Fifty years ago, Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, achieved a long-desired diplomatic triumph by signing the Helsinki Accords on Aug. 1, 1975. Sixteen years later though, the Soviet Union itself was thrown on the ash heap of history. What happened?

Brezhnev did not realize — nobody did — that in signing the accords, he was moving the Cold War onto unfavourable ground for the communist tyrannies. Onto the moral high ground, to be specific, ground that was owned by the courageous dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and their allies in the democracies.

By the early 1970s, 25 years after Stalin’s subjugation of Eastern Europe at the conclusion of the Second World War, the West was growing weary of the Cold War and wary of catastrophe in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Détente was the

mot du jour

, a desire to lower tensions with Moscow and to advance nuclear arms control agreements.

The Helsinki process took place under the auspices of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), a meeting of 33 European countries, including the Soviet Union, as well as the United States and Canada — hence its boast that it promoted co-operation from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

By 1975, Brezhnev had realized that the Soviet Union could not keep pace with the West economically, and therefore, militarily. The Soviets were thus increasingly reliant on the madness of MAD — mutually assured destruction — for their security. Soviet foreign policy thus sought a sort of “cold peace,” a recognition of the territories gained by the Red Army in the Second World War.

The CSCE meetings rambled on in Geneva until the grand summit in Helsinki. There, the 35 countries signed the final document. U.S. President Gerald Ford had been in office less than a year and was excoriated — along with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — for being soft on communism. In the presidential election of 1976, Ford was denounced by both Ronald Reagan, his Republican primary opponent, and Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee, for his weakness at Helsinki.

It produced a pivotal moment in the Ford-Carter presidential debate. Helsinki was the context for an exchange in which Ford said that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” an astonishing gaffe that may have cost him a close election against Carter.

What had Ford given away at Helsinki that earned him bipartisan ire? In the first “basket” of the accords all 35 countries agreed to respect the international boundaries of post-war Europe. This had been a Soviet goal since the 1950s, and Brezhnev regarded Helsinki as legitimating the internal Soviet empire regarding the Baltic countries, the external empire of Poland and its neighbours and the division of Germany.

Carter agreed with Brezhnev on that reading and attacked Helsinki as “legitimizing Soviet domination.” Reagan considered the accords a moral abandonment of the enslaved nations of what he would characterize eight years later as the “evil empire.”

Everyone got it wrong. As Kissinger himself would write later: “Rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.”

To get his de facto recognition of empire, Brezhnev conceded to the inclusion of “basket three” in the Helsinki accords. Those provisions committed the signatories to permitting the peaceful changes of international borders, allowing states to leave or join alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact) and, most remarkably, committed the Soviets to “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms … in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

The Soviets had solemnly signed a promise to honour human rights. Brezhnev thought he had made an easily ignored concession to gain a hard-won recognition of Russian imperial ambitions. He was wrong.

“Helsinki became, in short, a legal and moral trap,” in the judgement of leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. “Without realizing the implications, Brezhnev thereby handed his critics a standard, based on universal principles of justice, rooted in international law, independent of Marxist-Leninist ideology, against which they could evaluate the behaviour of his and other communist regimes.”

By 1976, a “Public Group to Promote Observance of the Helsinki Accords” was operating in Moscow with the endorsement of Andrei Sakharov, the leading scientist-dissident. “Helsinki Groups” were established in other communist countries, and the regimes were unable to silence them, given that they existed to monitor what the Soviet regime had itself promised.

Contrary to Brezhnev’s securing the legitimation of communist rule at home and in the near abroad, Gladdis concluded that, “the Helsinki process became instead the basis of legitimizing

opposition

to Soviet rule.”

Five years after Helsinki, Pope John Paul II had visited Poland and shook the regime to its foundations; Lech Wałęsa was leading the strikes that would lead to Solidarność, the Polish trade union that heralded an end to communist rule; Václav Havel had formed Charter 77 to advocate for human rights in Czechoslovakia; Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street and Reagan was on his way to the White House.

The Cold War had always been at heart a moral argument, but the realpolitik of the 1970s sought to minimize that. Helsinki was realpolitik in intention, but massively not in effect. It restored the language of morality, of good and evil, to the Cold War. And once that was done, the end happily came sooner than expected.

National Post

Canada’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state will likely change little in the world, as our country has refused to play a constructive role in the region for many years, but it confirms for Canadian Jews that their government is not really for them.

Since the October 7 attack on Israel, Canada has witnessed an explosion of hate targeting the Jewish community. Jews in Canada have had their businesses targeted, synagogues and schools have been shot at and firebombed, neighbourhoods have been harassed and Ottawa’s National Holocaust Monument has been defaced.

In the wake of all this, media reports, in

this paper

and

elsewhere

, indicate that there are a growing number of Jews who have simply had enough and are fleeing the country — some to Israel (during a war, no less) and others to places like Florida, where hateful protesters aren’t allowed to regularly take to the streets to call for the death of Jews.

Canada’s certainly not the only country that’s experienced a dramatic rise in anti-Jewish hate. Hamas has so successfully captured the narrative that there are few places in the world that have been untouched by the toxic rise in antisemitism. Yet few countries have fallen as far as Canada, which not long ago was one of the best places to be a Jew — ever, in the history of the world.

It would be disingenuous to place all the blame for this at the feet of the federal Liberals. But our leaders’ response to the explosion of hate has consisted of little more than holding conferences and creating duelling antisemitism and Islamophobia czars that have only served to increase tensions.

