This week, while the federal Conservatives were renewing their vows to

crack down

on so-called woke ideology, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston released a

three-minute video

that did more to counter the excesses of political correctness than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has done in his entire career.

This is because Houston’s “I am Nova Scotian” video (what some suspect is a precursor to his future bid for federal leader) offers a version of Canadian conservatism that celebrates patriotism and diversity at the same time — and most rare: in a way that isn’t annoying or cringey.

The video is a disarming Maritimer take on the “I am Canadian” Molson ad from the 1990s. Instead of beer, its focus is Peggy’s Cove, Celtic strings and “skaw-lups” (not “scaah-lips,” we are sternly reminded).

We see the premier, in a windbreaker of course, tour various Nova Scotia landmarks while his voiceover recounts the long list of important things invented in the province. Hockey. The telephone. Newsprint. Kerosene. The donair.

There are many nods to old-stock maritime tropes. “I have asked who your father is, and I give directions based on landmarks that are no longer there,” Houston says.

But there are also nods to themes rarely seen in Canadian Conservative politics these days.

We were “first in the country to legalize that love is love,” the premier says about his province, amid images of gay couples marching in a Pride parade.

“And ours is the province where Viola Desmond sat wherever she damn well pleased.…  Inspired by the Black Loyalists and the Trelawney Maroons, we will not be bullied by those that look to oppress us. We were the first province in Canada. The first port of call for generations of new Canadians. And we will never be the 51st of anything. My name is Tim and I am Nova Scotian.”

Houston’s video could be naked political opportunism masked as Maritimer pride, or a little bit of both of those things (it probably isn’t a coincidence the video launched days prior to an election result that could spell the end of Pierre Poilievre’s tenure as party leader).

But whatever its motive, it is frankly a masterclass in inclusion done the right way. Houston manages to acknowledge his province’s painful complexities without endlessly apologizing for the injustices of its past; he includes diverse groups without casting them as victims or invoking jargon to describe them.

In other words, the Nova Scotia premier is offering Nova Scotians — and by extension Canadians — a picture of a conservatism that says, “We see you for who you are — now let’s get on with it and do something great together.” It might seem trite to some, but it is a whole lot more invigorating than the identity politics offered by the federal Conservatives, which could be boiled down to: “We must destroy the woke mind virus to re-establish a warrior mentality in the Armed Forces.”

It’s not just that the latter worldview is, as many have pointed out, a tad Trumpy for an electorate practically allergic to U.S. President Donald Trump. It’s that it has almost zero relevance to the lives of average Canadians.

Granted, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a Canadian of any gender who doesn’t consider “radical wokeness” annoying, or who doesn’t cringe every time a man in the workplace begins a sentence with the apology, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to mansplain …” And it’s not as though “woke ideology” on campus or in government is harmless. I’m a gay Jewish woman — I am very familiar with a strain of politics on the left that celebrates one facet of my identity but shuns another.

But the ironic bottom line for the current top brass in Conservative federal politics is that they can’t stop committing the same sin that progressives themselves are historically guilty of: obsessing about identity politics when most people are simply tired of hearing about it.

The fight we find ourselves in now, all of us, is not against dreaded hordes of shrieking woke zombies. It is, as Tim Houston and Canada’s premiers seem to know well, a fight for the preservation of our independence and our soul against a rapacious force that lives next door and is not about to fade away. The sooner the federal Conservatives realize this, the less likely they will be to fade away themselves.

National Post

• Carson Jerema: Poilievre could only ever satisfy the media by becoming a Liberal
• Nadav Steinman: For Jewish Canadians, this election presents a stark choice

It’s difficult to summon much sympathy for Harvard University. Famously elitist, smug and with its graduates overrepresented among the ranks of the powerful, the school is a bastion of an increasingly unpopular establishment. Harvard’s recent indulgence in antisemitism and intolerance towards dissenting ideas do it no favours in terms of public esteem.

But in its ongoing tussle with the Trump administration, Harvard enjoys a significant advantage: the government has no right to condition money and tax-exempt status on ideology. The elite school could further reinforce its independence by emulating another college that cut ties with the government, in favour of private funding.

In two letters, one dated

April 3

and the other

April 11

, the Trump administration demanded that Harvard University implement specific reforms in return for access to federal funds. Prominent among them was a condition that that the school adopt “oversight and accountability for biased programs that fuel antisemitism.”

The letters also called for improved campus discipline, merit-based admissions and hiring to replace identity-based preferences, the abandonment of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and encouragement of viewpoint diversity on campus.

