Like virtually all politicians, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s

victory speech

was filled with promises and pledges to reach across the aisle and govern for all. The public would be right to be skeptical, because few political leaders manage to deliver on such lofty goals. But this time must be different, because as Carney acknowledged, this is a “critical time” in our history, when we are facing not only the upending of our relationship with the United States, but an increasingly hostile and dangerous world.

First on the agenda will be the upcoming trade negotiations with the U.S. Carney successfully convinced a plurality of Canadians that he was better suited to take on U.S. President Donald Trump than his rival, despite little evidence to back up the claim. Carney’s

upcoming meeting

with the president in Washington on Tuesday will provide the first real test of how he plans on dealing with Trump. And news that

King Charles

will deliver the throne speech on May 27 will help strengthen our image as a strong and sovereign country. Yet the question remains: what can we get out of such a deal with the Americans?

There are very real questions about whether Carney will be able to forge an amicable relationship with his U.S. counterpart. His election night speech was an odd mix of hopefulness that we can achieve big things and dark premonitions about a dystopian future. He spoke of “American betrayal,” and pointedly claimed that Trump “is trying to break us, so that America can own us.” In an uncharacteristically diplomatic fashion, Trump later

brushed off

Carney’s heated rhetoric by acknowledging that the remarks were made in the heat of an election campaign, and called the prime minister a “very nice gentleman.”

Despite Trump’s measured tone, it is telling that he wanted Carney to come to him. Trump revels in the idea of foreign leaders coming to the White House and grovelling for a deal. When former prime minister Justin Trudeau flew to

Mar-a-Lago in November

, Trump clearly saw him as weak, as that was when he started talking publicly about turning Canada into the 51st state and referring to the PM as “Governor Trudeau.” Carney must now walk a fine line of appearing confident and strong, while not giving the president an excuse to hold a grudge against him.

And this is merely the starting point in what is sure to be a tough set of negotiations. We can expect Trump to play hardball, because we know he thinks the current deal is too generous, and that his goal is to encourage manufacturers to move to the U.S. We must also acknowledge that Trump is not a trustworthy negotiating partner, as some of the tariffs he’s imposed are in clear violation of the free-trade deal negotiated during his first term.

Canada must be clear-eyed about the fact that whatever deal we get will likely be worse than the one we have now. Nevertheless, if Carney can come to an agreement that provides stability over the next four years — and includes a similar stipulation that it will be renegotiated after six years, when we will hopefully have a more friendly face in the White House — he will be able to consider it a win.

But this is only half the battle. Regardless of the outcome of the trade negotiations, Canada needs to start looking out for its own bottom line by tearing down internal trade barriers, building trading relationships with other countries, making it easier for Canadian companies to compete in global markets and developing our abundant natural resources. We were thus pleased that Carney talked about building Canada “into an energy superpower” on election night.

This is a phrase that was never uttered by Trudeau, who spent his nearly 10 years in office erecting barriers to energy development and transportation. But Carney has also pledged to keep the

Impact Assessment Act

— whose requirements are so onerous, it has caused most companies with plans to build pipelines and other infrastructure to simply give up — maintain the oil and gas

emissions cap

and the

industrial carbon tax

, and introduce a system of

carbon tariffs

.

While the government has a desire to balance economic growth with environmental protection, these policies continue to put too much weight on the environment and will only further Canada’s affordability problem. As we saw when Trudeau was in office, a sole focus on keeping Canada’s carbon emissions low, without acknowledging that cleaner-burning Canadian energy, like natural gas, can be used by other countries to help reduce their carbon footprints, will only serve to inhibit the Canadian economy, without reducing global CO2 emissions.

A big theme of Carney’s victory speech was “humility,” and we hope he is humble enough to realize that Canadians put a lot of trust in a party that, mere months ago, was so deeply unpopular, it looked like it would go down in a historic defeat. To live up to that trust, Liberals will have to follow through on the best of their myriad

campaign promises

, including building millions of new homes, growing the economy, developing the Arctic and strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces.

We remain skeptical that they will be able to achieve these goals, especially without burdening future generations with massive amounts of debt. But for the sake of our country, we sincerely hope this proves to be a pivotal and positive moment in Canadian history.

• Cody Mallette: The election is over. The harder work — of building — starts now
• Michael Taube: Trump will tear Carney to shreds

This week, Israel celebrated its 77th Independence Day — a moment of national pride, reflection, and defiance. But Israel’s story didn’t begin in 1948. Its true birth stretches back more than 3,500 years, rooted deeply in a land where the Jewish people first built their Temple in Jerusalem around the year 957 BCE. From the Western Wall, the only remaining vestige of that holy sanctuary, to the ancient synagogues of Tzfat, the fortress of Masada, and the ruins of King David’s palace, Israel is not merely a modern state — it is the very soil of Jewish history and civilization.