Moreover, despite giving lip service to the atrocities committed on October 7 and their desire for Hamas to release the hostages, prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney have only seemed interested in putting pressure on the victim of that heinous crime.

In April 2024, former foreign minister Mélanie Joly announced that Canada would cease future arm exports to Israel, leading Israeli Ambassador Iddo Moed to

accuse the Liberals

of trying to “increase pressure on Israel,” rather than pressuring Hamas to release the hostages.

The Liberals also

continued funding UNRWA

, even after an internal investigation found that some of its staff participated in the October 7 massacre.

In the latest slap in the face to Israel, Carney held a press conference on Wednesday announcing his intention to recognize a Palestinian state, but spent much of the time

criticizing

Israeli government policy, leading to the inescapable conclusion that coercing the Jewish state was one of his primary motivations. (The British were more explicit: agree to a ceasefire or we’ll recognize Palestine as a state.)

Carney did condition Canada’s support on “the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to much-needed reforms, including the commitments by Palestinian Authority President (Mahmoud) Abbas to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.”

He also earmarked $10 million to “support the Palestinian Authority’s role in stabilizing and governing the West Bank.” But he is foolish if he believes it will lead to any such thing with the notoriously corrupt administration in Ramallah.

It also begs the question: why would we declare Palestine a state now, before elections are held in 2026? Does anyone really believe Abbas will follow through on such a pledge? And what happens if he doesn’t? Do we say that we changed our minds and Palestine is no longer a state?

There’s also no reason to believe that a democratic Palestinian state would be any less hostile towards Israel, or that, like Gaza in 2007, it wouldn’t be taken over by terrorists.

According to a

May poll

by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, half of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza support Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 massacre. Asked who they’d support in a hypothetical election, a plurality (32 per cent) said they would cast a ballot for Hamas.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s well known that Palestinian schools and institutions indoctrinate their youth to hate Jews (something UNRWA, which Canada continues to fund, has played a large part in). Any attempt at recognizing a Palestinian state should acknowledge this and include a plan for de-radicalization, which Carney has not put forward.

On October 7, Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people, including at least seven Canadians. Instead of treating it as our fight — as we did after 24 Canadians were killed on 9/11 and after ISIS began terrorizing the Middle East — our leaders seemed intent to blame the victims and continually pressure Israel to end what clearly started as a war of self-defence.

Now, Carney is rewarding the terrorists by recognizing a state that has no basis in reality. Geopolitically, it is rather meaningless. But it will certainly embolden those who erroneously paint Israel as an evil occupying power, and vilify Canadian Jews in the process.

• Jesse Kline: Carney’s futile attempt to will a Palestinian state into existence
• Michael Higgins: Mark Carney abandons Canadian principles for pinky promises on Palestine

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Mark Carney’s statement that Canada intends to recognize a Palestinian state is a mishmash of good intentions, western naivete and wilful blindness.

The statement pays lip service to Israeli security concerns, saying that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must undergo fundamental reforms, that Hamas can have no role in Palestinian governance and that a Palestinian state must be demilitarized. Unfortunately, none of these conditions is grounded in reality.

Canada called upon Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to hold general elections in 2026, in which Hamas can play no part. But this ignores the fact that Hamas remains the most popular Palestinian political party, according to a

survey

published in May by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

As the poll noted, half of Palestinians still agree with Hamas’s decision to launch an attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Four out of 10 Palestinians surveyed chose “armed resistance” (violent terrorism) as the most effective way of achieving Palestinian statehood, more than those supporting negotiations or peaceful resistance.

Hamas’s October 7 massacre was intended to revive the Palestinian issue with a dramatic flair. In November 2023, Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official in Doha, explained to the

New York Times

that it was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” and noted that, “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

As he put it, “What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big. … We had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.” Prime Minister Carney is telling Palestinian society that mass violence succeeds in achieving territorial and diplomatic concessions.

Undoubtedly, the prime minister would argue that the move is intended to strengthen the “moderate” Palestinian Authority and sideline Hamas. This, too, overlooks the systemic antisemitism, incitement and terrorism at the heart of the Palestinian Authority, as detailed in a recent Kohelet Policy Forum

exposé

.

Abbas’s adviser on religious affairs,

Mahmoud al-Habbash

, recently admitted that the October 7 massacre was “praised and cheered” by Palestinians and that it “stirred the emotions of all of us.” The PA’s official

TV network

broadcasts Islamic preachers calling on God to “strike the Jews … kill them one by one.”

And the PA’s extremism is not confined to rhetoric alone. Palestinian Media Watch has detailed the involvement of PA

security forces

in terrorist attacks against Israelis. At the beginning of July, 22-year-old Israeli Shalev Zevuloni was murdered by two PA police officers. The PA immediately celebrated the attackers as “martyrs.”

In March 2024, Palestinian police officer Mujahid Barakat Mansour killed an Israeli soldier and wounded seven others, after ambushing a bus with a sniper rifle. In August 2023, the Fatah party published on its official Facebook page a poster of 30 Palestinian security force “martyrs,” the vast majority of whom were known terrorists killed while attacking Israelis.

And then there’s the PA’s “Martyrs’ Fund,” which, at least in the past, was

estimated

to be paying more than US$16 million a month to close to 10,000 terrorist prisoners, making being a terrorist one of the most lucrative careers in the Palestinian territories. The

PA claimed

to have ended the so-called pay-for-slay program in February, but there’s

reason to believe

that many of the payments continue.