In an

April 15 post

on Truth Social, U.S. President Donald Trump doubled down on the demands and the consequences of noncompliance. He speculated that, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ ”

Taken by themselves, the administration’s proposals are generally sensible. Elite colleges and universities really do have an

antisemitism problem

dating back even

before campus protests

supporting Hamas’s October 7 massacre. Administrators at some schools, Harvard included, seem to coddle or even encourage misbehaviour when they agree with the political motivations.

DEI programs

function as ideological litmus tests and fuel inter-group tensions. And with

around 80

self-identified “liberal” or “very liberal” faculty members for every “conservative,” Harvard is even more ideologically monolithic than most of academia, which is famously left-wing (a 2020 National Association of Scholars

study

found “no evidence that is inconsistent with the broad evidence that conservatives and Republicans are absent from leading colleges around the country”).

Increasingly removed from, and even hostile to, American society, institutions of higher education are losing public support. In 2024,

Gallup reported

that, “An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education.”

The result is an almost equal division among those who have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” (36 per cent), “some confidence” (32 per cent) or “little or no confidence” (32 per cent) in colleges and universities. Also last year,

Pew Research found

that, while 53 per cent of Americans believe “colleges and universities are having a positive impact,” 45 per cent say they actually hurt the country.

Yet even though Harvard and other institutions of higher learning have lost the Trump administration and much of the population, they still have the law and the U.S. Constitution on their side. Elected officials may have good reforms to suggest, but they have no right to impose them.

“Harvard isn’t entitled to federal funding. No institution is,”

points out

the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). But, the group adds, “just as the law gives us certain protections, it also says the government can’t cancel funding on a whim, like the administration did last week.”

If the Trump administration believes Harvard or any other institution has violated the conditions under which it benefits from tax exemption, grants and financial aid — say, by

allowing the persecution

of Jewish students — it must launch a formal investigation and prove its point. It is compelled to offer the school an opportunity to challenge any findings. Due process matters.

Harvard also enjoys constitutional protections for the ideas espoused on campus or embraced by the institution as a whole, even if, as President Trump characterized them, those ideas constitute a “sickness.” Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution

commented

: “Under the First Amendment, tax exemptions have to be distributed without discrimination based on viewpoint; that means that evil views have to be treated the same way as good views.”

Note that neither FIRE nor Volokh are fans of the state of higher education. In 2023, FIRE awarded Harvard the “

worst score ever

” in its college free speech rankings. Volokh

moved to Hoover

from the UCLA School of Law for greater freedom to “be able to write and say what I think is right, regardless of whether I’m mostly, partly or not at all in step with my colleagues or the administration.” Nevertheless, they assess Harvard’s battle with the administration on its merits and believe the school is likely to prevail in court.

But if Harvard really wants independence from the current administration and those to follow, there’s another approach. On April 14, as

Harvard announced

its resistance to the government’s demands on X, Michigan’s

Hillsdale College responded

: “There is another way: Refuse taxpayer money.”

Founded in 1844 and recognized as an early bastion of anti-slavery sentiment, Hillsdale College resisted federal efforts in the 1970s and ’80s to force colleges to categorize their students by race. In 1984, rather than comply with government demands, the college began

refusing federal money

, including financial aid for its students. Instead, it raised money from private donors to make up the difference.

In 2007, Hillsdale announced it would no longer accept money from the state of Michigan — again, as a means of minimizing any levers government officials might use against the school. Instead, it relies on private funding, which has built Hillsdale’s endowment to

over US$900 million

(C$1.25 billion).

Since then, a few other colleges — mostly religious in nature — have emulated Hillsdale. With an endowment of over US$53 billion, Harvard University is especially well-positioned to assert its independence from government oversight and interference. Demonstrating its financial strength, last month, Harvard began

offering free tuition

to students whose families earn less than US$200,000 a year.

Like all American individuals and institutions, Harvard enjoys constitutional protections against government meddling. But if the school really wants to assert its freedom from politicians and from an increasingly alienated public, it should look to itself and its supporters for funding.

National Post

• J.D. Tuccille: DEI is in retreat
• Harry Rakowski: Donors should not fund Harvard’s antisemitism

Western democracies face increasing pressures toward censorship, now is the time for Canada to distinguish itself as a nation that protects robust debate. The three major federal parties have released their platforms, revealing dramatically different approaches to free expression. Not only do the platforms make very different commitments — the platforms also provide insight into how the party leaders think about this fundamental freedom: do they see free expression foundational to democracy, or as threatening it?

