National Post (Politics) Archives

A stunning U.S. raid to capture Venezuela’s president came after a group of amateur intelligence analysts argued that satellite images reveal a Venezuelan launch site that could send ballistic missiles as far north as Washington, D.C.

There was no indication that the American attack had anything to do with the subject of the group’s claims, which the U.S. military dismissed earlier as “speculative” and one top expert rated as plausible but unproven by the evidence.

Days before the American strike on Venezuela, the private sleuths suggested military developments in Venezuela, with Russian, Chinese and Iranian troops stationed nearby, may have been the real reason for U.S. actions around the South American country – not the controversial targeting of alleged drug-smuggling vessels asserted by U.S. forces.

“I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with the drug boats,” said Lee Wheelbarger, a former U.S. Army technology developer who leads the private military analysists. “I think the drug boats are completely irrelevant. That’s an excuse.”

Meanwhile, separate images show a Cuban airfield with a collection of Russian “Kitchen” missiles designed to destroy warships, claims the same group.

Their findings, including a video compilation of satellite pictures, were presented recently at a meeting of the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute, a defence-oriented think tank.

A leading expert in the region said the group’s interpretation of the imagery “could be true” given Venezuela’s well-documented military ties with some of the States’ top geopolitical adversaries. But Evan Ellis, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College, said it falls short of proof of a dangerous new threat to the U.S.

“The things they said were plausible and they were consistent with more than 15 years of engagement with China, Russia and Iran,” said Ellis. “(But) not everything that they claimed by showing a satellite image was necessarily proven by that image … It’s not nothing but I don’t regard it as a significant ‘Ah-hah.’”

Even if the Venezuelans do have missile launchers buried in the mountain, the sites could be relatively easily destroyed by bombing the holes closed, said the academic.

Steven McLoud, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which covers South America, said earlier this week the organization does not comment on “speculative reporting or unverified premises.”

“Our mission remains focused on supporting regional stability, combating illicit activities, and working with our partners to address shared security challenges,” he said.

A Russian lawmaker did recently suggest that Russia may supply its new Oreshnik ballistic missiles to Venezuela, while internal U.S. documents indicate that Nicholas Maduro, the country’s president, requested missiles and other equipment from Russia, China and Iran.

There’s no question Venezuela has close military relations with those countries, as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and that it foments political unrest among its neighbours, said Ellis. A recent Chinese military exercise even involved training to fight in the Caribbean, a new paper of his recounts.

“Venezuela now for literally more than two decades has been one of the biggest strategic challenges to the U.S.,” the professor said. “To me the drugs the U.S. is currently going after are only the tip of the iceberg of a broader, long-time, multi-dimensional threat.”

Regardless of the accuracy of Wheelbarger’s analysis, the images he has collected and his conclusions about them help add an intriguing new dimension to the sudden clash between the U.S. and Venezuela.

President Donald Trump announced early Saturday that a strike on Venezuela had culminated with the capture and extraction of Nicholas Maduro, the country’s president, and his wife.

Before that, an armada of powerful American warships – including an aircraft carrier – patrolled the region as the U.S. destroyed at least 30 boats it insisted were carrying drugs to the States, and killed more than 100 people. The Trump administration said it was protecting Americans from lethal narcotics. Critics have condemned the actions as essentially extra-judicial executions of alleged criminals who would normally face arrest and trial. There has been particular concern about a case where survivors on a destroyed vessel were killed by a second missile attack.

Wheelbarger has been analysing military developments around the world for years, with a particular interest in Russian movements since Moscow’s first incursions into Ukraine in 2014. He says he has worked with Ukrainian forces, an assertion corroborated by a now-retired U.S. Air Force officer.

He presents some of the findings on his KLW online news channels, and says military and intelligence officials from the U.S., Canada and Europe are regular audience members.

For several years he was a “senior technologist” with the U.S. Army, a contractor developing night-vision equipment, communications gear and a system that enabled medics on the battlefield to transmit images back to military hospitals and then receive video instructions on a heads-up display. He was featured in a 1999 edition of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels program, which claimed “Wheelbarger’s electronic creations have extended the eyes and ears of America’s intelligence network.”

He also holds what many would consider fringe political beliefs – including the disproven theory that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and that American mainstream media is literally controlled by the Democratic Party. But one former American officer who worked with Wheelbarger in 2011 on chemical-biological-nuclear issues – then stayed in touch with him on a more personal level – suggested his open-source intelligence gathering should not be dismissed too readily.

“There were several times when I was confounded by what he presented to me, and then it blew my mind when I validated it was accurate: ‘Holy crap, OK, cool,’ ” said Michael Torres, a now-retired U.S. Air Force colonel. “One thing I’ve learned is he’s not going to put his word on the line unless he feels he can back it up. He will substantiate everything he has.”

Torres said he has seen pictures of Wheelbarger working with Ukrainian forces at the front.

Wheelbarger said he collects publicly available images from 28 satellites operated by several commercial-satellite companies, including Maxar Technologies, Planet Labs, Airbus Defence and Space, BlackSky, Capella Space, ICEYE, SkyFi, European Space Imaging, Apollo Mapping, Satellite Imaging Corp. and L3Harris Geospatial. He and colleagues also access images from ground cameras – sometimes by hacking into them. He employs another video method he declined to discuss on the record, gleans information from human sources around the world and follows aircraft movements with flight-tracking sites.

To help identify what can look to the untrained eye like undefined blobs on the ground, he’s obtained three-dimensional renderings of various military hardware. Those renderings are then placed over the objects revealed by satellite images to see if they match in shape and size, helping identify the equipment. Other objects – like fighter jets and tanks – are clearly recognizable.

In the video presented in Toronto, he points to images around Caracas that include a Russian base with a string of 94 T-72 and T-74 tanks. But most interesting is a mountain which he says has been all but hollowed out to create a subterranean military complex. An opening cut into the hill can be seen clearly in one image, surrounded by rebar that suggests work to create a massive concrete façade. Nearby, valleys have been filed with “millions of cubic yards” of excavated dirt, says Wheelbarger.

On the side of the mountain is an area cleared of vegetation with what appear to be three parallel, straight lines of holes. Wheelbarger and colleagues insist those are tubes for firing intermediate-range ballistic missiles, based on matching underground launch sites in Iran.

Intermediate-range missiles could reach as far north as the U.S. capital, said Jeff Nyquist, a writer and blogger on geopolitics and Wheelbarger collaborator.

The image of the Cuban airfield shows several cigar-shaped objects at the end of a runway, what the analysts say are Kitchen missiles. That’s the Western term for Russian weapons that travel at almost five times the speed of sound and can destroy naval ships. They’re fired from aircraft – usually the Tu-22 bomber. Those are not seen in the images but Wheelbarger said the jets could be disassembled and smuggled into Cuba on larger cargo planes.

Ellis of the Army War College said Venezuela’s military ties with U.S. rivals are longstanding and well known. Russia sold the country $12 billion in defence goods beginning in 2006, including a fleet of Sukhoi-30 fighter jets, helicopters, numerous S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and armoured vehicles. Moscow’s warships have made appearances, including last year when a Canadian frigate and surveillance helicopter joined two American ships to shadow a Russian fleet that visited Cuba and Venezuela.

China has supplied at least 27 of its K-8 fighters, Ellis said, as well as radars and other equipment. Iran sold Venezuela several of its fast-attack boats, trained Venezuelan special forces members and has collaborated on making drones.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more United States

TEL AVIV – Former IDF spokesman Alon Penzel is embarking on a Canada-wide speaking tour in coming weeks. He exhales deeply when asked why: he felt he had to, given the level of Oct. 7 denialism, minimalization and ignorance two years into the Gaza war.

