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Source: National Post (Opinions)

Caroline Proulx is the Coalition Avenir Québec candidate in Berthier riding in the 2022 Quebec general election. (Photo: Coalition Avenir Québec)

Can we, in Quebec, exclude certain citizens from public facilities because of their political views?

This type of discrimination, common under authoritarian regimes, “has no place in a free and democratic society like Quebec,” the province’s Superior Court said on July 31, in deciding a case involving a Christian group, B.C.-based Harvest Ministries International (HMI) and the former Quebec minister of tourism Caroline Proulx.

The drama began in 2023, when Proulx forced the termination of a lease agreement because she disapproved of HMI’s views on abortion. Her communications team tried to frame this cancellation as part of the abortion debate despite the fact the event in question, called “Faith, Fire and Freedom,” had nothing to do with abortion.

Freedom of expression is one of the fundamental rights recognized in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The state may infringe upon these rights only in rare cases and within strict limits established by case law, such as a violent situation. But that is not what happened here.

First, the evidence presented did not indicate that HMI hosted an “anti-abortion event,” but a gathering that “had as its primary objective to unite Canada’s two founding peoples.”

Second, it was not the nature of the event that prompted the minister to cancel its holding at the Québec City Convention Center, but rather the organizer’s beliefs regarding abortion which she discovered by visiting the organizer’s website.

Finally, the minister claimed to have acted entirely within the law to protect the “fundamental rights and freedoms” of Quebec women.

On this point, the ruling could not be harsher: the Superior Court found that she acted “without legislative or regulatory authority,” meaning she lacked the legal authority to force the termination of the lease.

The court found that Proulx acted “in an arbitrary and abusive manner, without any regard for (HMI’s) rights.” It further emphasized that “her interference” was “motivated by considerations of an essentially political nature and her contemporaneous public statements based on personal convictions.”

It was not the minister of tourism who acted here in her capacity as a minister. It was Caroline Proulx who abused her position to stifle the freedom of expression of a group with which she disagreed.

That is why the court held her liable for all compensatory and punitive damages in the amount of $60,000 . This kind of censure is severe and should lead to an equally severe political response.

It is regrettable that, following such a harsh ruling, Ms. Proulx refuses to admit any wrongdoing and is once again attempting to shift the focus of the case to the issue of abortion by claiming to defend Quebec’s “fundamental rights and freedoms.”

These so-called fundamental rights do exist, but it is not up to a minister to redefine them. They are already enshrined in the Charter.

If, after such a harsh ruling, the minister can simply reiterate her narrative and reject the court’s conclusions outright; if media attention shifts elsewhere; if citizens shrug it off — this signals that this kind of anti-democratic behavior can pay off politically. One can find some comfort in the fact that, notwithstanding the ministers’ claims, the government of Quebec will not be appealing the decision according to the lawyer for HMI.

It is important to remember that the real issue is whether we accept that a member of the government can trample on the rights of a group because of their own personal beliefs. A democracy that answers “yes” to this question is already beginning to forget why it adopted a Charter in the first place.

National Post

Jean-Christophe Jasmin is the Québec director at Cardus, where he draws on his background as a federal public servant and his training in political philosophy and theology to foster collaboration between faith communities, policy-makers, and the broader public.

Click here for more Canada

Caroline Proulx is the Coalition Avenir Québec candidate in Berthier riding in the 2022 Quebec general election. (Photo: Coalition Avenir Québec)

Can we, in Quebec, exclude certain citizens from public facilities because of their political views?

This type of discrimination, common under authoritarian regimes, “has no place in a free and democratic society like Quebec,” the province’s Superior Court said on July 31, in deciding a case involving a Christian group, B.C.-based Harvest Ministries International (HMI) and the former Quebec minister of tourism Caroline Proulx.

The drama began in 2023, when Proulx forced the termination of a lease agreement because she disapproved of HMI’s views on abortion. Her communications team tried to frame this cancellation as part of the abortion debate despite the fact the event in question, called “Faith, Fire and Freedom,” had nothing to do with abortion.

Freedom of expression is one of the fundamental rights recognized in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The state may infringe upon these rights only in rare cases and within strict limits established by case law, such as a violent situation. But that is not what happened here.

First, the evidence presented did not indicate that HMI hosted an “anti-abortion event,” but a gathering that “had as its primary objective to unite Canada’s two founding peoples.”

