National Post (Politics) Archives

Prime Minister Mark Carney will be in Halifax today to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the Ukrainian president makes his way to peace talks with U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday.

The prime minister’s office confirmed the meeting, as did Zelenskyy, who told reporters on his plane that the pair will hold a video call with European leaders, according to

Bloomberg

As reported by

AFP

, the leaders will “go through all the issues, provide updates, and exchange details” of the U.S.-backed peace plan to end Russia’s nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine.

He again stressed the country’s need for legally binding security guarantees from allied nations to bring hostilities to an end.

The meeting follows a phone call about the peace talks between the two leaders on Boxing Day, during which Carney commended Zelenskyy’s continuing peace efforts and the courage of the Ukrainian people, according to

the prime minister’s office.

“As Ukrainians face another winter of Russian aggression, I reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to Ukraine, and the need to maintain pressure on Russia to negotiate,” Carney wrote on X.

This morning, I spoke with President @ZelenskyyUA about ongoing efforts to secure a just and lasting peace.

As Ukrainians face another winter of Russian aggression, I reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to Ukraine, and the need to maintain pressure on Russia to negotiate.

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) December 26, 2025

Zelenskyy’s North American trip also comes just as Russia sent a series of strikes on Kyiv and the Ukrainian energy grid overnight on Saturday.

One person is confirmed dead, at least 30 were injured and hundreds of thousands are without power after more than 500 drones and 40 missiles — including hypersonic weapons — were launched, as reported by Bloomberg and AFP.

In a post on Telegram, the Russian defence ministry said its strikes “targeted energy infrastructure used by Ukraine’s armed forces as well as defence industry facilities.”

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 — Canada’s largest public-sector union blasted the top government department as “hypocritical” for refusing to say how many of its employees received notice of a potential layoff weeks ago.

The silence from the Privy Council Office (PCO) signals the government may not be forthcoming with public information as

the majority of federal departments and agencies

prepare to announce major layoffs in January.

PCO is the department that serves the Prime Minister’s Office and oversees the rest of the federal public service.

In early December, PCO was the first federal department to notify employees who were at risk of losing their job as part of the Carney government’s decision to cut the public service by roughly 40,000 people by 2028-2029.

Affected employees were sent “workforce adjustment” letters that said they were either being cut or were at risk of losing their job.

How many of PCO’s 1,208 employees received a letter? The top federal department refuses to say despite the fact that all impacted workers have already been notified.

“As the workforce adjustment process is underway, and out of respect for affected employees, we will not comment further at this time,” spokesperson Pierre Cuguen replied this week to repeated questions about the exact number of employees who received a “workforce adjustment” letter.

“Every effort will be made, through mechanisms including alternation and early retirement, to minimize layoffs,” he continued, adding that PCO is going about the process “compassionately, fairly and in line with Canada’s obligations as an employer.”

In a statement Friday, the head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) — the largest federal public-sector union that represents hundreds of PCO workers — blasted the department for its opacity.

“It’s concerning and frankly hypocritical that the Privy Council Office refuses to be transparent about the cuts to its own workforce,” said PSAC national president Sharon DeSousa.

“PCO is the architect of many of the austerity policies that have led to sweeping public-service cuts, and they have a responsibility to share the impacts of their decisions with workers and the millions of people in Canada who depend on public services,” she added.

In the absence of clarity from the PCO, some public servants appear to be going online looking to fill in the blanks.

In fact, one person recently

launched a shared document on an online forum

in which public servants can input information received from their departments and agencies about the number of positions affected by the cutbacks.

“In an effort to keep track of, contextualize, minimize disinformation about, and put in perspective the ongoing workforce adjustment situation, I thought it might be helpful to collect all of this information in one place,” wrote the unidentified poster.

The document suggests 230 PCO employees received a letter telling them their job would be affected by the cuts. That’s nearly 20 per cent of the department’s 1,208 employees,

according to 2025 government data.

Annie Yeo, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), said that the union is bracing for program and service cuts due to the layoffs.

