The United States has once again engaged in negotiations with Iran, chasing the elusive goal of turning the Islamic Republic into a peaceful, terror-free and nuclear-free state. This has left the world wondering: “Haven’t we seen this movie before?” The talks are going on now and no one knows how and when they will end. U.S. President Donald Trump, however, said last week that he would prefer to negotiate rather than resort to military action.

Instead of getting into discussions about what level of uranium enrichment is sufficient for Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and its allies must ask this simple question: what goal are they trying to achieve? Is it Iran’s uranium enrichment that is a matter of supreme concern for the world and a threat to the region, or is it the regime’s ideology and quest to control the region through terror that is a matter of concern?

If the goal is to drop the country’s nuclear enrichment by a few percentage points, then the likelihood is that these negotiations will be successful and will give the Trump administration a perceived win to dangle in front of its base. But if the goal is to make Iran a normal country again, that will not happen until its Islamist rulers are thrown out.

If the peaceniks still have doubts, we would recommend reading Wendy Sherman’s book, “Not for the Faint of the Heart.” Sherman was deputy secretary of state under U.S. President Barack Obama and chief negotiator in talks that led to the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. Her memoir proves, if any proof is needed, that the Iranian regime almost always comes to the negotiating table to weather the gathering storm, biding its time so it can gain a stronger position in the future.

Consider this: if Iran’s mullahs agree to all the conditions laid out by Trump negotiators regarding enrichment levels, will it lead to peace and security in the region? In all likelihood, it would just serve to pause the chaos in the Middle East for a period of time — until the regime recuperates. The point is that unless the Iranian regime in removed from power, the threat posed by Iran will continue to loom.

Not long ago, Iran was a normal state. Not a Westminster democracy, a monarchy alright, but a modern, progressive country with impressive economic indicators. The problem started when it was captured by the clergy and turned into a theocracy. Their regressive ideology gave birth to repression and coercion that characterizes the country today. Unless this problem is dealt with, peace in the Middle East will be as elusive as ever.

Peace will only be realized once the Iranian people rise up and get rid of the current theocratic order. Fresh young leaders of Iran could then be counted on to take their country away from this abyss of violence and regression. At that point, the U.S. would have real partners at the negotiating table.

This sounds idealistic, but until it happens, any peace negotiations would only serve to buy time for this oppressive regime. That time will certainly be used to build more weapons and arm proxies to project its regional hegemony. If the ideal solution is not available, it doesn’t mean you pick a bad option. Do it right or leave it till you can.

National Post

Raheel Raza and Mohammad Rizwan are directors of the Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism.

• Andrew Richter: Iran’s nuclear ambitions could soon lead it straight into war
• Jesse Kline: Sorry Joly, maybe all out war with Iran is exactly what we need

A joyful Filipino street festival ended in carnage Saturday night after a man driving an SUV rammed into a crowd,

killing 11 people

and injuring at least 20 more. The man arrested and charged with eight counts of murder has a history of mental illness. While many factors contributed to this avoidable tragedy, perhaps the greatest of them was Canada’s failure to embrace involuntary treatment and institutionalization.

 

If the suspect,

Kai-ji Adam Lo, 30, is found not criminally responsible and sentenced to psychiatric care, instead of prison, he will be institutionalized, like he should have been in the first place. In this case, the outcome of our more “compassionate” approach to mental health is disturbing.

The

Lapu Lapu Day festival

was coming to a close when the suspect charged in the attack,

drove recklessly

through the neighbourhood and accelerated into a narrow street that had been reserved for pedestrians and food trucks. According to

witnesses interviewed

by the Vancouver Sun, the accused drove so quickly that many of his victims were flung like bowling pins and had no time to scream. There were bodies everywhere, some twisted grotesquely. The youngest of the deceased was just five years old.

 

 

By the time the car stopped, its hood had

disintegrated

from the force of hitting so many people. Although the accused attempted to flee, he was detained by bystanders until his arrest. When they screamed at him, he held his hand to his head and

calmly responded

: “I’m sorry.”

