He won last month’s election for the Liberals promising he had a plan to protect Canada’s economy from the predations of the American president. But since returning to Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sent alarming signals to business and scared off badly needed capital investment, as economist and professor Ian Lee tells Brian Lilley this week. The Liberal government’s decision to delay the budget makes it seem like there actually is no plan, Lee says. Meanwhile, comments from Carney’s cabinet that they’re wavering on a new oil export pipeline suggest that this government will be just as unwelcoming to resource development as the last one. Now, it’s looking like the man elected to reverse Canada’s long-running decline might just make it worse. (Recorded May 16, 2025.)

• NP View: Week one, and Mark Carney’s cabinet is even worse
• Michael Higgins: How bad are things when the Liberals refuse to have a budget?

Practically the first words out of Anita Anand’s mouth after she became Canada’s new foreign affairs minister were not about reaffirming alliances, protecting Canadian citizens abroad or defending democratic norms. Instead, she chose to cast immediate blame on Israel for the devastating conditions in Gaza — without acknowledging, let alone condemning, Hamas’s horrific October 7 massacre, which precipitated this war.

This was no small omission. On that day, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, brutally murdering 1,200 people — including women, children, the elderly and at least eight Canadian citizens. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Any serious foreign minister, especially one stepping into the role during an active conflict, should have led with that fact.

Yet Anand’s statement focused almost exclusively on Israel’s conduct. She used the language of “aggression,” suggesting a one-sided moral landscape, and offered no contextual recognition that Hamas is a terrorist organization that has embedded itself within civilian infrastructure while firing thousands of rockets into Israeli cities. That is not just a diplomatic fumble, it’s a profound strategic misstep.

Historically, Canada’s foreign policy has rested on the principles of sovereignty, accountability and collective security. We joined the global coalition in Afghanistan after 9/11, not only out of solidarity with the United States but because 24 Canadians were murdered in the attack. We understood that terror organizations like al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts represented a global threat and that inaction or equivocation was not an option.

And yet here we are, just over two decades later, with a Canadian foreign minister choosing to emphasize Israeli “aggression” while downplaying or ignoring the role of Hamas — a group every bit as ideologically extreme and operationally ruthless as al-Qaida. The contradiction is glaring. When Canada’s own citizens were murdered by terrorists on 9/11, we mobilized militarily and diplomatically. When Canadians are murdered by Hamas in Israel, the new foreign minister offers language that reads like equivocation, if not appeasement.

This is not just morally incoherent, it’s strategically dangerous. It signals to allies that Canada cannot be counted on in times of crisis. It suggests that our foreign policy may be governed more by trending narratives than by hard realities. And it invites adversaries to believe that Canada’s leadership can be pressured or swayed by asymmetric warfare and media optics.

So the question must be asked: was this a rookie misstep, or the first clear signal of a broader shift under the Carney government? If this was Anand speaking out of turn — before receiving a full briefing or grasping the nuance of Canada’s historical posture in the Middle East — then she has done herself and the country a disservice. The Foreign Ministry is not a place for ideological improvisation or headline-chasing rhetoric. It requires precision, balance and, above all, a grounding in facts.

But if this was a policy signal — if Anand is articulating the new voice of Canadian foreign policy under Prime Minister Mark Carney — then Canadians deserve clarity. Is this government adopting a more strident, critical posture toward Israel while minimizing or ignoring the provocations and atrocities of Hamas? Is Canada moving away from its longstanding commitment to Israel’s right to self-defence? Is this the end of the careful, principled diplomacy that has marked Canada’s voice on the world stage for decades?

Carney has earned a reputation as a thoughtful, conscientious global actor who’s pragmatic, informed and deliberate. If Anand’s comments reflect his government’s intent, they mark a sharp, dissonant turn. And if they do not, then it is incumbent upon Carney to correct the record and reinforce a coherent message. Silence, in this case, implies endorsement.

Foreign policy begins with credibility, and credibility begins with facts and with moral clarity. If Minister Anand wants to lead Canada’s diplomacy, she must first recognize what happened on October 7 — not only because Canadians were among the murdered, but because truth is the foundation of peace. If she and her government chooses to forget this lesson, they risk not only moral confusion, but strategic irrelevance. Canada cannot afford either.

