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Halifax's Shaar Shalom synagogue was cleaned with a power washer after it was defaced with a swastika over the past weekend. Sept 15th 2025. Credit: Rob Roberts/Postmedia

HALIFAX — On Sunday afternoon, I walked over to a local synagogue to see if they needed help removing a swastika.

The shul’s sign had been defaced with paint overnight, according to a posting on X from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and I wanted to see if I could help clean up. I’m not Jewish, but the synagogue, Halifax’s Shaar Shalom, has personal connections for me, and I’ve attended services there.

As it happened, on Friday night I had watched, from a distance, as anti-Israel activists gathered in Halifax’s Grand Parade square. They stood on the steps of City Hall and denounced Israel and chanted “Free Free Palestine.” They were taking a victory lap for having disrupted plans for the Davis Cup match in Halifax between Canada and Israel, which organizers ultimately decided to stage without spectators.

From what I heard, the Grand Parade protesters didn’t chant From the River to the Sea or condemn Jews. I would have different personal views on who Gaza needed to be freed from, but the protest was orderly and seemed to fall within the grounds of reasonable debate and free speech.

It wasn’t like some of the rallies we’ve seen in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, featuring Calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, takeovers of streets, intimidation of Jewish neighbourhoods.

I’ve spoken to Jews who are fleeing, or thinking of fleeing, a Canada they no longer recognize. I’d argue that may well be the point of the big-city protests: some people want the Jews to leave.

In Halifax, one person (or perhaps more, the closed circuit cameras will likely clarify) was able to cause extreme discomfort to the city’s modest Jewish population. We learned later that three synagogues in the city were hit by graffiti; none served as the Israeli consulate, so there seems little point in litigating motive.

By the time I got to Shaar Shalom on Sunday the graffiti had been power-washed away; the concrete steps were still wet but the synagogue’s sign was pristine again.

Initially, no one else was there — not police, not congregants, not media. Soon, though, a friend and synagogue member happened by and we talked about the rise in Jew hate, and about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, seemingly triggered by events that started with the wholesale slaughter of Jewish civilians by frenzied terrorists.

I was, and am, furious and heartbroken about the swastika graffiti and its impact. He was furious, and resigned. He knows Jewish history.

In the early days after October 7, we at National Post decided to shine a light on acts of antisemitism in Canada. We wrote stories daily, but couldn’t keep up. There was just too much of it.

The Jew hate started even before the Gaza war began, with graffiti and ugly chants. The haters moved on to firing bullets and setting fires at Jewish institutions in the dark of night; more recently the antisemitism has taken an even darker turn, with the Montreal father who was beaten in front of his daughter, his kippah thrown into a puddle, and an elderly woman stabbed at Ottawa’s “Kosher Loblaws.”

I saw a social media post (which I haven’t confirmed myself) from someone who said she saw the elderly Ottawa woman at shul that same week proudly wearing the same Magen David that singled her out to her attacker. She recited a blessing thanking God for keeping her safe, there was a response of “Am Yisrael Chai,” and the whole congregation erupted with song and applause.

I have another story to share, from my own experience. I was walking with an observant Jewish man; he had removed his kippa while on the street, out in public. You could not find a prouder Jew, but this is a time for prudence.

CIJA’s posting about the Halifax synagogue called it “an assault on our core Canadian values,” and said it required “an unequivocal and urgent response from police and political leaders.”

Mayor Andy Fillmore, who I had heard being called “Genocide Andy” at Friday’s protest at City Hall, responded with this: “There is no path to peace anywhere that includes bringing fear and division to Halifax. We are better than this.”

This is exactly the choice Canada needs to make, isn’t it?

Rob Roberts is editor-in-chief of National Post.


Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.

The Liberals claim they’ve stopped the flood of temporary workers, foreign students and other immigrants that blew up our housing crisis and devastated the youth job market. Yet Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservatives’ immigration critic, tells Brian Lilley that the reality is nothing close to what they say. Five-million people remain here on temporary visas. Hundreds of thousands of more people are still being allowed in. And the asylum system is being exploited as a backdoor by thousands more making dubious refugee claims. Rempel Garner explains why we need drastic solutions to close temporary residency programs, weed out unfounded asylum claimants and start sending non-permanent workers home. (Recorded Sept. 12, 2025.)





People take part in a

The Government of Ontario has rightly taken over the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). But if this intervention remains limited to finances, it will have failed the students of Ontario.

The TDSB’s incompetence is not only about budgets — it’s about the complete collapse of its core mission: to educate. For years, the TDSB has abandoned its duty to teach the fundamentals — literacy, numeracy, science, and critical thinking. Instead, it has turned classrooms into arenas of political indoctrination.

Trustees and administrators have chosen activism over academics, propaganda over truth. The result: declining student performance, wasted resources and growing division.

Parents are not partners in this system; they are obstacles to be locked out. A June meeting on the board’s plan to adopt the concept of “anti-Palestinian racism” as part of a new anti-discrimination strategy that was closed off to concerned parents was not an exception — it was the rule.

The message is clear: input is welcome only if it agrees with the board’s agenda. This is an institution that refuses accountability and thrives on arrogance.

Meanwhile, antisemitism in Ontario is exploding. Jewish students are harassed in classrooms. Synagogues and community institutions are vandalized. Slogans that call for the eradication of Israel and the Jewish people are shouted openly in the streets.

These are not minor incidents — they are dangerous signs of hatred taking root in our schools and communities. And what has the TDSB chosen to prioritize? A strategy to address the supposed problem of “anti-Palestinian racism” — a concept so vague, politicized and one-sided that it reads like a manifesto rather than an educational framework.