Canada prides itself on its commitment to international law. Yet, as explained in a

letter

signed by 40 members of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, including a former Supreme Court justice, a Palestinian state does not meet the criteria of statehood under the 1933 Montevideo Convention. It has no defined territory and, indeed, no single functioning government.

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Europeans

conditioned

the statehood of former Soviet republics on their respect for the rule of law, democracy, human rights, minority rights and the inviolability of national borders. A Palestinian state, both under Hamas and the PA, has an atrocious human rights record and is committed to a revanchist struggle against Israel. Neither one has held elections in nearly two decades.

At the root of the conflict lies the persistent refusal of Palestinian leadership to recognize a Jewish state in any part of the Jewish people’s historical homeland. Bilateral negotiations were intended to lead to a Palestinian state only once the Palestinians renounced terror, accepted Israel’s legitimacy and agreed to end all territorial claims.

By unilaterally granting Palestinian statehood, the Palestinian leadership has no incentive to make the necessary compromises for lasting peace and coexistence. In an ever-difficult region, Canada’s plan will only make the situation worse. Prime Minister Carney — it’s not too late to change your mind.

National Post

Avraham Russell Shalev is senior fellow at Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem specializing in international public law.

• Jesse Kline: Carney’s futile attempt to will a Palestinian state into existence
• Michael Higgins: Mark Carney abandons Canadian principles for pinky promises on Palestine

Shortly after his January inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump made the peculiar decision to remove a portrait of the great Thomas Jefferson from the Oval Office and

replace

it with a portrait of James Polk.

Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president. Polk, the eleventh president, launched the Mexican-American War and expanded the reach of American sovereignty from what is now Texas to Washington State, and from Wyoming to California.

This history is directly relevant to the origins of British Columbia’s August holiday weekend, which uniquely intertwines the August 1 celebration of Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, and the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, on August 2, 1858.

The story is about how Canada very nearly lost the opportunity to extend its dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It was a very close call, and it’s an instructive lesson in the radical differences between Canada and the United States — differences that tend to get completely papered over by the current fashion for historical revisionism and the stupidity of the “settler colonialism” paradigm.

The thing about Trump is that, in his persistent expressions of territorial covetousness — most exuberantly in his

public meditations

on taking Greenland by military force and annexing Canada as the 51st state by economic coercion — you never really know if he’s being serious or if he’s just being a jackass.

In determining Trump’s preference for Polk over Jefferson, for instance, there are a couple of explanations.

The first is his

admiration

for Polk as “sort of a real estate guy,” and his esteem for Polk because “

he got a lot of land

.” It could also be because he found the frame around Polk’s portrait more pleasing than the frame around Jefferson’s. “I’m a frame person,” Trump told a cabinet meeting in early July. “Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.”

And fair enough, framing is important.

It has become commonplace to frame British Columbia’s colonial origin as an unwelcome intrusion of a foreign power to force the displacement of Indigenous peoples in a process of ongoing, systemic genocide. This is an interpretive paradigm that has the disadvantage of being untrue, masochistic, and fatally corrosive to the persistence of distinctly Canadian comprehensions of sovereignty and nationhood. It also deliberately elides the profound differences between Canada’s westward expansion and the way Americans behaved themselves south of the 49th parallel.

How British Columbia comes into this story is in Polk’s covetousness of the Pacific Northwest, which was known then as the Columbia Territory.

An

ardent disciple

of the American notion of “manifest destiny,” Polk had campaigned on the slogan “

54-40 or Fight

,” which declared an intention to displace British sovereignty West of the Rockies as far North as the Russian possessions in Alaska, at 54 degrees, forty minutes of latitude.

Polk very nearly succeeded. Coupled with American encroachment into the British fur trade realms of what is now Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, Polk’s belligerence induced the British colonial office to capitulate with the Oregon Treaty of 1846. The treaty sliced the old Columbia Territory in half by extending the 49th parallel from the Rockies to the Pacific.

The treaty forced the Northward migration of thousands of settlers, traders and adventurers under British dominion. They were Orkney Islanders, Scotsmen and Englishmen, Iroquois freemen, Quebecois voltigeurs, “King George Indians” from a variety of western tribes, and Kanakas, as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Hawaiian workers were then known. They would go on to become the first British Columbians.

Led by the HBC’s James Douglas, who would end up the governor of both the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, a new and thriving multicultural society sprung up around Fort Camosun, now Victoria, where they’d been welcomed by the local Saanich ad Songhees tribes.

Below the 49th parallel, the British and Canadian exodus opened the gates to genocide and anarchy: The Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War and the Nisqually War.

Absolutely nothing remotely like this occurred in the settlement of the Canadian West. For all the injustices and travesties of marginalization, and taking into account the Red River Rebellion and the Northwest Rebellion, it was mostly a collaborative affair between Euro-Canadians, Métis and Indigenous people.

The Vancouver Island colony bore absolutely no resemblance to the settlements in the American West. Douglas was a West Indian, as the HBC called him, or an “octoroon” owing to his mixed Scots and Creole ancestry. His wife, Amelia, was the daughter of a Cree woman and the Irish HBC official William Connolly. South of the 49th parallel, Black people were denied American citizenship. Douglas invited hundreds of Black people North.