Second, it was not the nature of the event that prompted the minister to cancel its holding at the Québec City Convention Center, but rather the organizer’s beliefs regarding abortion which she discovered by visiting the organizer’s website.

Finally, the minister claimed to have acted entirely within the law to protect the “fundamental rights and freedoms” of Quebec women.

On this point, the ruling could not be harsher: the Superior Court found that she acted “without legislative or regulatory authority,” meaning she lacked the legal authority to force the termination of the lease.

The court found that Proulx acted “in an arbitrary and abusive manner, without any regard for (HMI’s) rights.” It further emphasized that “her interference” was “motivated by considerations of an essentially political nature and her contemporaneous public statements based on personal convictions.”

It was not the minister of tourism who acted here in her capacity as a minister. It was Caroline Proulx who abused her position to stifle the freedom of expression of a group with which she disagreed.

That is why the court held her liable for all compensatory and punitive damages in the amount of $60,000 . This kind of censure is severe and should lead to an equally severe political response.

It is regrettable that, following such a harsh ruling, Ms. Proulx refuses to admit any wrongdoing and is once again attempting to shift the focus of the case to the issue of abortion by claiming to defend Quebec’s “fundamental rights and freedoms.”

These so-called fundamental rights do exist, but it is not up to a minister to redefine them. They are already enshrined in the Charter.

If, after such a harsh ruling, the minister can simply reiterate her narrative and reject the court’s conclusions outright; if media attention shifts elsewhere; if citizens shrug it off — this signals that this kind of anti-democratic behavior can pay off politically. One can find some comfort in the fact that, notwithstanding the ministers’ claims, the government of Quebec will not be appealing the decision according to the lawyer for HMI.

It is important to remember that the real issue is whether we accept that a member of the government can trample on the rights of a group because of their own personal beliefs. A democracy that answers “yes” to this question is already beginning to forget why it adopted a Charter in the first place.

National Post

Jean-Christophe Jasmin is the Québec director at Cardus, where he draws on his background as a federal public servant and his training in political philosophy and theology to foster collaboration between faith communities, policy-makers, and the broader public.

Click here for more Canada

A cyclist makes their way down the 83 Avenue bike lane near Gateway Boulevard, in Edmonton Monday August 10, 2026.

On Friday, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that there was no Charter right to bike lanes — and delivered an utter spanking to the judge below their rank who said otherwise. Not only was it a victory for those who prefer car to bike, it was a victory for democracy.

Before the case was overturned, it stood for the principle that elected policymakers had to submit to “expert” evidence on matters of mere traffic planning to avoid breaching the Charter rights of the masses. Justice Paul Schabas of the Ontario Superior Court arrived at this conclusion last year in hearing out the advocacy group Cycle Toronto, which had complained about the Ontario government’s plan to remove a bike lane along a major thoroughfare downtown.

While there wasn’t a positive duty on governments to create bike lanes, went the Schabas’ logic, there was a duty to justify the removal of any existing bike lane with evidence satisfactory to the court. His scheme entombed all roads and traffic policy in thick constitutional armour.

Cycle Toronto’s central expert witness, engineering professor Shoshanna Saxe of the University of Toronto, was key in convincing Schabas that the potential harm caused to cyclists by removing the bike lanes was so severe that it constituted a violation of Canadians’ Charter rights. On the other side of the equation was the government, which did not produce its own math on how much harm the bike lane removal would cause and to whom.

Schabas concluded — erroneously — that he had no choice but to give Toronto’s bike lanes the armour of constitutional protection. The appeal court above was not so easily fooled. Writing for the three-judge court, Justice Grant Huscroft issued a firm reminder that “Judicial review under the Charter is not an occasion for courts to comment on or critique policy or political decisions.” He said that Schabas further erred by binding present governments to the policies of past governments.

It was an example of the system working as intended. In examining the cyclists’ pleas with a magnifying glass, Schabas lost sight of his own role in the bigger picture and was corrected for it. And there will be knock-on effects elsewhere: Alberta is preparing legislation that will give the provincial government a framework to order the removal of nuisance city bike lanes. The Schabas ruling was certain to be used as ammunition for cyclist advocates out west; the Schabas takedown, which will be far more persuasive to the courts, is a firm defence to bike lane removal.

The means by which the Toronto cyclists got their initial victory in court are still cause for concern, however. Schabas relied heavily on the cyclists’ expert witness, Saxe, in trying to understand traffic congestion. Saxe’s view was that “investing in cycling infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools available to reduce congestion,” while removing it would make congestion worse long-term. She was a proponent of a theory called “induced demand,” which asserts that building more car capacity creates more drivers.