“To speak up for those whose voice was taken,” he says; those who were murdered “but also to those tortured, raped, wounded, held hostage, abused; to the victims’ families and the massacre’s survivors, who want their story and the truth out, but some of them are still too traumatized, mentally unprepared, to share these stories themselves.”

When Penzel spoke June 2 last year at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, protesters broke windows, threatened him with bodily harm, and denied Hamas’s atrocities, screaming “lies,” and insisting there were no women raped. Harry Pettit, assistant professor of geography at Radboud, posted on social media that Penzel was a “terrorist,” said Israel was committing a “holocaust,” and that the school “should refuse to normalize platforming Zionists.”

Penzel authored “Testimonies Without Boundaries, Israel: October 7th 2023,” released just five months after the Hamas-led massacre, containing 50 first-hand accounts of the horrors.

The effort to record the brutality was a fight against

a tide of revision and propaganda

that continues to muddy the historical record, and erode global understanding, he explained over coffee in Tel Aviv.

“I documented the atrocities and wrote the book because already on October 7, I immediately foresaw the worldwide denial that we would face. I realized the urgency for documentation. I knew something must be created so that what happened would be commemorated for generations to come — and so I did,” he told the Post.

StandWithUs

will be organizing the speaking tour, according to Penzel, that will combine campuses and community events.

The world seems oddly inclined to accept the Hamas narrative, which delegitimizes the Gaza war and has successfully delegitimized Israel as a result, according to interviews with several writers, filmmakers, politicians and activists.

Penzel’s was the first compilation of its kind after the attacks, has since been translated into nine languages, and was used as research material for the Dinah Project – the U.K.-backed comprehensive study on October 7 sex crimes.

In the past 18 months, Penzel has spoken to tens of thousands of people in 16 countries, addressing the U.K. House of Lords and university campuses as well as journalists, diplomats and others.

“The reason I decided to write the book in the most unfiltered, graphic and unapologetic way possible, without censoring any of the atrocities’ details, as challenging as it is for the reader, was to shock the international community. To wake them up. To make them comprehend the extent of the cruelty, the evil, the inhumanity,” said Penzel, who worked for the IDF’s Unit for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which coordinates civilian and humanitarian affairs in the Palestinian territories.

His pain is compounded by the shock of watching much of the world taking at face value what comes from Hamas-supportive information sources, leaving Jews and Israelis outraged and heartbroken.

“A lot of what Hamas was doing was recorded. So it’s not like you can deny it, even though a lot of people around the world are trying to deny that this even happened,” said member of Knesset Shelly Tal Meron, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, reflecting the collective disbelief that, despite a flood of evidence, denialism and disinformation has gained traction.

“What we’re seeing around the world, all the demonstrations, all this chanting of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ I think that people basically don’t understand that means no state of Israel,” she said. “They have no idea which river and which sea. They don’t even know where we are on the globe. So a lot of people are watching TikToks of 30 seconds, and they’re sure that they’re experts on Israeli history.”

Minimization, willful ignorance and apathy on organizational levels have only emboldened the denialism, she said. As acting chair of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, she wrote more than 100 letters to human rights organizations and women’s organizations in the weeks following Oct. 7, asking them to condemn sexual assault as a weapon of war.

“It’s not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s not right or left. It’s simply the moral thing to do, to say that this is wrong. Nobody responded. Not one,” she told the Post, in a meeting facilitated by the Jerusalem Press Club, in Tel Aviv.

Yet on a political level, she’s found some success. Alongside France’s minister for gender equality, they’ve built a coalition of other leaders around the world, to acknowledge sexual assault as a weapon of war — “not only Israel, Yazidi women, Ukrainian women, Druze women that just suffered this in Syria and many other conflict areas.”

Certain countries that ordinarily would not have normalization with Israel agreed to join the committee (she would not specify which).

Igal Hecht, who released his Oct. 7 documentary film The Killing Roads online for free in hopes of cutting through misinformation, said “the further we get from the 7th, the easier it is for people to change the narrative. If you can deny what happened on the 7th, then it’s much easier to demonize and blood libel Israel.”

In Canada, many try to “blur the lines,” the Toronto filmmaker said, with “our state-funded broadcaster and mainstream media disregarding the 7th, glossing over it, to look at it like a footnote.”

That helps remove any context to Israel’s response, said Hecht, an Israeli-Canadian documentary filmmaker.

Hecht also said that colleagues in his industry “outright minimized the rape of Israeli women” and some even denied the rapes occurred at all. Other colleagues told him that there’s no proof Hamas was responsible for Oct. 7, he said.

***

Filmmaker Chris Atkins’ plane had lifted off from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Oct. 7, 2023, moments after Hamas attacked Israel, and he recalls being “horrified” as the news beamed into his phone.

He felt the urge to act. Simultaneously his friend, Egyptian-born human rights advocate Majed el-Shafie, had the same urge, hiring a cameraman in Israel to begin documenting the atrocities.

El-Shafie reached Atkins – both are Christian – to help sew together the footage, when the two agreed they had to continue the work together. It was the beginning of the documentary Dying To Live, screened for the first time in Toronto, in November 2024.

The film, which incorporates October 7 archival footage, takes viewers through areas devastated by violence, including kibbutzim and the site of the Nova music festival, as El Shafie conducts interviews with survivors, victims’ families and those affected by the attacks.

In one segment, El-Shafie had a frank discussion with a Palestinian man, who “justified the attacks, diminished the attacks,” he told the Post.

For Atkins, the denialism hit home.

“I actually have family members who either don’t believe October 7 happened, or that it was an inside job planned by Netanyahu,” he told the Post. “I’ve met others with similar and worse beliefs. It’s put a strain on my family, and I’ve lost friends over this. It’s also interesting that these people refuse to watch our film.”

Adam Hummel, meanwhile, published “Essays from Afar: 700 Days of the Diaspora Experience Since October 7,” a book of collected writings from his “Catch” Substack, putting together two years of weekly commentary.

Much like Penzel, Hecht, Tal Meron and Atkins, he’s concerned that few sources get the war story straight, and as such, the untruths contribute to denialism.

The report from the UN Commission of Inquiry in September alleging there was “genocide” perpetrated by Israel, for example, “is an unfortunately misguided piece of fiction,” said the Toronto lawyer.

“I often say that if Israel wanted to kill all the Palestinians, this war would have been over on Oct. 8, 2023. They do not, however; which is why 900-plus Israeli soldiers have been killed over the last two years, because Israel has gone above and beyond to protect the lives of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, who have been put in the line of fire because of their own leaders.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

Click here for more Canada

An immigrant pharmacist whose Canadian citizenship was revoked in November 2024, a decade after officials first suspected she hadn’t met the requirements, has seen that decision set aside and revocation proceedings permanently stayed by a Federal Court judge who criticized officials for waiting so long to act on the allegations of “false representation, fraud, or knowingly concealing material circumstances.”

Nermine Magdi Ibrahim, who became a Canadian permanent resident in July 2003 and subsequently a Canadian citizen in October 2007, applied to the Federal Court for a judicial review of the revocation proceedings.

Immigration officials were not “concerned about the impact of the delay on (Ibrahim’s) ability to defend her case, nor (her) well-established ties to Canada as reasons for granting her special relief,” Justice Avvy Yao-Yao Go wrote in a recent decision out of Toronto.

“In short, the unfairness with which the applicant was treated, coupled with the unfairness in the proceedings caused by the delay, calls into question the integrity of the justice system if the court allows the proceedings to continue under these circumstances.”

In her citizenship application, Ibrahim “declared 166 days of absences from Canada during her relevant residency period from July 9, 2003 to February 18, 2007,” Go said.

Ibrahim’s “citizenship was initially flagged for investigation in 2014, and the investigation was completed in that same year,” said the judge.