The NDP

platform

implicitly positions speech as something to be suspicious of and requiring curtailment. While asserting they would ensure that Charter rights are protected, they immediately pivot to expanding support for the CBC and local journalism as “critical during this time of misinformation, disinformation, and U.S. threats.” To be clear, a diverse and vibrant press is beneficial to democracy. But there is nothing about funding the CBC that is constitutionally required. And the NDP’s stance ignores that the CBC has its own perspective. The NDP’s definition of the term “misinformation” is undoubtedly broad, and will ultimately be selective. When the government defines these terms, there’s a non-zero chance that they will define them in a way that captures the speech of their opponents.

Perhaps most concerning is the NDP

promise

of “concrete action to protect Canada from misinformation and disinformation — whether it comes from foreign actors, bad-faith influencers, or unregulated ‘media’ platforms.” This sounds frighteningly like an intention to target independent media outside “state-sanctioned” outlets, essentially putting government in the role of truth arbiter — a dangerous proposition for a democracy.

Additionally, the NDP proposes legislation to criminalize “residential school denialism” — a likely unconstitutional measure with unclear boundaries that could stifle legitimate historical inquiry.

The Liberal

platform

says significantly less about free expression, but what it does say is concerning. It begins by claiming “the Liberal party is the party of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” because the Charter was introduced by a Liberal government. This partisan framing of our constitution is deeply divisive and unhelpful.

The platform promises to “stand up for the Charter,” but ignores how the Liberal government has repeatedly undermined Charter rights. The Trudeau government illegally invoked the Emergencies Act, made unconstitutional amendments to the Canada Elections Act (struck down by courts), proposed censorship legislation (Bill C-63) that would have put people under house arrest for future speech crimes, and passed the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act, which undermine free expression.

The Liberals also propose expanding the Court Challenges Program, which uses taxpayer money to fund litigation against the government’s own laws. Research from the MacDonald Laurier Institute has shown this program has an overwhelming progressive bias, with 96 percent of funding going to progressive activism.

Their platform also proposes criminalizing obstruction of access to places of worship, schools, and community centers. While ostensibly responding to concerning protests targeting Jewish communities, such “bubble zone” laws often restrict legitimate protest activity and get the government involved in determining which topics of protest are permissible — fundamentally undermining the content-neutral right to free expression.

The Conservative

platform

contains multiple commitments to free expression. It promises to modernize laws against online harassment and strengthen child protection online “without infringing on the civil liberties of law-abiding Canadians” — a direct criticism of the Liberals’ Bill C-63.

The platform proposes tougher sentences for religious property damage and penalties for masked rioters. While these offenses are already criminalized, the Conservatives emphasize stronger enforcement.

What distinguishes the Conservative platform is its dedicated section on free speech, which begins by quoting Wilfrid Laurier: “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.” It commits to restoring free speech through a Freedom of Speech Act that would repeal “liberal censorship laws” and restore Canadian news on platforms like Meta — a direct reference to repealing the Digital Streaming Act.

The Conservatives also commit to protecting free speech on campus by requiring universities to enforce Charter guarantees of free expression as a condition for federal funding — addressing the well-documented challenges to academic freedom at Canadian universities. This is good. A university without a commitment to freedom of expression isn’t a very good university. The situation has gotten so bad that the Canadian Constitution Foundation is

helping

a group of professors and a former student at the University of British Columbia sue that university over academic freedom.

How we approach free expression reflects our vision for Canada. The NDP sees speech as something to be suspicious of and requiring government control. The Liberals offer rhetoric about Charter rights while having undermined them for years. The Conservatives position freedom of expression as central to Canadian identity.

When casting your ballot on April 28, consider which vision of free expression aligns with your values for Canada’s future. Can we be trusted with the freedom to speak, debate and disagree? Or does the government need to protect us from “harmful” ideas?

Free debate is essential to discovering truth and maintaining a healthy democracy. As voters, we should demand that all parties commit to robust protections for this fundamental right.

National Post

• Christine Van Geyn: Free speech is backsliding across Europe. It must be an election issue here
• Christine Van Geyn: Court ruling condemning use of Emergencies Act must be upheld

In November, Matthew Boswell, Canada’s Commissioner of Competition,

stated

, “The Competition Bureau conducted an extensive investigation that found that Google has abused its dominant position in online advertising in Canada by engaging in conduct that locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools, excluding competitors, and distorting the competitive process. Google’s conduct has prevented rivals from being able to compete on the merits of what they have to offer, to the detriment of Canadian advertisers, publishers and consumers.”