Induced demand is the grand unifying theory of urbanists, who usually believe in turn that removing car lanes is a simple way of reducing drivers. Commuters, goes the idea, will naturally switch to bikes and buses if car infrastructure is taken away. These people do not take into account the fact that bikes are particularly vulnerable to theft. Nor do they think too hard about winter. Nor do they dwell much on the fact that few people want to spend two hours on buses full of riff-raff to get to work. And perhaps most critically, they ignore the fact that North America has more space and money than the cycling paradise of Europe, which drives a natural tendency towards car infrastructure.

Saxe’s day job is to promote exactly those kinds of urbanist policy stances. In 2020, she was made a Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure. This is a federally funded position that comes with money and prestige. The chairs have been around for decades at this point, but within the last 10 years the Liberals have repurposed the program as a vessel for diversity hiring in academia.

The Liberals have also infused the program with funding to create a multitude of prestigious postings on topics that just so happen to advance the government agenda. There are still meritorious academics studying serious topics working as Canada Research Chairs, but there are many others who didn’t have to fully compete for their roles thanks to diversity quotas, and whose work focuses on “Sustainability Governance and Innovation,” “Citizenship, Social Justice and Ethno-Racialization,” “Inclusivity and Active Ageing,” “Reimagining Capitalism,” “Critical Disability Studies,” “History of Health and Social Justice,” “Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics,” and “Urban Sexualities.”

It was during the bike lanes court battle that we saw the precise purpose of dumping money into bogus new frontiers in the Canada Research Chairs program. Progressive policy now has a front line of full-time defenders with the prestige of academia and the punch of a well-funded Liberal think tank. Saxe’s golden aura of an expert could be used to tactically blind the court, and it worked on Schabas.

This is a common use of this new crop of Canada Research Chairs. They appear as non-partisan experts advancing the objectively correct position on contentious subjects — whether in media, the academic world, or in court. Their expert status gives allied decision-makers the cover needed to side with whatever the progressive side wants. It happens all the time.

Earlier this year, for example, Federal Court Justice Avvy Yao-Yao Go ruled in favour of a group of RCMP officers who alleged they were victims of systemic racism on thin evidence. They had lost at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, but Go decided that they deserved a redo, in part because the tribunal didn’t give enough weight to the RCMP officers’ expert witness, Kanika Samuels-Wortley . Samuels-Wortley is the Canada Research Chair in Systemic Racism, Technology and Criminal Justice, an inherently activist role. Justice Go is an aggressive DEI advocate; of course she’d shred the tribunal below her for not hearing out an academic ally.

The Ontario Court of Appeal, at least, didn’t fall for the new-generation Canada Research Chairs charm or use it as cover to push the law to the left. Justice Huscroft identified that “Saxe clearly favours bicycles,” and put proper caveats on her urbanist theory of induced demand. Whatever her expert credentials, her explaining theory of traffic forces was just a prediction model, and even if it predicted correctly, it certainly shouldn’t attract constitutional protection.

“The principles of fundamental justice neither require nor permit courts to countermand rational policy choices legitimately made by the government and legislature, regardless of the preferences of academic experts,” wrote Huscroft.

True experts have their uses. It’s a mark of an advanced, thriving society to have safe surgeries, spaceworthy astronauts, trustworthy historians and engineers capable of building massive bridges that withstand earthquakes. There should be a healthy respect for this — not blind adherence so extreme that policy activists with fancy grants can render elections useless. The highest court in Ontario knew exactly where to strike that balance; let it be a lesson to the country’s less rigorous judges.

National Post

Click here for more Alberta

A cyclist makes their way down the 83 Avenue bike lane near Gateway Boulevard, in Edmonton Monday August 10, 2026.

On Friday, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that there was no Charter right to bike lanes — and delivered an utter spanking to the judge below their rank who said otherwise. Not only was it a victory for those who prefer car to bike, it was a victory for democracy.

Before the case was overturned, it stood for the principle that elected policymakers had to submit to “expert” evidence on matters of mere traffic planning to avoid breaching the Charter rights of the masses. Justice Paul Schabas of the Ontario Superior Court arrived at this conclusion last year in hearing out the advocacy group Cycle Toronto, which had complained about the Ontario government’s plan to remove a bike lane along a major thoroughfare downtown.