Meanwhile, wholeheartedly supported by the American slave states, Polk decided to take by force all the Mexican territories North of the Rio Grande in a war that unfolded in unspeakable cruelty. The abolitionist Abraham Lincoln was against the war, and General Ulysses S. Grant, who would go on to succeed the assassinated Lincoln, said he was ashamed of his role as a young soldier on the Mexican frontier. “I had not moral courage enough to resign,” he once

confessed

.

Two years after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the Mexican war, ushered in the same ghastly progression of mass murders and shooting sprees: The Yavapai slaughter, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Mendocino War, the Yuki genocide, the Snake River War, the Colorado War, and on and on. It was a tidal wave of hideous crimes against humanity that lasted decades.

That’s how the American West was “won.” It’s also how the territory that came to be called British Columbia was very nearly lost.

By the late 1850s, American miners were streaming North across the 49th parallel, headed to the Fraser Canyon in a mania for gold. Upon arriving by ship at Victoria, they were greeted by the First African Rifles — a regiment of armed Black men. In Victoria, Emancipation Day was already a civic holiday, although it was more than a century before either B.C. or Canada formally celebrated it.

In the Fraser Canyon, the Americans had formed themselves into militias, and scores of dead began to pile up in their encounters with local Indigenous miners. So, Douglas took matters into his own hands, and at Fort Langley, on August 2, 1858, Douglas unilaterally declared the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia.

The following year, 1859, an American insurrection very nearly broke out in Yale, in the Canyon, when a Black man filed assault charges against an American. Governor Douglas put down the revolt, but was immediately seized of another crisis, on San Juan Island.

In a petty dispute over the shooting of a pig, American troops commanded by the notorious General William Harney invaded the island and settled in for a siege, awaiting orders. Harney was one of the worst war criminals in the US military at the time. His

instructions

to his troops as they were exterminating the Lipan and Caddo tribes were to “exterminate all the men and make the women and children prisoners.” Their villages were to be looted and burned.

Fortunately, however, by 1859, the presidency had gone to James Buchanan, who was preoccupied by tensions that would soon erupt in the war to free the slaves. The dispute on San Juan Island, ostensibly about the trajectory of the border between the islands, was given over to arbitration.

Two years later, the American Civil War broke out. Douglas proposed that British and Canadian forces, comprised mainly of voltigeurs and Indigenous warriors, should take advantage of the disarray and seize the lost territories south of the 49th parallel all the way to San Francisco Bay.

Nobody took him up on the idea. More’s the pity.

National Post

• Michael Higgins: Mark Carney abandons Canadian principles for pinky promises on Palestine
• Jesse Kline: Carney’s futile attempt to will a Palestinian state into existence

Earlier this month, a federal judge paused the deportation of Angel Jenkel, a non-binary American, after determining that the immigration officer evaluating their case failed to properly consider the Trump administration’s recent transgender policies. The

ruling

was narrowly focused on procedural fairness and was agnostic about whether non-binary people actually face persecution in the United States. Nonetheless, some Canadian media outlets misleadingly implied that the judge had found that gender minorities are intolerably unsafe in the United States.

While activists have celebrated Jenkel’s story as a victory for LGBTQ rights, what we have here is a case study of poor journalism.

Jenkel, a 24-year-old multimedia artist from Minnesota, arrived in Canada in August 2022 on a six-month visitor visa to spend time with their then-boyfriend, now common-law spouse, in Thunder Bay, Ont. During this visit, the spouse’s epilepsy suddenly worsened, causing frequent grand mal seizures that led Jenkel to become his primary source of at-home care.

Jenkel

told

the Times Colonist this month that, although they had originally planned to leave before their visa expired in February 2023, they “lost track of time” for two whole years due to their caregiving duties. Being the spouse of a Canadian, they could have applied for permanent residency during this period, but failed to do so. As such, the Canada Border Services Agency summoned Jenkel for an interview this February and issued a deportation order a month later.

Jenkel subsequently asked for a

Pre-Removal Risk Assessment

(PRRA), which is a mechanism that allows individuals facing deportation to stay in Canada if they have a well-founded belief that they will face persecution, torture or other serious harms in their home country.

While a PRRA is not the same as a refugee claim, the two systems

overlap considerably

. Uniquely, a PRRA can grant protection to individuals who, despite not counting as refugees, face special personal dangers in their home country — e.g. in 2024, an applicant

avoided deportation

to El Salvador because gang members there had been targeting him. However, a PRRA may also grant protection to individuals who are found to meet the definition of a refugee. In this case, the applicant does not need to show that they have experienced any specific threats, as general persecution of their minority group is sufficiently dangerous.

Ultimately, an immigration officer determined that Jenkel could not demonstrate that they would face the general risks needed to justify refugee status, nor the personalized risks that would justify non-refugee protection. However, in making this determination, the officer made a grave procedural error.

Immigration officers rely on

National Documentation Packages

(NDP), which are lists of public documents outlining the conditions of various countries, to help adjudicate PRRAs and refugee claims. These cyclically-updated packages provide some baseline knowledge about an applicant’s country-of-origin, but are not meant to be exhaustive. Officers are encouraged to supplement their NDPs with their own additional research, especially when the conditions within a country are rapidly changing.

But Jenkel’s immigration officer failed to do this. Relying on an NDP that had been published in January 2024, the officer omitted any recognition of the Trump administration’s contentious gender policies and cited an out-of-date Freedom House report which stated that “in recent years, (American) democratic institutions have suffered erosion.”