 

The provincial online court database indicates that Lo had no prior criminal record.

 

In a subsequent news conference, the Vancouver Police

ruled out terrorism

as a motive and disclosed that they, along with specialized health-care professionals, had had a “significant” number of interactions with Lo due to his poor mental health. The exact number remains unclear, but it appears that there were at least a few dozen.

 

 

Global News

later reported

that one such interaction had occurred the day before the attack, and that officials would not disclose further details beyond confirming that it did not warrant a hospital visit. Concerningly, the Vancouver Sun also

reported

that, just hours before the attack, a family member contacted a hospital psychiatric ward out of concern for Lo, as he appeared to be suffering from delusions and paranoia.

 

It appears that Lo’s unravelling was substantially driven by the sufferings of his family.

 

After his older brother was murdered in January 2024, Lo launched a

fundraising page

to cover the associated funeral costs, ultimately receiving more than $9,000 in donations. He wrote that he was “burdened with remorse” for not spending more time with his brother, whose death had left his mother with “an indescribable sorrow.” He further noted that his mother was “financially strained” after taking out “significant loans” to build his brother “a modest tiny home” that had involved “painful encounters with builders.”

 

Then, in August, Lo set up another

fundraising page for his mother

after she attempted suicide and was hospitalized for a month. He wrote that she tried to take her own life because of her grief over her son, and because a long period of unemployment had left her “struggling immensely with her finances” and “on the verge of losing her home.”

 

“The day I found her unconscious, I feared I had lost the only family member I have left,” he wrote. “I cannot stand to see her suffer anymore, and there’s nothing I can do to help her.”

 

He claimed that she told him that she would rather die than give up her home, and that he worried that she would attempt suicide again if she could not pay her bills. Yet, this fundraiser only secured $175 in donations. As they lived together, it appears that he may have been on the verge of losing his housing, too.

 

Several of Lo’s neighbours confirmed to

The Globe and Mail

that the suicide attempt and prolonged hospitalization occurred, and that Lo often yelled at his mother and showed signs of anxiety. A notice of claim filed in a provincial court also indicates that the family owned a $213,000 laneway home, which they now rent out, that had a list of alleged defects.

 

More details of Lo’s life will undoubtedly emerge over the next few months, but it is already clear that he was a profoundly sick man who should have been segregated from society before his breakdown reached its macabre climax. And yet he wasn’t. Why?

 

The root cause here is the dismantlement of Canada’s large psychiatric hospitals —  a process popularly known as “

deinstitutionalization

.” These asylums were shuttered, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, under the belief that their conditions were inhumane and that patients would benefit from living in regular communities while receiving outpatient support.

 

While not unreasonable in theory, Canadian deinstitutionalization

abjectly failed

because the mental health services that were supposed to replace these shuttered asylums were never adequately funded. Oftentimes, discharged patients were abandoned without adequate shelter or care, and ended up homeless or imprisoned.

 

Because of this movement and its philosophical baggage, we now have a status quo where, although involuntary care is still available, our capacity to provide it is limited. We have a status quo where this care is

frowned upon

as a violation of civil rights, and where its use is dominated by crisis management, rather than proactive healing. Under this system, people like Lo do not get help until it is

too late

.

 

Dr. Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist and distinguished professor at Simon Fraser University, argues that the federal government bears some responsibility here, as “there are really no good reasons not to change, other than a lapse of leadership and an unwillingness to alter the status quo.”

 

National Post

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

Every single available indicator has the April 28 election going for the Liberals. Every poll aggregator is projecting Liberal victory. Every betting market is favouring Conservative defeat. Financial markets are already pricing in another Liberal term.

The Conservatives’ chance of victory is not high, but it’s also not zero. And if there’s ever been a Canadian federal election that was more likely to yield a surprise outcome, it’s this one. Below, a cursory summary of how this election could still go for the Tories.