Instead of protecting Jewish students — those actually under threat — the board is building programs that distort history, excuse terrorism and vilify Israel. This is not education. It’s malpractice.

The province cannot look the other way. It now controls the TDSB. That means that Queen’s Park is responsible. If the government does not act decisively, this takeover will go down as little more than a bookkeeping exercise while Ontario’s children are robbed of both safety and learning.

Ontario must lead. It must set the national benchmark for how a province responds when a school board collapses. It should immediately refocus on the fundamentals — classrooms should be about literacy, numeracy, science and history rooted in fact, not ideology.

A direct and unapologetic fight against antisemitism — the most dangerous and resurgent form of hate in our schools — must be waged. The entrenched leadership — trustees and administrators who failed in their duties — must be dismissed. They are the problem.

The board should also be held strictly accountable based on measurable results. No more empty policies. Every initiative should be tracked, enforced and proven effective — or scrapped.

The TDSB has failed its students, failed its parents and failed its city. The province cannot allow Ontario’s largest school board to continue to be used as a laboratory for activists while academic standards collapse and antisemitism spreads.

The time for half-measures is over. Remove the trustees. Shut down the ideological experiments. Protect Jewish students. Restore real education. Anything less will be a betrayal — not just of Toronto’s students, but of Ontario’s future.

Ontario now has the authority. The question is whether it has the will.

National Post


The post on X made by Ruth Marshall, an associate professor of religious studies and political science at University of Toronto, after the shooting death of U.S. conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

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

TOP STORY

When a wave of Canadian figures took to social media this week to publicly celebrate the assassination of U.S. political commentator Charlie Kirk, it shouldn’t have been all that surprising that a disproportionate number of them worked in academia.

Kirk was murdered at a university while engaging in a very university-like activity: Peacefully debating students who disagreed with him. Ironically, Kirk was shot while responding to a Utah student’s assertion that claims of U.S. political violence were overblown.

Nevertheless, calls for the act to be repeated were loudest among those whose workplace was a university.

A screenshot

was circulated

by B.C. conservative politician Dallas Brodie that allegedly shows University of Victoria’s Melia Bose saying “GOOD RIDDANCE. The ‘woke radical left’ finally sent someone with good aim,” in an Instagram post. Bose’s Instagram page has since been cleared of posts.

Against a headline reporting Kirk’s murder, University of Calgary associate professor Tawab Hlimi wrote “

bullseye

,” and then “Charlie Kirk no longer exists” with an emoji of a laughing face.

A University of Toronto political science professor, Ruth Marshall, uploaded a post on Sept. 10 reading “shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascist c–ts.” Marshall’s prior posts have often adopted a loose definition of “fascist,” with the professor at one point referring to a Jewish children’s summer camp as “

fascist indoctrination

.” She later denied that she was posting in response to Kirk’s death, but the university said she is on leave while they investigate.

https://x.com/AllFactsNoHate/status/1966279957782421822

This has all been happening for a while. Only two years ago, Canadian academia similarly

yielded a score

of faculty and campus organizations justifying or cheering the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

Hlimi allegedly did enough of it to

pack an entire dossier

assembled by the Jewish group B’Nai Brith. As recently as Aug. 31, he

posted to his X account,

“Hamas has the right to exist. Hamas has the right to resist.”

While the attacks were still ongoing, a McMaster University faculty union posted a jubilant message to social media reading “Palestine is rising, long live the resistance!” A University of Toronto Indigenous studies professor, Uahikea Maile, issued an Oct. 7 statement calling for more acts of “anticolonial resistance.”

Within hours of the October 7 attacks, York University law professor Heidi Matthews posted to social media, “A lot of obfuscation going on about what the right of resistance looks like in brutally asymmetrical contexts.” When a colleague warned against representing Hamas as freedom fighters, Matthews replied “I think I’ll leave it to the Palestinians to let us know what resistance means to them.”

The comments yielded virtually no professional sanctions. In many cases, it was just the opposite.

Matthews not only retains her position, but she’s subsequently been quoted as a “legal scholar” by CBC and the next year was

invited to be a featured speaker

at Memorial University with her talk “From Genocide to Unlawful Occupation.”

Harsha Walia, a former director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, appeared at a Vancouver rally celebrating the October 7 attack, and was recorded delivering a speech specifically praising Hamas’s use of paragliders to slaughter revellers at the Nova music festival.

Only a month later,

she was feted

with a dedicated Toronto event hosted by the American Anthropological Association. Eight academics from seven universities convened for a roundtable “to celebrate the work of Harsha Walia.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that Canadian universities quickly became a hub of the anti-Israel extremism that has defined much of the last two years.

The summer of 2024, for instance, saw illegal “Intifada” encampments established everywhere from UBC to McGill University to the University of Ottawa. The McGill version even

used photographs of armed Palestinian militants

to advertise itself as the site of a “Youth Summer Program.”

When a Montreal anti-Israel demonstrator was photographed last November delivering a Nazi salute and screaming “the Final Solution is coming,” she was right outside Concordia University, where mobs of demonstrators had spent the entire day

actively blocking access

to classrooms and campus spaces.

And this is all occurring on campuses where rising numbers of Canadian students are reporting discomfort with the extremism around them, and are actively censoring their own views to avoid sanction at the hands of faculty or administrators.

A recent report by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy found that

nearly 40 per cent of Canadian university students

considered themselves moderate or conservative, but diligently concealed these beliefs for fear they would be punished by instructors or investigated by campus authorities.