While there wasn’t a positive duty on governments to create bike lanes, went the Schabas’ logic, there was a duty to justify the removal of any existing bike lane with evidence satisfactory to the court. His scheme entombed all roads and traffic policy in thick constitutional armour.

Cycle Toronto’s central expert witness, engineering professor Shoshanna Saxe of the University of Toronto, was key in convincing Schabas that the potential harm caused to cyclists by removing the bike lanes was so severe that it constituted a violation of Canadians’ Charter rights. On the other side of the equation was the government, which did not produce its own math on how much harm the bike lane removal would cause and to whom.

Schabas concluded — erroneously — that he had no choice but to give Toronto’s bike lanes the armour of constitutional protection. The appeal court above was not so easily fooled. Writing for the three-judge court, Justice Grant Huscroft issued a firm reminder that “Judicial review under the Charter is not an occasion for courts to comment on or critique policy or political decisions.” He said that Schabas further erred by binding present governments to the policies of past governments.

It was an example of the system working as intended. In examining the cyclists’ pleas with a magnifying glass, Schabas lost sight of his own role in the bigger picture and was corrected for it. And there will be knock-on effects elsewhere: Alberta is preparing legislation that will give the provincial government a framework to order the removal of nuisance city bike lanes. The Schabas ruling was certain to be used as ammunition for cyclist advocates out west; the Schabas takedown, which will be far more persuasive to the courts, is a firm defence to bike lane removal.

The means by which the Toronto cyclists got their initial victory in court are still cause for concern, however. Schabas relied heavily on the cyclists’ expert witness, Saxe, in trying to understand traffic congestion. Saxe’s view was that “investing in cycling infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools available to reduce congestion,” while removing it would make congestion worse long-term. She was a proponent of a theory called “induced demand,” which asserts that building more car capacity creates more drivers.

Induced demand is the grand unifying theory of urbanists, who usually believe in turn that removing car lanes is a simple way of reducing drivers. Commuters, goes the idea, will naturally switch to bikes and buses if car infrastructure is taken away. These people do not take into account the fact that bikes are particularly vulnerable to theft. Nor do they think too hard about winter. Nor do they dwell much on the fact that few people want to spend two hours on buses full of riff-raff to get to work. And perhaps most critically, they ignore the fact that North America has more space and money than the cycling paradise of Europe, which drives a natural tendency towards car infrastructure.

Saxe’s day job is to promote exactly those kinds of urbanist policy stances. In 2020, she was made a Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure. This is a federally funded position that comes with money and prestige. The chairs have been around for decades at this point, but within the last 10 years the Liberals have repurposed the program as a vessel for diversity hiring in academia.

The Liberals have also infused the program with funding to create a multitude of prestigious postings on topics that just so happen to advance the government agenda. There are still meritorious academics studying serious topics working as Canada Research Chairs, but there are many others who didn’t have to fully compete for their roles thanks to diversity quotas, and whose work focuses on “Sustainability Governance and Innovation,” “Citizenship, Social Justice and Ethno-Racialization,” “Inclusivity and Active Ageing,” “Reimagining Capitalism,” “Critical Disability Studies,” “History of Health and Social Justice,” “Gender, Race, and Inclusive Politics,” and “Urban Sexualities.”

It was during the bike lanes court battle that we saw the precise purpose of dumping money into bogus new frontiers in the Canada Research Chairs program. Progressive policy now has a front line of full-time defenders with the prestige of academia and the punch of a well-funded Liberal think tank. Saxe’s golden aura of an expert could be used to tactically blind the court, and it worked on Schabas.

This is a common use of this new crop of Canada Research Chairs. They appear as non-partisan experts advancing the objectively correct position on contentious subjects — whether in media, the academic world, or in court. Their expert status gives allied decision-makers the cover needed to side with whatever the progressive side wants. It happens all the time.

Earlier this year, for example, Federal Court Justice Avvy Yao-Yao Go ruled in favour of a group of RCMP officers who alleged they were victims of systemic racism on thin evidence. They had lost at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, but Go decided that they deserved a redo, in part because the tribunal didn’t give enough weight to the RCMP officers’ expert witness, Kanika Samuels-Wortley . Samuels-Wortley is the Canada Research Chair in Systemic Racism, Technology and Criminal Justice, an inherently activist role. Justice Go is an aggressive DEI advocate; of course she’d shred the tribunal below her for not hearing out an academic ally.