The Canada Border Services Agency had “received a tip about companies operating citizenship fraud schemes with (Ibrahim’s) husband’s name appearing as one of the clients who used these services to simulate his residence in Canada,” said the Federal Court decision, dated Dec. 19.

The CBSA referred this information to the immigration minister at the time for further investigation.

“During its investigation, the case management branch … found (Ibrahim’s) LinkedIn profile which suggested that she was continuously employed as a Medical Delegate with Nestlé Infant Nutrition in Kuwait from June 2002 to June 2009,” Go said.

“On July 23, 2014, an analyst of the Immigration Section at the Canadian Embassy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates verified her continuous employment with the employer.”

It wasn’t until 2023 when Canadian immigration authorities advised Ibrahim of the potential revocation proceedings and offered her an opportunity to respond.

They argued “that the delay was not unreasonable considering this case was part of a large-scale investigation involving 300 other individuals,” said the decision.

The judge wasn’t buying it: “Based on the record before me, I find that the minister has not provided any justification for the delay,” Go said.

To become a Canadian citizen, permanent residents need to have lived in have lived in Canada for three out of the last five years.

In September 2023, immigration officials wrote to Ibrahim indicating she “may have misrepresented herself during the citizenship process and that (she) may have failed to disclose some of her absences from Canada during the four years immediately before the date of her citizenship application,” said the decision.

She was given 30 days “to make written submissions regarding the length of time she spent in Canada before acquiring citizenship and her ties to Canada since becoming a citizen,” it said.

Ibrahim responded on Sept. 21, 2023, with a one-page letter requesting “more details about alleged absences and stated that she has integrated well into Canadian society as shown in her successfully becoming licensed as a pharmacist, being a partner of two pharmacies, and owning property,” said the decision

“She also argued that the revocation would result in severe hardship and added that all her points can be substantiated with supporting documents upon request.”

On May 9, 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) notified Ibrahim it was revoking her citizenship.

“The notification letter cited (Ibrahim’s) LinkedIn profile listing her employment with Nestlé in Kuwait, the Canadian Embassy’s verification with Nestlé’s Human Resource Department of (her) continuous employment from July 2002 to June 2009, and (her) failure to disclose this information as basis for alleging that (she) may have obtained citizenship by misrepresentation.”

Ibrahim responded on July 4, 2024, indicating “that her LinkedIn Profile is not of a factual nature and does not include any leaves taken.”

She “also explained that she was pregnant with her daughter during the relevant period, and that Nestlé had a relatively flexible maternity leave policy that enabled her to stay in Canada for the duration of her pregnancy and throughout the breastfeeding period until her daughter was two years old.”

Ibrahim “noted it has been over 15 years since the relevant period has elapsed,” said the decision.

She “emphasized that it was not only a matter of intellectual recollection, but of documentary recollection.”

Ibrahim “noted the steps she undertook to obtain information from various institutions including the pharmaceutical company she worked for, her bank and her phone company, but was unable to produce records longer than seven years prior due to these institutions’ policy on record retention,” said the decision.

Ibrahim “submitted supporting documentation, including her daughter’s Ontario birth certificate, her Ontario and Manitoba pharmacist licences, document of prior property ownership, an Ontario Profile Report for the two pharmacies she is a partner in, copies of her driver’s licences containing a residential address in Ontario, as well as her and her daughter’s hospital cards containing the same address.”

Ibrahim also “provided copies of Nestlé’s policies regarding maternity and parental support from 2012 to 2019.”

She argued “that the evidentiary burden in revocation cases rests with the minister who asserts that there was a misrepresentation.”

But in Ibrahim’s case, immigration officials “reversed the onus by requiring (her) to prove that she was a resident in Canada when she has no such obligation.”

By reversing the onus, Ibrahim argued, immigration officials did not make the decision to revoke her Canadian citizenship “based on any evidence of misrepresentation.”

Instead, Canadian immigration officials “made their findings based on the absence of evidence to infer that (Ibrahim) was not residing in Canada during the relevant period.”

Immigration officials didn’t dispute that.

But, they said, “the basis for the (revocation decision) is readily apparent: (Ibrahim) produced minimal evidence to support her residence in Canada.”

Ibrahim was asked for “basic evidence to address (her) alleged day-to-day activities and connections in Canada,” immigration officials said, noting it “was not unreasonable” to expect her to produce “at least some evidence about activities” in Canada.

Officials here wanted proof “such as, involvement in their community, school and medical records, evidence of participation in local activities, sports teams, religious organizations or community events, as examples.”

The judge rejected those submissions and agreed with Ibrahim’s arguments.

Go found immigration officials “erroneously required” Ibrahim “to prove that she was in Canada during the relevant residence period, instead of examining whether the minister has, on a balance of probabilities, established that (she) misrepresented her residency,” said the decision.

The judge found the long delay in dealing with Ibrahim’s case constituted “an abuse of process.”

Ibrahim “demonstrates that she suffered significant prejudice directly stemming from such delay as she is unable to obtain the necessary document to substantiate her residency in Canada during the relevant period, thus undermining her ability to present her case,” Go said.

The judge also found “the integrity of the justice system has been prejudiced as a result,” said the decision.

“The initial reason why (Ibrahim) was flagged for citizenship investigation was due to CBSA’s concern of residency misrepresentation regarding her husband, who has since passed away. There is no evidence that (Ibrahim) herself was implicated in any citizenship fraud scheme. Nevertheless, the IRCC decided to proceed with the misrepresentation allegations based solely on the applicant’s LinkedIn Profile and the CBSA verification that was never shared with” Ibrahim.

“While (Ibrahim) was given some opportunities to respond to the allegations, the IRCC failed to provide her with adequate disclosure, and denied her of an oral hearing where she could counter (an immigration officer’s) findings of credibility,” said the judge.

Sending Ibrahim’s case back to another decision maker for redetermination “would add further delay, and would add to the difficulties that (Ibrahim) may encounter in gathering further evidence,” Go said.

The judge found “the interests favouring a stay of proceedings outweigh the public interest in proceeding with (Ibrahim’s) citizenship revocation process.”

She granted Ibrahim’s application for judicial review.

“The decision to revoke (Ibrahim’s) citizenship is set aside,” Go said.

“The citizenship revocations proceedings relating to the applicant are permanently stayed.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more Canada

OTTAWA — Alberta Indigenous Affairs Minister Rajan Sawhney says vocal opposition from

some Indigenous groups

won’t

affect her government’s timeline

for proposing a new West Coast pipeline to Ottawa by mid-2026.

In fact, she says that the real work of engaging with the First Nations along the pipeline’s route will start in earnest after the application is submitted to the federal government’s Major Projects Office in May.

“Actual true consultation with Indigenous communities is not going to begin until we put our application in,” Sawhney said.

No Alberta infrastructure proposals were included in the federal government’s two waves of project announcements since the Major Project Office’s

opening in late August

. But the province agreed to a memorandum of understanding with Ottawa on a new oil pipeline to the West Coast in November, and aims to have one added to the list of federally backed major projects.

The plan would

require a carve-out

from the federal oil tanker ban in Canadian waters off the northwest coast, and has already faced opposition from some groups.

Coastal First Nations,

a registered non-profit

activist organization representing some B.C. Indigenous bands opposed to development in the area, has been

an especially strong opponent

of the idea.

Sawhney said the loudest voices don’t speak for all Indigenous communities that would be impacted by the pipeline’s construction.

“In every community I’ve visited, they say ‘no one speaks for us except for us’,” said Sawhney.

Sawhney visited B.C. three times in 2025 and is planning a fourth trip in February.

She concedes that she has a long road ahead to dispel the skepticism surrounding a new pipeline.

“It’s 50/50 right now, between support and what I’m going to call concern,” Sawhney said. “There have been two nations who’ve said ‘hell no.’ Everybody else has been asking questions around things like: can we do this safely and without a major spill?”