Justice Julie Blackhawk, who paused the deportation, stated in her ruling that, although Jenkel did not submit evidence specifically addressing the Trump administration’s transgender policies, officers “have a duty to consult recent and publicly available reports on country conditions, even where an applicant did not submit such evidence.”

As the officer failed to follow protocol, the judge found their assessment “flawed and unreasonable.” Although Blackhawk concluded that the officer “failed to consider recent evidence of the conditions that may have supported a reasonable fear of persecution,” she did not assert that any risk of persecution actually existed — which is a crucial distinction.

Acknowledging that omitted evidence was possibly relevant to an applicant’s case is not the same as accepting that evidence as compelling, and certainly not the same as agreeing with the applicant’s arguments.

Jenkel’s lawyers, Adrienne Smith and Sarah Mikhail, confirmed to me in a phone call last week that this interpretation of the decision is correct. “You’re right in the sense that there is no endorsement from the judge that non-binary and trans people will face persecution in the United States. That’s not at all what the decision says,” said Smith. “It’s not up to the judge to ever make that finding that someone will face persecution. That jurisdiction and authority lies entirely with (the immigration officer).”

Yet, some media outlets are now

misleadingly implying

, to

varying degrees

, that Blackhawk concurred that non-binary people should probably be granted refugee status. Existing news coverage

has ignored

the technical nature of this case, while generously quoting LGBTQ activists who claim that the ruling may set an “

important precedent

” for trans rights, even though Blackhawk’s decision actually sets no such precedent and only affirms normal evidentiary standards.

To avoid deportation, Jenkel had to further show that they would experience “irreparable harm” (harm that cannot be financially quantified) if Blackhawk failed to intervene, and that the benefits of judicial intervention would outweigh harms to the public interest. Ultimately, Blackhawk determined that Jenkel would be irreparably harmed if they were robbed of the chance to properly litigate their case, and that Jenkel poses no evident threat to the public and provides “essential support in the care of their common-law spouse.”

Scrubbed of media sensationalism, this was a reasonable ruling. Procedural integrity matters, and any person who faces deportation must be given a fair hearing.

That doesn’t mean that Jenkel’s underlying PRRA case has merit — it clearly doesn’t. Trump’s gender policies (e.g. blocking males from competing in women’s sports, banning risky sex changes for minors) are a far cry from persecution. To suggest otherwise makes a mockery of the horrifying threats (beatings, torture, murders) faced by LGBTQ people worldwide, and contributes to the misperception that these dangers are exaggerated or frivolous.

In

an interview

with the Globe and Mail, Jenkel justified their case by claiming that they fear not being able to visit their family in the southern United States, which “has already been deemed unsafe for transgender people to travel.” But why would Jenkel fear losing the opportunity to make voluntary trips to this supposedly dangerous region? And why do they believe that staying in Canada would make such trips easier, not harder?

More fundamentally, though, the comment suggests that Jenkel does not understand how Canada’s immigration system works: protected status is granted to individuals who can show that no safe regions exist within their own country, which is different from showing that only some regions are unsafe.

As mentioned earlier, Jenkel is from Minnesota, a

trans-friendly jurisdiction

. They themselves acknowledged, in

an interview

with The Canadian Press, that the state is “still protecting trans people,” but feared this might eventually change. Yet, Canada requires evidence of

actual persecution

that exists in the present moment, not vague speculatory risks.

Even if Minnesota were unsafe, Jenkel would have to prove that it is somehow

impossible to relocate

to a large, progressive American city. Alternatively, they would have to argue that every American city — including New York City and San Francisco — is intolerably bigoted and less accommodating of gender minorities than Thunder Bay, which is absurd.

To maintain the integrity of Canada’s immigration system, Jenkel’s fight against deportation should fail — but let it fail fairly.

National Post

KEREM SHALOM, Israel — Desolation. Fittingly, that is all one sees on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Especially at this time of year, the ground is hard-baked. Intermittent wind gusts grind sand into your skin.

I wait in the intense heat, along with a small group of international journalists and Israel Defence Forces officials to be transported a short distance from a makeshift parking lot to the storage area inside the Gaza Strip where humanitarian supplies are gathered.

Following a brief period from March to May when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to halt the passage of aid into the Strip, supplies have continued to pile up since May 19. In the last week, the pace of aid flowing into the Strip has surged. But for the past several months, it was a trickle, at best.

The temporary and ill-advised suspension of aid into the Gaza Strip by Israel was introduced to mollify Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist coalition members. They were threatening to bring down the government following the ceasefire and hostage exchange deal that was in place from mid-January to mid-March.

At the time, Netanyahu diminished the significance of this aid hiatus. After all, he said, Israel had allowed in substantially more aid than was necessary during the preceding months. And he may very well have been correct.

What he was also aware of is the fact around 85 per cent of the aid that has entered the Strip has been intercepted and looted, according to the United Nations’

own data

. Hamas and other gangs maintain warehouses in the Strip where they hoard and then resell aid to desperate civilians at extortionate prices.

Netanyahu’s thinking, it would seem, was that a temporarily reduced aid flow would generate anger and desperation among the civilian population and pressure Hamas to provide food.

But that expectation was disconnected from reality. Because we also know that Hamas feels no responsibility to provide its people with the necessities of life. Quite the opposite: the group’s position is that food and other humanitarian supplies are the responsibility of the UN.