Youth turnout breaks records

It wasn’t a sure thing in 2015 that Justin Trudeau was going to win a majority. For much of that election, polls showed a toss-up between the NDP, the Conservatives and the Liberals. What changed on election day was voter turnout: Non-voters, and particularly young non-voters, showed up for Trudeau in outsized numbers. The voter turnout in 2015 came to 68.3 per cent; the highest since 1993.

The singular reason that Trudeau was never able to replicate his 2015 victory in subsequent elections is that this kind of turnout never happened again. As per the stats, thousands of voters who cast a ballot for Trudeau in 2015 simply didn’t bother in 2019 and 2021.

So if election day yields a surprise outcome, it will likely be due to a bizarro version of 2015, in which youth again show up in outsized numbers, but this time to vote Conservative.

There’s no question that the Conservatives are doing well among young voters: The under-30 cohort has consistently been the strongest single age demographic for the Tories. All that cohort has to do to upend expectations on election day is to vote at the same rate as seniors.

The polls are slightly wrong

Canadian pollsters are doing their best, and they’re usually pretty good at this. Leger, the official pollster for Postmedia, called the 2021 election almost perfectly. Their last pre-election poll in 2021 had the Conservatives at 33 per cent and the Liberals at 32 per cent, as compared to the actual results of 33.7 per cent and 32.6 per cent, respectively.

But the polls are sometimes wrong. The 2013 B.C. election was so favoured to the NDP that the incumbent B.C. Liberals had almost nobody at their headquarters on election night since they assumed they were going to lose. Instead, they won a comfortable majority. As recently as October, polls in the Saskatchewan provincial election were off by nine points.

And if there was ever a federal election that would be difficult to forecast, it’s this one. As mentioned, youth are the most important variable in this election, and youth are notoriously difficult to survey accurately, if only because they’re more likely to ignore robocalls or text messages from polling firms.

The Conservatives are also leading a more populist campaign than any in their history. And populist campaigns can be hard to track as they often upend prior demographic expectations, and pull in outsized rates of non-voters.

This was most dramatically represented with the 2016 and 2024 elections of U.S. President Donald Trump. Both times, polls underestimated the extent of Trump’s support, and both times it was due in part to the fact that Trump was able to inspire outsized rates of turnout, often in unexpected categories.

And the polls for the 2025 election only need to be wrong in a few specific areas to upend projections: If they’re off by just a few points in Atlantic Canada or the Greater Toronto Area, a projected Liberal minority could very quickly become a projected Conservative minority.

Progressives abandon the Liberals at the last minute

The Liberals are leading the Conservatives by as much as five points going into election day, but their support has always been much more tenuous. The Conservative vote has been locked in at around 40 per cent for more than a year at this point, and polls consistently show that Tory voters are the most committed and motivated voter demographic.

The Liberals, meanwhile, were recently facing electoral extinction. Only a week before Christmas they charted an all-time low of 16 per cent voter support.

With the Liberals now polling in the mid-40s, this means that as much as two thirds of their support base is voters who were fully prepared to kick them to the curb only four months ago.

Thus, only a relatively small share of these last-minute Liberals would need to have second thoughts on election day for the lead to evaporate.

In Quebec, at least, a version of this is underway. At the beginning of April there were projections showing that the Bloc Quebecois would be lucky to get 10 seats. Now, they’re poised to take at least 25 seats.

The Conservative vote becomes more efficient

The Conservative Party actually won the popular vote in both 2019 and 2021. In the last election, the Tories received 5,747,410 votes to the Liberals’ 5,556,629 votes, but they didn’t form government because their vote was “inefficient.”

The Conservative vote was disproportionately consolidated in safe seats: 13 Conservative ridings in 2021 were won by margins of more than 70 per cent. Liberals, meanwhile, were uniquely able to capitalize on ridings where the vote was split in multiple directions. Trudeau cabinet minister Pascale St-Onge, for instance, won her Quebec riding of Brome–Missisquoi with just 35.1 per cent of the vote; the other 64.9 per cent of ballots being mostly split among the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Tories.