The Ontario Court of Appeal, at least, didn’t fall for the new-generation Canada Research Chairs charm or use it as cover to push the law to the left. Justice Huscroft identified that “Saxe clearly favours bicycles,” and put proper caveats on her urbanist theory of induced demand. Whatever her expert credentials, her explaining theory of traffic forces was just a prediction model, and even if it predicted correctly, it certainly shouldn’t attract constitutional protection.

“The principles of fundamental justice neither require nor permit courts to countermand rational policy choices legitimately made by the government and legislature, regardless of the preferences of academic experts,” wrote Huscroft.

True experts have their uses. It’s a mark of an advanced, thriving society to have safe surgeries, spaceworthy astronauts, trustworthy historians and engineers capable of building massive bridges that withstand earthquakes. There should be a healthy respect for this — not blind adherence so extreme that policy activists with fancy grants can render elections useless. The highest court in Ontario knew exactly where to strike that balance; let it be a lesson to the country’s less rigorous judges.

National Post

Click here for more Alberta

Women walk towards luxury yachts at the harbour in Monaco next to the Circuit de Monaco, on May 25, 2018 ahead of the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix.

My arguably obsessive files on the state of the world, a.k.a the mess we are in, include one labelled “You Have Mistaken Me For Someone Else,” as a repository for offers to curate this, moisturize that, and improve my “email deliverability.” It is evident that many people live in ways I could not emulate and do not wish to. And also that marketers have surprising trouble telling me from our libertine liberal elite.

For instance the moisturizer from the New York Times “Wirecutter,” a sometimes-useful guide to “lifestyle hacks” if I had a lifestyle or were into hacks. Instead they lost me at hello, a.k.a. “Do you need a different moisturizer for each season?” to which my response was “No, the tap works year round.” But evidently they had something different in mind. And someone different. As so often.

I won’t dwell on the demoralizing offer to “Improve Your Chess Rating” that arrived right after achieving my lifetime peak. But hot off the presses here’s another Times item, Canadian-girl-makes-good , where “She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients.” To mistake me for the ultrarich would take some doing. But it’s also weird that they thought I’d get a vicarious thrill from this debauchery. And that “they” were the New York Times .

If you get the joke about the preacher who read the Bible and the Times every day to know what both sides were thinking, you’re aware that the “Grey Lady” is the sober, reputable voice of wacky woke liberalism. It favours DEI, loathes Donald Trump, and wants higher taxes, Net Zero, income redistribution, an anti-fun nanny state and blah blah blah progressive orthodoxy. Yet it also celebrates grotesque displays of hedonism among those whose rank and wealth bring privileges. And it’s no coincidence.

I won’t wallow in the horrifying details. You have the Interwebs on your computer, your phone and possibly also your watch and can read it for yourself if you find high-flyers with pointless lives and huge bank accounts bathing in champagne alluring. As many people apparently do, since the influencer or whatever she is in question has some two million followers online and a contract for a “scripted series” to somehow push her over-the-top existence over another top or something.

Suffice it to say that one featured event she created, or possibly curated, for a client evidently determined to prove money can’t buy class, involved spending six figures just on Dom Pérignon sprayed on party-goers by … um … sexy young women in revealing outfits. Not exactly Woke 1.0 , is it? Or is it? Ideas are not random. As philosopher J. Budziszewski observes, people disinclined to obey natural law are inclined to deny its existence.

The piece calls it “pointless excess” with apparent glee, revelling in the final cost of all this wasted high-tone booze, including “artisanal” tequila , being “$226,000 and change” and quoting the facilitator of this sinful display that “Honestly, (the client) would have spent more. But he got hit hard at the casino the night before.”

Not hard enough, I say. (Cue the opening scene of Diamonds are Forever .) But the Times , and the entrepreneur, know their audience: nearly 3,000 people “paid anywhere from $1,500 to $25,000 for a table at the outdoor club” without even knowing the host. “But that hardly mattered. What the glossy strangers provided was an appropriately uproarious backdrop when the inevitable reels of the blowout would stream on social media.”

So there was a point, hidden in plain sight: obscene excess that would have had Caligula talking like Cato the Elder. But surely the Times too should declare censoriously that the money could have been better spent on the homeless, the carbon footprint was the size of the Chicxulub crater and as ominous that Narcissism inhibits compassion and so on. Instead the piece is celebratory to the point of parody, chortling that our heroine “has flown to Paris to retrieve the largest croissant in that city to please the daughter of a Miami billionaire.” “Luxury Beliefs Go Wild” for your private public pleasure.