Sawhney says she expects these concerns to die down once her government has a chance to address common misconceptions about moving and shipping oil.

“We have to talk about technology and innovation. We have to talk about tankers and how the technology has improved there,” said Sawhney.

Sawhney said that multiple First Nations bands have told her they’d like to see the B.C. Lower Mainland’s

Western Canada Marine Spill Response Corporation

, which patrols the recently expanded Trans Mountain pipeline for spills, replicated on the North Coast.

The endorsement of a new West Coast pipeline by the Major Projects Office would

start a two-year clock

toward the project’s final approval. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that projects fast-tracked by the new office must advance

Canadian and Indigenous economic interests

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says the

pipeline would bring billions of dollars

of royalty and tax to federal and provincial governments by serving booming markets in the Indo-Pacific region. No private proponents has come forward yet to build the pipeline, although the province has

put up $14 million

to support early regulatory and technical work.

Polling on this topic is hard to come by, but one 2022 study found

that a slim majority

of Indigenous people across Canada supported oil and gas development.

Data from the 2021 Census shows that oil and gas is

the highest-paying sector

for Indigenous workers, paying nearly three times the prevailing wage in other fields.

Heather Exner-Pirot, Director of Natural Resources, Energy and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says that pipelines tend to have a smaller ecological footprint than other large-scale resource projects, making the constitutional duty to consult with affected Indigenous groups less onerous.

“Impacts from pipelines tend to be more minor and temporary, when comparing, for example, to a mine. Their challenge is they cross many territories and must adequately consult many Indigenous groups,” said Exner-Pirot. “The duty is about reasonably mitigating impacts to Aboriginal rights such as hunting, fishing and cultural use of the land.”

Exner-Pirot added that the standard will likely be higher for communities located near the potential terminus for a pipeline, where there would be the largest impact. The residents of Kitimat, B.C., near the proposed terminus of the cancelled Northern Gateway Pipeline, had narrowly

voted against the project

by a 58-42 margin in 2014.

Exner-Pirot stressed that the consent of all Indigenous groups along the route is not necessary for the pipeline to go forward.

“It is clear that Canadian law does not require Indigenous consent for pipelines. This has been reiterated in multiple recent challenges in (northern B.C.),” said Exner-Pirot.

Sawhney says she’s shelving the surveys and plebiscites for now and focusing on one-on-one conversations.

“From what I’ve heard from First Nations is that there’s a lot of consultation, engagement, polling, surveying, fatigue … The best thing we can do, at the moment, is get out there in person,” said Sawhney.

She added that she’s aware of tensions surrounding reconciliation in B.C. — such as the backlash to

August’s Cowichan Tribes decision

, affirming Aboriginal title over tracts of private property near Vancouver,

and calls to repeal

provincial legislation enshrining the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People — but says she’s staying neutral on these matters.

“Alberta is focused on promoting economic reconciliation within its own jurisdiction,” said Sawhney. “Decisions regarding legislation in British Columbia rest with that province..”

Sawhney said Alberta would not be participating in the appeal of the Cowichan Tribes decision.

National Post

rmohamed@postmedia.com

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.

Click here for more Alberta

A recent court decision out of Ontario reveals how judges’ hands are tied when it comes to sentencing hard-core criminals.

Justice Craig Brannagan was sentencing Justin Anderson for repeatedly flashing a handgun at a woman he forcibly confined for a week the spring of 2024 while he travelled through the province selling drugs, and for later terrorizing another woman at gunpoint he believed to be an informant. Both the Crown and defence lawyers in Anderson’s case had recommended he be sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison. The judge dubbed their position “very lenient,” but he went along with it, anyway.

Brannagan accepted that he was “not free to interfere on the basis that I may have a different view of what the sentence could or should be. I may only interfere where the proposed sentence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute or is otherwise contrary to the public interest.”

Joint sentencing recommendations are “vital to the operation of the criminal justice system,” Brannagan said, but they “are not sacrosanct. Trial judges may depart from them.”

The test for departing from them “is, however, ‘undeniably high,’” said the judge.

He acceded to the joint recommendation from both the Crown and defence and sentenced Anderson to 10 and a half years in prison.

The 34-year-old pleaded guilty in the Ontario Court of Justice to nine indictable offences including forcibly confining two women, pointing a firearm, possession of methamphetamine for the purpose of trafficking, breaching a weapons prohibition order, and possessing a firearm with a defaced serial number.

“While I find that this sentence is a generous one, perhaps even very lenient considering the circumstances of the offences and the offender, I am unable to find that the joint submission is ‘so unhinged from the circumstances of the offence and the offender’ that accepting it would lead reasonable and informed persons to ‘view it as a break down in the proper functioning of the criminal justice system,’” Brannagan wrote in a recent decision out of Barrie.

The court heard that a woman identified only by the initials R.C. met Anderson in May 2024 through a friend in Belleville.

During the last week in May 2024 Anderson forced her to “travel with him throughout Ontario, while he engaged in drug trafficking activities and made cash deliveries,” according to Brannagan’s decision, dated Dec. 11.

“Throughout that week, Mr. Anderson carried a handgun in his waistband. He would repeatedly flash the handgun towards R.C. as a means of controlling and intimidating her. He controlled her movement and coerced her to stay with him while he engaged in repeated criminal activity.”

She was with Anderson on May 31, 2024, when he trafficked in a firearm, said the decision. “R.C. later recalled to police having seen Mr. Anderson assume control over a firearm wrapped in a pink sweater.”

The woman managed to escape Anderson in Vaughan and called police. “She returned to Belleville safely by train.”

Anderson drove from Vaughan back to Belleville “to regain control over R.C. By that time, however, the Belleville Police had been contacted and Mr. Anderson fled to evade his arrest.”

Anderson “was bound by multiple weapons prohibition orders” at the time, said the decision.

Barrie Police learned on June 1, 2024, that there was a warrant out for Anderson’s arrest in Belleville.

“He was known to be the driver of a blue four-door BMW.”

Barrie Police found the BMW just before 5 p.m. that day parked in a plaza parking lot on Grove Street East. “They initiated surveillance.”

That night, a woman identified only as T.J. was hanging out with her boyfriend J.L. at a home near the parked BMW when they got in an argument, said the decision. “In anger, J.L. told the occupants of the residence that T.J. was a ‘rat,’ alleging that she had provided information to the police concerning drug trafficking activities in the City of Barrie.”

Anderson was there and heard the accusation that T.J. was an informant, said the decision. “Mr. Anderson became enraged by this. He pulled out a brown and grey handgun and pointed it at T.J., numerous times, forcibly confining her in this manner for approximately one hour.”

While pointing the handgun at T.J., “he told her that he was going to rape her and force her into the sex trade as a prostitute. T.J. feared for her life.”

She fled around 11 p.m.

“She jumped over numerous fences and hid beneath a motor vehicle. Police located her several hours later.”

Soon after she took off, Barrie Police saw Anderson return to his BMW and arrested him.

They found a loaded CZ 9 mm handgun tucked into his waistband, as well as a satchel that contained 429 grams of methamphetamine; 64 grams of cocaine; 19 grams of fentanyl; 948 oxycodone pills; a dozen hydromorphone pills; and 60 pills of a synthetic cannabinoid called nabilone, said the decision. “Mr. Anderson’s satchel also contained $1,185 in cash, and a small scale.”

In the BMW’s trunk, police “discovered a break-action rifle with a defaced serial number.”

Anderson “has a lengthy criminal record, beginning in 2015 with entries consistent through to 2025,” said the decision. “He has upward of 30 convictions for various types of offences, including breaches of court orders, crimes of dishonesty, property offences, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, flight police, assault police, weapons possession and, most seriously, aggravated assault.”