What could happen in 2025 is that Liberal support disproportionately surges in places where it’s not going to have any effect. A good example would be Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s home riding of Carleton, which he is still favoured to win despite a reported increase in Liberal sentiments.

The B.C. provincial election in October is a model of how a Tory vote could become more efficient. The B.C. Conservatives turned 43.28 per cent of the vote into 44 seats. In the prior election, their predecessor, the B.C. Liberals, had turned 33.77 per cent of the vote into just 28 seats.

What the B.C. Conservatives had been able to do was to gain support in new areas, at the expense of support in “safe” ridings that they were going to win anyway.

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

• Death toll in Vancouver ‘car ramming attack’ rises to 11 as parties recalibrate campaign plans
• On Western alienation, Preston Manning is not backing down

As the sprint of the shortest election period allowed under Canadian law nears the finish line, one aspect of the campaign that has stood out is the central role that international law has played in political messaging. The unsubstantiated claim that Israel is committing genocide while fighting against Hamas has surfaced several times.

During the French-language leaders debate last week, for example, NDP Leader

Jagmeet Singh asked

Liberal Leader Mark Carney, “Why don’t you call it what it is? It’s a genocide.” Carney responded that he prefers not to use the word “genocide” in a manner that will “politicize” the situation in Gaza.

The next evening, during the English-language debate,

Singh criticized Carney

for not acknowledging that “what’s going on in Gaza has now clearly become a genocide.”

This time, Carney did not directly address the genocide claim. Instead, he

stuck to

the

Liberal platform

of calling for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, more humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza and a lasting two-state solution.

Earlier in the month, during a Carney campaign rally, an attendee

shouted

, “There’s a genocide happening in Palestine.” Rather than confronting the assertion, Carney responded, “I’m aware, which is why we have an arms embargo.” When asked later by a reporter if he concedes there is a genocide in Gaza,

Carney claimed

he “didn’t hear that word” during the rally.

While Carney’s assertion seems rather implausible based on

video

of the exchange, his campaign

did not return

repeated requests to clarify his position on the “genocide” issue following the rally and after

a video

surfaced of Liberal candidate Adam van Koeverden telling a group of constituents that their voices will help “end the genocide in Gaza.”

With the NDP leader stridently insisting Israel is committing genocide and the Liberal leader’s position on the matter unclear, the characterization of Israel’s conflict against Hamas in Gaza has emerged as a central — perhaps even pivotal — issue in the federal election. It is imperative to clarify whether the military campaign against Hamas actually does qualify as one of the worst possible crimes under international law.

In short, no, Israel is not committing genocide. Canada’s political leaders should be clear about this, or they should be held accountable for misleading the electorate.

The crime of genocide is established in the

Genocide Convention

of 1948 and clarified in the

Rome Statute

of 1998, both of which Canada has adopted. It is committed when prohibited acts are carried out “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Israel’s political leaders have repeatedly affirmed that the strategic objectives of the campaign in Gaza are to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, thereby ending the enduring security threat posed by the terrorist group, and the return of all the hostages.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

reiterated this message

earlier this month, and these remain consistent with the

goals

announced in October 2023, during the early stages of the ground offensive in Gaza.

Seeking to destroy a transnational terrorist group that promises a repeat of the October 7 massacre is not genocide — it’s war.

A significant number of civilian casualties are, unfortunately, predictable given that Hamas deliberately hides and fights among the civilian population. But harm to civilians that is incidental to attacks in pursuit of the destruction of a terrorist group during armed conflict does not constitute genocide.

To date, Turkey is the only NATO member that has

officially concluded

that Israel is committing genocide. Some activist groups, such as

Human Rights Watch

and

Amnesty International

, have also characterized Israel’s conduct as genocide.