“

Even when one simply adds up the numbers available from unions or workers sharing data on the internet, what’s not clear, and what CAPE would like transparency on, is what programs and services will be affected by all these cuts across all these departments for ordinary Canadians,” Yeo asked in a statement Friday.

Unions such as PSAC have frequently shared updates

on how many of their members have received workforce adjustment letters since the process began after the federal government tabled Budget 2025 on Nov. 4.

Earlier this month, Natural Resources Canada confirmed that it had sent letters to 700 employees as part of the process to cut more than 400 jobs by 2029.

The government also said it sent early retirement offers to nearly 68,000 public servants in recent weeks.

The cuts come as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government embarks on the most significant reform of the public service in decades in an attempt to streamline services and “right-size” a bureaucracy that has grown by over 100,000 in the past decade.

Between 2015 and 2025, the number of federal public servants swelled to 358,000 from 257,000, according to government data.

In the fall budget, the government said it would achieve the cuts through attrition, voluntary departures, early retirements and layoffs.

The budget also confirmed sweeping 15 per cent spending cuts over three years for most federal organizations outside of the departments of public safety and national defence.

National Post

cnardi@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 Canada

After the October 7 attacks in Israel, Aviva Klompas noticed that rather than sympathy and support, what surfaced was a “disturbing undercurrent of Jew hatred that was apparently lying dormant in Canada.”

“The nature of what has exploded from under the surface is shocking, particularly for a country like Canada that prides itself on multiculturalism and the ability to live together,” said Klompas, a writer and the CEO and co-founder of Boundless, a think tank dedicated to educating groups about Israel and combatting antisemitism.

She also served as the director of speechwriting for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City and as a senior policy adviser in the Ontario government, supporting efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in Canada.

Klompas grew up in Toronto. Since October 7, she said the synagogue she attended with her family and where she had her bat mitzvah has been vandalized on 10 different occasions.

“A message is being sent both to the perpetrators, that there’s no consequences, and to Jews, that they are under attack and that nobody’s showing up for them,” she said.

“If this was happening to any other minority group, we know it would be a national crisis. But because it’s Jews, it’s not. And so the question of every person of conscience, which I believe most Canadians are, is: Why isn’t anyone stopping it? Why isn’t anything being done?”

As the year comes to an end, Klompas is reflecting on the past 12 months and how to move forward amid growing antisemitism in the country.

Which recent antisemitic incidents stand out to you the most?

I think about, let’s say, a Toronto

Jewish elementary school being hit by gunfire three times

arson at a Montreal synagogue

, Vancouver, also

arson at a synagogue

while Jews are inside praying.

Bomb threats across the country to different Jewish institutions, swastikas painted on Jewish institutions, the encampments on college campuses, university campuses. It’s not just that students are protesting, but that they’re making a Nazi salute or harassing Jews.

Has reaching a ceasefire in the Middle East lessened antisemitism in Canada?

We reached a ceasefire. The kinetic fighting is essentially — not entirely — over, but the main hostilities have come to an end. And that hasn’t stopped antisemitism. And again, the nature of the threats of who is being targeted is speaking to a disease in Canada.

We’re talking about

mezuzahs (Jewish prayer scrolls) being stolen

from the doorways of Jewish seniors (in Toronto this month). There’s something particularly sick about targeting the elderly in their own homes.

They’re publishing

a database of Canadian Jewish institutions

. (A Canadian publication created a database of institutions it said were associated with the IDF, made up of mainly Jewish schools, summer camps and synagogues.) We’re not talking about institutions that are planning military strategy or aligning with the Netanyahu government. We are talking about places where children learn, where families are gathering, where people are praying together.

History makes us hypersensitive to this notion of Jewish lists being published and disseminated.

Why are “Death to the IDF” or “From the river to the sea” chants are inappropriate at protests?

People that say they hate the IDF, I ask them to tell me what would happen if the IDF didn’t exist. You saw exactly what it would mean on October 7. What are the implications for the 10 million people who live between the river and the sea, not all of whom are Jewish, by the way? Twenty per cent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

We got a glimpse into what Hamas would do if they had the opportunity to attack Israel from the river to the sea — mass atrocities, sexual violence, hostage taking of children, of the elderly, of entire families — that’s what you’re backing.