Anderson’s pre-sentence report indicates he “was raised in a pro-criminal environment that included exposure to criminal activity and drug use from a young age. His upbringing was void of structure and positive role-modeling, leaving him to fend for himself. His biological parents separated when he was just one year old.”

When Anderson was three years old, his mother went to his father’s place to pick up her son, said the decision. “She found Justin playing with a bag of cocaine.”

The father of four by three different women “is not permitted to have contact with any of his children,” said the decision.

Anderson admitted “that his peer group consists solely of individuals involved in the drug and gun subculture. He advised that he does not like police. He advised that he regularly uses cocaine and methamphetamine, acknowledging that he has a drug addiction, and that he supports his addiction through drug trafficking. He has never sought treatment for his addictions.”

He reported arming himself with guns “for protection while dealing drugs, noting the unpredictability of people involved in the drug subculture. He readily acknowledged the inherent dangers of guns, accepting their possession as necessary for someone like him ‘being in (the) drug game.’”

The judge found Anderson’s attitude callous. “He demonstrates a marked indifference for the lives or safety of others. He is deeply entrenched in the criminal lifestyle, readily acknowledging his ongoing criminal associations within a subculture that identifies itself through illicit drug trafficking and firearm possession. In my view, he fits the description of a true criminal outlaw.”

The author of Anderson’s pre-sentence report “opined that Justin Anderson is at a high-risk to reoffend,” Brannagan said. “That is a finding with which I wholeheartedly agree and adopt.”

Both the women Anderson confined declined to take part in his sentencing.

“I find that in both cases, Mr. Anderson used a firearm to threaten, intimidate, control, and strike fear into his female victims,” said the judge. “The harm suffered by T.J. and R.C. is both apparent and undisputable.”

Anderson’s “role as a trafficker of hard drugs is pitiless and indifferent to the destructive effects his poisons have on our communities,” Brannagan said.

“While acknowledging that Mr. Anderson is a user himself, I find that the primary motivation behind his drug trafficking activities was for profit; the sheer quantity of hard drugs found on his person is evidence of that. Mr. Anderson was effectively a travelling pharmacy.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more Canada

A 77-year-old woman who went overboard on a cruise ship north of Cuba has not been located after an eight-hour search on Thursday, according to authorities.

The woman was a guest on the Nieuw Statendam ship, part of the Holland America Line. The Line said it was “deeply saddened” to confirm the woman went overboard in a statement shared with National Post.

“The captain and crew initiated search and rescue procedures and worked closely with the U.S. Coast Guard which deployed a cutter and helicopter to assist,” the statement said.

According to a

post on X

by the U.S. Coast Guard, crews searched for the woman approximately 40 miles northeast of Sabana, Cuba. The search spanned 690 square miles. Later on Thursday, the Coast Guard said the search had been suspended “pending the development of new information.”

The ship departed for an eastern Caribbean seven-day voyage from a port in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. on Dec. 27, the cruise line said.

As a result of the search, the ship’s planned call to Key West, Florida, January 2 was cancelled,” the statement said.

The

Nieuw Statendam

has capacity for 2,692 guests and is 975 feet long. It is equipped with a shopping centre, multiple restaurants, a fitness centre, a casino and pickleball courts.

“Our family assistance team is supporting the guest’s family, and our thoughts are with the guest’s loved ones during this difficult time,” Holland America Line said.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more Canada

A grizzly bear broke into Tanyss Munro’s home, tearing down walls, ripping out the furnace and destroying her kitchen.

The attack came in October, after a summer of spotting a number of bears on her property in Bella Coola, B.C. Munro said she and her husband warned local conservation officers that if they did not deal with the aggressive animals, someone could die.

One month later, a female grizzly bear with two cubs attacked a group of teachers and 20 children from a nearby school,

injuring 11 people

, including three students, two of them critically.

“I’m sure, the whole school is just shocked, not to mention all the little children who were not personally attacked, but saw their friends attacked,” Munro said. “I mean, absolutely terrifying. It’ll have changed their lives forever, no question.”

Following the Nov. 20 incident,

the local Nuxalk First Nation

advised residents to avoid walking and offered ride share services.

There are an estimated 13,000 grizzly bears inhabiting British Columbia. In the 4 Mile subdivision of the Nuxalk First Nation where the attack on schoolchildren occurred, there are reportedly about 22 bears per 1,000 square kilometres, which is considered high.

The B.C. Wildlife Federation said that there have been more bear attacks since

trophy hunting was banned in 2017

In the last year, there have been various reports in Bella Coola of bears breaking into residences, and schoolchildren missing recess and needing RCMP supervision to board buses due to the bear threat.

Munro thinks it’s time for a broader conversation about how to fix the issue.

“There are probably many who would say, ‘No, the bears, the bears were there first, and we need to respect them,’” Munro said. “We wouldn’t be talking about that if they were in a city, if they were in Victoria or Vancouver or Calgary or wherever.”

The Bella Coola resident spoke to National Post about the growing threat from bears in her community. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

How much do you know about the recent attack and how has it affected the community?

The attack in November with the schoolchildren and a couple of teachers was pretty appalling. We’re all just horrified that that happened, and especially to children. But there’s also a teacher who is really injured, and we’re pretty devastated, you could say, because that is so unusual. In particular, a bear attacked a group of 20 human beings together. And these were not grade one and twos, they were grade four or five. So they’re not tiny, it was pretty shocking for everybody. It was pretty horrible.

How prevalent are grizzly bear attacks in the area?

We’ve had our property for about 18 years, and we’ve always had bears around, and normally black bears and grizzlies. We use good bear sense. We don’t go for walks without bear spray. The last thing you want to do is surprise a bear. We also, in our house, have been extremely cautious regarding bear attractants, so we don’t even have a compost outside.

About four years ago, maybe, there was a bear who broke into our car, even though there was nothing in it, and ripped the door off. The car was a complete write-off, and that bear was also doing the same elsewhere, going up onto people’s porches and so on.

In October (2025), it was just unbelievable, where the bear, a sow and two almost full-grown cubs came in. Both of our homes, which are both on the same property, just devastated.

This past summer, we had, first of all, a black bear on our property in May and June. And then by July, and for sure, August and September, what we had on our property was a sow with a cub. So we just steered really clear of them, right? Usually I go out for a run, and I just didn’t do running outside at that point, because you have to really respect a sow with her cub.

Do existing community safety protocols fall short and who do you think should be held accountable for the attack on the schoolchildren?

The bears are accountable. What we have is a big problem. What we need to do is we really need to have broader community consultation with the federal, or with the provincial, enforcement people.

A lot of people talk about bear attractiveness. Well, not in our place, unless you call a refrigerator inside a locked house and canned food on the shelves a problem. We never have had any attractants outside. So attractants can be a problem. They were not a problem where they devastated our place. It’s pretty scary having that happen, because now they will, for sure, come back looking for their food cache again in the spring. I think maybe they’re becoming habituated to people, and that’s a problem. I’m not sure what to do about that.

For us, when the three bears came into our house and did all that damage, the conservation officers came out, not super quickly, because there were many attacks, ours was just the worst, but many attacks by that group of bears. They eventually came out and set a trap. One bear was caught in the trap. There was an opportunity at that time to shoot a bear that was about 10 to 15 feet away from the conservation officers, who were heavily armed and ready to do such a thing. They heard the bears snorting and crashing, and so another one or more bears in the forest. They didn’t take action to dispose of those bears.

I’m definitely not saying that we need to kill all bears. The conservation officers themselves talk about a line, and the line that was crossed for us is when they go into somebody’s locked, closed-door house. That’s a line. Bears aren’t stupid animals. Relying on traps is a little like putting a sandwich into a jail cell and hoping Billy the Kid goes in to get it, but it’s not happening. Bears aren’t stupid, so that’s that’s a problem. The conservation officer’s lack of quick action is a big challenge for everybody.

