharply with the Crown’s enduring neutrality. The institution has no room for partisans, and this is a valuable piece of Canada’s political culture.

There are certainly good utilitarian arguments for retaining the monarchy. A tradition of upholding a head of state who stays above the fray is far better than another dreadful suit that society must divide itself over.

Crownless states typically breed tribalistic strongmen, who are very effective at ravaging their own countries and hollowing them out. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand stand as examples of politically stable former Dominions that retained the monarchy, and are vastly preferable to republics like Pakistan, South Africa, and Ireland.

Despite more than 50 years of passive and overt attempts to sever Canada’s historical ties, the appeal of the Crown endures.

Recent public surveys have shown a

sharp decline

in

support

for abolishing the monarchy, an institution republicans stubbornly refuse to accept as fundamental to our country and how it was built. True, there are constitutional barriers to removing the Crown, but some of the most profound political movements in Canadian history were in pursuit of constitutional change.

The lack of inspiration and vigour in the republican movement is why it continues to fail. It has its vocal advocates, but they are a politically and culturally impotent rabble when taken as a whole.

It is not a coincidence that some of our most radical republicans, like William Lyon Mackenzie, have been

traitors

willing to

spill blood

in the pursuit of their goal.

Thankfully, today’s republicans are reduced to the status of being frustrated, challenged hobbyists.The lack of inspiration and vigour in their movement is why it continues to fail. It has its vocal advocates, but they are a politically and culturally impotent rabble when taken as a whole.

Some among them have even attempted to

cite the Bible

as a reason for removing the monarch, proclaiming that its text goes against the elevation of any one man. They should read further into that same book and find the words “Fear God, Honour the King.”

If republicans are bewildered by the affinity that Canadians retain for the monarchy, it is because their vision of the country is dull, unremarkable, and grey. A republican Canada is one stripped of elegance and tradition, rendered into a purely managerial and bureaucratic state where obscure public servants occupy the position of head of state.

People desire something beyond crass political contests in their leaders. In 2025, this world of ours is incredibly flat, digital, and racked with presentism, where genuine beauty, transcendent majesty, and time-tested refinement are in short supply.

There is something deeply uplifting about the Crown, and all of its pageantry and resonance help to swell national pride, which Canada sorely needs. These intangible qualities enliven society and renew or create a sense of wonder for millions, a gift not easily found and impossible to recover if lost.

For those that do care about preserving a distinct Canada, the Crown is a point of connection that links us with long-buried generations through rituals and continuity. Critics call it irrational, but so is love, friendship, and the other parts of life that motivate and drive human beings more fiercely than anything material.

A Canada with a Crown is the country that it was intended to be in 1867, and fidelity to that is an act of patriotism. This past federal election saw a renewed sense of Canadian nationalism, albeit expressed in strange and lowbrow ways like the worship of ketchup chips and nostalgia for Molson Canadian beer commercials from the 1990s.

Nonetheless, it displayed that the Canadian people still have a desire to be distinct. The celebrations and parades marking King Charles III’s visit to Canada this week are the healthiest expressions of that seen in years.

The monarchy’s popularity in Canada tends to grow whenever it makes

itself present here

, and it ought to do that more often and remind people why it exists.

When the late Prince Philip visited Canada in 1969, he perfectly

summed up

why we still continue to have a sovereign.

“It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch. It doesn’t. It exists in the interests of the people. If at any time any nation decides that the system is unacceptable, then it is up to them to change it.”

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An illustration depicting the execution by guillotine of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution.

Elites are under fire, and not without reason. Over the past decade, nearly every pillar of the modern elite has revealed its hollowness.

Public health officials told us masks didn’t work, until they did, then closed playgrounds while leaving big-box stores open. Major news outlets pushed narratives they later quietly retracted, from the viability of the lab leak hypothesis to the Hunter Biden laptop.

University presidents couldn’t say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their own codes of conduct. Tech CEOs promised to protect speech, then blacklisted dissenters at the government’s request. Hollywood gave up on storytelling to produce lectures in costume.

Economists and policymakers dismissed inflation as a passing concern, then watched it gut household budgets. They insisted mass immigration was an unqualified good, even as housing costs soared, services strained and social cohesion frayed. From COVID mandates to campus mobs, from censorship to cultural decay, the people in charge have not just failed, they’ve discredited themselves.

In response, a populist revolt has gained steam throughout the West. Many now say the problem is elites themselves, that leadership is a lie, hierarchy a con and that the wisdom of the people should rule unfiltered.

This is where conservatives must draw a line. There is nothing inherently wrong with elites. The problem is simply that ours have failed us.

Conservatism, in its truest and most dignified form, has never been anti-elitist. It’s anti-revolutionary. It distrusts mob rule not because it holds the people in contempt, but because it understands human nature too well to entrust civilization to the whims of the masses. That’s not cynicism, it’s wisdom.

The conservative tradition has always accepted hierarchy as a fact of life — and often a necessary good. There will always be leaders and followers, the cultivated and the crude, the strong and the weak. The question is not whether hierarchies exist, but whether they are just and capable.