However, these assertions are based almost entirely on comments from various Israeli political leaders that were taken out of context, coupled with observed effects of the conflict that can be consistent with the intent to destroy Hamas rather than the population of Gaza.

When it comes to

the genocide case

initiated by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it is

commonly suggested

that the court’s

provisional measures

concluded

that Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounts to a “

plausible genocide

.” However, this is an

incorrect interpretation

of the

purpose

of ICJ provisional measures.

Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. When Canadians head to the polls, they should consider each party’s record on countering this pernicious disinformation directed against Canada’s closest ally in the Middle East.

National Post

Twitter.com/BrianCox_RLTW

Brian L. Cox is an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, a retired U.S. army judge advocate, a journalism graduate student at Carleton University and a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.

• NP View: No truth behind claim that Israel is committing genocide
• Lisa MacLeod: Mark Carney’s flippant remarks on ‘genocide’

It’s good that Liberal Leader Mark Carney at least understands his party’s role in overpopulating Canada faster than it can grow capacity, but it’s a problem that he doesn’t have a plan to wind it up.

That’s one big reason a Carney win on Monday would prove disastrous to Canada’s youth: the immigration excesses will continue, and with it, the affordability squeeze. This is only a recent problem: population growth reached an average of 320,000 people per year from 2001 to 2015 — but doubled to an average of 612,000 from 2016 to 2023. In turn, Canada’s longtime receptive attitude towards immigration has

cooled

; people have lost faith in a system that was once revered for welcoming only the world’s best and brightest.

In his campaigns for party leadership and Parliament, Carney hasn’t committed to any across-the-board immigration caps.

He has

committed

to capping temporary workers and international students — the two types of non-permanent residents — to five per cent of the population by 2027, consistent with the

plan

set by former immigration minister Marc Miller last year. But this idea isn’t poised to help us out all that much.

A five-per-cent cap may sound like an improvement, because non-permanent residents reached 7.4 per cent of the population in fall 2024, but it’s still atrociously far away from restoring the status quo. Before 2020, non-permanent residents

never surpassed

three per cent of the population.

Carney is also planning to limit annual permanent resident admissions to one per cent of the population by 2027, which is equivalent to a target of about 400,000 per year. This, too, is consistent with the

targets

set last fall by Miller. However, just like his non-permanent-resident targets, Carney’s goals are, once again, far beyond Harper-era numbers, which

only saw

permanent resident admissions reach 300,000 (these were often lower, in the mid-200,000s).

This is only a partial solution to our crowding problem. Carney’s platform makes no mention of new naturalized citizens or reducing the number of asylum seekers in Canada. All he

commits

to on this front is the “support” for legal aid for refugees and asylum seekers.

The challenges are numerous: Quebec is still being

overwhelmed

at its ports of entry by claimants coming over the United States border, a persistent problem that the Trudeau government never fully resolved. Claims by international students have

grown exponentially

, from less than 2,000 in 2018 to nearly 14,000 in the first nine months of 2024. The majority of claims from allied, not-at-war countries like Mexico and India, between 2018 and last fall, have been approved.

The result? Record numbers. In 2016, a total of just under

24,000

asylum seekers arrived. In 2025, we’ve already surpassed that, at just under

29,000

applicants in the first three months of the year. Where is this headed? Well, in 2024, Canada took in 172,000 asylum seekers, for reference. It seems the word has spread that Canada can hardly ever say “no.”

Most of these sojourners are likely here to stay, and soak up Canada’s extensive benefits —

free first-world health care

(the cost for which has

risen sevenfold

from 2017 to 2024),

free hotel rooms

,

free bonus money

— because our immigration bureaucrats

accept

more than 80 per cent of claims. (Even in 2018, acceptance rates were a more modest 62 per cent). Gaping loopholes have been created to open the door to unfalsifiable claims: the LGBT asylum

guidelines

, for example, don’t require much actual proof, leading to

suspicious claims

.