What protective measures should be put in place to keep the community safe?

I would never say that everybody has to have a gun, like this is just not going to be anything that I ever would think would be necessarily a solution. What I will say is that, just like us, when we go for a walk, the teachers, when they went out for their field trip, had several cans of bear spray. That’s the strongest thing that we know, to haze the bears to get them away. According to the chief, the teacher went through two cans of bear spray about a foot-and-a-half away from the bear’s face, and it did nothing. So what needs to be done?

According to research that I’ve seen, and I am in no way an expert, relocation of bears is not very effective, because the bears will have a strong instinct to be where they grew up and where they’re used to being, and so they very likely will come back, even if they’re quite far away. We have to do a better job of managing the bear population. We really do have a problem because when it’s a matter between a bear life and a human life, we can love bears, not a problem, and respect our wildlife and all of that. But human life always takes precedence, in my opinion. So we do need to do something and I’m not sure what the answer is.

What is the general consensus in Bella Coola after the bear attack?

All I can tell you is what I hear from my friends and someone in the valley, which is that there are some people who think, no, that the problem is a human problem. It is not a bear problem. And then there’s other people who like, in my case, that’s just not the case. Our house has been there for a long time, and we didn’t have any bear attractants, so I don’t think that’s a human problem. There’s other people who say, no, there’s got to be something we can do. And there’s some people who would say that the bear population is too high. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But one thing I don’t see is an open dialogue about these statistics. What statistics do they have? Why not start to share this and just have a more transparent discussion about all of this in the province? I think that would really be appreciated by people, that we can start to look at building policies based on what stats there are. Look, we might find that the bear population has declined, okay, and that the problem is something else. But like, let’s get to the bottom of it. Otherwise, what you get is strongly held opinions, views, judgments, and you don’t ever get anywhere. People just get into one camp or another, and the human-bear conflict problem remains, and maybe even increases.

What lessons should the province and Bella Coola take from this attack?

It’s like the human nightmare, right? It might as well be a dinosaur or whatever it is. A bear attack on children is just pretty horrific. And I think the lesson, there’s two lessons for me. One, is that the conservation officers must be allowed, in our case, not in the case of the children — but look, we’re talking about the same season and the same valley — they can’t not be able to react quickly, and according to their training and responsibly. They cannot be in a situation where they delay response to a bear, because that now puts humans at even higher risk than they were before the bears, in our case, came into the house to begin with, because now they’ve learned their lesson and they will come back. So that was not exactly what happened with the schoolchildren, absolutely. But we are talking about the same valley and the same bears.

The other lesson learned, although I don’t know that anybody is learning, but this is what I would like, is that we start to have more open dialog and start to have more statistics shared. I don’t know what the stats are, or is our bear population increasing? Is it not? What are the bottlenecks? What are the drivers of bear attacks?

We need stats, and if they don’t have stats, no problem. Let’s start to get them. Let’s start to tag and color more bears, maybe, so that we can start to look at the bears. Most grizzly bears are not problematic, will not attack people. When grizzly bears have lost their fear of people, that’s a very dangerous situation.

Obviously, it’s what made grizzly bears and humans be able to live together, with each of them respecting the other’s boundary. But when the grizzlies lose their fear of humans and are not being dealt with after an attack immediately, because conservation officers feel like they’re being watched like a hawk, in their words, this is a problem. It is almost certainly going to result in a death at some point. I would think, a loss of a human life. I get that people all have strongly held opinions and views on one side of the line or the other, but let’s start the conversation.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more Alberta

The U.S.-Canada relationship had a trying year in 2025, and 2026 promises more drama with a coming U.S. Supreme Court decision on President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the scheduled renegotiation of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) and U.S. midterm elections in November.

To kick off the new year with some perspective, National Post spoke this week with Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. to get his insights on the key bilateral issues to watch in the year ahead.

Sands is a leading expert on Canada-U.S. relations and a former director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute in Washington, D.C.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. How might the 2026 CUSMA review unfold amid Trump’s trade war and tariffs on Canadian autos, steel, goods not covered by CUSMA, etc., and what concessions could Canada realistically offer on dairy quotas or digital taxes?

I think the challenging thing about the CUSMA review is that it is a good idea at its root. That was one of the things that we added in CUSMA that we didn’t have in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is the opportunity to do a review and to fine tune and update various bits of it. So I think the idea of the review is a really solid one.

We’ve gone into it with a process that Congress mandated, at least on the U.S. side, that led to the private sector — including Canadian companies and trade associations — putting in their ideas for how the agreement could be better. And of course, Canada has a process like that, and so does Mexico. And what you heard from the business community overall is not what you have heard from President Trump. What the business community broadly said is there’s a huge economic opportunity here, this agreement provides a stable set of rules, and, in the main, we’d like it to stay the same.

Canada would need to address

(its restrictions on imports of) dairy

the Online News Act, and the Online Streaming Act

, I think. And then it would be important to take a look at provincial procurement. Those are the three big obstacles that the

U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) identified

, but there could be others.

On provincial procurement … it was never bound in USMCA, and when we negotiated NAFTA, the U.S. proposed putting all procurement, including U.S. state procurement, on the table. We got a majority of states, something like 38 states in the United States, that agreed to put their state procurement into NAFTA, so that Canadian and Mexican firms would have the right to bid on (those contracts).

But Canadian provinces in the ’90s said no. Later, during the Obama administration’s Recovery Act (amid the) post-2008 crisis, Canadians wanted to bid on U.S. infrastructure projects. The fix? The U.S. urged provinces to join Article II of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement — a voluntary plurilateral protocol the same 38 (U.S.) states already signed. Quebec led the way in saying yes. Not all the provinces did, but it did open up procurement to a set of international disciplines and to the participation of American firms.

That ended what was kind of a tough dispute, but it wasn’t a universal solution. So, now, if Canada addresses provincial procurement, it really just brings those few provinces back into line and creates a little more stability.

On the Online Streaming and Online News Acts, there’s a tougher case. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to regulate the media in the age of AI, and I think Canada’s come up with an approach that is defensible for sure: Trying to preserve Canadian voices, which is a different goal than the U.S., which is just trying to make sure the business is efficient and everything’s fair. Where the Trudeau government broke with OECD’s (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) consensus on how they were going to deal with taxing internet transactions and large tech firms, it muddied the waters. This led Canada to be kind of out on its own and, therefore, vulnerable.

Canada could address the USTR’s concerns by saying, “OK, we’re going to put a pause on these things. We’re going to try to align our policies more carefully with our OECD partners …” Or, Canada could take its approach and try to think about how it could make a proposal for CUSMA to include digital services in a way that was uniform across the region.

And the last one, which everybody says is the toughest one, is dairy. And if I were Ottawa, I would take this as the opportunity to reform the sector. It is going to be difficult to get rid of dairy supply management and move towards a more subsidy-oriented system. It’s going to be intensely politically unpopular in areas that actually matter for elections in Quebec and B.C., and parts of Ontario. But if Canada’s ever going to change the system, having the pressure of the Trump administration driving that change might lead to a way of making a reform that would be a reasonable compromise that would be beneficial to Canadians.

Q. Shifting to U.S. politics, what role might the 2026 midterms play in congressional or administration support for CUSMA revisions or tariffs? What can Canada do to mitigate exposure to tariffs via other laws like sections 232 or 301?

If you think about the Canadian economy in sort of broad swaths, I would make a distinction between primary products, commodity goods, in one basket; a second basket that’s manufacturing and integrated production; and then a third sector for services of all sorts. And if you look at those three, it’s manufacturing that’s in (the U.S. administration’s) crosshairs. Why? Because commodities are fungible, whether it’s a bushel of wheat or a steel beam … there are countries that will buy Canada’s commodities. Now, as the prime minister has pointed out, the biggest barrier to Canada shipping its commodities to other customers is a lack of infrastructure.