Hamas’s mission is to

destroy Israel

and murder all the Jews — a goal stated in its founding charter, and on which it has

never wavered

.

Since Israel resumed aid transfers from Kerem Shalom and other border crossings in May, the chaos in Gaza has intensified. Most of the Strip’s infrastructure and dwellings have been destroyed. People subsist in horrific conditions. They are not receiving the aid that’s intended for them. And the global community has decided that this crisis is fully attributable to Israel’s conduct.

This uninformed presumption is zealously promoted by much of the international media and was on full display on Thursday, as 20 or so journalists were driven in a convoy of SUVs into the holding area for hundreds of truckloads of aid.

Food, medicine, hygiene products, blankets — all these supplies have been inspected by Israeli security, ensuring that there are no weapons or other prohibited goods hidden inside. Once transported to the Gaza side of the border, UN and international aid trucks are meant to retrieve and distribute the supplies.

What tends to happen, though, is that Hamas and other armed thugs wait. They ambush the trucks and steal much of the aid. Sometimes they straight up hijack the whole load.

Among the international reporters in the group was a self-described 30-year veteran of countless humanitarian crises. She declared Israel’s conduct to be unprecedented and inexplicable.

In the initial briefing with IDF officers and again later in a small breakout group, this TV reporter hammered the issue. As she noted, trucks enter Gaza with aid supplies, unload and return to Israel on the same road. This meant, she asserted, that Gazans knew that more trucks would come back along that same route. So, they lie in wait to ambush and loot.

“Why do you not vary the routes,” she asked IDF officers, repeatedly. When they explained that the transport and distribution was within the purview of the UN and other international aid organizations, the reporter was dismissive, asserting that Israel controls the Strip. That statement reflects a severe deficit of understanding regarding the chaotic reality on the ground.

Her question also assumed that there are multiple routes into Gaza that would allow drivers to constantly and spontaneously change things up. There are, at most, three roads into and out of Gaza from Kerem Shalom. Not all are always accessible to traffic. The reporter in question seems to disregard the fact that the Gaza Strip is a dynamic and volatile military zone where active fighting may break out at any time, anywhere.

She also failed to recognize that within Gaza, all efforts to separate the civilian population from Hamas fighters have been stymied.

Nowhere in the world has a situation existed in which humanitarian workers have persistently been forced to operate in such a complex, full-blown conflict zone, according to military expert Andrew Fox.

He said that standard protocols prioritize the separation of civilians into safe zones and it is almost unheard of for humanitarian workers to have to operate on the very front line where battles occur — daily, and often unexpectedly. But when Israel attempted to do just that in the earliest days of the conflict, many other countries were

vigorously opposed

.

Had the civilian population been moved temporarily to a safe zone in Egypt, the war would have been fought and won much more quickly.

Many journalists have been asking why Israel doesn’t just allow the press free access to the Gaza Strip to roam about. As the TV reporter in my group contends, that is the norm with every other humanitarian crisis in the world. Again, she overlooks the reality that this is a unique situation, where the terrorist forces are embedded in the civilian population. There is no “safe” zone.

Journalists do not saunter about freely in active conflict zones. Humanitarian zones? Sure. But the Gaza Strip is not that. It is a volatile and active combat zone. And many journalists have entered the conflict zone embedded with the IDF. Just as they do elsewhere and have for decades.

By coincidence, on this same day, the conduct of Canada — once a stalwart ally of Israel — was making headlines here. That, in and of itself, is remarkable. Prime Minister Mark Carney bizarrely chose this week to announce that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state in September, upon the fulfillment of certain conditions.

And, so, Carney

spoke with

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday. Abbas reportedly agreed to Carney’s terms for state recognition, which include the requirement that free and fair elections are held, the governance structure of the West Bank and Gaza is “fundamentally” reformed and that Hamas will not be in any position of leadership and will lay down its arms.

The readout of the call issued by the Prime Minister’s Office confirms that Abbas agreed to all that and more. Carney’s naivete is incredulous. Does he really think that these conditions have not been pounded for the last two decades?

Mahmoud Abbas was elected to the position of president for a four-year term 20 years ago. He has had more than enough opportunities to hold elections and govern differently. And he has quite deliberately chosen not to do so.

Perhaps even more significantly, since his election on April 28, Carney does not appear to have bothered to arrange even a courtesy phone call with Netanyahu. That rebuff is beyond contemptuous. (The Post reached out to the PMO to inquire about this, but did not receive a response by press time.)

Prime Minister Carney’s audacity has stunned many in the international community, including, of course, U.S. President

Donald Trump

. Carney seems to think he can impose peace upon the Middle East without engaging Israel or the United States. Extraordinary.

He is either unaware of the repeated attempts to work with President Abbas or he thinks he walks on water. Either scenario reflects terribly on Canada. We are not a serious nation.

National Post

Vivian Bercovici is a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and the founder of www.stateoftelaviv.com, an independent media enterprise.

• Jesse Kline: Carney’s futile attempt to will a Palestinian state into existence
• Irwin Cotler & Noah Lew: We support a two-state solution. But not this way

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)

released an analysis this week

of just what the Liberal government’s pursuit of government savings might mean for the federal public service — i.e., first and foremost, significant job cuts. The left-wing think tank estimates 57,000 total jobs might be shed by 2028, and focuses in particular on the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Employment and Social Development, and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

“it will be harder to get help with tax issues and already long wait times will get longer,” the CCPA analysis warns.