National Post

Alan Kessel is a former legal adviser to the Government of Canada and deputy high commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom. He is also a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute.

• Carson Jerema: Anita Anand debuts at foreign affairs by doing publicity for Hamas
• Raymond J. de Souza: Trudeau and Joly have made Canada into Hamas’s greatest G7 ally

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet hasn’t even been around a week, and it’s produced what should be a month’s worth of gaffes. It’s an omen so bad that even many Carney backers are slumping in disappointment, taken by surprise at how swiftly their hopes were dashed.

Carney’s cabinet was named Tuesday, and with that, the apprehension began. Key problem ministers of the Trudeau age were left in: Steven Guilbeault, former environment minister, was moved to culture; Chrystia Freeland, finance minister of ill repute, was moved to transport and internal trade; Mélanie Joly, former inconsequential foreign affairs minister, went to industry. Sean Fraser, who handled both housing and immigration with catastrophic results, is now in charge of justice.

In case there was any doubt as to their incompetence, they were quick to demonstrate why any skeptics’ misgivings were correctly placed. Guilbeault

immediately took to

dismissing the need for new pipelines, perpetuating the myth of peak oil and peddling the falsity that Canada’s newest pipeline was running at under half capacity (in fact, it was running at 77 per cent capacity).

Fraser, meanwhile, started off his tenure by

telling

media, heading into the new cabinet’s first meeting, that he intends to work more from home. In December, he had announced he planned not to run again to spend more time with his “amazing family,” and another candidate was lined up for his seat — only for him to

un-resign

three months later, after Carney’s ascent.

“Given the nature of the portfolio, a lot of the stakeholders we have are less interested in having you attend groundbreakings, the openings of new buildings that you may have funded, and are quite accustomed to having meetings virtually,” he told the scrum. “So I anticipate during constituency weeks, I’m going to be based in my hometown a little more than I was before.

“There may be an opportunity, depending on what’s going on in the House, to avail myself — not all the time, of course, but once in a while — of the virtual abilities to participate in the House of Commons proceedings, so we’re going to figure some of this out as we go.”

Crime is already worsening in Canada, and citizens increasingly feel unprotected by the system, which seems more interested in balancing racial scales and excusing any criminal that can spin a victimhood narrative. It’s a bad sign that the attorney general — one of the most critical roles in the federal cabinet — is already planning how to not fully devote himself to the job.

Joly and Freeland, at least, have managed to keep their first week relatively blemish-free. Their longtime colleague, Anita Anand, newly arrived at the foreign affairs post, was quick to use her new platform to blame Israel and put up a

defence

for Hamas, however.

As for the new ministers, they’ve provided Canadians even more reason for concern — Housing Minister Gregor Robertson being chief among them. The fact that Robertson was even named housing minister was an immediate red flag, given his record of overseeing Vancouver’s transformation as city mayor (a role he held from 2008 to 2018) from a family-friendly coastal city into Ground Zero of Canada’s drug and housing crises. Under his watch, detached home prices in his city

doubled

and rents skyrocketed. He denied responsibility for this at the time, even though he addressed development fees and zoning at a glacial pace.

Robertson confirmed that he’d be no different as housing minister when he

opened his mouth,

heading into that first cabinet meeting. Asked whether home prices need to go down, he replied: “No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable. It’s a huge part of our economy. We need to be delivering more affordable housing.” He had made the

same point

on CBC’s Power and Politics the day before.

If that’s his true goal, it spells disaster for Canada’s younger generation. The University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative, founded by economist Mike Moffat,

did the math

in April. It found that, assuming home prices stay frozen for the next few decades, it would take an average of 18 years for Canadian incomes to catch up such that housing returns to 2005-levels of affordability.

“Clearly, this approach isn’t going to work,” read the analysis. “Waiting 20 years to restore affordability would mean pricing out an entire generation of middle-class families from housing.”

And to top it all off, the government doesn’t plan to table any form of budget until the fall, leaving Canadians in the dark about Carney’s plan for the country’s immediate future. This is after the prime minister wrapped up a five-week campaign that focused on his ability to come up with a plan, and on his expertise in statecraft — a message that managed to convince enough Canadians to win him a minority government.