I don’t know what could possibly be more un-Canadian than that vision for the Middle East, or for Israel.

This year, Prime Minister Mark Carney recognized Palestinian statehood. Was that a mistake?

I’m not entirely sure what the prime minister thought he was accomplishing by preemptively trying to recognize a Palestinian state. It’s a fanciful notion. It has no concrete meaning in reality.

Now I hope the Prime Minister feels quite embarrassed, because declaring Palestinian statehood did not free the hostages. It did not bring about an end to the fighting.

We just had the

UN Security Council actually back President Trump’s plan

. And what it said was that Israel has a legal right now to be holding 50 per cent of Gaza. It says that there will be no Palestinian state until a series of things take place. So now, codified in international law by that UN Security Council Resolution, is the fact that there is no Palestinian state, and there will not be a Palestinian state until the Palestinians take some meaningful action to demonstrate their ability to show leadership and to demonstrate their willingness to make peace with Israel.

Looking back retroactively, what Mark Carney did was really just theatrics, empty theatrics.

From protests outside the Munk debate to reported mistreatment by Uber drivers, what will happen if antisemitism continues to grow in Canada?

The problem is the nature of it, right? Those people outside of the Munk debate were screaming, “Devil worshiping Zionists! Go to hell and go back to the slums of Europe!” We’re not talking about policy debates here.

Well, they didn’t quite want us in Europe, if people will recall, and now they don’t want us in the Middle East, and now they don’t seem to want us in Canada. So, where exactly do they want Jewish people to go? Where are Jewish people going to be safe?

How do you think Canadian leaders should react or show up for the Jewish community?

Canadian Jews are being forced to hide their identity, to think twice before wearing a Star of David, or walking into a synagogue or sending their kids to a Jewish day school.

I would love to see Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Mark Carney spend a week, go work from a synagogue or a Jewish community centre. Go and see the daily reality for Canadian Jews. We’re not government offices. We’re not security institutions, but somehow we’re surrounded by police cars and private security.

Let them see that we need bulletproof glass to be able to pray in peace. Let them see small Jewish children walk through metal detectors just to go to kindergarten. Let them witness how Jewish life in Canada has been reduced to this high security operation. And how much higher do you want our fences? Do we need quadruple reinforced glass or more security cameras? Or is it maybe time to drop the thoughts and prayers, the empty statements about solidarity and get down to what really needs to be done, which is accountability and enforcement, arrests, charges, prosecutions.

How can Canada learn from the most recent massacre targeted at Jews in Australia?

The attack on Sydney’s Jewish community was inevitable. It was the foreseeable result of a sustained failure to take antisemitism seriously.

I am entirely unimpressed to see the very people who ignored repeated warning signs, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, offering “thoughts and prayers.” Jihadists are attacking Jewish communities with guns and explosives, and all they can muster in response is “thoughts and prayers,” perhaps they can finally try actions, enforcement, and consequences.

Civic leaders need to make it unequivocally clear antisemitic hate crimes are going to be prosecuted to the full weight of the law.

You recently met with 200 mayors in North America, including some Canadian leaders. What was the takeaway?

We found (through a Boundless study) that

42 per cent of Americans don’t distinguish between the Israeli government and Jewish people

. Now I haven’t studied it in Canada, but in Canada, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something quite similar, and that’s an enormous problem. If you’re looking at Canadian Jews or American Jews, and what you’re seeing is the Israeli government, we have an enormous problem.

We found that in the States, 41 per cent of people don’t think it’s antisemitic to say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America. Almost 40 per cent don’t think protesting outside a synagogue is antisemitic, and about a quarter say it’s acceptable to boycott Jewish owned businesses.