Commissioner Boswell must be pleased that United States District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in a

detailed opinion

, ruled last week that Google engaged in unlawful monopolistic conduct in controlling the software used by publishers to manage online ads as well as the exchanges used to buy and sell them.

As Brinkema wrote in 2023, “The essence of antitrust law is to try to keep the system working by recognizing that, at certain points, some companies may get too big for their own good, they’re self-imploding, or the technology may become so dominant that it’s just crushing all other elements where there can be innovation.”

Every newspaper or website that wants to sell ads pretty much has to use Google’s software to place and match ad buyers and sellers. And the reason is Google has bought a bunch of companies and engaged in practices like tying its products together and excluding rivals from the market by restricting whether its customers can use non-Google services. As a result, Google’s middleman software services take 30 to 50 per cent  of revenue spent by advertisers on ads meant for publications, instead of one to two per cent. So, if the judge finds a good remedy, it could mean billions of dollars more for the press, because Google won’t be able to take nearly as much.

Here are five key points about her decision.

• First, this decision is now the  third  loss for Google. In 2023, Google

lost a monopolization case

to Epic Games over its control of the Android app store. Last year, the company

lost a case over its control of search

. Last week, it lost a third case over yet another line of business. These decisions build on each other; Brinkema cited the decision in the search case to describe why Google had control over so many small advertisers. Referencing across the cases will continue to happen as we move into the remedy phase. Additionally, private and state antitrust cases, like a case led by the Texas attorney general on adtech currently working its way through the courts, will

benefit

from this decision.

• Second, this decision shows antitrust cases don’t have to take as long as they do. The complaint for this one was filed in January of 2023, and it has been decided just 26 months later.

• Third, all three judges overseeing these Google cases have criticized the behaviour of the company’s lawyers, specifically calling out its top lawyer, Kent Walker, for false claims of privilege and for allowing the wholesale destruction of documents while on a litigation hold. Judge Brinkema wrote, “Google employees and executives also misused the attorney-client privilege. For example, Kent Walker, an attorney who served as Google’s President of Global Affairs and oversaw the company’s legal team, marked an email in which he asked his colleagues for reactions to a New York Times article as ‘privileged …’”

Google’s systemic disregard of the evidentiary rules regarding spoliation of evidence and its misuse of the attorney-client privilege may well be sanctionable. But because the court has found Google liable under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act based on trial testimony and admitted evidence, including those Google documents that were preserved, it need not adopt an adverse inference or otherwise sanction Google for spoilation at this juncture. As in Google Search, the court’s decision not to sanction “should not be understood as condoning Google’s failure to preserve chat evidence.”

• Fourth, this decision is an illustration of how judges are updating antitrust law as they confront modern commercial realities. When judges write decisions like this, they interpret the laws and set future precedents. Judge Brinkema noted that Google wasn’t blocking rivals, but customers. She also pointed out investment patterns of a monopolist — a willingness to sacrifice short-run benefits to harm smaller competitors for longer term benefits.

• Fifth, the likelihood Google is taken apart has gone up. The judges involved in the various Google decisions are likely going to have to co-ordinate with one another over how to manage the various remedies, and at some point, consent decrees over behavioural elements are simply too complex to administer, especially when the legal authorities within the company are engaged in bad faith. They may need to allow technical committees managing such decrees to share information.

The broader dynamic here, as illustrated by the Google decision, is unmistakable. The antitrust revolution rolls on. Canada, make sure your Competition Bureau has the resources it needs to be a leader in fighting against monopolists who abuse their market power.

National Post

Matt Stoller is the publisher of the newsletter BIG and the author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.”

Jagmeet Singh is urging people to vote NDP and calling it the only defence against a Liberal “

supermajority

.

” It is a rather pathetic conclusion to Singh’s time as party leader, but par for the course when taking into account the entirety of his career in federal politics.

 

When Singh first became NDP leader in 2017, he did so with a mandate to build a young, multiracial coalition to challenge Justin Trudeau’s place as leader of Canada’s progressive movement. That coalition has been built, but they’re not voting for the NDP. 

 

Win or lose the federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives made themselves the standard-bearers for the aspirations and anger of millennial and gen Z Canadians. Arrayed against them are the resurgent Liberal party led by Mark Carney and his almighty base of boomers.