Yet, you wouldn’t know any of this if you lived in Canada or much of Europe today, where mobs chant in the streets not for peace, but for the erasure of Israel. Rampaging against the Jewish state, antisemitic demonstrators call for its destruction with impunity — even as Israel mourns and remembers its fallen on Yom HaZikaron and celebrates its miraculous survival on Yom Ha’atzmaut.

It’s been a devastating 18 months. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their puppet master Iran launched a war not of Israel’s choosing. It was barbarism against civilization. Yet Israel — as always — has fought back, not just with might, but with a heart of courage. This is a war for survival, and it is one Israel will finish on its own terms.

The statistics tell a staggering story. There are 57 Muslim-majority countries across the globe, representing 24 per cent of the world’s population and covering nearly 25 million square kilometers of territory. In contrast, there is only one Jewish country — Israel — encompassing just 21,937 square kilometres, a fraction of the world’s map and population. And yet, in that sliver of land, a miracle was born.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has lost over 25,000 soldiers in defence of its people — brave men and women who stood between their homes and annihilation. In recent months, we’ve mourned the innocent victims of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, as well as the young soldiers who continue to risk their lives in Gaza and along the northern border. Yom HaZikaron was especially poignant this year — the pain raw, the wounds still bleeding. But even amid tears, Israelis paused to remember and then resumed the sacred act of living.

Despite it all, Israel’s population has reached more than 10 million — a teardrop in a world of 8.2 billion but a great achievement for a people who have had to rebuild after the murder of the six million in the Holocaust.

But walk the streets of Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, or Eilat, and you’ll find cafes bustling, babies in strollers, students laughing on campuses, and startups humming with energy. Israel is not just surviving — it is thriving. It is the beating heart of hope.

Need inspiration? Look at Israel. Despite war and trauma, Israelis were recently ranked the 8th happiest people on earth. Why? Because Israelis live with purpose. While their neighbours build terror tunnels and preach hatred, Israelis innovate. They heal. They dream. Just last month, Google acquired an Israeli tech firm for $32 billion — its largest acquisition ever. Out of 196 countries, Israel now ranks 28th in global GDP, a mere six places behind Canada.

To the detriment of its enemies, the atrocities of October 7 have only solidified Israel’s national spirit. A new generation is rising — battle-tested, proud, determined. These young men and women, forged in the fires of war, will become the leaders of tomorrow, writing the next chapters of Israel’s story. Like Hannah Senesh, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to save lives, and Menachem Begin, who built a state from the ashes of exile, they will carry the flame forward.

Israel is undergoing a rebirth. The political squabbles will subside. What remains will be resilience, strength, and unity. Israel’s enemies should take heed: they have not only failed — they have accelerated Israel’s renewal.

So, yes — remember the past. But today, celebrate the future. Israel is still the most magical place on earth.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Avi Benlolo is founder and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, a Canadian think-tank.

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

A University of Saskatchewan law professor provided a unique window into the equity mandates now ubiquitous at Canadian universities by blogging the details of a compulsory anti-racist “learning journey.”

The course was officially known as an Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression and Unconscious Bias Faculty Development Session, and is a mandatory requirement of University of Saskatchewan faculty looking to participate in hiring committees.

An email announcing the program was given the subject line: “Mandatory unconscious bias and anti-racism training.”

“The training is intended to further your personal journey of learning and action, regardless of how knowledgeable or experienced you are, so attendance is mandatory irrespective of previous training or academic field of specialization,” faculty were told.

The course materials tell participants that they’ll be taught about the “systemic racism” of the university environment and how they have benefited from unearned racial privileges.

By session’s end, participants are told that they’ll be able understand their own “unconscious bias” and “reflect on and understand how power, privilege and meritocracy lead to inequities.”

One of the activities is to fill out a “power and privilege” wheel. These wheels, prepared and distributed by the Government of Canada, ask users to grade their “privileges” on everything from mental health to sexuality to skin colour. The most privileged identity, as identified by the wheel, is a white, able-bodied, heterosexual “colonizer/settler.”

Michael Plaxton, an expert in criminal law and statutory interpretation, alternately called the course a “mandatory DEI bootcamp” and a “forced march of self discovery.” He noted that it began with a declaration of “we’re not here to debate.”