People have trouble recognizing what is appropriate and inappropriate political protest, what is and what isn’t you hatred. The very first thing that we need to do is to arm leaders with the language in order to be able to explain really, really clearly: if you don’t like a war, that’s perfectly reasonable, and if you don’t like how Palestinians are being treated, that’s also perfectly reasonable. But how you choose to express that, and how you choose to express your frustration or your dismay matters a great deal.

Are you hopeful for the future of Canadian Jews?

Before October 7, (the Canadian government) had plenty of chances to try to get this right. The fact that there’s now a ceasefire in place, and that antisemitic incidents (continue), particularly against vulnerable individuals like the elderly or like Jewish children or community centres…and nothing is being done meaningfully to intervene and address it, that makes me incredibly worried for Canada.

This is not just about Jewish safety, by the way. It should be enough that it’s about Jewish safety. That should be the beginning and end of it, but it’s clearly not enough for Canadian leaders to care. And what I think they don’t understand, and what makes me concerned for the future of the country, is the integrity of Canadian democracy.

If you can’t protect one community, you can’t protect any community. That’s a reality, and it seems to me, Canada is determined to learn this the hardest way possible.

This is not the first time in our history where we’ve been targeted and harassed and been the victims of violence. We always endure. We are a story of resilience, and I think Jewish people can take great pride in that.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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

“Bondi was a warning shot,” cautions Cary Kogan, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa. “If Western governments aren’t going to deal with the issue (of antisemitism), this is what we’re going to end up with. And I worry; the intelligence community has told us very clearly that there are bad actors here in Canada, and you know, the government needs to listen.”

Offended, both as a Jew and an academic, by faculty union manoeuvres to constrain the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, Cary co-founded the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA) in 2022. It was a prescient move; a year later, in the aftermath of the horrific Hamas massacre of Jews in Gaza, the network was positioned to support academics across Canada.

“We’re 400 members across 53 campuses,” Cary explains, “concerned about the safety of Jewish faculty and students and staff and combatting antisemitism.” What’s going on in campuses across the country is “really taking us away from the things that a university is supposed to be about.”

After graduating with a PhD in psychology and completing a residency at SickKids hospital in Toronto, Cary’s been teaching psychology for two decades. In that capacity, he’s studied faculty experiences of antisemitism. “Basically, what we find is there are two groups of faculty; those who have experienced no antisemitism or very low, and those who have experienced really high levels,” he shared in a recent conversation.

The mental health of the latter group takes a hit, leading to professional disruption, he explains: “It seems to work through feeling that you have to support yourself, your Jewish identity; that you’re vulnerable; and that you’re betrayed by your institution and your colleagues.” Faculty often tell him they will retire early or focus on something else in their lives; some can’t even speak to colleagues in their own department.

“In a very strategic and intentional way,” Cary asserts, “our universities are being used as a source of ideological propaganda. And there are bad actors who we know are doing that.” It makes sense, he adds, if you are trying to get some “intellectual ideological capture,” focus on university campuses; that’s where you have the most academic freedom.

The network he helped build is a line of defence against campaigns targeting Canadian universities, most often, he explains, those post-secondaries “with a high proportion of Jewish students and faculty, like the University of Toronto,” or campuses more likely to attract media attention.

I ask him: Why aren’t colleges and trade schools targeted? “Trade schools don’t teach sociology, they don’t teach anthropology, they don’t teach sociology and gender studies,” Cary explains. University campuses, “are the places where there’s been an ideological picture that incorporates anti-Zionism into the fold, so it emerges from, I think it’s driven by, a lot of faculty who have very strong ideological positions on this stuff.

“You just don’t get that when you’re teaching people how to be paramedics or how to be technicians. All very important trainings,” he notes, “but it’s hard to talk about the conflict in that context.”

We talk through the arsenal of tools available to combat antisemitism on campuses in Canada: the enforcement of laws and rules and policies already on the books; better transparency of foreign donations; greater collaboration with federal intelligence agencies; DEI policies that incorporate Jewish identity and antisemitism; more proactive governance models at universities; and the exercise of leadership, even when choices are unpopular.

Feasible options, we agree, yet as Cary reports, the statistics remain sobering: Jews are one per cent of the Canadian population experiencing 70 per cent of the religious-based hate crimes. If you are Jewish, you’re 25 times more likely to experience a hate crime than the general population.