 

Where do the Singh and the NDP fit into this remarkable realignment? Apparently nowhere. 

 

Contrary to Singh’s delusional past assertions that he would one day become prime minister, nobody ever seriously expected an NDP government under his leadership. Under his leadership, the NDP lost 15 seats in 2019, along with the party’s lowest vote share in 15 years, and that was only his first election as leader.  

 

This year, he is reduced to begging for enough votes to prevent a Liberal majority government, and his party will be lucky to get close to 10 seats. It will set a new standard for disastrous leadership in Canadian politics. 

 

Some diehard NDP supporters

have declared

that Singh will be remembered as some kind of great statesman whose efforts gave birth to expansive new social programs like pharmacare and dental care. 

 

There is some truth to this, as Liberal concessions to these ideas were Singh’s price for supporting the Liberal minority government from 2019 until now, but Canadians remember events in strange ways. 

 

Few recall how Pierre Trudeau’s many social democratic reforms in the 1970s during his own minority government

only passed

with the NDP’s support, let alone award the NDP their share of the accolades.

 

Considering how surveys suggest that Canadians credit Mark Carney for axing the consumer carbon tax, rather than the long Conservative opposition that made the tax into a vial of political poison. Singh would be a fool to believe he will ever receive his laurels. 

 

Instead, if Canadians remember Singh at all, it will be for trying to ride the wave of millennial Democrats like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and others elected before the pandemic. With social media savvy and popular appeal, AOC and company were seen as the

youthful torchbearers

of Bernie Sanders and the future of the Democratic Party’s left-wing. 

 

Never one to pass up an opportunity to import American political trends, Singh hopped on

TikTok

to spread the NDP message and show off his dance moves. AOC even

granted him

an audience on Twitch where they played video games for a live streamed audience. 

 

So impactful were Singh’s hip efforts to reach out to Canada’s disaffected, terminally online youth that they began running away to the Conservative party. The problem for Singh is that his outlook was crafted in a different time.

 

The last dregs of rebellious but hopeful Occupy Wall Street-style rhetoric died during the pandemic, replaced by a dull anger and frustration at yet another setback for young people in North America. When aged, paranoid columnists

decry

the rise in populism in Canada and think it cannot be anything but a Trumpist ideological satellite, they are missing the point completely. 

 

Canada is not a great place to come of age right now, and the sense of hopelessness for the future felt by younger people cannot be ignored. They bore the brunt of the pandemic in the name of protecting the elderly, and have not received their due for shouldering that tremendous economic and psychological burden. 

 

Apathy towards Canada among them has risen to dangerous levels, with Angus Reid finding just 39 per cent

aged 18 to 34

have an unconditional attachment to the country at the end of last year. 

 

 

Their anger is fully justified, and Pierre Poilievre has captured the mood among them by bashing the “gatekeepers” and promising to bring back Canada’s promise to the youth and the have-nots. 

 

Even if this youthful infusion cannot push the Conservatives over the top this time, it may simply be a biological inevitability that their coalition will age into power as the demographic weight of boomers declines.

 

This era could have been primetime for Singh and the NDP had they adopted a left-wing populist message, the likes of which

have found

great success

in Europe and Mexico in recent years. Instead, they attached themselves to the Liberal government that upheld this brutal status quo, rendering them into their lackeys in the public eye. 

 

If the NDP are not seen as the party of change and the aspirations of the hard up, they are failing. Under Singh, the NDP are so far from that after six years of supporting the Liberal government that Mark Carney, an elite central banker, is seen as a superior change candidate. 

 

At the ballot box, Singh and the NDP will receive the body blow of all the frustrations with the Trudeau government. The failures of the past decade to build a wealthier and more just Canada has created a generation of the hopeless, and Singh’s NDP are its last visible vestige after Carney managed to convincingly set himself apart from Trudeau for millions of voters. 

 

The English-language debate was probably the last time most Canadians will ever see or hear Singh on television. He spent most of it behaving like a newly elected student councillor, and attempting to talk over Poilievre. On social media and living rooms across Canada, Liberals and Conservatives were united in expressing their desire for Singh to simply go away. 

 

Considering how few people will likely vote NDP on Monday, Canadians are relatively united at least on this matter. It will be one result of the election that should make most people very happy. 

 

National Post 

• Carson Jerema: Poilievre could only ever satisfy the media by becoming a Liberal
• Jamie Sarkonak: Just like Trudeau, Carney is planning to go full steam ahead on DEI