“Liberals basically feel free to say anything they want on any subject, regardless of consequences — that’s not an overstatement — while moderates and conservatives and libertarians feel like they have to radically self-censor, if they want to avoid consequences for their beliefs,” the foundation’s research director David Hunt

told the National Post

.

As Canadian universities once again produce a stream of public statements cheering political violence, the only difference this time seems to be a modicum of recognition from management that things might have gone too far.

Shortly after Marshall issued her “fascist c—ts” post, the University of Toronto announced that she had been placed on leave and was “not on campus.”

Nevertheless, as of press time, no similar sanction has accorded to McGill University associate professor William Roberts, who recently called for Canada to send military aid to the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

“We … need to begin supplying, supporting and even arming the Palestinian and Lebanese forces that can resist Israel,” Roberts, a vice-chair of McGill’s Committee on Student Discipline, explained in an interview with Postmedia.

As Roberts’ employer told local media, “McGill is aware of the comments made last week by a faculty member. When faculty members express themselves, they don’t speak on behalf of the institution.”

 

IN OTHER NEWS

 It wasn’t just coming from university campuses. This is a since-deleted post by Manitoba Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine reacting to Kirk’s murder. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, whose own response to Kirk’s assassination was quite eloquent, has said Fontaine will not lose her job over the post.

It’s been nearly a year that the Government of Canada officially announced that a terrorist group, Samidoun, was

operating openly

on the country’s West Coast. And yet, in the months since, Canadian authorities have done remarkably little to break up, interdict or arrest the members of said terror group. As critics have pointed out for months, the federal government didn’t even get around to pulling Samidoun’s non-profit status. This week, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said

she’s going to have someone look into that

. “It is completely unacceptable that any organization listed as a terrorist entity by the Government of Canada continues to exist as a federally registered not-for-profit organization,” she wrote in a social media post.

Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter.



Technology has not only permeated our lives, but our government, as well. Foreign tech companies control the systems that allow government employees to communicate and store the personal data of Canadians. Now, an increasing number of decisions are being placed in the hands of opaque AI models. In a new series, international trade lawyer Barry Appleton explores how Ottawa’s lack of control over its IT infrastructure is eroding Canada’s digital sovereignty.

On a typical Monday morning, Canadian government epidemiologists log into their workstations. They are analyzing Canadian health data, shaping public policy for 40-million citizens. But the algorithms that process their findings were designed in California. The cloud servers crunching the numbers are subject to American law. Even when the data never leaves Canadian soil, it can still be accessed under Washington’s CLOUD Act.

The doctors likely do not know this. Their supervisor likely does not know this. The deputy minister who signed the cloud contract for the federal government probably does not know this, either.

To the public, the system looks Canadian: Canadian websites, government seals, the familiar language of service delivery. But the reality is stark — every click crosses a border into someone else’s jurisdiction, optimized for someone else’s interests.

These scientists think they are serving Canadian democracy. In reality, they are operating inside someone else’s jurisdiction.

This is sovereignty in the algorithmic age: not about soldiers at borders, but about who governs the cloud contracts, the inference engines and the artificial intelligence logic that quietly structures national decision-making.

Canada is losing jurisdiction and control — one system update and one procurement order at a time.

Your phone does not display a foreign flag. Your social media feed does not play another nation’s anthem. Your government portal is branded in familiar fonts and speaks the language of efficiency and service. But every time you scroll, tap, search or transact online, you cross a border into someone else’s jurisdiction, governed by someone else’s rules and optimized for someone else’s interests.

This is not an empire in the old sense of armies and territory. It is an algorithmic empire: a system of extraterritorial jurisdiction enforced not through military occupation, but through computational architecture, technical standards and embedded governance logic. It does not conquer land, it captures the infrastructure of decision-making. Canada is no longer sovereign within it.

Empires once built railroads. Now they build AI systems. And Canada has already surrendered its tracks.

The algorithmic empire

The algorithmic empire is a new kind of geopolitical power. It does not conquer territory. It governs through code. The empire is built on control of the digital infrastructure that societies depend on: cloud services that store and process government data; artificial intelligence systems that make decisions on visas, taxes and health care; recommender engines that shape what citizens see, hear and believe; and digital finance rails that move money across borders.

Through this infrastructure, foreign powers extend their legal and economic norms directly into Canadian life. It enforces laws, norms and economic preferences across borders without physical occupation. Lawyers call it “jurisdiction without borders.” Citizens experience it as a convenience. In reality, it’s outsourced governance.

Unlike the industrial empires of the past, which relied on controlling physical choke-points such as canals and ports, the algorithmic empire holds cloud contracts, app stores and inference engines.

In the last century, power flowed through railways, shipping routes and telegraph lines. The state that controlled the bottlenecks controlled the future. Today, the new bottlenecks are digital. Cloud platforms, machine-learning engines and algorithmic systems process the flows of information that governments need to govern.

Unlike ports or pipelines, this infrastructure is invisible until it fails — or until it’s weaponized. Canadians think their government controls it. In fact, Ottawa has quietly outsourced much of its sovereignty to foreign corporations.

When a Canadian official logs into Microsoft 365, they are not simply sending an email. They are entering a system governed by American corporate law, subject to foreign intelligence orders and designed to reflect business priorities that may have little to do with Canadian values. This is not efficiency, it’s dependency disguised as modernization.