“We need to move to action,” Cary asserts, forcefully, “where people are taking a stand, being vocal about this. We can have people talking about, you know, even protesting against war. That’s fine. We can have people who are asking for rights for Palestinians. Absolutely fine. But we can’t have this kind of identity-based hate movement being taught in classrooms, being propagated through motions at university, faculty unions, student unions and all of that.”

There’s been reluctance by some institutional leadership to engage with the police, Cary decries. And in some situations, the police were reluctant to do anything because they worry about the backlash. “It’s called ‘feeding the crocodile,’” he reports, with a grimace: “If we just allow them to have their space, it will settle down.” It’s a wrong-headed notion, Cary blurts, that’s actually created a more permissive environment that’s led to escalation.

He also points to variability in how provincial laws and local policies are applied, in the face of what he sees as collaboration between faculty and students. “I mean, faculty were helping students with these encampments, helping students write these reports, make these statements, and I think there are unions, both student and faculty unions, supporting this ideological position.”

So, he continues, “it became harder for certain leaders to actually make clear statements, and there was a double standard in terms of implementing policies, more than in any other minority group experience.”

From Cary’s perspective as a parent and educator, “the biggest or the most painful thing for Jewish students is the double standard.” How do students cope? “They’re avoiding campus, taking courses online, they’re hiding their Jewish identity. Their behaviour is changing as a function of the hostility,” he reports.

“They won’t talk about their opinions on things. They’re put on the spot, asked to speak for the Israeli government, like absurd, absurd kinds of things that we would never see other minority groups be subjected to.” If you didn’t like what Vladimir Putin is doing, Cary posits, you wouldn’t go up to somebody who is Russian-Canadian and say, “I want you to denounce Putin.” That just doesn’t make sense. That’s the double standard.

And many of these Jewish students are quietly quitting programs of study that are hostile. What programs is he referring to? It’s a long list that includes feminism, gender studies, legal studies, anthropology, sociology. Law school is proving to be a problem, he adds, and medical schools too.

What does Cary see unfolding in the coming year? Of course, we will continue debating the fine distinctions between political speech and hate speech; I’m a lawyer, I know how this goes. We will clutch our pearls and lament what happened at Bondi beach. But can we break this scapegoating of Jews?

“It’s a pendulum that swings,” Cary responds, “so you’re gonna see a momentary emergence of compassion towards the Jewish community after Bondi. I think that’s clear.”

But, we’re about to see phase two in the negotiations with Hamas, and journalists will report on the destruction in Gaza — it looks like Dresden — and the reason for that, he asserts, is the land had been converted into an underground military bunker. And so, he concludes, after this momentary bit of reprieve, things will return to the stereotypes.

“It’s deep, it’s structural, it’s embedded, it’s years old, it’s informed by religion, it’s informed by culture,” Cary offers, “and so it’s not going away anytime soon. But I think we can bring the temperature down, if we have strong leadership.”

2026 is shaping up to be quite the year, for leadership.

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

For the second time this month, mezuzahs affixed to the doorways of Jewish homes in Toronto have been stolen in what police say they are investigating as a potential hate crime.

Just after noon on Dec. 25, the Toronto Police Service was notified of four mezuzahs that were taken from door frames for four condo units in a building on Bayview in the suburban neighbourhood of North York.

A mezuzah is a small tube affixed outside and often within the home that holds a prayer scroll.

A spokesperson told National Post via email that an investigation is already underway and the TPS hate crime unit has been notified.

“This is the first time officers have been called to this location for this type of incident,” the spokesperson wrote.

In early December,

, where about 20 mezuzahs, mostly belonging to seniors from the Russian Jewish community, were removed or vandalized.

That incident is still under investigation. It’s not immediately clear if the two incidents are connected.

According to Councillor James Pasternak, the site of the latest mezuzah thefts is home to several Jewish residents, including Holocaust survivors.

