Andrew Coyne is an intelligent man and a victim of the recently discovered mental affliction which is caused by the lawful elevation of Donald J. Trump to the office of President of the United States twice. Unfortunately, Andrew’s column in the Globe and Mail on Aug. 29 is demented rubbish. He wrote that “the dictatorship of Donald Trump is no longer a theoretical possibility or even a distant probability. It is an imminent reality.” He accuses Trump of accumulating powers “illegally, in brazen defiance of the Constitution.” He cites the appropriately approved addition of a ballroom to the White House as indicative of his determination to remain there after the end of his term, and suggested he might simply remain in the White House, either having taken it upon himself to cancel the 2028 presidential election, or to allow it to proceed and ignore its results, both of which he would be able to do, despite the post-Roosevelt prohibition of a third term as president, because the senior officials of the armed forces at that point will be his appointees. He concludes: “That Mr. Trump is bent on making himself dictator is no longer in doubt.” It is well-established that the U.S. has a non-political military.

Almost every sentence is untrue, though Andrew, in his hatred of Trump, is in a delirium, and his lies are mitigated. Trump has not violated the Constitution; and Andrew construes this as the result of Trump having gagged and intimidated his opponents, packed all three coequal branches of the United States government with corrupt placemen and co-conspirators in the ultimate American crime (of which no one has ever been convicted), of systematically violating and revoking the Constitution of the United States. The chances of Donald Trump attempting to remain as president after January 20, 2029 are less than zero. I recognize that Donald Trump as a public personality, is an acquired taste, or not. As I’ve known him for many years, socially and as a business associate, I know him to be courteous, entertaining, and a loyal friend. I agree with Andrew and others that some manifestations of Trump’s egocentricity are unattractive, even in an office which requires anyone who aspires to it to have a mighty and indomitable ego.

The District of Columbia is under direct federal authority and the partisan Democratic mayor of Washington (Muriel Bowser), who was an enthusiastic champion of the racist operation, Black Lives Matter, has thanked Trump for deploying the National Guard and sharply reducing crime rates. Presidents routinely deploy the National Guard to deal with what could be called insurrections, a condition that did apply to Los Angeles last month when the mayor, Karen Bass, declined to restrain riots by violent criminals. Trump has a clear mandate to deport illegal immigrants. Year by year, Trump has expelled far fewer than those deported by President Barack Obama. The president can fire any employee of the executive branch of the federal government, like any other employer.

The FBI, CIA, and NIA in the late months of the Obama-Biden administration participated in attempting to have a pastiche of lies and defamations about Trump (the Steele Dossier), commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign, treated as authentic intelligence that could be accepted by the media without verification. (It has since been discredited.) The FBI filed false affidavits in support of illegal telephone intercepts of Trump’s campaign. The voting rules in the 2020 presidential election were radically altered by Congress and state governors and elected state courts and not, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures, supposedly to facilitate voting during the COVID pandemic. Trump has not remotely challenged the system as directly. Former FBI director James Comey responded under oath to a congressional committee “i don’t know” or “I don’t recall” 245 times when asked about these and other events around the 2016 election, less than two years later.

In 2020, the country had a very extended election period and 81 million ballots, most unsolicited, were mailed out and many millions of them were cast unverifiably in drop boxes. The number of people voting in the 2020 presidential election rose by 22 million compared to 2016 and after the pandemic, the number of voters shrank by at least four million in 2024. In 2020, if 50,000 votes had flipped in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won. Stolen or questionable elections occur in the U.S., (1876, 1960, 2000), but generally there is some review process; the courts declined to hear or judge all the cases contesting the constitutionality of the changes in the 2020 election. Trump and his followers had a legitimate grievance.

Trump has prevailed against overwhelming media opposition, was heavily outspent in last year’s election, faced utterly spurious indictments, and was even given insufficient security protection against potential assassins in his campaign. He is widely portrayed as a boob and a gangster but in his career prior to being inaugurated president, as a quality builder and developer, immense reality television star, and innovative political strategist, he achieved more than any president except those vital to the founding of the country (Washington, Jefferson, Madison), and the victorious commanders of great armies in just wars, (Grant, Eisenhower), and possibly Herbert Hoover for his administration of relief to war-ravaged Europe after World War I. In 2016 he saw a level of public discontent that no one else recognized and became the first person elected president of the U.S., never to have sought or held any public office or high military command.