Three pillars of dependency

Modern governance rests on three digital pillars:

  1. Cloud computing — the foundation layer. Ottawa’s “cloud first policy” shifted critical systems to American providers. Shared Services Canada now runs much of government on Amazon, Microsoft and Google servers. These contracts embed foreign law into Canadian government operations.
  2. Artificial intelligence has become Canada’s shadow government. AI algorithms now help decide who gets visas, which taxpayers the Canada Revenue Agency audits for fraud and how your provincial health system distributes life-saving resources. Yet many of these digital decision-makers were trained on foreign datasets that know little about Canadian values or laws. Worse still, many run on American cloud servers governed by the CLOUD Act — meaning Washington could access your most sensitive government data. The kicker? Canada has zero AI reporting requirements. Ottawa literally cannot inspect many of the algorithms making decisions about your life. We’ve outsourced governance to black boxes built mostly by foreign corporations, with no oversight, no accountability and no way to peek under the hood. Canada isn’t just losing its digital sovereignty — it’s already gone.
  3. Digital finance — the transaction layer. From PayPal to Stripe to crypto platforms, Canadian money increasingly travels on foreign rails. Parliament can regulate interest rates, but it cannot audit the algorithms setting credit scores or processing stablecoin transactions.

Together, these pillars form the “digital hinge.” The state that controls them governs the future. Canada is not that state.

Europe acts, Canada sleeps

While Canada drifts, Europe is legislating. The European Union’s Digital Services Act forces transparency from platforms. The Artificial Intelligence Act requires risk-based oversight. The General Data Protection Regulation ensures European privacy rules follow European citizens wherever their data flows.

Europe understands the stakes: digital systems are constitutional infrastructure. If governments cannot govern their own algorithms, they cannot govern at all.

Canada, by contrast, tried and failed. The artificial intelligence and data act collapsed in committee. Even if it had passed, its scope was too narrow. It would not have touched the recommendation engines that dominate our information environment. The legislation was not suited for its important purpose.

Parliament has not yet grasped that sovereignty in the 21st century is not only about energy pipelines or borders. It’s about who owns the cloud contracts and the AI logic that shape daily life.

The lock-in trap

Every new dependency makes escape harder. Economists call this “vendor lock-in.” Digital dependence is not temporary — it hardens. Governments that migrate to Microsoft 365 cannot easily switch to Canadian alternatives without chaos. Health systems utilizing American AI cannot suddenly move to domestic engines.

Most contracts are governed by U.S. law. Disputes are often governed by American law, not Canadian courts. Once contracts are signed, sovereignty leaks away in ways that are invisible to voters. Every renewal entrenches foreign jurisdiction deeper into Canadian institutions.

China’s alternative

Where Canada has surrendered and Europe has regulated, China has imposed control. Beijing mandates algorithm registration, data localization and state oversight of all digital infrastructure.

The model works — at the price of freedom. China proves sovereignty is achievable. But it also shows the danger of confusing sovereignty with surveillance.

Canada should not copy Beijing. But we must recognize that drifting toward dependency is equally dangerous.

Canada’s policy vacuum

Canada has no equivalent to Europe’s comprehensive digital sovereignty framework. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulates television and telecommunications. But there is no Canadian regulator with authority over cloud platforms, AI inference engines or algorithmic governance.

The result is that our health data is governed by U.S. law, financial transactions are processed in the United States and cultural discourse is shaped by Chinese algorithms.

The genius of the algorithmic empire is that it feels like convenience. Canadians choose U.S. platforms because they work well, not because they are coerced.

Canadians supply the raw materials: data, engagement and problems to solve. Foreign platforms own the rails, set the terms and harvest the value.

This is digital sharecropping. We work the digital fields; someone else collects the harvest.

The results are visible everywhere: foreign firms dominate Canada’s ad-tech stack, payment platforms and even the cultural narratives Canadians consume. The wealth and power flow outward. What remains is dependency — dignified with the language of modernization.

Canada now faces three stark paths. We can continue outsourcing core infrastructure, adapting piecemeal to U.S., EU and Chinese rules. This guarantees permanent dependency. Alternatively, we can import China’s sovereignty-through-surveillance model. This would allow us to secure control, but would sacrifice our traditional Canadian freedoms.

Thus, the only viable path is to assert a Canadian model of digital sovereignty, rooted in democratic oversight, transparent algorithms and domestic infrastructure.

The government should introduce a “digital infrastructure act” that treats AI, cloud and payment systems as constitutional infrastructure. Algorithmic transparency should be enshrined as a legal right: citizens must know how automated systems affect them. Canadian disputes must be resolved under Canadian law. And government procurement should favour Canadian providers, incentivizing homegrown alternatives to foreign tech solutions.

In the 19th century, sovereignty meant controlling railways and ports. In the 20th century, it meant pipelines and broadcasting. In the 21st, it means cloud contracts, algorithmic systems and digital finance. We must govern code with the same authority we once applied to borders.

If governments cannot govern their algorithms, they cannot govern at all. If Canada fails to legislate sovereignty into its digital architecture, we will find ourselves living inside someone else’s empire — quietly governed, invisibly ruled, without ever being conquered.

We stand at the hinge of history. The choice is simple: renew sovereignty through law, or drift quietly into the algorithmic empire — a province of someone else’s digital domain, ruled without conquest and governed without consent.

Canada must decide what it means to be sovereign — before that decision is made for us.

National Post

Barry Appleton is an international trade lawyer, distinguished senior fellow and co-director at the Center for International Law at New York Law School and a fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.


Say you’re a step-parent of a young child for a few years. Say you break up with that child’s biological parent. Should you be put on that child’s birth certificate in addition to the biological parents, and be awarded partial custody? In New Brunswick, the answer is yes.

This clarification comes to us from the New Brunswick Court of King’s Bench, which

decided

last week to grant partial custody of a five-year-old boy to his mother’s ex-girlfriend-turned-boyfriend.