If you’re wondering how the rich can roll about in cash and wasted luxury foodstuffs cackling in ways Marie Antoinette would have found disquieting while Times readers savour the frisson, consider that one of this panderer-to-conspicuous-consumption’s working mottos is, “Our job is to execute, not judge.” Voila. Non-judgementality gives you licence to bask in privileged excess while flaunting your social conscience. If you care to.

Yet again, they appear to have mistaken me for someone else. I’d be out back hosing off the tequila with municipal moisturizer muttering “O Tempora O Mores.” But with a client list who “must fork over an annual fee of $100,000 and agree to book $1 million in yearly travel,” the mere planning of which would kill me, I don’t suppose they care.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

Women walk towards luxury yachts at the harbour in Monaco next to the Circuit de Monaco, on May 25, 2018 ahead of the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix.

My arguably obsessive files on the state of the world, a.k.a the mess we are in, include one labelled “You Have Mistaken Me For Someone Else,” as a repository for offers to curate this, moisturize that, and improve my “email deliverability.” It is evident that many people live in ways I could not emulate and do not wish to. And also that marketers have surprising trouble telling me from our libertine liberal elite.

For instance the moisturizer from the New York Times “Wirecutter,” a sometimes-useful guide to “lifestyle hacks” if I had a lifestyle or were into hacks. Instead they lost me at hello, a.k.a. “Do you need a different moisturizer for each season?” to which my response was “No, the tap works year round.” But evidently they had something different in mind. And someone different. As so often.

I won’t dwell on the demoralizing offer to “Improve Your Chess Rating” that arrived right after achieving my lifetime peak. But hot off the presses here’s another Times item, Canadian-girl-makes-good , where “She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients.” To mistake me for the ultrarich would take some doing. But it’s also weird that they thought I’d get a vicarious thrill from this debauchery. And that “they” were the New York Times .

If you get the joke about the preacher who read the Bible and the Times every day to know what both sides were thinking, you’re aware that the “Grey Lady” is the sober, reputable voice of wacky woke liberalism. It favours DEI, loathes Donald Trump, and wants higher taxes, Net Zero, income redistribution, an anti-fun nanny state and blah blah blah progressive orthodoxy. Yet it also celebrates grotesque displays of hedonism among those whose rank and wealth bring privileges. And it’s no coincidence.

I won’t wallow in the horrifying details. You have the Interwebs on your computer, your phone and possibly also your watch and can read it for yourself if you find high-flyers with pointless lives and huge bank accounts bathing in champagne alluring. As many people apparently do, since the influencer or whatever she is in question has some two million followers online and a contract for a “scripted series” to somehow push her over-the-top existence over another top or something.

Suffice it to say that one featured event she created, or possibly curated, for a client evidently determined to prove money can’t buy class, involved spending six figures just on Dom Pérignon sprayed on party-goers by … um … sexy young women in revealing outfits. Not exactly Woke 1.0 , is it? Or is it? Ideas are not random. As philosopher J. Budziszewski observes, people disinclined to obey natural law are inclined to deny its existence.

The piece calls it “pointless excess” with apparent glee, revelling in the final cost of all this wasted high-tone booze, including “artisanal” tequila , being “$226,000 and change” and quoting the facilitator of this sinful display that “Honestly, (the client) would have spent more. But he got hit hard at the casino the night before.”

Not hard enough, I say. (Cue the opening scene of Diamonds are Forever .) But the Times , and the entrepreneur, know their audience: nearly 3,000 people “paid anywhere from $1,500 to $25,000 for a table at the outdoor club” without even knowing the host. “But that hardly mattered. What the glossy strangers provided was an appropriately uproarious backdrop when the inevitable reels of the blowout would stream on social media.”

So there was a point, hidden in plain sight: obscene excess that would have had Caligula talking like Cato the Elder. But surely the Times too should declare censoriously that the money could have been better spent on the homeless, the carbon footprint was the size of the Chicxulub crater and as ominous that Narcissism inhibits compassion and so on. Instead the piece is celebratory to the point of parody, chortling that our heroine “has flown to Paris to retrieve the largest croissant in that city to please the daughter of a Miami billionaire.” “Luxury Beliefs Go Wild” for your private public pleasure.