For the 43 per cent who voted Liberal, there were clearly expectations for change that warranted giving the Liberals yet another chance. We can at least appreciate that Carney wasted no time in revealing their judgment to be mistaken.

National Post

• NP View: Mark Carney is a mirage
• Carson Jerema: Anita Anand debuts at foreign affairs by doing publicity for Hamas

Problems with political activism and antisemitism seeping into Canadian schools came to the fore last fall after Toronto students were taken to a rally against environmental contamination on an Indigenous reserve that quickly descended into an

anti-Israel hate-fest

. But this was only the tip of the iceberg: our schools have become cesspools of Jew-hatred and woke identity politics, yet most of the time, the public never hears about it.

The elementary school in my urban Toronto neighbourhood, for example, is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with our public-education system.

On a tour of the facility last fall, every classroom I visited prominently displayed a Progress Pride flag. Many included other faddish political slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Every Child Matters.” Yet the closest thing I saw to a Canadian flag was a Maple Leaf embedded in Pride colours. In class, students spend an inordinate amount of time learning about the “bad white people” in residential schools and participating in mock protests, while completely ignoring all the things that make Canada great.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that following October 7 — when thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, brutally raping and slaughtering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking over 250 hostages — the school has become increasingly inhospitable to the neighbourhood’s Jewish community.

At the start of the month, a display celebrating Jewish Heritage Month — which contained cultural symbols (notably, nothing relating to Israel) and artwork created by students attending a private Jewish aftercare program run out of the school — was put in a glass cabinet in the school’s foyer. A commemoration of Asian Heritage Month, which also takes place in May, was put up along another wall at some point.

Based on accounts from parents and teachers, along with photos, a teacher added two keffiyeh — a symbol of violent resistance against Israeli Jews — to the Asian Heritage Month display last Friday, arguing that the Middle East is technically part of Asia.

Islamic History Month

, however, is observed in October, which calls the teacher’s motives for prominently featuring Palestinian jihadi symbols next to a Jewish cultural display into question. Either way, the effect was to politicize what was supposed to be an innocuous celebration of the school’s multiculturalism.

Then, on Tuesday, the displays were abruptly moved to a remote corner of the library, where they cannot be seen by parents or other visitors. Books about Islam were also added to the exhibit, which can be seen from a photo. A number of Jewish families expressed concern to me, and in emails to the principal that I have viewed, that the decision may have been made because their cultural identity had become too controversial. The school’s principal refused to answer questions about why she made the call, and a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) spokesperson claimed that, “As both displays continued to grow, they were relocated to the library to better support student engagement.” Yet the new space is much smaller than the old one.

This is not the first time something of this nature has happened. To commemorate the anniversary of the Quebec mosque shooting at the end of January, some classes attended a TDSB-sanctioned talk by children’s author and illustrator Hatem Aly, who’s listed as a participant in a

boycott

of Israeli cultural institutions. And the day after Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the October 7 massacre, was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, two kindergarten teachers showed up for work wearing keffiyehs.

As I noted in an email to the principal at the time, the keffiyeh is “an overtly political symbol with roots in Islamic terrorism that has become associated with the vile antisemitic rallies on Canadian streets, in which protesters regularly call for the genocide of the Jewish people and have led to violent attacks against Jewish institutions, including schools. It is both divisive and deeply offensive and should have no place in the classroom.”

Indeed, although the scarf is a traditional Bedouin garment, it has

long been associated

with violent Palestinian attacks against the British, who controlled the area after the First World War, and the region’s Jewish inhabitants. It was used to hide the identities of Palestinian guerrillas when they launched assaults against the Brits in the 1930s. It was popularized in the West in 1969 as the garment worn in a

widely circulated photo

of

Leila Khaled

, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who was one of the hijackers of TWA Flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv.

In more recent decades, it became associated with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a man who turned down numerous viable offers for peace and Palestinian statehood in favour of two bloody intefadehs. And nowadays, it is the fashion choice of the thugs who occupy university campuses, picket outside synagogues and in Jewish neighbourhoods, and fill western streets with calls to “globalize the intefadeh” and wipe out all the Jews “from the river to the sea.”