That’s the short version. The long version is, in 2020, a New Brunswick woman named J.K., and her ex-husband, D.K., had a son, L, the child at the centre of the is court battle. But they didn’t exactly know it at the time. The two already had one child together in 2017 and separated in 2018. They continued to have sexual encounters after their separation, but since J.K. was also seeing other people, the parentage was unclear until court-ordered paternity testing took place.

In 2019, J.K. began dating a woman who worked at her first kid’s daycare, K.M. This ended later in the year due to toxicity (“there was violence on both sides,” was the court summary of K.M.’s testimony), and J.K. ultimately moved back in with her husband — not as a couple, but not in an asexual way either, because it was during this time that their now five-year-old son was conceived. In early 2020, J.K. began seeing an old college friend named C.C, and found out she was pregnant. She believed him to be the father, but he was struggling with drugs at the time, and didn’t see him as ready to take the role.

When the pandemic hit, J.K. resumed her relationship with the woman from daycare, K.M. They were together during the pregnancy — K.M. was even listed on the birth certificate as a parent — and for the two years that followed, splitting up in 2022. K.M. identified as a woman when the child was born, but transitioned afterward and took on the role of a father figure. Post-breakup, J.K. returned to C.C., and they’ve been together since; in 2024, they even had two kids. They’re the primary caregivers of L.

There’s also a layer of geography to all this: the mother and her trans ex lived in Saint John initially, but in 2024 the mother moved two hours away. Still, both households shared custody of the child, him going back and forth between the two as they continued to fight for full custody in court.

K.M. petitioned the court for parental rights and for full custody (or partial custody, if the mother moved back home). The biological parents and C.C. petitioned for K.M. to be cut out of the child’s life completely.

K.M. won a compromise: custody every third weekend.

New Brunswick law defines a “parent” as someone who “who has demonstrated a settled intention to treat a child as a child of the person’s family” — and the presence of K.M. in L’s life from day 1 as a parental figure

fulfilled

that definition for the judge. As for apportioning custody, most parenting time was awarded to the biological mother — but some weekends will go to the unrelated step-parent because the judge believed it to be in the kid’s best interests.

“Although L has had three father figures in his life so far, only one father has been present since birth (and even before) until now. That father is the applicant, K.M.,”

wrote

the judge.

The judge found it important that the child had formed sibling-like relationships with the children of K.M.’s new wife (though, it’s possible that they lost custody of those two kids; the

evidence was unclear

on that point). The judge also gave some weight to K.M.’s intention to enroll the kid in French immersion (something the mom wasn’t about to do). He expressed some skepticism at the biological family’s religious views, particularly relating to transgender matters.

“Given the mother’s evidence about her parents’ (negative) views on LGBTQ relationships, this could raise concerns about what will be said to the child about the reality of transgender people. For the time being, however, this has not been raised,” he noted. Elsewhere, he referred to K.M.’s female name as a “deadname,” adopting the terms of gender ideology. It seemed that the judge viewed gender ideology as the neutral state of nature, possibly a reason to favour K.M.

So, what does it all mean? In New Brunswick, at least, you can get custody of someone else’s kid, even if both of their biological parents are in the picture.

Reading between the lines, you can find some additional reasons why the judge leaned this way. The kid in question’s mother has a handful of mental illnesses and a history of drug addition. She wasn’t all that credible in court, her story laden with “significant contradictions.” She claims to have been sober in 2019, but

relapsed

again in 2023 for a brief period. When she moved two hours away, the new home initially

did not have a toilet

. Her partner, C.C., also has a history of drug abuse and relapsed in 2023; he is a sex offender, convicted of having non-consensual sex with a previous girlfriend as she slept.

You get the impression that the judge may have seen a better parent in K.M. — who isn’t perfect, either, having recently pleaded guilty to cannabis distribution charges, but who was more forthright and didn’t appear to be living with a sex offender. As for who the kid wants to live with, it’s hard to say; each claims the kid says concerning things about the other.

Decisions like these confuse what a family actually is. And while it does make sense for step-parents to take an active role in their stepkids’ lives, they still aren’t the real parents. Canadian law is increasingly moving towards a family model detached from true kinship: a Quebec judge

ruled

that multiple parents can go on a birth certificate earlier this year, following a B.C. court

in 2021

. And in that year, an Alberta court

ruled

that a stepfather had to provide support for children that weren’t his — even after they turned 18.

In 2022, meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada said that kinship carries “minimal weight” in determining where a child goes: “changing social conditions … have diminished the significance of biological ties,”

remarked

the unanimous court. It’s not an absolute rejection of the biological nuclear family, which has carried our civilization for centuries, but it is a departure.

We’re moving towards something like the common-law marriage for parent-child relationships, where the state imposes a legal relationship on people without their consent, and that’s something to be concerned about. It means that real parents who allow unrelated adults to become a fixture in their kid’s life can ultimately lose some of their parental rights in the process.

National Post


People pay their respects during a candlelight vigil for youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk at a makeshift memorial at Orem City Center Park in Orem, Utah, a day after he was shot during a public event at Utah Valley University on September 11, 2025. (Photo by MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP via Getty Images)

In an astounding coincidence, as the news arrived that Charlie Kirk, founder and head of the enlightened traditionalist movement Turning Point USA, had been assassinated, I was sitting in the Oval Office of the White House across the Resolute Desk from the President of the United States. Although I have known him for more than 25 years and have generally been in touch with him throughout that period, I had not seen him in person for some years. I have written approximately two million words about him, almost all of it reasonably or unambiguously favourable, though not uncritically so, mainly on U.S. Internet sites, as well as a book that was appreciative of him though no hagiography, (A President Like no Other).

