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.

• Kelly McParland: Scorning Trump’s Golden Dome would be a mistake
• Colin Kenny: The case for missile defence

“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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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

• Trump says Canada’s Golden Dome membership costs $61 billion — or free as 51st state
• Carney says Canada in talks about Trump’s Golden Dome, releases mandate letter for all ministers

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.”

National Post

• Ben Woodfinden: King Charles III and the glorious weirdness of Canada’s monarchy
• Carson Jerema: The Governor General just undermined the King of Canada

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.

National Post

• Joel Kotkin: Elite arrogance is fuelling the rise of the global right
• Tasha Kheiriddin: Poilievre’s populism appeals because elites abandoned the working class

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.

National Post

• Carson Jerema: The Governor General just undermined the King of Canada
• Jesse Kline: Throne speech was a win for King Charles, a challenge for Mark Carney