Although the principal seemed genuinely concerned with parents’ objections to keffiyehs in the classroom, she insisted she had no control over her staff’s work attire and suggested reaching out to Erin Altosaar, TDSB superintendent of education. Altosaar, however, also insisted that the “keffiyeh is a symbol of cultural identity and we do not question … the cultural identities of others.”

A TDSB spokesperson defended the more recent heritage month incident along similar lines, stating that, “Palestinians (Gaza, West Bank) are considered to be a part of West Asia, including the Levant region, and as such cultural attire and other artifacts from that part of the world were represented in the Asian Heritage Month display.” (Though one can imagine the backlash from displaying an Israeli flag or Israel Defence Forces logo for Asian Heritage Month, even though Israel is technically part of West Asia, as well.)

School administrators, it would seem, are more than happy to sweep issues like this under the rug and pretend as though the problems caused by their wholesale buy-in to the identity-politics craze and blurring of the lines between education and activism don’t exist. But in this case, it would appear as though the keffiyeh was used, not as a means of expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, but of antagonizing the local Jewish community and politicizing Jewish cultural expression.

This incident was orchestrated by those at the school who apparently could not stand the thought of elementary kids celebrating their culture without injecting Middle Eastern politics into the fray. It was aided and abetted by a school administrator who was unwilling to stand up to her own staff, creating a culture of fear among faculty, who are genuinely afraid to speak out. And we can be quite sure that similar things are taking place at public schools right across the country.

Unfortunately, the school board is unlikely to do anything to address issues such as this. While the

TDSB’s inquiry

into the field trip to an anti-Israel rally acknowledged “the deleterious effect on young minds of hearing chants that troubled them,” it spent more time criticizing the media for its coverage of the incident and painting the “TDSB’s Indigenous communities” as the true victims.

It’s high time for the provincial government to intervene and make it clear that politics has no place in the classroom — full stop.

National Post

jkline@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/accessd

This column was originally published in the Channel Israel newsletter. Sign up here.

• Jesse Kline: The UNRWA teachers who slaughtered Jews and the Canadian profs who admire them
• Jesse Kline: The anti-Israel profs who aided the illegal U of T encampment

Happy North America Day! Don’t laugh. There was a time when policy-makers, political theorists, business leaders, economists and politicians would have raised glasses of trilateral Canadian whiskey, American bourbon and Mexican tequila to toast a grand concept: “Here’s to the union of our three glorious nations into a North American Community!” Some even took the idea further: “Let us drink to a United North America!”

Today, in the midst of trade wars and what seems like accelerating division and animosity, the prospect of greater continental cohesion looks impossible. Not too long ago, however, many dreamed the impossible dream of a united North America. If unity and amicable co-operation ever does catch on some time in the currently unimaginable future, the perfect date to celebrate would be today, May 17.

Exactly 20 years ago — on May 17, 2005 — a group of Canadian, American and Mexican political and business officials produced a document that bears an improbable title:

“Building a North American Community.”

The 47-page report, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, was signed by a diverse collection of business and economic personalities from each country, including (among other Canadians) Thomas d’Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives; John Manley, former Liberal deputy prime minister; Tom Axworthy, a former key figure in the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau; Allan Gotlieb, former Canadian ambassador to the U.S.; and Michael Hart, a leading Canadian academic and bureaucrat.

It is hard to imagine today that, only 20 years ago, such a distinguished and somewhat diverse collection of experts in North American business, political and economic affairs could have coalesced around a report that advocated greater integration of the three nations. It was a radical document by today’s standards. Examples of its key recommendations — to be executed under the essential principle of “respect for each other’s National sovereignty” — included the following ideas:

• Creation of a common economic space in which trade, capital, and people flow freely, by truck and train and through open skies for air travel;

• In trade, national boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff around a secure perimeter;

• Greater integration of military, security and defence structures;

• Develop the integration of North American resource strategies around metals and minerals central to the growth and economic security of North America. While the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement has produced great economic benefits, it has not ensured a free-flow of resource products; more needs to be done; and

• Develop a continental energy strategy, including accords for mining, forestry and agricultural products.

It is important to note the obvious: the ideas and principles behind the North American unity movement 20 years ago have no relation to President Donald Trump’s arrogant references to wiping out the Canada-U.S. border and the creation of a 51st state. Trump is an anti-free-trader and extreme nationalist who aims to impose his American authority, while the North American Community project was based on positive, voluntary and mutually beneficial collaboration and negotiation.