Carney’s fortunately open to deporting the few whose claims aren’t approved, promising to “Move forward with a credible and fair immigration system that removes failed claimants once due process has been accorded, reinforcing the system’s integrity.” But that should already be the case.

As for removing the small minority of non-citizens who commit crimes in Canada, Carney makes no mention of that, either. This is a platform promise of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, at least.

It should be a more popular priority: at this time, non-citizens can commit crimes, ranging from minor to vile, and can often expect to remain in Canada even with a conviction — and sometimes even

receive

a sentence discount due to their immigration status. Convictions open the door to deportation, but in the lengthy quagmire of immigration tribunals, foreign criminals often remain welcome to stay.

Many of Canada’s problems in the last 10 years can be traced back to over-immigration: housing is

scarce

as more people try to cram into relatively fewer homes, youth employment has

suffered

, and federal supports have been over-extended. Culturally, large influxes can bring about problems, too: foreign conflicts have played out in

riots

and in

synagogue attacks

, and few assimilative pressures have worked to counterbalance the tendency for some communities to form enclaves. It’s a problem that is difficult to acknowledge, let alone solve.

It’s hard to see an end to it all. Not too long ago, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a

majority-government-funded

charity (essentially, a pro-government lobby group),

produced

a series of posters depicting immigration skeptics as mentally inhibited troglodytes, with distorted, slack-jawed, idiotic faces.

That about sums up how arrogantly the Liberals have gone about piling newcomers into the country, without concern for the people already here and the positive immigration consensus that was created through strict, high standards. Carney fully intends to keep immigration levels far above Harper-era levels, and we can bet that he’ll expect us to like it — heck, the propaganda campaign to snuff out objections is already underway.

National Post

• Jamie Sarkonak: Just like Trudeau, Carney is planning to go full steam ahead on DEI
• Jamie Sarkonak: Why Poilievre’s three strikes plan for violent offenders has promise

The Liberals are selling a new green-energy fiction in their 2025 platform — an East-West electricity grid — that will, no doubt, require them to impose additional disproportionate economic and social costs for a limited decrease in Canada’s contribution to global emissions. This is a problem, given Canada’s “lost decade” of growth and the Liberals’ failure to admit policy mistakes over the last ten years.

Canada’s global carbon emissions were already remarkably low when the Liberals came to power under former prime minister Justin Trudeau. In 2015, Canada’s share of gross global emissions was

1.6 per cent

. Fast-forward to the latest data from 2023 — Canada’s gross emissions have dropped to

1.45 per cent,

which is a measly 0.15 per cent share of global emissions.

And, Canada’s emissions contributions are a pittance compared to

other countries

, particularly China and India, which were at 31.5 and 8.1 per cent respectively in 2023, fuelled by their economic expansion and dependence on coal.

The effect we could have on global emissions was always negligible — considering our contribution to global emissions and the fact that other economies are not beholden to climate targets and grow their economies with fossil fuels. Despite this reality, and the fact that they’ve also burdened Canadians with the consumer carbon tax and all the inflationary costs that went along with it until they recently reduced it to zero (only because, according to them, it was “unpopular” and “divisive”) the Liberals’ new platform suggests an even more expansive version of the dream of net-zero.

This, even though how they’ve managed Canada so far has resulted in a “

lost economic decade”

during which the Liberals massively increased immigration and public spending leading to a larger economy in terms of size, but not wealth, as productivity remained stagnant.

The Liberals seemed to do everything in their power to stifle growth in the natural resources sector. And it looks like Canadians are in for more of the same. Liberal Leader Mark Carney has said he will

not repeal

the Impact Assessment Act, which strangles energy infrastructure projects, or the emissions cap on the oil and gas industry, and has additionally proposed an overly ambitious East-West electricity grid.

According to the party platform, this grid, would “unleash clean growth across the country, connecting more homes and businesses to the power of clean electricity and attracting new investments in resource projects” to “enhance connectivity to low-emissions electricity needed for industry and the broader economy to reach net-zero emissions.”