If the U.S. doesn’t want to avail itself of Canada’s high-quality, great commodities, then Canada does have options at least, to the extent they can address some of the port issues and the shipping issues.

Canada is quite a services superpower. Whether we’re talking about banking, financial services, or software, or even things that are kind of crossing over into entertainment, like video game production and design … Canada’s very good in this sector. Very good.

Manufacturing is the toughest because, thanks to trade signals, we have highly integrated manufacturing across North America, taking advantage of specialization and a larger market… Canada needs a solution that allows it to participate in those supply chains. One is that the focus on selling goods to Europe needs to be accompanied by looking at the advantage of CUSMA, NAFTA, and, before that, CUSFTA (the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement), which is the rule of origin. And to the extent that the rule of origin, even when it’s 75 per cent (North American content) for auto, still allows 25 per cent non-compliant content, this is a way for companies in Europe to participate in North American manufacturing, because they can sell in that 25 per cent space. They can get into Canada — which isn’t gonna hit them with a tariff when they come in — get bolted into larger items that are CUSMA-compliant, and enter the U.S. market.

The rule of origin can be redefined that way. And if you look at the way CUSMA sort of spells out the terms of the review, adjustments to the rule of origin are one of the primary areas where the drafters anticipated the change would be allowed … Watching the rule of origin is going to be the one thing that has the greatest potential to either stabilize or massively reshape our manufacturing supply chains.

Q. The Supreme Court has expressed skepticism on Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) for imposing tariffs based on national security justifications. How might a decision against the tariffs stabilize trade?

The

Supreme Court has been very skeptical of the use of the IEEPA for issuing tariffs.

The challenge to using IEEPA for issuing tariffs came quickly.

They were first addressed by the Court of International Trade

… It said, “No, there’s nothing on tariffs in IEEPA.” And then they went up to a federal appeals court level. Those appeals courts in the two different cases both agreed that there was no basis for using IEEPA for tariffs. And finally, it’s gone to the Supreme Court, and the justices showed a great deal of skepticism in their questioning, and promised an early ruling, perhaps early in 2026, which most of us who follow it are expecting will reject the use of the IEEPA for tariffs.

Almost everywhere where Congress has (delegated its tariff power), it has done so with a requirement that you do an investigation and you lay out an evidentiary basis for issuing tariffs. That’s what we have with Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which has hit Canada on steel and aluminum. With IEEPA,

there’s no requirement for anything. If the court is going to trim that back and force the administration to do its homework to make its case with evidence before it brings out tariffs, then it is a great stabilizer for international trade.

Q. With Trump’s dismissal of the need for Canadian oil, gas, or lumber, how can bilateral energy ties evolve amid shifting U.S. clean energy policies?

Trump

says we don’t need (Canadian) energy

. I think it’s because he wants to deny that anybody has an upper hand on him. But that isn’t the reality on the ground, and I think a lot of Canadian energy fits really well within the U.S. system.

The good side of Trump is that he says he wants everything on the table, which is a pretty traditional Republican position, to be much more open to fossil fuels, including LNG, whereas the Biden administration shifted us sharply to focusing on sustainable energy, green energy, and the energy transition. So Trump’s return has led to this kind of counter-revolution, where a lot of projects are now being regulated out of business, subsidies are being cut, and they can’t sustain themselves without subsidies.

And the thing that’s frustrating about the U.S. is it’s such a big economy that to the extent it moves in a direction, it can carry a lot of companies in other countries with it. And if we shift sharply in another direction, it affects the Canadian participants in the market equally.

Well, what (Prime Minister) Mark Carney’s decided, or

seems to be deciding to do

, is to try to say, “OK, well let’s not ban fossil fuels. We have some of the cleanest around. Let’s see what we can do … it’s probably a bad bet just to rely on the U.S. market … But let’s make sure that we can access global markets and that we’re part of that conversation so that we’re not seen as being ‘green’ only, and we have these resources, and the West really cares about them, etc.” He has looked at that as an infrastructure challenge, and that’s fine. But on energy, the U.S. has benefited tremendously from Canada, and I think it’s mutual, but it’s benefited from Canada because Canada’s done the hard work of building hydroelectric dams, etc. Canada has some R&D advantages here, which I think could make Canada a reliable innovator going forward.

I think one of the things that has emerged from the whipsaw (presidencies) of Trump-Biden-Trump is a kind of energy pragmatism … as long as we stay ecumenical, open to all, Canada’s got strengths in every one of those areas. The U.S. market is a huge one.

Q. What more should Canada do in defence production, border security, or collaborating on China threats? Any other 2026 issues to watch?

The defence sector in a lot of ways looks like ordinary manufacturing … Canada has a lot of expertise to contribute. Canada has (programmable machine tools and skilled labour), and I think it has a great deal of talent that is impossible or at least really risky for the U.S. just to not take advantage of. The additional money (allocated to defence) is going to mean that this is a booming sector.

On the border … it’s becoming more and more important to the U.S. to have Canada inspecting against third countries. I’d love to see a

de minimis

(bare minimum) agreement built into the CUSMA that commits the countries to maintaining an inspection regimen. We could come up with mutual border commitments … co-operation on third-country nationals … a sanctions committee of the three governments could review sanctions proposals.

The U.S. has been dramatically more successful than I thought they would be in shifting away from China … The only way to really do the kind of forensic investigation to figure out where things really come from is to have markets that are aligned with you that also do the investigating … Canada should say, “Yeah, we’ll be happy to work with you because we’re more or less aligned with you on China.”

National Post

tmoran@postmedia.com

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

Click here for more Alberta

A lesser known feature of the planet Earth’s magnetic field has recently gained a special Canadian connection that is often overlooked in the better known science story about the magnetic north pole drifting away from Canada toward Russia.

The wandering north pole typically gets a round of media attention every five years when there is a new update to the World Magnetic Model, basically a map of the local variations in the planet’s magnetic field that is used for precise calculation in navigation systems. The 2025 version, released a year ago by British and American national scientific organizations, showed that the magnetic north pole is still drifting across the Arctic Ocean toward Russian territory, though at a slower rate than in recent years.

But there is another different wandering north pole that has recently made landfall on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, a theoretical “geomagnetic” pole that has more relevance to space science than to compass needles and navigation aids. This one rarely gets noticed in the same way, partly because it has fewer practical applications.

Most news reports about the wandering north magnetic pole tell a story that goes like this.

They will point out that the magnetic north pole is not the same as the geographic North Pole, the point where all the lines of longitude meet and from where there is nowhere to go but south. This geographic North Pole is theoretically the exact same as the place where the Earth’s rotational axis meets the surface, but even that wobbles around a bit because nothing is ever perfect in observational physics.

So, for example, in 2007, when the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve took a dramatic series of timelapse images over 24 hours on the frozen Arctic Ocean, as he slowly walked opposite to the Earth’s rotation so that, in his words, “

I didn’t turn with the world

,” he was at the geographic North Pole, or at least very close to it.

He was relatively far from the magnetic north pole, though, which was then drifting toward him at a few kilometres per year, though he was a lot nearer than he would have been just a few years previously when the magnetic north pole was way further south in Canadian territory. Had he done the same project more recently, in 2020, he would have been about the closest yet on the drifting magnetic pole’s observed trajectory.

Sometimes these drifting magnetic pole stories will have an element of “news you can use,” about how this drift could affect navigation systems at the tourist consumer level, by disrupting the courses of boats and planes.

Sometimes the framing of the story is more fanciful, such as that this will give bragging rights to a militaristic Russia, or somehow mess with Santa Claus’s deliveries.