In a statement on X, he said such acts are indicative of the fomented hate in the city, “often a result of the incitement from the mobs on the streets and online hate.”

“There must be a universal condemnation of these acts. And there must be consequences. The chants on the streets and the feeling of lawlessness is leading Toronto to the abyss,”

he wrote.

Staff from the United Jewish Appearl Federation of Greater Toronto are said to be assisting residents and will father them together for an afternoon Shabbat service.

In its statement condemning both incidents, B’nai Brith Canada said their growing frequency reflects the increasing normalization of antisemitism and sends a clear message.

“The intent of the perpetrators is clear, Jews are not welcome and do not belong in our communities,” it wrote on X.

“When incidents like this are minimized or grouped together, the true scale of antisemitism is obscured.”

B’nai Brith Canada has been alerted to yet another incident of antisemitic hate in Toronto, where mezuzot were once again deliberately removed from the doors of Jewish residences.

The increasing frequency of such disgusting acts speaks to the normalization of antisemitism in… pic.twitter.com/G5HeaFKiA0

— B’nai Brith Canada (@bnaibrithcanada) December 26, 2025

The Jewish human rights organization stressed that accurate reporting is essential to ensure cases are properly dealt with and touted the effectiveness of its anti-hate app, webform and hotline, which have “led directly to police action and charges being laid against antisemitic actors.”

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs also decried what it called “another brazen antisemitic act.”

“Law enforcement and governments at all levels must act with urgency to protect Canadians and ensure accountability for offenders,” Josh Landau, CIJA’s director of Ontario government relations, wrote in a statement.

TPS data show

that hate crimes against Jews made up the largest single group, with 177 reported incidents in 2024, 19 per cent more than 2023. It also found that the Jewish community, while representing less than four per cent of Toronto’s population, was the target of 40 per cent of reported incidents.

“Mischief occurrences” made up most of the hate crimes levelled at Jews, with 148 reported incidents, and anti-Jewish mischief-related hate crimes made up a third of all hate crimes in 2024.

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

Although a ban on boiling live lobsters is set to come to the U.K., a Canadian fisherman says similar legislation will never pass in Canada.

“Live boiling is not an acceptable killing method,” the new guidance unveiled Monday by the U.K. government’s

Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

(DEFRA) states. Alternative practice suggests stunning before boiling lobster; among the measures that countries like Norway, New Zealand and Switzerland have adopted.

The new policy follows a

2022 U.K. law

that said invertebrates like lobster, crabs and lobsters were sentient and felt pain like other animals.

But Jonathan Lamade-Fuentes, fisherman and co-owner for Moby Nick Fishing Charter in Mississauga, Ont., told National Post that the practice is justified as the food is prepared fresh.

Fuentes’ said legislation similar to the U.K.’s will never pass in Canada “and there is no point in Canada discussing this.” He added, “I do not see an issue (with boiling live lobster), eating seafood fresh has been what has been happening for the last thousands of years.”

Meanwhile in the U.K., Crustacean Compassion advocated since 2016 for DEFRA to act on putting regulation on inhumane methods of cooking animals. The push by the non-profit group resulted in 4,000 actions, in the form of emails and postcards, being sent to DEFRA in 2025.

“Boiling animals alive is a cruel practice that has no place today. Scientific evidence clearly shows animals like crabs and lobsters can feel pain,” ambassador Wendy Turner Webster said in a Crustacean Compassion press release. “Yet they remain unprotected under legalization and the suffering continues, unchecked. We’re urging the government to act swiftly to end this needless cruelty.”

YouGov poll

conducted in February 2025 commissioned by Crustacean Compassion found 65 per cent of British adults oppose the live boiling of crabs and lobster, up from 51 per cent in a similar 2021 survey.

Despite government backing, there has been opposition towards the regulations by the U.K.’s shellfish industry.

David Jarrad, CEO of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain

told Daily Mail

Tuesday that the regulatory measures will add costs to shellfish businesses. He also believes restaurants and hotels will just import frozen seafood from abroad instead of paying £3,500 (approx. $6,640 CAD) for stunning equipment.