The course included three readings. The first,

White settler colonialism and the myth of meritocracy

, was written by Idle No More activist Sheelah McLean, and details how white Saskatchewanians owe their prosperity to “150 years of racist, sexist and homophobic colonial practices.”

“The myth that Canadian society is created on individual work ethic ignores how racially dominant groups gain access to social and political power,” it reads.

The second was a chapter from the 2022 U.S. book Confronting Institutionalized Racism in Higher Education. The chapter interviews five “racialized” American university faculty and concludes that the entire system is rigged to benefit white people. “Racialized faculty are expected to have accomplished more, yet their tenure and promotion files are always scrutinized through certain deficit driven lenses of presumed incompetence,” it reads.

The third reading was also from the United States. A paper from the American Association of University Professors entitled Achieving Racial Equity in Promotion and Tenure. The document argues that if the racial makeup of university faculty doesn’t mirror the racial makeup of social generally, standards should be altered to “increase the number of tenured faculty members of color on campus.”

Plaxton was asked to leave the meeting after about 30 minutes, although not because he was posting its details on social media. As he

detailed in a follow-up post

, when a coordinator asked him why he was there, he replied, “I was there because my union made it a condition of participating in future tenure and search meetings.”

This precipitated a brief exchange which ended with Plaxton being told that if he was “unwilling to participate,” he was free to go.

Plaxton told National Post that he wasn’t any kind of “crusader on the whole DEI thing,” and that he didn’t think any of the course leaders “were anything other than earnest, well-meaning people.”

“No one was rude to me,” he wrote in an email, adding that he mostly felt “awkward” about the whole affair.

But Plaxton’s experience is now the norm. Academia has been at the sharp end of a wholesale Canadian institutional embrace of the doctrine of “anti-racism,” and everything from grant funding to hiring to promotion now hinges on a candidate’s willingness to accept the tenets of “equity, diversity and inclusion.”

In February, an analysis by the Aristotle Foundation found that nearly all Canadian academic job postings

now contain a “diversity” requirement

. This could be a mandatory “diversity survey” in which the applicant is required to detail their various racial and sexual identities. Or, in some cases, it could be a job that is explicitly limited to select demographics, such as a Black, Indigenous or female applicants.

• Liberals lose Quebec riding according to revised election results
• Kelly McParland: Carney must prioritize quelling western discontent

It is also standard practice for research funding to be incumbent upon the racial or sexual diversity of the applicants. As far back as 2021, McGill University’s Patanjali Kambhampati

went public with criticism

of new guidelines from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada that required applicants to list the identity characteristics of research assistants they would be prioritizing.

Anti-racism is different than traditional Canadian guidelines on racial tolerance, which mostly advocated for race to be treated as an irrelevance.

Rather, anti-racism is based on the premise that any inequality of outcome is itself evidence of a racist system, and must be remedied via special treatment for groups deemed to be marginalized or “

equity-deserving

.”

The University of Saskatchewan’s EDI Framework for Action, like most institutionalized anti-racism plans, is quite specific about this. The goal is “equity,” as distinct from equality, and is defined as “taking the range of human attributes and qualities into account and providing each individual with what they need to be successful.”

IN OTHER NEWS

Within hours of Monday’s election result, one of the most immediate consequences was a credit rating agency warning that Canada’s AAA credit rating was now in peril. “Canada has experienced rapid and steep fiscal deterioration, driven by a sharply weaker economic outlook and increased government spending during this electoral cycle,” read an analysis by FitchRatings published Tuesday. The agency said that Canada’s economy was still resilient to take a punch in the form of “a fiscal or economic shock,” but the sheer scale of spending promised by the new Liberal government “would pressure its credit profile.”

Another consequence of Monday’s election that hasn’t been getting a lot of notice: A bunch of MPs won’t be getting their pension now. Last year,

it was a scandal

that the Trudeau government changed the date of the October election to one that just so happened to put dozens of MPs over the finish line towards qualifying for the gold-plated parliamentary pensions. You need six years of parliamentary service to qualify for the pension, and by moving the election from Oct. 20 to Oct. 27, 80 MPs first elected in 2019 would be pushed over the threshold, regardless of whether they won re-election. With the election having been called six months earlier, some of those 80 are now pensionless, including the NDP’s Laurel Collins, Taylor Bachrach and Matthew Green, and the Liberals’ Jenica Atwin.

By winning just seven seats on Monday night, the NDP not only chalked up the worst result in their history, but they lost official party status in the House of Commons. You need at least 12 MPs to be an “official” party, and without it the NDP will lose millions of dollars in parliamentary allocations, and will lose many of its privileges in regards to question period. And so, one of the only surviving New Democrats, Don Davies,

is now proposing that they just be given official party status anyway.