No one has ever been so severely and illegally obstructed as president and as a presidential candidate as he has, and he has become a considerable president in reorienting the country club Republican Party of the Bushes, McCain and Romney, to crack the Democratic fiefdoms of working class and ethnic minority votes, and in producing and broadening prosperity, shaping up the Western Alliance, ending the invasion of the United States by illegal immigrants, attacking the forces of wokeness in the universities, forcefully reducing crime rates, drastically reducing the fiscal and trade deficits, attracting in seven months nearly $15 trillion of new investment to the United States, destroying the Iranian nuclear military program and evicting men from girls’ sports and requiring mature approvals of trans-gender changes. This will not be undone by venomous and ignorant piffle from the media, especially the Trump-deranged and chronically bigoted Canadian media.

National Post

Although Prime Minister Mark Carney has degrees from Harvard and Oxford and experience running two central banks, his fiscal plan doesn’t appear to be taking a page out of the book of famed economists like Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes, but is instead adopting strategies outlined in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

On Wednesday,

Carney told reporters

that the upcoming fall budget will be “an austerity and investment budget at the same time,” noting that, “We need to rein in spending, we need to find efficiencies … that create the room for these big investments.” The following day, his finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne,

said

, “We’re going to spend less so we can invest more.”

Congratulations to anyone who realizes the government can’t be both austere and embark on a massive spending spree — you haven’t yet succumbed to Liberal “

doublethink

.” What Carney is really saying is that Ottawa plans to focus on different priorities, cutting some areas in order to increase spending in others.

But the Liberals don’t have any fiscal room to manoeuvre. Last year’s

fall economic statement

projected a $31-billion deficit in the 2026-27 fiscal year, and if past experience is any indication, it will be much higher than that.

During the last election, the

Liberals promised

nearly $33 billion in new spending in the coming year. And since that time, they’ve announced a slew of new expenditures, including a

$9.3-billion increase

in defence spending. To pay for all the new goodies, Champagne asked federal departments to find ways to

cut spending

by 7.5 per cent in the upcoming fiscal year.

But here’s the rub: the government has already said that major transfers to individuals and other levels of government — which collectively represent nearly half of program expenses — will not be touched. Military and law enforcement will also be spared from the chopping block.

Meanwhile, the fiscal outlook has significantly worsened since the government’s last economic statement. The

unemployment rate

hit a nine-year high of 7.1 per cent, after the economy shed 66,000 jobs in August. Many businesses throughout the country are hanging by a thread, unable to withstand the punishment of U.S. tariffs for much longer.

This will further strain the public treasury through increased employment insurance and other benefits, at the same time as Ottawa dropped many of its counter-tariffs, which means less money in government coffers. And, of course, public debt charges will only increase.

Even the Liberal election platform only expected to find a paltry $6 billion in savings in the coming year, which will barely cover the cost of the

$5-billion bailout program

for companies affected by tariffs that Carney announced on Friday.

In order to get buy-in from the Canadian public for their fiscally ruinous plan, the Liberals are relying on the Orwellian concept of “

doublespeak

,” in which the meaning of words are altered to make the truth more palatable.

They’re not engaging in reckless new spending programs after the previous government managed to more than double the national debt in less than a decade, you see — they’re “investing” in Canadians.

To further obscure reality, Carney has promised that the next

budget will separate

operational spending from capital expenses. This will allow him to balance the operating budget, while still running sky-high deficits on the capital side.

If the government were a business, this might make sense, as short-term capital losses can be expected to turn into long-term gains when those investments start paying off.

But government is not a business. Most of the public infrastructure it “invests” in — from roads to fighter jets — never see any returns. On the contrary, they only add to the government’s long-term maintenance costs.

Some of the new spending measures — such as the massive increase in the military budget intended to meet our NATO commitment of spending two per cent of GDP on defence — is certainly necessary. And there’s no question that Canada is in desperate need of new large-scale infrastructure projects, such as pipelines and ports.