The party claims the policy provides new opportunities for clean electricity producers, such as

Hydro-Québec

and Manitoba Hydro — but neither appear to be up to the task.

While Hydro-Quebec is a major producer of electricity, it’s a strange thing for the Liberals to suggest it can be part of such a grid when it has its own capacity issues. Its own website makes it clear that “when all the power system’s resources are operating at full capacity, Hydro-Québec buys electricity from its neighbors.”

Anyone who lives in Quebec also knows that

incentives

are often suggested to customers to use less during these periods. One such incentive, the “Winter Credit Option,” encourages customers to curtail their energy use during the coldest time of the year. Winter “peak demand events” may occur 25 to 33 times (100 hours) per year. Customers are told, “the greater effort you make, the more you’ll save,” placing the burden of shouldering an insufficient grid on its customers. In other words, Hydro-Québec is currently struggling to properly service the province’s own customers, nevermind expanding to other provinces.

And this, get-the-customer-to-reduce-their-use communal mindset is

common

in Quebec, whose Energy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said in March 2024, “If we can reduce this peak, there will be more power available.” By 2023, demand in Quebec had hit 43,000 megawatts, exceeding its capacity of 38,000. At that time, he noted that Quebec companies could face energy shortages for ten years, if unresolved.

The Montreal Economic Institute concurs. Though once

brimming with surplus energy

, the think tank suggested last summer that Hydro-Québec’s surplus power would run out by

2027

, and that its proposed solutions of “

building or upgrading dams, building wind turbines, and reducing consumption through greater energy efficiency,” are “too little or too late.” While Quebec could stop exporting energy to the U.S., it’s not clear that will actually happen.

More importantly, due to exports and existing infrastructure constraints, neither Hydro-Québec nor Manitoba Hydro, which the Liberal platform also mentions, produce enough electricity for their respective provinces. In terms of end-use energy demand, in 2020, Quebec’s energy came from

a mix of resources

of which electricity is 41 per cent, followed by refined petroleum products at 35 per cent, natural gas at 14 per cent, and 11 per cent biofuels and others. Over the same period, Manitoba received

even less of its energy from electricity

and more from refined petroleum products with 41 per cent coming from refined petroleum, 29 per cent from natural gas, 26 per cent from electricity, and 15 per cent from biofuels. The idea that either of these provinces are in a position to contribute to an East-West electricity grid is a green fiction.

Quebec has been exporting so much energy elsewhere that it’s

experiencing shortfalls

as well as 

unfavourable weather

conditions which have negatively impacted those exports. And sure, Quebec could stop supplying New York State and New England with electricity, but how likely and advisable is that, given that our neighbours to the south will have a new president in four years?

To top it off, the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, brought in by the Liberals in 2021, commits to achieving net-zero by 2050. This is neither feasible nor realistic, even if desirable. Renewable energy generation isn’t yet technologically capable of replacing fossil fuels. Canada can be both prosperous as a mixed energy economy, which develops its natural resources, while focusing on creating incentives for private companies to reduce emissions. This is the way.

National Post

tnewman@postmedia.com

X: @TLNewanMTL

• Anthony Furey: Canada is in decline — a vote for Carney will ensure we stay that way
• Carson Jerema: Mark Carney is a misinformation machine



Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party, with the campaign’s momentum and tightening polls, could yet declare victory in the federal election. But the party infighting that started early in the campaign already has some sniffing around a potential leadership change, as the

Political Hack newsletter’s

Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson discuss with Brian this week. Our 2025 election panel also gets into the surprises that could come with last-minute voters, the curious advertising blitzes of the two front-runners in the race’s dying days, and Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s exorbitant platform promises and his growing smugness about his standing. They also consider the new, likely power status of the Bloc Québécois, should either party need the separatists to sustain a minority. (Recorded April 25, 2025)

• Conrad Black: Pierre Poilievre is the obvious choice for Canada
• Poilievre pledges to cancel Parliament’s ‘summer vacation’ to pass three key bills