If you’re wondering how the rich can roll about in cash and wasted luxury foodstuffs cackling in ways Marie Antoinette would have found disquieting while Times readers savour the frisson, consider that one of this panderer-to-conspicuous-consumption’s working mottos is, “Our job is to execute, not judge.” Voila. Non-judgementality gives you licence to bask in privileged excess while flaunting your social conscience. If you care to.

Yet again, they appear to have mistaken me for someone else. I’d be out back hosing off the tequila with municipal moisturizer muttering “O Tempora O Mores.” But with a client list who “must fork over an annual fee of $100,000 and agree to book $1 million in yearly travel,” the mere planning of which would kill me, I don’t suppose they care.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson

Canada has been a leader on smart media policy, but when it comes to reining in the theft of news content by artificial intelligence companies, it has been a laggard. Under its laissez-faire approach to date, the theft of news content is happening on an industrial scale.

Against this backdrop, over the past couple years, several large leading Canadian companies have entered into strategic partnerships with AI companies. Some have done so with great fanfare, making bold claims of sovereign AI. But the sellers didn’t create that content, nor did they licence it. They stole it and are passing it off as their own creation.

Corporate Canada’s chief legal officers, chief financial officers and chief corporate communications officers should carefully study the legal strategy unleashed by Robert Thomson, chief executive officer of News Corp.

During the news giant’s latest earnings call, Thomson told investors he expects “compelling, cash-rich” revenue from its legal war on AI — and that he’s stepping up the fight. He will now be suing not only the tech firms that scrape News Corp.’s journalism, but the customers who buy the stolen intellectual property, too.

He’s escalating his combative “woo and sue” doctrine. It’s seen him licence news to those who pay, and drag those who don’t into court for years. Litigation “is far from over,” he promised, adding that existing suits were spawning what he called “cash-rich legal sequels.”

And he put browser company Brave in the crosshairs next saying it was “brave in name only.”

And anyone purchasing News Corp.’s scraped content “should know that they are in possession of stolen goods,” he warned. “This will certainly not be the last litigation related to AI,” he told investors at its latest earnings call. “We’re focusing not just on companies that have scraped and stolen our content, but on their clients who knowingly or unknowingly have purchased stolen goods.”

Thomson’s outspoken attack on Brave is the latest salvo in an increasingly fierce fight with the privacy-first browser, but it was Brave that went to court first.

In March 2025, News Corp.’s lawyers fired off a cease-and-desist accusing Brave of infringement, threatening legal action and demanding compensation.

Brave ran to court and urged the judge to throw it out, using America’s fair use exemption on copyright. Brave’s lawyers cast the Murdoch empire as the aggressor, accusing it of “an anticompetitive bullying campaign, built on an incorrect legal premise.”

It argued News Corp. was waging a war on privacy by going after the little guy while partnering with search giant Google.

Last month, News Corp. returned fire, branding Brave’s “covert scraping” as “flagrant theft.”

Its counter-suit alleged Brave used masked crawlers to dodge being blocked, then resold News Corp.’ articles and IP to AI firms.

“The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content,” the suit argued. “Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”

News Corp. has sought an injunction and up to $150,000 per infringement.

Thomson branded Brave’s conduct content laundering and “tacky tech trafficking” that “must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future.” He doubled down: “Their scheming started with masked web crawlers scanning our pages to ingest copyrighted articles and continued when they repackaged those stolen files and delivered near verbatim copies.”

Then he upped the ante by widening the threat to Brave’s customers. “Companies who buy from these pirates should know that they are in possession of stolen goods” — opening a new front for more claims for damages.

Thomson flagged that damages from legal actions were now seen as a revenue stream for News Corp., as the AI economy emerges.

The boards of directors of large Canadian public companies should be asking tough questions of management. Are you buying stolen IP? What due diligence did you do? What is our legal exposure? What is our financial exposure? What is the risk to our brand and reputation? Canada’s federally regulated industries should not be doing business with pirates. Ignorance is not bliss. Canadian IP must be protected.

National Post

Ricky Sutton, a former media executive, is the author of Future Media, a Substack reporting on the collision of Big Tech and Big Media.

Click here for more Canada

News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson

Canada has been a leader on smart media policy, but when it comes to reining in the theft of news content by artificial intelligence companies, it has been a laggard. Under its laissez-faire approach to date, the theft of news content is happening on an industrial scale.