But like his predecessor, Carney has shown a preference for centrally planning the economy rather than unleashing the power and potential of the free market and attracting private investors.

The Carney government’s signature piece of legislation, the

Building Canada Act

, for example, does not seek to reduce regulation and red tape across the board in order to attract private investment; it only gives the green light to projects that the Liberals deem to be in the “national interest.”

No one should thus be surprised if this government uses the

Trans Mountain pipeline

— a boondoggle the Trudeau Liberals ended up footing the bill for after scaring off its private owners — as a template for future infrastructure projects.

Carney’s ambitious agenda will be very costly and it cannot be financed by shaving a few points off the operating budgets of some departments, no matter how much the Liberals would like us to believe they’ve seen the light and transformed into the party of “austerity.”

Canadians should not be fooled by Liberal doublespeak. When it comes to mortgaging our children’s future for short-term political gain, this government is just like the last.

• Opinion: Despite the ‘cuts,’ Carney will likely out-spend Trudeau
• Matthew Lau: The unrelenting growth of Canada’s wealth-destroying public service

The government of Quebec
announced
last week that it would soon introduce legislation to ban prayers in public spaces. “The proliferation of prayers in the street is a serious and sensitive issue in Quebec,” said Jean-François Roberge, the minister responsible for secularism. The announcement comes a few weeks after a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a public prayer in front of Montreal’s most famous Catholic Church, the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal.
 

This is not the first incident of the sort in the city. After a similar demonstration in the middle of a major commercial artery last winter Premier François Legault had expressed his unease: “Seeing people who pray in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec. When we want to pray, we go to a church or we go to a mosque, but not in public places.”
 
 

Roberge’s announcement comes at a time when Legault’s party, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), has dropped to third place
in the polls
, a year away from the next provincial election. For months now, the caquistes have been looking for an issue that would help them rise from the dead. They may have found it by this new attack on Quebecers’ fundamental rights. 
 

Contrary to what the premier has stated, freedom of religion is not limited to places of worship or private spaces. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
states, in its article 18, that freedom of religion “includes … freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Like freedom of expression, freedom of religion would be meaningless if it only protected the practice of one’s religion in private.
 

Based on what could be heard last week during
a popular radio show
, most Quebecers appear to be in favour of the proposed ban. Proponents of the measure cite the unease caused by Islamic prayers in public, that those demonstrations are meant to provoke, that they disturb public order and that Islamists are seeking to impose their way of life in the province. Each of those arguments can be reasonably replied to, but in Quebec, when Islam is concerned, people don’t listen to reason.
 

Understandably, in a province that has thrown Catholicism overboard decades ago, public religious manifestations cause a deep malaise. But unease is not a sufficient reason to infringe on a minority’s fundamental rights. 
 

Yes, some of the demonstrations, tied as they are to the war in Gaza, are provocations. The demonstrators want to shock the public in the hopes of raising awareness to their cause. This is exactly the kind of unpopular behaviour that is protected by freedom of expression, as long as the demonstrators do not break the law, for instance by blocking traffic or intimidating others. If they cross those lines, the police already possess all the tools necessary to remedy the situation. An all-encompassing ban on prayers in public spaces is neither necessary nor reasonable.
 
 

Separatist intellectual Mathieu Bock-Côté, who inspired many of the CAQ’s nationalist policies,
wrote

in Le Journal de Montréal

that Islamic street players are “symbolic aggressions”: “We are talking about a conquering Islam, that is to say, an Islam shaped by Islamism and carried by waves of migration that are transforming the demographic composition of our societies.” However, Islamists are in no position to “transform the demographic composition” of Quebec, where Muslims represent
a mere five per cent
of the population, compared to 54 per cent for Catholics and 27 per cent for those who have no religion. 
 

For make no mistake: as with bill 21 banning the wearing of religious symbols by teachers, only one religion, Islam, is being targeted here. Other religious groups, including Catholics, have held ceremonies in public in Quebec for decades without anyone challenging their right to do so.  
 