I had developed a few ideas about a couple of his programs, in emails and by telephone, and he suggested I visit him. Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025 was the day. As I was arriving at the White House visitors’ entrance I saw on my mobile phone that Charlie Kirk had been wounded in an assassination attempt. I did not really know him and was only generally conversant with his Turning Point movement and from the initial wording of the bulletin I hopefully assumed that he would recover. There was no sign of alarm as I sat in the outer anteroom with a number of distinguished fellow visitors including a prominent senator and the well-known economist Arthur Laffer, whom I had not seen in thirty years. A few friends in the administration came and went and we exchanged greetings and the time passed pleasantly.

The outer anteroom for the Oval Office is rectangular and has doors on three walls and in the middle of what I assume was a typical weekday afternoon, an astonishing number of people were constantly coming and going through all three doors, one the entrance and the other two into parallel inner anterooms to the Oval Office. The ambience is one of constant and purposeful activity in a shared and good-spirited cause. Occasionally, it happened that successive doors were simultaneously ajar, and the familiar voice of the chief occupant would be heard, good-humoured but authoritative. A pleasing aesthetic aspect, as usual in Trump matters, is the presence of very capable and attractive youngish ladies on the presidential staff.

Although I had been a number of times to the White House before, it was in groups and in reception rooms. Here it was possible to see how the private office functioned and it was clear the president’s staff is devoted to him personally and that he, unlike some holders of great offices that I have known, is unfailingly polite to staff. In this he reminded me of Margaret Thatcher, who frequently beat up her cabinet ministers because she thought they could and should defend themselves if they were any good, (and if they weren’t she sacked them), but never forgetting her own modest socioeconomic beginnings, she was unfailingly courteous to people in lesser positions.

After about an hour I was invited to leapfrog the crowded intermediate waiting room and was cordially greeted by my eminent host. He was looking trim, fit, and completely undaunted by the requirements of his position. In my observations, going back to the Eisenhower years, U.S. presidents either enjoy their position and get on top of it or are worn down by it and the presidency imposes itself upon them. Donald Trump is distinctly in the first category. We were briefly joined by Art Laffer who wanted a photograph taken of himself with the president in front of the painting of President Reagan to the right of the president’s desk. After a few pleasantries and reflections Laffer departed and the president said that Charlie Kirk had died.

I condoled with him and when he indicated that it would be appropriate, I started into my reasons for being there. He listened intently and made a few comments and we were shortly joined by the vice president, J.D. Vance, known even by me to be a close friend Charlie Kirk. He was reporting on the initial results of the investigation. My offer to excuse myself was declined and there followed a surrealistic and unforgettable scene: the president and vice president lamented their deceased friend and I was likely almost as improbable a third party as could be found to participate in such an exchange. In the circumstances, I only commented when my opinion was asked.

Especially in the light of ungenerous imputations of motives to both men in their public remarks in ensuing days. I would be remiss not to emphasize that neither the president nor the vice president expressed any sentiment except sorrow at the death of their friend and sympathy for his wife and family and close associates, and calm, deep concern at the extent of violence in the country. There was not a vengeful or partisan word or even an ill-tempered one. Both men were absolutely exemplary and in fact somewhat inspiring in their sole preoccupation with the horribly premature and violent death of a talented friend and supporter, and their shared concern at the frequency of recourse to political violence in America and much of the western world.

The only reference to the immediate political implications of this tragic event was by me when I said that this was such a ghastly episode it might have a salutary effect in sobering public discourse and discouraging violence. This elicited a noncommittal response. All Americans, whatever their political leanings, should be reassured that the two holders of the national offices of the United States, in a poignant hour of great sacrifice and sadness, had no thoughts except charity for the bereaved and concern for the country. It was my sad privilege to be a witness to this and the completely spontaneous tastefullness and generosity of the thoughts of the president and vice president did not reduce but somewhat ameliorated the deep sadness of the occasion.

The vice president departed, the president invited me to finish what I’d come to say which I did with uncharacteristic economy of words and got up to leave. He said he had then to telephone Mrs. Kirk. I was staying near the White House and walked back, reflecting on the fortuitously fine qualities of America’s leaders, whatever controversies they may arouse on other grounds. And for the 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, whom I knew to be a committed and patriotic Christian, I could only wish him eternal rest with the Prince of Peace as he reposes in the honoured memory of the great nation for which he made the highest and noblest sacrifice.

New York Sun


Dr. Brian Day

What drives Dr. Brian Day, one of Canada’s leading advocates of private health care? If we look beyond the headlines and identify what actually motivates him, we will see how to fix medicare in Canada.

Day has been

called

“Dr. Profit” and the “Darth Vader” of medicare. Until this summer, most people knew him only from headlines and (generally hostile) media.

Day is best known for having challenged provisions in British Columbia’s Medicare Protection Act that limit private health care in the province. The case, Cambie Surgeries Corporation v British Columbia, involved complex legal arguments entwined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

These are hard to capture in headlines. It’s much easier to reduce Cambie to a story about profit and greed, which is what much of the media did.

In May, Sutherland House

published

Day’s new book, “My Fight for Canadian Healthcare: A thirty-year battle to put patients first.” It reads like an explorer’s diary: exciting, funny and intimate.

Readers seeking dirt about profit will be disappointed. Buried on page 196, Day admits: “An independent audit of Cambie showed that every $5,000 in revenue generated a profit of just $65.”

I

asked

Day about this. “That’s a bad business,” I said. He smiled and told me how Cambie had considered gaining non-profit status.

“Some of our founding shareholders had donated literally hundreds of millions of dollars to the public system,” he continued. They have pavilions and buildings named after them: hardly opponents of public health care.