Against this backdrop, over the past couple years, several large leading Canadian companies have entered into strategic partnerships with AI companies. Some have done so with great fanfare, making bold claims of sovereign AI. But the sellers didn’t create that content, nor did they licence it. They stole it and are passing it off as their own creation.

Corporate Canada’s chief legal officers, chief financial officers and chief corporate communications officers should carefully study the legal strategy unleashed by Robert Thomson, chief executive officer of News Corp.

During the news giant’s latest earnings call, Thomson told investors he expects “compelling, cash-rich” revenue from its legal war on AI — and that he’s stepping up the fight. He will now be suing not only the tech firms that scrape News Corp.’s journalism, but the customers who buy the stolen intellectual property, too.

He’s escalating his combative “woo and sue” doctrine. It’s seen him licence news to those who pay, and drag those who don’t into court for years. Litigation “is far from over,” he promised, adding that existing suits were spawning what he called “cash-rich legal sequels.”

And he put browser company Brave in the crosshairs next saying it was “brave in name only.”

And anyone purchasing News Corp.’s scraped content “should know that they are in possession of stolen goods,” he warned. “This will certainly not be the last litigation related to AI,” he told investors at its latest earnings call. “We’re focusing not just on companies that have scraped and stolen our content, but on their clients who knowingly or unknowingly have purchased stolen goods.”

Thomson’s outspoken attack on Brave is the latest salvo in an increasingly fierce fight with the privacy-first browser, but it was Brave that went to court first.

In March 2025, News Corp.’s lawyers fired off a cease-and-desist accusing Brave of infringement, threatening legal action and demanding compensation.

Brave ran to court and urged the judge to throw it out, using America’s fair use exemption on copyright. Brave’s lawyers cast the Murdoch empire as the aggressor, accusing it of “an anticompetitive bullying campaign, built on an incorrect legal premise.”

It argued News Corp. was waging a war on privacy by going after the little guy while partnering with search giant Google.

Last month, News Corp. returned fire, branding Brave’s “covert scraping” as “flagrant theft.”

Its counter-suit alleged Brave used masked crawlers to dodge being blocked, then resold News Corp.’ articles and IP to AI firms.

“The more content Brave copies and sells, the more revenue it generates, and the less incentive AI companies have to negotiate licenses with the publishers who produced the content,” the suit argued. “Brave profits while publishers are cut out.”

News Corp. has sought an injunction and up to $150,000 per infringement.

Thomson branded Brave’s conduct content laundering and “tacky tech trafficking” that “must come to an end if journalism is to have a sustainable future.” He doubled down: “Their scheming started with masked web crawlers scanning our pages to ingest copyrighted articles and continued when they repackaged those stolen files and delivered near verbatim copies.”

Then he upped the ante by widening the threat to Brave’s customers. “Companies who buy from these pirates should know that they are in possession of stolen goods” — opening a new front for more claims for damages.

Thomson flagged that damages from legal actions were now seen as a revenue stream for News Corp., as the AI economy emerges.

The boards of directors of large Canadian public companies should be asking tough questions of management. Are you buying stolen IP? What due diligence did you do? What is our legal exposure? What is our financial exposure? What is the risk to our brand and reputation? Canada’s federally regulated industries should not be doing business with pirates. Ignorance is not bliss. Canadian IP must be protected.

National Post

Ricky Sutton, a former media executive, is the author of Future Media, a Substack reporting on the collision of Big Tech and Big Media.

Click here for more Canada

Etienne Alexandre Beauregarde joins the National Post’s Terry Newman to discuss his new book, “Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good.” Beauregarde argues the West is experiencing a profound crisis due to the excessive emphasis placed on individualism over common good and the absence of shared norms, typically transmitted through generations. Beauregarde argues that the isolation this societal change has created has deeply affected generation Z.

Plot twist: Beauregarde believes that this is precisely why it may be generation Z that saves the West by instituting the norms they never inherited but so deeply crave.

National Post

Click here for more Canada

Etienne Alexandre Beauregarde joins the National Post’s Terry Newman to discuss his new book, “Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good.” Beauregarde argues the West is experiencing a profound crisis due to the excessive emphasis placed on individualism over common good and the absence of shared norms, typically transmitted through generations. Beauregarde argues that the isolation this societal change has created has deeply affected generation Z.

Plot twist: Beauregarde believes that this is precisely why it may be generation Z that saves the West by instituting the norms they never inherited but so deeply crave.

National Post

Click here for more Canada