The promised legislation will very probably violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. It is not yet known for certain if the Legault government will pre-emptively invoke the charters’ notwithstanding clause, but we do know that they have done so for two previous pieces of legislation, bill 21, already mentioned, and bill 96 strengthening the protection of the French language. This abuse of the notwithstanding clause is extremely serious, for in effect it deprives Quebecers of the right to challenge rights-infringing measures adopted by the state. Citizens are left with no means of defence, as if the charters did not exist.
 

And so it is that Quebecers’ fundamental rights are being slowly but surely eroded. Sadly, that worrisome trend is met with an immense collective shrug. 
 

André Pratte is a communications consultant and a former senator.

• Leslie Roberts: Quebec calls street prayer what it is — intimidation
• Matthew Lau: The unrelenting growth of Canada’s wealth-destroying public service

The federal government spent

$71.1 billion

on personnel costs in fiscal year 2024-25, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has estimated, up from $69.6 billion the year before. Unfortunately, even though the number of public service jobs fell by about three per cent in 2025, the count of full-time equivalents, which accounts for whether those jobs were full-time or part-time, continued to grow, helping drive the cost increase. And despite the slight decline in the count of public servants in 2025, last year still capped off a decade of significant growth: from 257,034 in 2015, the federal public service

expanded

by more than 100,000, or over 39 per cent, to 357,965 by 2025.

For the high and increasing costs Canadian taxpayers pay for federal public servants, is there at least a good return? Are the federal public servants working diligently and efficiently to provide better services and a better-run federal government?

The PBO

report

gives no opinion on this, but its contents still give readers an indication. Published on Aug. 28, the report provides a cost estimate for personnel costs in fiscal 2024-25, which ended on March 31. Why is it an estimate? Because even five months after the federal government’s fiscal year-end, the actual number is not available: the federal government still has not published its 2024-25 public accounts.

In fact, last year’s public accounts for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024 were not

tabled

in the House of Commons until December 16. For comparison, Canada’s publicly traded banks have an Oct. 31 year-end and publish their annual financial statements in the first week of December. To repeat, even though Canadian banks have a fiscal year-end that is seven months later than the federal government’s, last year they published their financial statements earlier, because the banks took approximately one month to publish their financial statements, but the federal government took over eight.

That the federal government takes eight times as long as the private sector standard to complete a routine task does not inspire confidence in the federal public service’s efficiency and productivity. To be fair, financial reporting timelines may not be representative of federal government activities as a whole. A rule of thumb, notably

applied

by

Milton Friedman

among other economists, is that government generally spends about twice as much as private companies in a competitive environment would need to accomplish the same thing.

Consuming twice the resources to achieve the same result is not as bad as eight times. On the other hand, it is not good, either. It suggests Canada’s 357,965 federal public servants are doing work that could instead by done by 178,982 workers. The approximately $71.1 billion taxpayers spent on federal public servants last fiscal year probably should have been $35.5 billion instead. And taxpayers should have been able to see the reported actual cost of those public servants by the first week of May, as opposed to being provided PBO estimates five months after the fiscal year-end.

There are two other things taxpayers should understand to evaluate whether they are getting good value for their tax dollars. First, the federal public service is not a complete count of jobs that are federally funded. The CBC has

over 7,000 employees

, but as employees of a Crown corporation they are not counted as part of the federal public service. The employees of electric vehicle battery plants receiving billions in taxpayer support are essentially government-funded employees too, even if they are considered private sector workers in the official statistics. And there are many other similar examples.

Second, much of the federal public service is not involved in delivering goods and services that benefit Canadians. Those who take eight times as long as they should to produce financial statements, even if they are inefficient, are doing valuable work; financial reporting is a valuable activity. But many other things the government does destroys value instead of creating it. For example, the approximately 2,000 public servants working in Canada’s regional economic development agencies were not providing valuable public services, but instead were involved in figuring out how to hand out combined corporate welfare payments of over $1 billion annually. Taxpayers have been paying regional economic development bureaucrats to lose their money.

Notably, while the federal public service has grown significantly in the past decade, wasting many billions of dollars, there has been considerably lower growth in the number of private sector workers whose taxes are being wasted. In comparison to the 39 per cent growth in the count of federal public servants from 2015 to 2025, combined private sector

employment

and self-employment in Canada increased only 15 per cent in the same time period.