Davies

told CTV News

that one of his first legislative priorities will be a proposal to change the terms of official party status.

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Economists, commentators and casual observers alike predicted that the election of Prime Minister Mark Carney would do the economy more harm than good — and it seems that they’re already being proven right.

On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings, one of the great deciders of how much interest Canada pays on its debt,

flapped a warning flag

in our faces for electing Prime Minister Mark Carney the night before.

“Canada’s credit strengths offer significant headroom to weather a fiscal or economic shock,” wrote the ratings agency, “but increased structural deficits would pressure its credit profile.”

Fitch had already priced in federal government deficits for 2025 and 2026, amounting to 2.6 per cent and 2.4 per cent of Canada’s GDP, respectively. Factoring in the Carney platform, though, resulted in even worse figures: the 2025 deficit is now slated to be 3.1 per cent of GDP, growing to 3.2 per cent in 2026.

For context, the federal deficit between 2000 and 2019 ran at 0.4 per cent of Canada’s GDP. The Carney plan takes us to eight times that. Plus, he has the hurdle of a new Parliament, with new political dynamics. “As a minority government,” Fitch cautions, “the Liberals will have to compromise with other parties to pass legislation, increasing the likelihood that enacted policies will differ from the platform.”

Yeah, if you thought the projected deficit was bad now, just wait until the survivors of the great NDP cull start demanding socialized doggy daycare. It’s only going to get worse from here. Remember that Canada is already

paying

$54 billion in interest annually on its giant pile of debt, or 1.8 per cent of GDP. Downgrades from the ratings agencies will mean we have to pay even more.

Go elsewhere and you find additional warnings. Morningstar, the American financial services firm,

figured

that the housing situation in Canada won’t be sorting itself out with all the red tape and trade uncertainty; Carney’s plan to remove GST from homes bought by first-time buyers “may drive improved demand but exacerbate the same housing problem they are trying to solve,” making matters worse.

This bodes very poorly for Canada, which is already in a bad place. GDP, the measure of our country’s objective output, has been limping upward. Divide that by population, which has been growing relentlessly under the Liberal government, and it looks much worse. GDP per capita

fell

for six consecutive quarters, only to slightly improve in the subsequent, and most recent, quarter.

A recession is reached when a country has seen at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth — but since that usually refers to a decline in total GDP, Canada has narrowly avoided the label. In February, CIBC Deputy Chief Economist Benjamin Tal didn’t bother sugarcoating it with labels: “Let me break it to you: we are in a recession — a per-capita recession,” he

told

a real estate forum in Toronto.

How bad we’re doing on a per-capita basis depends on your reference time period. Going back to 1981 and following up to 2024, the economy grew per capita at an average rate of 1.1 per cent,

says

Statistics Canada. Only now, this growth has since flattened, leaving our post-pandemic GDP per capita seven per cent below what it otherwise would have been: in the last quarter of 2023, GDP per capita was $58,111; had we remained on the 40-or-so-year trend, it would have been $62,356. We’re at a point where catch-up games will need to be played for years to return the economy to what it once was.

Carney won’t be able to fix the economy in a day, and reasonable people will hold off on feelings of betrayal until he’s actually had some time behind the wheel. But no one should ignore the warning from Fitch, which says, “We’ve read what Carney had in store and it was bad; worse, even than the trajectory under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.” Canada’s AA+ rating from Fitch — and high praise for its stability — haven’t been downgraded by the agency just yet, but it’s certainly looking like it’s headed that way. Instead of ignoring it, it should be taken as a last warning.

Unheeded warnings are par for the course in Canada, though, so it’s doubtful we’ll ever see that blimp turned around. The same, we can probably say for, on the trade front: Carney, despite baselessly maligning Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by

telling

followers that he “worships at the altar of Donald Trump,” and

declaring

the “relationship we had with the U.S.” to be over, is already warming up to President Donald Trump.

Trump

praised

Carney on Wednesday, reportedly saying on a call with the Canadian prime minister that “we’re going to have a great relationship.” Despite the Liberal campaign’s constant invocations of Trump, the president was happy with the election result because, between the two candidates for prime minister, “They both hated Trump, and it was the one that hated Trump, I think, the least that won. I actually think the Conservative hated me much more than the so-called Liberal.”

An improvement from the “governor” talk no doubt, but still cause for concern.

So, Canada, this is what we have in the first week of the (elected) Carney government. A recession that, let’s be real, is already underway, a credit downgrade on the horizon and a tariff warmonger who’s suddenly very happy to be working with the country’s new private-equity prime minister.

National Post