The May 17 report in 2005 was preceded by ideas that began to take hold a few years earlier. In an interview with the Post for this article, Thomas d’Aquino, the former head of the Canadian CEO council and a leading advocate of continental co-operation, pointed to the two main factors driving the unity movement. One was an obvious need at the turn of the century to expand and improve the 1994 NAFTA agreement, although chances of action on NAFTA were slim, he said. But then came the need to react to the security risks revealed during the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. “As soon as 9/11 happened,” said d’Aquino, “we at the CEO council launched an initiative called the North America Security and Prosperity initiative. And what we were proposing was a much bigger and broader project than NAFTA.”

That project was formally taken up by the three governments in March 2005, at a leaders meeting in Waco, Texas, the first of many meetings of the “Three Amigos” — prime minister Paul Martin and presidents George W. Bush and Vincente Fox. On the day of the March leadership meeting, Canadian John Manley, former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe and former Massachusetts governor William Weld published a commentary in The Wall Street Journal titled “North America the Beautiful.” The three called on the North American leaders to announce a plan and structure to “provide energy and momentum to the North American agenda.”

At the Texas meeting, the three leaders established a

Security and Prosperity Partnership

that was to meet annually to advance continental integration. As time passed, however, the annual meetings of the Three Amigos stumbled, generally making little serious progress. The national leaders never met during Trump’s first term and then only irregularly under Biden. At the last one, in 2023,

nothing much happened.

By 2023, the North American idea had been totally abandoned. What went wrong? As d’Aquino sees it, the concept lost momentum as national leaders changed. While Liberal PM Paul Martin backed the project, Conservative PM Stephen Harper was “much, much cooler to the idea. … He thought it was too big, too grandiose.” The real reason the project lost momentum, according to d’Aquino, was the arrival of president Barack Obama in 2009. “Obama thought the security partnership project was a Republican thing and he basically decided to walk away from it. And he didn’t reject it outwardly, he just let it die on the limb. It was Obama who killed it.”

Before we get to another reason for the fate of the North American unity proposals, it’s worth noting that there were some later attempts to revive continentalism among the three nations.

One came from Hugh Segal, the late Canadian Senator, author and political strategist who in 2011 wrote a book that extolled the benefits of what is described as moderate Canadian conservatism. Segal’s progressive moderation was put aside briefly in

The Right Balance: Canada’s Conservative Tradition

when he advocated for a Canadian White Paper on how to structure a North American Community. As he put it in his book, “drugs, climate change, disease control, trade and poverty challenges known borders.”

In a excerpt from The Right Balance published in 2011 in the National Post, Segal

outlined his belief

that Canada should take a leading role in fostering a continental pact of some kind. “A North American Community is not about the victory of the right or the left in this country, the United States or Mexico.”

On that point, Segal was wrong. The opposition to any form of continental unification has generally come from the harder edges of left and right, two populist streams that meet at the Canada-U.S. border. That clash of cultures was documented in another 2011 book titled

The North American Idea: A Vision of a Continental Future

by Robert Pastor, who died in 2016.

Pastor’s book offers insightful perspectives on the ideological forces in favour of North American cohesion and the left/right forces that have ultimately produced the anti-collaboration environment that dominates today. And Pastor, who worked on the ideas long before 9/11, knows the continental story, up and down, inside and out.

A professor of international relations and a former U.S. government national security official, Pastor wrote an earlier 2001 book — 

Toward a North American Community

— that outlined the basis for a continental structure that was needed to move beyond the limited scope of the 1994 NAFTA agreement. On the cover is a photo of prime minister Jean Chrétien, and presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox.

The problem with NAFTA, in Pastor’s view, was that while it was successful in boosting trade and growth, it failed to provide structures and approaches to the inevitable ongoing areas of cross-border trade and conflict. As if reading the tea leaves for 2025 and the Trump era, Pastor wrote that NAFTA would come under constant criticism from political and economic players who tend ”to focus on the balance of trade and capital flows and the creation and loss of jobs.”