“Help with Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan payments to seniors could become harder to find.”

And don’t expect faster help with visa issues or at the passport office, the CCPA cautions, though one hopes we have already seen

the worst possible performance by the latter

, when the entire organization was flummoxed post-pandemic that people actually wanted to travel again.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC)

issued the same basic warning

last month about job cuts and their effects on public services (though it couldn’t resist complaining along the way about its members actually having to go into the office).

Sad to say, in normal times, such predictions are usually accurate: Job cuts do often lead to service cuts. But these aren’t normal times. First and foremost, the government would be cutting a public service that has 100,000 more employees today than it did in 2015 — a 39 per cent increase, over a period where the population of Canada grew 17 per cent.

If the CCPA’s estimate of 57,000 total jobs is correct and came to pass, we would still be up 43,000 workers from 2025, which would put it roughly in line with population growth.

If I were PSAC, I would very much want to highlight the good all those extra public workers did for frontline services. I haven’t seen that; instead they focus mostly on the cuts themselves. So I asked the union for some examples.

A spokesperson argued the public service had to be rebuilt

after Stephen Harper-era cuts

. She reminded me in particular of the

debacle over closing regional Veterans’ Affairs offices

, which created a very off-brand conflict between the Conservative government and the military. She argued rolling out emergency benefits during the pandemic would have been impossible without extra staff. That’s certainly plausible, but that was inherently not a permanent need. The CRA started shedding employees after the pandemic under the Trudeau government.

It would behoove the unions to provide more examples, if any exist, if they really want to save all these jobs. Because people tend to remember negative interactions with government much more than they do positive ones. Not every call to CRA or visit to the passport office is a disaster, obviously. But you’ll hear far more about the disasters around the water cooler than you will about times it all went as it should have. I have never encountered anyone arguing we’re far better off for those 100,000 extra employees. I very much suspect we are not.

Naturally, the bloat isn’t just among frontline workers. A memo from Chief Human Resources Officer Jacqueline Bogden, obtained by National Post, indicates

an intention to target government executives as well

— their number having ballooned in recent years, and not, Bogden thinks, for any particularly good reason.

“New (executive) jobs at all levels are created, in many cases without a significant change in the organization’s mandate,” her memo reads. “In essence, this can mean that the same pie is being sliced in smaller pieces.” She notes a report by the Public Service Management Advisory Committee finding that nearly half of core public service departments have more executives aboard than the officially recommended complement.

This certainly isn’t what Carney promised on the campaign trail. Spare a thought for Bruce Fanjoy, the Liberal MP who dethroned Pierre Poilievre in Carleton — in large part, it is often argued, by appealing to public servants worried about job cuts under a Conservative government.

“Pierre’s plan would cut 100,000 public service jobs over 10 years, at a time when we need all hands on deck to defend our country from Donald Trump’s trade war. Carleton, you deserve better,”

Fanjoy wrote on X

just before election day.

Whoops.

But then, when you sign on with the Liberals, you have to check most of your principles at the door anyway, and all of your sense of shame. Carney may be new to the office, but he understands the party’s basic grift just fine: “Sure, we’re not doing what we said we’d do. But it needs to be done. And we mean well.”

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

• Chris Selley: Canadians rediscover the sometimes deadly calculations of medicare
• Chris Selley: There are easy solutions to the ‘longest ballot’ problem, so let’s end it

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada intends to recognize the state of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in September. This follows similar announcements by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Fortunately, unlike Macron’s approach (pledging unconditional recognition) and Starmer’s approach (pledging conditional recognition, yet perversely imposing those conditions on Israel, rather than the Palestinians), Carney made Canada’s recognition of the state of Palestine dependent on the Palestinian Authority meeting two key conditions: Democratization, described as fundamental governance reforms and a promise to hold elections in 2026, with Hamas precluded from participating; and the demilitarization of the future Palestinian state.

At first glance, this announcement appears to be a step in the right direction. We strongly support a two-state solution, involving two democratic countries for two peoples, living alongside one another in peace, security and mutual recognition of each others’ legitimacy. Carney’s preconditions appear to seek something very similar — requiring the state of Palestine to be democratic and to be demilitarized, which is key to securing peace and security for the two nations.

Regrettably, it is highly unlikely that Canada’s approach will be successful, as it suffers from several key flaws. First and foremost, Canada’s framework is backwards. The future state of Palestine should be required to meet certain preconditions — including those put forward by Carney, and then Canada should recognize Palestine as a state — not the other way around.

Under Carney’s framework, Canada will recognize the state of Palestine in September — less than two months from now. It is inconceivable that Canada’s conditions could be met in that time frame. Accordingly, either Canada will not go ahead with recognizing Palestine at the UN, or the “conditions” will prove to be unenforceable, aspirational rhetoric that fail to achieve their intended goals — a democratic, peaceful Palestinian state. This is readily apparent upon a closer inspection of the conditions.

The “democratization” condition does not make Canada’s recognition of Palestine conditional on that state being democratic — rather, it makes it conditional on the unenforceable promise made by someone who has ruled over an authoritarian, ineffectual and deeply corrupt government for 20 years that it will be transformed overnight into a functional democracy.