Is it any wonder Canada is suffering a productivity crisis? The growth of government must be reversed.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer. 

It’s time to disband the Concordia Student Union. This year’s CSU student handbook doesn’t look like a guide to academic life. It looks like a political manifesto. Plastered with slogans such as “Stop Genocide” and “Free Palestine,” it positions Concordia not as a university for all students, but as a staging ground for militant activism. For Jewish students, the message is unmistakable: their presence and perspectives are unwelcome.

In the recap of “What did you miss at Concordia last year?” the guide details protests and clashes, and concludes with: “This is … the many ways Concordia students have mobilized against campus repression and have continued to call for the university to adopt BDS. The legacy of organizing on campus is often too quick to be co-opted by the administration … It is our responsibility to engage in the movement in whatever capacity we can.” This is not neutral reporting — it is an instruction manual for activism, endorsed and distributed by the very body meant to represent all students.

On paper, the student union advocates for affordability, housing, and mental health services. But in recent years it has also led the political charge to “Free Palestine,” demanding Concordia divest from defence industries, sever ties with Israeli universities, and cut partnerships linked to NATO and the police.

These are not student service issues. They are ideological ultimatums designed to force the university into global conflicts. Last November’s strike vote was proof: rather than focus on concrete improvements to campus life, the CSU mobilized students into a two-day shutdown to advance a BDS-style agenda.

Symbolic stunts have followed. Funeral processions were staged on campus to “mourn Palestine,” turning student space into ideological theatre. Demonstrations have spilled into confrontations with pro-Israel peers, at times requiring riot police to intervene. One incident left three people arrested and two suspended. What began as activism has devolved into intimidation.

On its own website, the CSU declares: “Two things are essential: that we are beholden to our membership, and that our funds are used responsibly.” On both counts, it has failed.

A student union’s mandate is to represent all students fairly, to fight for affordable education, and to improve access to essential services. Instead, the CSU has targeted a segment of its membership, weaponized compulsory student fees for international campaigns, and abandoned the principle of inclusivity that justifies its existence.

Student unions are not sovereign political bodies. They exist under the authority of the university. That recognition is not unconditional. It rests on the assumption that a union serves its entire student body, not just the loudest faction. The CSU has violated that trust.

While the Quebec government cannot directly dissolve a student union, it has acknowledged the problem. The Ministry of Higher Education told National Post it is “aware” of the situation and “in contact with the establishments concerned.” That puts Concordia on notice.

The real authority lies with Concordia’s Board of Governors. It is the board that has the power — and the duty — to act. If a student union ceases to fulfill its mandate, the board can revoke recognition, restructure it, or call for new elections. Doing so would not silence student voices. On the contrary, it would restore representation to its rightful purpose: defending the needs of all students — housing, mental health, academic rights — not serving as a megaphone for divisive international politics.

There is nothing wrong with students caring deeply about world affairs. Universities should be spaces of debate and dissent. But there is everything wrong with forcing all students — through mandatory fees and compulsory membership — to bankroll a one-sided campaign rooted in hostility toward Israel and, by extension, Jewish students.

Enough is enough. Concordia’s Board of Governors must step in. Dissolve the CSU in its current form. Rebuild a structure that truly represents the student body. And let this serve as a precedent for other student unions at other universities: higher education is a place for ideas, not a staging ground for hate.

National Post

Pierre Poilievre’s call for the Carney government to

permanently scrap the temporary foreign workers program

may well prove to be a winner with voters who agree with the Conservative leader that the Liberals broke the immigration system.

But that doesn’t make it good policy, or even a smart political move in the long run.

Poilievre was accompanied at the announcement by the party’s immigration critic, Michelle Rempel Garner, who is the driving force behind the policy.

She said that young Canadians can’t even think about buying a house or starting a family without a good paying job. Today, they can’t secure those jobs because they can’t find entry-level positions, even with a university degree. Those of us who are parents of young people struggling to launch are all too aware of the cold reality of a

youth unemployment rate of around 15 per cent

.