Often there will be some history of polar exploration. Based on records that go back to the early 19th century, the magnetic north pole meandered around Canada’s Arctic archipelago, drifting as far west as the tip of Victoria Island and as far south as King William Island near Gjoa Haven, but since about the last 100 years it has been moving steadily north. Lately it has accelerated away across the Arctic Ocean toward Siberia, so far north it passed the geographic North Pole and started going south.

But usually the “drifting pole” story is a simple popular science report that describes the grand dynamo of the Earth’s outer core of molten iron and nickel, in which convection currents driven by the intense heat of the solid inner core carry electrical current, which in motion generates a magnetic field.

Because of this physics, somewhere on the Earth’s surface is a place toward which a compass needle will always point, because a compass needle is a magnet that aligns with the Earth’s magnetic field. If you actually go to that special place, the compass needle will point straight down, aligned with the magnetic field that here points vertically toward the Earth’s core. This is the magnetic north pole.

At the magnetic south pole, conversely, a compass needle will point straight up. One quirk of this system is that the Earth’s magnetic north pole is actually a “south” pole according to the conventional physical description of bar magnets, in which opposite poles attract and like poles repel.

And of course, no popular science report about the Earth’s magnetic field would be complete without a mention that the planet’s entire magnetic field has flipped north to south many times over geological history in an unpredictable process that takes thousands of years and leaves evidence for example in places where molten magnetized rock has solidified, leaving its magnetic polarity frozen in time, but opposite to the rest of the Earth.

There might also be mention of the places on Earth, mountain ranges for example, that are notoriously difficult to navigate by compass because the local magnetic fields of the rocks can throw off the needle.

So the magnetic north pole is drifting away from Canada toward Russia. This continued in the year just passed, and the newest trend is that its recent acceleration is slowing down, which might hint at a coming grand scale reversal, though there is no way to predict that.

But there is another aspect to this story that is getting more Canadian by the day, not less.

There is also a geomagnetic north pole, different than either the geographic or the magnetic north poles.

This is more like an idealized theoretical point that takes a wider view of Earth’s magnetic field, and imagines it as a perfect bar magnet, with the local variations averaged out.

The earth is not a perfect bar magnet, of course, so measuring magnetic north on the surface leads to a different “north pole” than modelling it from this wider perspective.

Geomagnetic polarity is basically the wider view of Earth’s magnetic field from space, the view from the perspective of the Sun’s radiation, for example. Some of this radiation is regular sunlight. But it also includes charged particles with high energy from which all life on Earth is protected by the deflecting effect of the planet’s magnetic field.

Sometimes that radiation is deflected in such a way that it does not pass by the Earth, but instead interacts with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere to produce the northern lights. These occur in oval bands around the poles, shaped by the planet’s magnetic field. The geomagnetic north pole, therefore, is the point around which these auroras form in the high atmosphere, unaffected by the local surface drifting of the magnetic north pole.

So, while the magnetic north pole is moving comparatively quickly across the Arctic Ocean, the geomagnetic pole is less actively mobile, and gets less attention. But it does drift, for similarly complex reasons driven by the dynamic physics of the Earth’s interior.

Until recently, it was off the northwest coast of Greenland, moving west. Then about five years ago

it came aground on Ellesmere Island

, not too far from Hans Island, an uninhabited rock best known as the subject of an unrelated and now settled mild diplomatic feud between Canada and Denmark, which is sovereign over Greenland.

So, in what amounts to the blink of an eye in geological time, Canada has lost one north pole but gained another, a new and different claim to be the true north.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Click here for more Canada

The B.C. Court of Appeal has revoked the bail granted to an elderly convicted killer, reasoning that his release would undermine public confidence in the administration of justice.

The province’s highest court said given the weak merits of his appeal, the seriousness of the offence, and the appellant’s moral culpability, there is a strong public interest in seeing the sentence imposed without delay. It set aside the bail order and had the convicted man returned to custody.

Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon recounted the history of the case in

her Dec. 16 decision

In December 2024, a jury convicted Adrianus Johannes Rosbergen, 82, of the second degree murder of Allen Skedden. The jury heard that Rosbergen and Skedden had been in a court dispute over a tenancy claim. Rosbergen had been ordered to pay Skedden $1,080 but failed to do so.

The night before a court enforcement hearing scheduled in February 2017, Rosbergen and a friend, Richard Anderson, went to Skedden’s home in Delta, B.C. (Anderson testified at trial for the Crown, saying that he and Rosbergen told Skedden they were going to take him to a bank to get the money he was owed. Anderson went on to testify that Rosbergen dropped him off before carrying on with Skedden.

“That was the last time Mr. Skedden was seen alive,” wrote Justice Fenlon.

Anderson testified that Rosbergen later asked him to help clean a trailer box stored on Rosbergen’s rental property. As Anderson cleaned out the trailer, the water turned red. Rosbergen told him, “Don’t worry about it. He’s gone.” Later, Rosbergen told Anderson: “I tied him up with a rope and I threw him in the drink.”

There was a compelling body of circumstantial evidence linking Rosbergen to the murder, wrote Justice Fenlon. Skedden’s blood was found inside Rosbergen’s truck. Skedden’s jacket with blood on it, his baseball cap and other items linked to him were located at Rosbergen’s rental property. A piece of duct tape matching tape found near Skedden’s body was also located at the property.

Fenlon went on to recount that the trial judge found that Rosbergen had beaten Skedden until his bones were broken, then suffocated him before “callously disposing of his body by the side of the river where it was (seized upon) by animals.”

Rosbergen was 74 years old at the time and 82 when convicted. The only mitigating factor in his favour was the absence of a prior criminal record. While accepting that Rosbergen was elderly and had some health issues, the sentencing judge did not find that his circumstances rose to the level of “excessive hardship.” A sentence of life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 12 years was meted out.

Rosbergen subsequently filed a notice of appeal from his conviction and sentence in April 2025. In August, he applied for bail pending his appeal. “He argued that the strength of his appeal, his age, his deteriorating health while in custody for the previous eight months, and the need to liquidate his real estate assets to fund the appeal all weighed in favour of his release,” wrote Justice Fenlon.

“In the present case, the judge found that Mr. Rosbergen should be released because a reasonably informed member of the public ‘would take into account that, if bail is denied, Mr. Rosbergen could spend a considerable amount of time in jail pending the hearing of his appeal.’”

However, wrote Justice Fenlon, criminal appeals are routinely heard in the BC Court of Appeal within 12 months of filing. “There was nothing to suggest that Mr. Rosbergen’s appeal could not be heard within that timeframe. It was, in my respectful view, an error in principle for the judge to consider the time Mr. Rosbergen could spend in jail while waiting for the outcome of the appeal, without placing that period within the context of the length of the sentence imposed — life with no eligibility for parole for 12 years.”

However, she noted that the Crown conceded the grounds of Rosbergen’s appeal were not frivolous and that he did not pose a flight risk and or a risk to the public. Therefore, she reasoned, the court had to “determine whether Mr. Rosbergen has met his burden of establishing … that his release would not cause a loss of public confidence in the administration of justice.”

In the end, she concluded the convicted killer’s appeal was “not a strong one … In my view, the enforceability interest carries significantly greater weight and must prevail in this case.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Source: National Post (Politics)

Click here for more United States

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Alberta

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

How much do you know about the recent attack and how has it affected the community?

How prevalent are grizzly bear attacks in the area?

Do existing community safety protocols fall short and who do you think should be held accountable for the attack on the schoolchildren?

What protective measures should be put in place to keep the community safe?

What is the general consensus in Bella Coola after the bear attack?

What lessons should the province and Bella Coola take from this attack?

Click here for more Alberta

Click here for more Alberta

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

loonie politics

premium content