To make matters worse, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly broken his promises to

hold elections

in the past. One of us (Irwin Cotler) has personally met with Abbas and his former foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, many times over the years. They have repeatedly promised that they would abolish the pay-for-slay program, end incitement and move towards demilitarization, de-radicalization and the like. Regrettably, those promises have largely gone unfulfilled.

Canada’s second precondition, demilitarization, is equally unfeasible. The PA only has tenuous control over the West Bank, and has no control whatsoever over Gaza (assuming these will be the recognized territorial boundaries of the state of Palestine). Gaza is currently controlled by a genocidal terrorist organization, Hamas, whose sworn purpose is the annihilation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and has promised to repeat the events of October 7 “again and again.”

Underneath Gaza, Hamas built and maintains a vast network of terror tunnels, and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups have embedded terror infrastructure throughout residential areas, under mosques, schools, hospitals and even UN facilities. While much of that infrastructure has been destroyed in the war with Israel, it’s clear that the demilitarization of a future state of Palestine is impossible in the less than two months’ time, and is improbable in the near future.

Furthermore, how will compliance with Canada’s demilitarization precondition be verified? Will Canadian troops or diplomats be sent to observe and inspect whether the condition has been met, or will it be, once again, simply relying on an empty and unenforceable promise from a dysfunctional authoritarian government?

Equally as problematic as the significant defects in the preconditions that Canada did include are the preconditions that it did not include. First, and most notably, despite Canada calling for the immediate release of the hostages held in Gaza, this is merely lip service, as our government failed to make their release a precondition for recognition.

The immediate release of the hostages is a crucial, standalone, humanitarian, moral and legal imperative. The failure to make their release a key condition is a grave injustice to them and their families, and lends significant credence to the argument that recognizing the state of Palestine at this juncture rewards and incentivizes terrorism.

To recognize the state of Palestine while the hostages remain in captivity in Gaza, an ongoing crime against humanity, would be to recognize a criminal state — one born in standing violation of international law, including the

Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations

, which Canada itself initiated and signed merely four years ago.

In other words, Canada’s stated goal of recognizing a peaceful and democratic Palestine is impossible while the hostages remain in captivity. If Canada moves forward with recognition despite this, this country will — however inadvertently — be complicit in the creation of yet another terrorist state in the Middle East.

Second, there must be a de-radicalization condition alongside demilitarization. To build a sustainable and lasting peace, it is imperative that antisemitic, inciteful and inflammatory content be removed from the educational curriculum in the West Bank and Gaza.

Similarly, the leadership of a future state of Palestine should commit to no longer trafficking in antisemitic and incendiary language, including Holocaust denial — which Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on, and

continues to

consistently spread.

At a bare minimum, the Palestinian Authority must be required to end its infamous pay-for-slay program, which incentivizes and rewards terrorism. Although the PA claimed it ended the program in February, it is incumbent upon Canada to seek proof that it has followed through on its pledge. Otherwise, Canada will be complicit in the creation of another terrorist state in the Middle East, rather than a peaceful and democratic one as it intends.

Third, Canada’s recognition of Palestine must be contingent on the new state of Palestine’s recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel — something that regrettably has not been forthcoming all these years — in fact, the exact opposite has been the case.

Finally, Canada’s plan to recognize the state of Palestine is

contrary

to international law. Canada has consistently grounded its positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and, indeed, its foreign policy more broadly — in its deep respect for, and consistent adherence to, international law.

This has been the case even when international legal bodies themselves have acted in contravention of international law, most notably when the International Criminal Court issued warrants of arrest for Israeli leaders despite breaching its own foundational principles of complementarity, co-operation and equality before the law in doing so. At the time,

the response

by then-prime minister Justin Trudeau was: “We stand up for international law … this is just who we are as Canadians.”

The Montevideo Convention of 1933 — a cornerstone of international law — sets out four parameters for statehood: a permanent population; a defined territory; a government; and the capacity to enter into relations with other countries. These parameters are clearly not met in the case of Palestine, which lacks a singular functional government, and whose territory is disputed and undefined. Crucially, the Montevideo Convention is widely recognized as customary international law, and is therefore binding on all states — Canada included.

Canada’s commitment to international law — which is an admirable centrepiece of our national identity — must be principled, not political. Canada cannot selectively ignore international law when it is not in our government’s political interest, as this fundamentally undermines the rule of law.

We strongly share the Carney government’s aspirations for a two-state solution, and appreciate its good faith efforts to achieve it. In order for the two-state solution to be successful, however, and to achieve a lasting, just and sustainable peace, it must involve two democratic states for two peoples, living in mutual recognition of one another.

The framework for recognizing Palestine that Carney set forth on Wednesday attempts to bring us closer to that goal, but suffers from several fatal defects — with respect to the conditions it includes, the conditions it fails to include and, most importantly, the fact that it gets the paradigm backwards, granting recognition before the necessary conditions are met, rather than after.

If Canada moves forward with this framework, it will almost certainly be complicit — however inadvertently — in the creation of another authoritarian terrorist state in the Middle East, rather than a peaceful democratic one, thereby decreasing, rather than increasing, the possibility of securing a lasting peace in the region.

National Post

Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR), a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace-building for over 50 years. Noah Lew is a lawyer, special advisor to Cotler and a director of the RWCHR.

• Jesse Kline: Carney’s futile attempt to will a Palestinian state into existence
• Avi Benlolo: Carney’s message to Hamas — terrorism pays