Rempel Garner said the social contract has been broken and part of the blame lies with the temporary foreign workers program, which has foreigners competing with Canadians for entry-level jobs. The majority of those positions are on farms, in restaurants and in homes as child-care providers. But as the government’s own statistics show, permits are issued for jobs as diverse as graphic designers and comedians.

Poilievre took up the case from there, pointing out that what he calls “generation screwed” is the first generation of Canadians that can’t afford a house.

He said the Liberals brought in “too many (workers), too fast,” and he’s not wrong. After the pandemic, with the job vacancy rate heading towards one million, the government panicked and opened the floodgates by creating a parallel immigration system of temporary workers and international students. Then immigration minister

Sean Fraser ignored warnings by his own department

that allowing a tsunami of foreign students into the country, and allowing them to work off-campus, would lead to “program integrity” concerns.

Instead, he listened to employers who warned that the economy would seize up without hundreds of thousands of new workers.

In the event, the number of temporary workers increased 88 per cent and the number of international students by 126 per cent between 2019 and 2023. Work-permit–holder numbers rose to 1.58 million, or nearly seven per cent of the workforce.

The changes created a large pool of cheap labour: the Immigration Department’s own figures suggested that 80 per cent of international students were working more than 20 hours a week.

But, as the government was all too aware, the newcomers would be competing with Canadians for work once the economy cooled.

A

paper prepared for the Department of Employment and Social Development in 2023

, concluded that there was a negative correlation between the number of temporary workers employed and the annual earnings of Canadians employed in the same firm at the lowest levels. Not only that, but the number of temporary workers correlated with higher earnings for Canadian workers at the upper end of the firm’s earnings ladder. In other words, it was no wonder employers and bosses wanted more temporary workers: it made them richer.

The public intuited that the government had broken the system, undermining a remarkable consensus in favour of mass immigration.

A Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies last December

concluded that 65 per cent of voters believed Canada was accepting too many legal immigrants, up from just 35 per cent in March 2019.

The Liberals belatedly realized that they’d screwed up, and

reduced targets of temporary workers

to 82,000 a year and foreign students to 286,000 this year and 128,7000 next.

New restrictions ended the policy of allowing visitors to apply for a work permit while in Canada; restricted the work eligibility of spouses; and, brought in new rules that aligned post-graduation work permits to market needs. The goal remains to reduce the number of temporary–work-permit holders to five per cent of the workforce by the end of next year.

But as

then immigration minister Marc Miller admitted last year

: “We didn’t turn the taps down fast enough.”

Poilievre is likely aligned with Canadian public opinion in his criticism of Tim Hortons for increasing its use of temporary workers by 1,135 per cent in the last four years. (Tims said that less than five per cent of its workers are hired through the program, “generally in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available.” Still, that’s around 5,000 jobs.)

“The principle is very simple: Canadian jobs for Canadian workers,” Poilievre said this week. “Temporary foreign workers are not bad people — they are being taken advantage of by Liberal corporate elites who want to drive down wages. The time has come for decisive action.”

But while he has correctly identified the disease, it is less clear he has found the cure.

The Conservative plan would create a standalone program for seasonal agricultural workers and the food processing industry.

But ending the issuance of new permits cold turkey is likely to result in a completely different set of unintended consequences than the ill-advised policy that caused the problem in the first place.

The program should return to its original intent of allowing firms to hire foreign workers when qualified Canadians are not available, gradually reducing the number of temporary foreign workers as a share of the low-skill workforce.

That is what the Liberal reforms are trying to do, although as Poilievre pointed out, it looks like the government won’t hit its target in 2025.

However, a hard stop to the program is likely to give labour markets whiplash.

From a political perspective, it’s not an obvious win for Poilievre, even if the public is sympathetic to the intent.

His critics cite this as another example of him fighting the culture wars. That’s unfair: he was clear he was not demonizing foreign workers or regular immigrants.

But it is undoubtedly a hardening of the party’s position from the 2025 platform, which talked about dramatically reducing the number of temporary foreign workers and international students.

Poilievre seems to be more concerned about his leadership review in January than winning votes from people who didn’t vote for him last time.