As a result of his 2001 book, Pastor played a significant role in preparing the May 17, 2005, report, Building a North American Community. He also had an inside track on the evolution of the idea over time and the role of what today would be called right and left populism in undermining the prospect of greater continental agreement on trade, economics, national security and other issues.

In Canada, core opposition to greater North American unity has come primarily from an activist left that has consistently fought against NAFTA and globalized trade expansions. Pastor mentions Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians, along with other Canadian intellectuals who have mounted

steady campaigns

against any perceived risk of Americanization. The greatest Canadian fear is loss of sovereignty, a risk now accentuated by Trump’s claims to want a 51st state.

While few Canadians would favour full-scale union with the U.S., the idea raises the instant responses from the liberal left. It always has. A few days after the May 17, 2005, report Toronto Star columnist David Crane warned Canada to steer clear of what he called Fortress North America. “What Canada needs is a global vision of its future, not that of the 51st state.” True enough, but that was not the plan for the North American Community.

American opposition to continentalism has perhaps most often come from the populist right. Pastor describes as typical his appearances on a CNN talk show with Lou Dobbs as he came under attack from “paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan for allegedly attempting to undermine U.S. sovereignty by wiping out the borders, a move that would give anti-conservative leftist liberal Canadians and Mexican’s greater control over conservative America. Pastor says that as a result of these

accusations

, he received emails accusing him of being a “treasonous wretch” who should be deported to Mexico or Canada. Another said: “You are an enemy of the U.S.A. and should be hung for treason.”

Writing in 2011, Pastor again read the tea leaves. He said that Americans should “absorb the North American idea and accept that they are part of the solution.” Only then will the three countries ”find more creative paths to address chronic problems like drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and trade, and new transitional issues like pandemics or the crisis in the auto industry.”

Since the 2005 report, a succession of national leaders have failed to tackle the North American problem and turn it into an opportunity. Earlier co-operative action could have avoided today’s confrontational crises that now require another rethink of the continental issues, this time with Trump in control.

Some, including d’Aquino, see an opportunity. Mexico would remain as part of a revitalized Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement on trade, while Canada also pursued other international trade options. But on other issues, Mexico would not be part of a separate Canada-U.S. treaty covering bilateral defence and security, the role of Canada as a supplier of minerals and products such as aluminum and steel, and the border management of drugs and guns, among other topics. “This is not a substitute for the U.S. free trade agreements,” said d’Aquino, but a complement.

At this point in Canadian-U.S. relations over growing continental economic and security issues, we seem to be a long way from such agreement, just as we are a long way from being able to drink a toast to celebrate Happy North America Day. The opportunity was abandoned more than a decade ago, but we could benefit from recalling that there once was a time when reasonable co-operation and agreement was possible and appreciate that history offers a reason for hope that the opportunity could come again.

National Post

• Jamie Sarkonak: Of course Steven Guilbeault would cling to the myth of peak oil
• Colby Cosh: Dear Mark Carney, please cut the republican crap

There are two principal takeaways from the election last week of Pope Leo XIV, one reflecting on the condition of the Roman Catholic Church, the other that the new Pope is an American, albeit one who has spent much of his career in Latin America. Despite centuries of effort by millions of people to portray the Roman Catholic Church as a superstitious anachronism, it endures. This is the first pope whose native language is English since Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear), who died in 1159. English is the most widely spoken language in the world and although that singular self-nominated “defender of the faith” Henry VIII of England caused the English-speaking peoples to be more heavily influenced by the Reformation, and not necessarily its best aspects, than the other great western cultures, it is high time that there was an English-speaking pope.

People of my venerable age group will recall that St. Pope John XXIII attempted a substantial modernization of the Roman Catholic Church and made it more accessible by increased use of contemporary languages in place of Latin and other liberalizations, and that this is a process that generally has continued gradually. His successor, Paul VI, initiated the practice of popes travelling widely and the subsequent elections of Polish, German, Argentinian and now an American Pope, are steadily wrenching that organization free from the secretive and easily caricatured Roman cohort of its curial governors, and have brought it closer to and made it more reflective of its far-flung constituencies. With any organization, ecclesiastical or secular, the challenge of reform is to make the basic tenets more available and popular without modifying them in a way that undermines the raison d’etre of the institution. The Catholic Church, in walking this line, has tested the faith of many and forfeited the respect of some.