Day started exploring private care in 1991, after funding was cut to public hospitals. His clinic, the Cambie Surgery Centre, opened in 1996. The B.C. NDP government offered neither opposition nor support. Cambie attracted opposition all by itself.

In 2016, Day launched the Cambie Surgeries lawsuit to give patients access to private care. He fought the B.C. government all the way to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. Day lost and his opponents

saw

the 880-page ruling as a definitive victory.

Day’s team requested appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. It had ruled in favour of private care in its

Chaoulli

decision, so most people expected a similar ruling to apply to the rest of Canada. But the court

dismissed

the request.

Day’s opponents gloated. The spectre of a Supreme Court ruling on private care no longer haunted Canada.

The passion for Day’s “30-year battle to put patients first” sprouted 50 years ago. He entered training in Vancouver in 1973, at the peak of medicare’s golden era.

The Canadian medical establishment itself was a vibrant industry built up over centuries: Canada’s

first hospital

, Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, was built in 1637. In the 1970s, doctors competed for patients and Canada had

seven beds

per 1,000 population (down to only

2.5

per 1,000 today).

Nurses and doctors focused on patient care; rationing, reporting and resource shortages never crossed their minds. They were limited only by their own passion and stamina.

Day remembers operating on 12 fractured hips in a row, without a break. No one told him to stop. Orthopaedic surgeons had 17-22 hours of regular, scheduled operating time each week in addition to virtually unlimited OR time after hours.

Today, surgeons have five hours per week at the same hospitals. They must seek approval from administrators before surgery, as there might not be any beds open. Nurses must not step outside their job descriptions.

Day’s book describes a time when patients came before politics, budgets and resource allocation. His memories offer a yardstick for today. But surely nostalgia cannot navigate current fiscal pressures? Surely we need more than saccharine recollections?

We could dismiss Day, if it were not for Cambie Surgeries itself. Cambie is about far more than private care. Inside Cambie, an old vision survives. Doctors and nurses put patient care before concerns about resources, politics or collective agreements.

Staff report 100 per cent satisfaction versus 40 per cent reporting burnout in public hospitals. If multiple ORs need cleaning at once, nurses and surgeons scrub the floor themselves to avoid delay. No union grievances or questions from the administration; just smiles, photo-ops and a passion for patient care.

The secret to outstanding health care lies within doctors and nurses. Their internal drive to care, limited only by personal stamina, is the only path to excellence.

We can either amplify their passion and remove barriers to its expression, or we can crush it by regulating what we don’t understand and trading knowledge for power. For 50 years, Canada has done the latter.

Day’s book shows us what it looks like to put patients before politics. Will we give it a try?

National Post

Shawn Whatley is a physician in Mount Albert, Ont., a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of “When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing.”


A rally and counter-protest for the Alberta separatist movement is held outside the Alberta legislature on May 3.

After spending most of last weekend in Calgary and having the privilege of speaking with scores of well-informed Albertans including a number of prominent political figures, I came away with an uneasy feeling that it is not generally recognized in Canada how politically vulnerable this country is and how vivid and well-founded are the public policy grievances of Alberta. Alberta was a conventional farming and ranching economy until the discovery of oil there in 1947. Today, mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction account for a quarter of Alberta’s GDP, and 70 per cent of exports, with ancillary benefits to the construction, manufacturing, transportation and other industries.

For its first 30 years as an oil and gas producing jurisdiction, Alberta’s standard of living and per capita income naturally rose accordingly, especially after the steep rises in international oil prices following the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in 1973 and the ensuing Arab oil boycott. The first cloud on the brightening blue horizon of Alberta came in 1954, when the long-serving premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, after warning the federal government for 20 years that income taxes were a concurrent jurisdiction and being ignored, imposed a provincial income tax and forced the federal government to accept its deductibility from Quebecers’ income for purposes of assessing their federal tax. This was the beginning of decentralization in Canada, as other provinces followed Quebec’s example and the federal government produced the equalization program, in which the most wealthy provinces paid through Ottawa to assist the less prosperous ones.

Duplessis was a political leader of such virtuosity that he managed to get the conservatives and the nationalists in Quebec to vote together without his nationalism frightening the conservatives or his conservatism irritating the nationalists. When he and his two chosen disciples, Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson, followed Duplessis in dying in office but at much younger ages and only a short time as premier, the nationalist torch in Quebec passed to Rene Levesque and the left, and there was no conservative restraint on what quickly became a move to the outright secession and independence of Quebec. Duplessis had effectively made this possible by preserving provincial autonomy from federal centralization and by maintaining the Roman Catholic clergy as the great majority of the personnel in the province’s French-language education and health service departments, at very modest cost, while balancing the provincial budget, reducing taxes and devoting almost all of the budget to modernizing Quebec. When he died in 1959 after nearly 20 years as premier, he had built 3,000 schools, the first autoroutes and most of the modern roads and almost all the university campuses. Quebec had ceased to be a primitive province in all respects except possibly political mores, and these changed quickly.

In legitimate response to the separatist threat, the federal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau expanded the equalization transfer payment program and Alberta and Ontario and British Columbia were effectively buying votes for federalism in Quebec. This was a successful strategy, but it became particularly onerous for Alberta when the Trudeau government also imposed its national energy program and seized a confiscatory share of the income from that industry, despite the fact that natural resources are constitutionally a provincial jurisdiction. Alberta’s talented premier, Peter Lougheed, strongly contested the federal government’s action and he was widely represented in Canada by the Liberal party propaganda apparatus that has long dominated most of our political media, as a ”blue-eyed Arab” greedily gathering in fortuitous oil revenue and overcharging his fellow Canadians. Lougheed and Trudeau jousted in the court of public opinion as well as the courts of constitutional law.

Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney arranged a reasonable compromise with western and eastern offshore oil producers in 1985 and comparative peace reigned for a time. This was the ironic background of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assault on Canada’s greatest income-earning industry, oil and gas, not to confiscate its proceeds as his father had attempted to do, but to shut it down, in the utterly spurious claimed interest of defending the planet against climate change. The Marxist left demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected talent for improvisation by spontaneously and almost universally clambering aboard what had been a somewhat tedious but honourable conservationist bandwagon of birdwatchers, butterfly collectors, champions of duck wetlands and Greenpeace zealots trying to climb up the anchor-chains of visiting American aircraft carriers, and transform the environmental movement into a battering ram against capitalism from this new unimpeachable angle of saving the ecosystem.

Of course, there are legitimate environmental concerns and great vigilance must be shown. All pollution is odious but Canada’s record is good and it has almost no impact on global fossil fuel use. Now we are in the increasingly precarious position that Quebec, which has been fiscally better managed than Canada for some years, has prospered and ostensibly separatist parties are leading the polls there toward next year’s general election. The economic argument is not as convincing as it was, but the nationalist susceptibility of the population has been diluted by the admission by the Government of Quebec of large numbers of Moroccans, Haitians and Lebanese, to try to maintain the French-speaking population of the province following the collapse in the French-Canadian birthrate after the secularization of the province, and these people are not much interested in Quebec nationalism. The outcome is unpredictable.

The election of a climate change fanatic, Prime Minister Mark Carney, with a long record of demanding the most rapid possible shutdown of the oil and gas industry, has caused Albertans to think increasingly of the fact that if they seceded from Canada and made an agreement to sell their oil and gas either to the United States or through pipelines like Keystone XL through the United States to the world, they could probably abolish the income tax, would become a petrostate like Norway and become one of the per capita wealthiest countries in the world, which they could run themselves without hearing another word from Ottawa. In Alberta, as in Quebec, there are alternatives to Canada. And there is no public evidence that this federal government has given much original thought to how to keep Confederation going. Carney’s first five big projects did include an encouraging emphasis of liquefied natural gas, but they fall far short of an effective answer to the separatists of the east or west.

National Post


Romana Didulo, a conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed

Based on my family background, which is 100 per cent Saskatchewan-Socialism Diaspora, I’m naturally inclined to like the Saskatchewan NDP even less than I like the other NDPs. So you’ll pardon me for giving a little “Yeah, what’s up with that?” shoutout to

the party’s MLA Brittney Senger

.

On Sept. 3, the RCMP in the province descended on a decommissioned school in the village of Richmound to round up members of the weird Romana Didulo cult who had bought and occupied the building.

The self-styled Queen

, a leftover of COVID-era online-conspiracy madness who has recruited a couple dozen followers, has been an object of national and international attention for years. Didulo’s group settled in Richmound in September 2023, and a disturbingly familiar pattern of cult-vs.-neighbour conflict began almost immediately.

Initial news reports on the arrests made it sound as though the police raid was motivated by

reports of illegal arms

on the premises — a legitimate fear, certainly, when dealing with a personality cult in a remote rural area, one said to have been making occasional hair-raising threats to neighbours. But the police seemingly didn’t find any actual weapons when they invaded the defunct school — only replicas of guns — and almost everybody they detained, with the exception of Didulo and the owner of the building, was immediately released without charge.

If you stuck to big news outlets, it was only a little later you began to hear about the sewage thing.

The Didulo cult has a strong “Freeman-on-the-Land” character, believing that obeying what you and I understand to be the law is optional, and the followers have apparently been talked into magic-bean monetary-crank beliefs to boot. Several of Didulo’s followers are in a state of personal ruin because they think tax bills and mortgage payments are suggestions. As a consequence of this anarcho-stupidity, the cult stopped paying sewage bills ages ago. According to

a desperate Facebook post

published by the village’s mayor Aug. 8, the village plugged the school’s sewer drains

in the spring

, and followed up by cutting off potable water.

At which point the Queen and her followers apparently rigged together a system of hoses and started dumping their feces onto a nearby park (now closed as a health hazard) and baseball diamonds. After the mayor’s plea for help, there was some

local reporting

on the cult’s innovative waste management/biological warfare techniques. (How long do you figure you would be able to get away with openly effusing sewage onto your neighbours?) But it took another month for the RCMP to act — and their raid was quickly followed up by personnel of the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), which very suddenly condemned the building as unfit for habitation.

MLA Senger is now politely asking the Saskatchewan government why the reaction was so slow. Of course, one can imagine good answers to her questions. The appearance of coordination between the cops and Saskatchewan Health is as obvious as its wisdom, and the double descent on the school would have taken time to arrange. Those agencies couldn’t have known in advance that the whole thing wouldn’t turn into a Waco-style mass-casualty fiasco without some planning.

This being the case — and Senger specifically acknowledges it — why did Saskatchewan’s justice minister feel the right countermove was to condemn Senger and the NDP for their “unrestrained” and “reckless” desire to “interfere in independent police matters”? Even if you accept the narrow point, the Saskatchewan government is still wholly responsible for its health authority; and if the SHA couldn’t act until the police did, which is probably the case, talk of the political independence of the police is pure hee-haw. It is a bad sign for the Saskatchewan Party if they can’t get this right — and especially if the left starts being appropriately sensitive to rural Canadians’ sense of general abandonment by the state.

National Post