Richard Wilkins, owner of fine dining restaurant 104 Restaurant in Notting Hill, London, U.K., questions if these regulations are really necessary.

“If you’re a big restaurant doing lobsters and you’re required to do something extra, it could create more of a staff cost,” Richard Wilkins told the Daily Mail.

Wilkins is also critical towards how the government is going to enforce this measure, saying banning this practice is pointless without enforcement.

“How do you police something like that? Is Keir Starmer(the U.K. Prime Minister) coming in in his chef’s whites to keep an eye on things?” Wilkins said to the Daily Mail. “The wider issue is whether we should be legislating on everything. It’s probably the most inane part of the strategy — if we’re just banning it without enforcement, that’s kind of pointless, isn’t it?”

James Chiavarini, owner of two restaurants in West London, U.K., said that this move takes away from traditional methods and suggested that smaller restaurants will be opposed to investing in stunning equipment due to already stressful financial pressures of owning a restaurant.

“Like any restaurant that’s struggling to make ends meet is going to spend £3,500 electrocuting lobsters,” Chiavarini told the Daily Mail. “We’re all in a hunter-gatherer mindset — we know things have to die for us to eat. That’s the natural world. If you take the view that we’re all part of that, why are we singling out lobsters?”

Chiavarini said that if animal welfare regulation was really serious they would look at the way chickens are raised to be used in fast food restaurants, instead of just singling out lobsters.

“People know what’s responsible and what isn’t. It doesn’t have to be brought in as legislation,” said Chiavarini. “The government just brought it in to make them look like the good guys.”

Debate began in Canada following Switzerland’s decision to regulate boiling live lobsters in February 2018.

Animal lawyer and professor at the University of Toronto, Leslie Bisgould told

CBC in 2018

, that there is not a more horrifying act than taking a live animal and boiling them alive in your kitchen.

“Why wouldn’t we apply the precautionary principle? Why wouldn’t we choose our actions that we know don’t cause harm rather than actions that might?” Bisgould said, suggesting we should err on the side of caution.

The Lobster Council of Canada says

that Canada holds more than half of the world’s supply in hard-shelled Atlantic lobsters.

Between 2017 to 2019, lobster landings make up nearly 100,000 tonnes per year and are valued at $1.5-billion, according to

Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Lobster boils have been a popular tradition for families and restaurants in the Maritime provinces. They also serve as a major tourist attraction for visitors, promoted through advertisements by Maritime provinces’ tourism boards.

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

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Could they really break up Canada?

In recent months — and as recently as last week — separatists have been wooing the Trump administration for support for an independent Alberta. They plan to continue those discussions with the U.S. State Department, and one Alberta Republican even plans to take the campaign further south, to Latin America, to rustle up support for the cause. The idea is to have friends with open chequebooks if (they say “when”) their efforts lead to a “Yes” vote.

Back home, the bid for Alberta independence saw a victory on Monday that could soon lead to a referendum: Elections Alberta approved a referendum question proposed by the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP). Following months of legal wrangling over the APP question’s constitutionality — a fight rendered moot by the provincial government’s passage of Bill 14, which greenlights citizen initiatives despite questions of constitutionality — it has won a chance to gather signatures for a potential referendum.

Their question? Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?

APP co-founder Jeff Rath and his colleagues, pointing to momentum, are doing what they can to prepare for success.

“I think it’s important that we put the building blocks for success in place to make sure that when Alberta’s negotiating its independence from Canada, it can do so from a position of strength,” Rath said, detailing his recent meetings with U.S. officials in Washington.

Having the White House on speed dial, after all, could be handy.

From America, with love?

Rath said that he and Dr. Dennis Modry, APP’s CEO, were in the American capital last Tuesday, meeting with officials at the Department of State. They discussed how the U.S. could support Alberta independence.

“One of the things that we’d like to see is U.S. recognition of Alberta as an independent country immediately upon a successful referendum,” Rath said, reiterating what he’s told National Post in recent months.

While no formal agreements have been made, the discussions also focused on the possibility of conducting a financial health study — Rath mentioned major brands like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs — to line up substantial financing.