Of the approximately 1.4-billion nominal Roman Catholics, about one billion attach a significant amount of credence to being members of that faith. It is an organization united by concepts of the sanctity of life and the existence of a divine intelligence that can be propitiated, and that does assert itself in human lives. Anyone who entertains any religious views is thoroughly aware of the widespread practice, particularly prevalent in our atheistic media and academic and other cultural communities that religion is merely a fetishistic heirloom of the Dark Age when people generally had an insufficient respect and ambition for what human ingenuity and diligence could achieve; a consolation for the fact of death. Perversely, our anti-theistic elites profess a respect for Islam, which is in some measure a violent replication of theoretically pacifistic Christianity (including the annunciation of both by the Archangel Gabriel). This indicates that non-western support of Islam is really, in many cases, just antagonism to Christianity. It requires more faith and is intellectually more difficult to deny the existence of any spiritual or supernatural forces in the world than to uphold them. There has always been a zone in the human psyche that ponders the unknowable regions of the cosmos and attempts to replace authentic faith with a vacuum, which has sometimes led to the most horrible pagan aberrations in history, including Nazism and communism.

The immense crowd that packed St. Peter’s Square and the approaching Via de la Conciliazione last week, conspicuously largely composed of younger people waving the flags of most of the countries of the world, indicated that the papal election is not just a Roman municipal tourist celebration. Interest in ecclesiastical matters has fluctuated very widely throughout history, from the dawn of Christianity when Christ and most of his early disciples were brutally murdered, through centuries when Rome was more powerful than any secular government, and times of terrible lassitude, degradation and corruption, when the public’s respect was thoroughly alienated but the faith that had been dishonoured survived.

There are now evidences of growth of Catholic religious practice, partly in reaction to the oppressions of Christianity, partly in recognition of the spectacular failure of secularization and the unsustainably incompetent performance of most secular governments, and partly because of a resurgent sense that spiritual forces do exist and persist despite the antics of charlatans and publicity-seeking iconoclasts. While the rigorous non-believers regard the Roman Catholic Church as an institutional bumble bee, flying laboriously in defiance of all laws of nature and logic, the election of the new Pope has demonstrated its imperishability again. Secularism and parts of the Enlightenment have not delivered a human plenitude of knowledge, any more than unspontaneous piety did. When Christianity fields its intellectual first team from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to modern thinkers such as St. John H. Cardinal Newman and Jacques Maritain, it always defeats the atheists.

The new Pope’s American nationality has been widely claimed to indicate increased administrative efficiency, which the church desperately needs. It is also significant that such an internationally varied and highly intellectual group as the College of Cardinals has not hesitated to elect a pope from the most powerful and influential, as well as the most controversial country in the world. The American public has rejected wokeism, reckless tampering with gender, subordination of parents to educational administrators and the effective deconstruction of our Judeo-Christian traditions, and given a mandate for their reinforcement. The current U.S. administration is raucous and sometimes abrasive, but it is eliminating the country’s trade deficit, has stopped the invasion of the U.S. by masses of destitute foreigners and is using its influence effectively in the Middle East and elsewhere. This Pope has been a Republican voter in Chicago. He appears to be socially generous but a defender of the traditional verities. Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, this is the first time that the Holy See and the world’s most powerful secular government have been led simultaneously by fellow countrymen since the “Babylonian Captivity” of the pope removing to Avignon in the 14th century. The world’s most powerful state and the world’s largest organized religious institution, led by men of the same nationality, may be advancing on parallel lines.

The terrible and long-ignored crisis of molestation and sexual abuse has finally been addressed, and the Christian churches are now among the safest milieus for the sexually vulnerable. Faddishness and the appeasement of destructive tinkerers have nibbled at the base of the Roman Catholic Church, as the United States between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump wobbled badly at times, and the constitutional guidelines of American government have been challenged, especially by politicization of the justice system. Both the Holy See and the United States have retained their preeminence and they may now be counter-attacking simultaneously, not by agreement, but by the spontaneous wish of their leaders and people.

If this is what is happening, the world will be better for it.

National Post

• Michael Higgins: Expect Pope Leo XIV to bring more liberal controversy
• Raymond J. de Souza: Praying that Leo XIV is the Pope we need now