Since the French Revolution, the West has been haunted by the spectre of egalitarianism elevated to a fanatic creed. The guillotine didn’t merely decapitate a king — it aimed to destroy the very concept of natural order. In its place came Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naive worship of the “general will,” a cult of popular sovereignty that mistook numbers for wisdom and emotion for truth.

But crowds do not think. They react. They surge, scream and stampede. As the crowd grows, the mind shrinks. That is the enduring lesson of the revolution: when the mob is sovereign, civilization burns.

The conservative does not idolize the mob. He fears it. He respects the people but insists they deserve more than flattery. They deserve leadership. Real leadership — wise, learned, prudent and self-restrained. The kind that builds cathedrals rather than chasing hashtags. The kind that governs with duty rather than ruling for applause.

Our problem today is not that we have elites. It’s that they are unworthy of the station they hold. They sneer at tradition, mock virtue and outsource their conscience to PR firms and DEI consultants. They lack the moral formation, the historical consciousness and the sense of stewardship that once defined true aristocracy — not of blood, but of character.

What we need is not to abolish elites, but to demand better ones. We need statesmen, not managers; custodians, not careerists; a ruling class that sees its role not as a license to exploit, but as a duty to preserve — to pass on the best of what came before, and to elevate what lies ahead.

That is the conservative vision: a society not of rigid castes or phony egalitarianism, but of ordered liberty, guided by a moral elite that’s worthy of its name. A society where hierarchy is not oppression but harmony; where authority is earned, and exercised with humility.

Revolution flatters the masses and devours them. Conservatism respects the people enough to guide them. That’s not elitism. That’s responsibility. And it’s long overdue.

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Demetrios Nicolaides, Alberta's Minister of Education and Childcare speaks at a media conference in Calgary on Monday May 26, 2025.

There is currently no expectation that Alberta schools refrain from giving kids access to books containing depictions of child molestation and point-of-view oral sex. That is why on Monday, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced he’d be working over the summer to craft a new policy on age-appropriate content for schools, slated to take effect in September.

Public consultations for the new standards are

open until June 6

, and the ministry has indicated that the ensuing policy could come as early as “late spring, 2025.”

Which all means that Nicolaides will now have to spend his summer facing performative outrage from progressives suddenly concerned about free expression, and who insinuate at every turn that common-sense content curation is the same thing as fascist book banning. Kudos to him.

What prompted this new project was the education ministry’s

discovery

of some clearly over-the-line materials in

57

Alberta schools. Among these was the infamous autobiographical graphic novel

Gender Queer

by Maia Kobabe, which

has been banned

from the collections of at least 56 U.S. school districts. The contents are so graphic that a concerned adult in Florida

was

removed from a school board meeting for trying to read some pages into the record.

Not only does that book promote gender ideology — the idea of a gender spectrum completely detached from biological sex — it contains graphic depictions of sex and masturbation in child-friendly colours. It covers porn (the main character is an avid user), masturbation (vibrators and dildos are discussed with excitement) and kinks (the main character claims to be an autoandrophile — that is, someone who is aroused at the thought of being a male).

At one point, the main character is told — and I’m sorry to repeat this here, but the point that this is inappropriate for children needs to be made — “I can’t wait to have your c–k in my mouth — I’m going to give you the blow job of your life. Then I want you inside me.” She later dons a strap-on and receives oral sex in a panel that graces the viewer with multiple angles. The entire book is

more than 200 pages

, and isn’t entirely about sex, but that’s not the point. The problem is that some pages contain graphic sexual content — to the point where even the author

doesn’t recommend

it for children.

And yet,

Gender Queer

was found on the library shelves of some Calgary schools with students in Grades K-9, according to the ministry, as well as high schools of both major cities. Garrett Koehler, spokesperson for the education department, shared a photo with me showing the book on the same shelf as

Naruto

, a popular manga series for children; it was taken at an elementary school.

Other finds included

Fun Home

by Allison Bechdel, which

shows

masturbation and, some pages later, oral sex (though at least in black-and-white);

Flamer

by Mike Curato, which contained depictions of masturbation and masturbation games; and

Blankets

by Craig Thompson, which depicted the main character’s younger brother, with bare legs and buttocks visible, being molested by their father. These were found in some schools with students in the K-9 range.

Now, it’s true that many kids will come across this kind of stuff in the wild. Some find porn online. Some watch R-rated movies. Some learn new words for increasingly niche sex acts through music. Some, sadly, become victims of abuse. But that’s not a reason to hand them materials containing these things at a school.

In a similar vein, we don’t expect school libraries to introduce minors to the concept of body shots, or inform them how to use a bong or snort lines of cocaine. They can learn about drugs, sex and sexual predators without the use of comic books.

And for parents who don’t mind, or even want to allow their children access to graphic novels with adult themes, they’ll always be free to grant it through a public library or bookstore.

Some progressive voices, nonetheless, are unhappy, making a connection between reasonable safeguards and irrational social conservatism.

“Make no mistake — this actually IS about banning books — and Smith’s administration is not the first in history to target and ban books seen as contrary to its ideology in order to control public discourse,” wrote Edmonton NDP MLA Lori Sigurdson on X. Some members of the media took the same line: Sean Amato of CityNews

referred

to the banning of books; the Globe and Mail’s

headline

spoke of consultations on “which books should be banned from school libraries.”