This — and other immigration-reform positions to come — are Rempel Garner’s work and it should have been her show. There are many able Conservative MPs who have been reduced to bobbleheads by the leader and that must change.

Scrapping the temporary foreign worker program is a valid, if misguided, response to the crisis in youth unemployment.

But the risk for Poilievre is that he’s shrinking, not expanding, his pool of available voters.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

• John Ivison: Liberals’ EV mandate will see Canada’s carmakers paying billions to Elon Musk
• John Ivison: Carney’s reputation is holding up better outside of Canada than in

Leadership in the fight against antisemitism is measured not by words, but by action. This week, Quebec MP Anthony Housefather and 31 of his Liberal colleagues signed a statement on “the deplorable rise of antisemitism in Canada.”

It was a clear, moral and necessary acknowledgement of the hatred that is endangering Jewish-Canadians. The statement recognized that a Jewish woman was stabbed in Ottawa solely because she was Jewish; that synagogues, schools and Jewish-owned businesses are under threat; that monuments have been defaced; and that this reality has become chillingly normalized in our country.

It drew a link between October 7 and the rising tide of antisemitism, while also pointing to statistics showing that the Jewish community, representing just one per cent of the Canadian population, is the target of 70 per cent of hate crimes. The MPs are correct: antisemitism is a spreading plague that demands action.

And yet, the deafening silence in response spoke louder than the statement itself. Out of 169 Liberal members of Parliament, only 31 joined Housefather in signing the statement. Of those, at least five are Jewish.

In other words, just 26 non-Jewish Liberal MPs supported a document that did not advance a political agenda, but simply condemned hate against Jews. Worse, around 80 per cent of the governing caucus could not even bring themselves to sign a straightforward denunciation of antisemitism. The absence of signatures exposed a void of moral courage at the very heart of our government.

This is not new in Canada. Our history is littered with examples where political leaders failed the test of moral courage, only to apologize decades later. Ottawa has formally apologized for the horrors of the residential school system, the internment of Japanese-Canadians, the internment of Italian-Canadians, the head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants, the shameful Komagata Maru incident, the systemic racism faced by the No. 2 Construction Battalion, the mistreatment of LGBT citizens and the turning away of the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

The pattern is painfully familiar: when minorities are in crisis, political leaders lack the clarity of vision to defend them in real time. Decades later, apologies are offered, but the damage is irreparable. Something is deeply broken in our system when the protection of minorities depends on political expediency rather than enduring moral principles.

What makes this even more troubling is that these MPs are not calling on an abstract body to act — they’re calling out their own government. Their statement appealed to law enforcement, schools and institutions, but the government is not a bystander in this crisis. It has the power to legislate and to enforce. And yet, 137 of Housefather’s own colleagues failed to answer that call.

This failure matters. It’s a signal to antisemites that even in the face of violence, even when a Jewish woman is stabbed in public, condemnation is not unanimous, not resolute and not bipartisan.

My hope is that this fall, Parliament will table and pass serious hate crime legislation that addresses the new realities of social media and extremist networks. But even that will not be enough. A picture is building of a government failing to rally against antisemitism, while siding with Hamas and declaring it will recognize a Palestinian state, even though such a state currently does not exist by any reasonable definition.

Foreign policy is being driven not by logic but by internal demographics, and by an instinct to appease rather than to lead on principle. A system of government that bows to shifting demographics rather than moral clarity will always fail the most vulnerable.

Housefather’s letter, though admirable and probably meant to appease his constituents, would have carried greater weight had it been backed by more Liberals (including the prime minister) and by MPs from other parties. This would have sent a message that the fight against antisemitism transcends politics. The abysmal response to this statement did more harm than good, proving why the Jewish community and its allies are losing faith in this government.

If the Liberal party was once based on equity and inclusivity, this exercise has proven otherwise. Housefather’s letter will stand as historic evidence of who stood up to antisemitism and who was silent and complicit.

National Post

Avi Benlolo is the chairman and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.

• Richard Robertson: Ottawa must start taking online youth radicalization seriously
• David J. Bercuson: By recognizing ‘Palestine,” Carney upends 80 years of Canadian foreign policy