The Alberta Teachers’ Association went as far as

implying

the province was targeting LGBT books because the announcement “specifically singled out 2SLGBTQIA+ materials.” A CUPE representative

echoed

that concern.

Their concern is political censorship, and if the Alberta government was angling to take its new policy to the extreme, I’d be concerned about that, too. But that’s not the indication: the minister’s priority appears to be overt, explicit, graphic sexual content that borders on the pornographic. The fact that his examples of over-the-line material depicted largely same-sex encounters is beside the point. Besides, it’s not like he’s making

substantive political tweaks

to the curriculum or diversity-and-inclusion-related library book

purges

, which is a common tactic of the left.

This could very well be the second time that Albertan officials have handled a matter of extreme cultural contention with the balance and nuance it deserves. The first was last year, when the province set out its rules limiting sex changes for teens and the facilitation of social transitions at school.

Now, in the case of school books, Nicolaides isn’t talking about binding orders, but general baselines. It’s looking optimistic: since the announcement, Calgary and Edmonton schools have

pulled

the books highlighted by the minister from their shelves. If that’s an indication for things to come, he won’t need to take a hard-handed approach.

National Post


King Charles III arrives at the Senate to open the 45th Parliament of Canada to deliver the Speech from the Throne on Tuesday, May 27.

The 

Post 

and other Canadian organs have been full of conscious praise for our unusual absentee monarchy lately, what with the King being in the capital to give the throne speech in person. But Canadian republicans must be hoping that our people will instinctively reject the spectacle, and at least see the genuine need for that blessing without which no sovereign state can hope to be taken seriously — a president.

There are rumblings about behind-the-scenes diplomatic tensions between Canada and the United Kingdom over the royal visit, rumblings which 

the Sunday Times (of London) put in print this weekend

. The crux of the story is that Canada and the U.K. are not quite using the same playbook in dealing with the volatile and cutthroat Trump administration.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is applying lots of soft-soap, using Trump’s fondness for the British monarchy and its highly ornamented nature as a means of getting special treatment in trade negotiations. Meanwhile, Canada and its government hope to use the presence in Canada of Canada’s King as a subtle way of asserting independence, determination and strength as we bear the economic blows of Trumpian whim.

And — wait for it — the crazy part is, THOSE TWO KINGS ARE THE SAME EXACT DUDE. WHAAAT?

To a republican, this seems like a mystery concocted to obfuscate a logical weakness in the system. No doubt they see it just the same way an atheist looks at the centuries of early Christian debate over the Holy Trinity. It’s not exactly as though the U.K. and Canada are at war, or as though there is any overt disharmony between the two states. But the monarchists have to concede at least this much: when mutually sovereign countries have a shared head of state, you do in fact end up with the exotic possibility that George XIV of Canada might one day, in theory, have to issue a declaration of war on George XIV of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is baked into the improvised post-Imperial ontology of our government and of Britain’s.

This is why Canadian monarchists are so fussy about the independent constitutional footing on which the Canadian Crown rests. We do this, implicitly insisting that 

our system of government was reinvented in 1931

, while at the same time arguing that the advantages of monarchy include antiquity, historical continuity and the preservation of a special bond between Commonwealth realms. Perhaps we are sneaky imperialist (or racist) hypocrites. Perhaps we just feel that those advantages are legitimate and important, and that the Statute of Westminster is an optimum compromise that preserves them while guaranteeing our sovereign freedom of action in the interplay of governments.

Or perhaps we are scurrilous free-riders. There’s a key paragraph in the 

Sunday Times

 piece by Royal Editor Roya Nikkhah: it’s a quote from a University of London historian, Philip Murphy, who is trying to explain what those devious Canucks are up to.

“The Canadians’ game plan will be to have their constitutional cake and eat it by exploiting the ambiguities of the constitutional position of monarch. They’ll be keen to stress that Charles is not just King of Canada but King of the United Kingdom, and seen throughout the world as such, so by having him there they can stress that the U.K. is on Canada’s side in any trade confrontation with the U.S.”

The current government of the U.K. isn’t totally comfortable with this, and Nikkhah claims that Labour ministers tried to urge Canadian ones to play fair in freely choosing words and actions for the visiting King of Canada, who is certainly thought of as the “King of England” by ordinary people the world over. This seems to be perfectly proper behaviour on the part of Starmer’s government, offering no danger that the British are trying to reconstruct the Empire by stealth. No evidence is offered that the U.K. tried to appeal directly to, or interfere with, the King of Canada himself.

So they may not like our “game plan,” but they have to live with it. And, of course, this morning’s throne speech didn’t end up containing eleventeen paragraphs of bloodthirsty anti-American invective. Instead, the King spoke politely of Canada’s PM and the American president working together to begin “defining a new economic and security relationship … rooted in mutual respect and founded on common interests.”

This sounds quite a lot like the

old

economic and security relationship between Canada and the U.S., but in 2025 the words are perhaps more like a prayer. If the tongue of an anointed king can really speed them to heaven, so much the better.

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