“We were talking about introductions to officials of the U.S. Treasury,” Rath said, pointing to a feasibility study to secure a $500 billion line of credit.

This, he said, “would allow Alberta to negotiate its departure from Canada from a position of strength.”

Rath said the discussions also focused on the possibility of building two pipelines, post-independence, with one going through the Midwest to the Gulf Coast and another through Montana or Idaho and Washington to the West Coast. The plan is to double down on oil exports to and through the U.S., and Rath is excited to see such plans come to fruition without being hampered by federal red tape.

Such discussions are a bit premature, according to Cameron Davies, the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta, but he can see the logic in working on additional pipelines with Washington.

For now, he’s focused on getting to a referendum, but he said it “makes a lot of sense to have different options for pipeline access to the West Coast.”

“If Canada wants to continue to fight over access to Tidewater even after Alberta is an independent nation, then why wouldn’t we have a discussion with the United States about having a pipeline, either through Oregon or Washington?” he added.

The APP and Davies have generated headlines this year about their trips south and attempts to secure a pledge for U.S. recognition of an independent Alberta, frequently reaching out to journalists to discuss their every move. Rath believes this is helping feed the momentum for the movement he claims he sees back home.

“I think it’s extremely helpful,” Rath said about the headlines regarding potential U.S. support. “People want to know what an independent Alberta’s going to look like, and they want to know that we’re going to be successful.”

Andrew Hale, a senior policy fellow at Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., does not think it’s appropriate for U.S. officials to meet with separatists from any Canadian province, but he understands why they have.

“Obviously, I can see why the Trump administration people would do so to maybe just prod the (Prime Minister Mark) Carney government and maybe upset them a bit.”

But Hale said wooing U.S. support could backfire in Alberta, owing to the anti-American sentiment generated by President Donald Trump joking about Canada becoming the 51st state and launching a trade war.

“(Trump’s antics) ensured the Liberal party, which had less than a five per cent chance of winning the general election (under Trudeau), had a second chance,” Hale said, pointing to how Liberal political operatives told him they couldn’t believe their luck, which they attributed to Trump, earlier this year.

“I can’t see how President Trump or his administration’s interference in domestic politics can help anyone in Canada, whether it be separatists or anyone else.”

Davies said he didn’t know how news about his U.S. trips and discussions this year were impacting public opinion back home, but he did say he plans to expand his international support efforts. In early 2026, he has trips planned to both Argentina and El Salvador.

“I think it’s helping to raise the conversation about what is happening, and it’s forcing people who may not be aware of what’s happening to start looking into it, and to become aware that we’re a province of nearly five million people that is talking about leaving one of the G7 nations … and forming our own independent republic.”

Can independence really prevail?

Rath and Davies claim to have seen polling numbers in favour of independence as high as 45 and 52 per cent in recent months, but they failed to share more information or links to any such polls, other than less-than-scientific social media surveys.

Earlier this year, it looked like support for secession was growing. Angus Reid’s April 2025 surveys showed separatist sentiment in Alberta at around 30 per cent.

Innovative Research Group’s surveys, meanwhile, reflected a slight softening in separatist support last summer, after the federal election, which means the numbers are likely somewhere south of 30 per cent.

Most analysts believe separation remains highly unlikely, but separatist leaders are unfazed. They believe a referendum campaign would quickly raise these numbers. Even former Alberta politico Thomas Lukaszuk, who founded the Alberta Forever Canada campaign earlier this year to halt the independence movement’s efforts and ensure Alberta remains in Canada, fears the separatists could break through.

When asked whether a separatist referendum could be successful, Lukaszuk said, “Yes, I do.” But that’s not because there are enough separatists in Alberta, he added.

“I agree with all the polling that the number of people who are seriously considering separatism is no higher than 20, maybe a maximum of 25 per cent,” he said.

“But the problem with referenda is that a lot of people frivolously check off on a referendum as a ‘Yes’ because they want to send some kind of a message,” he added, claiming that even Brexit won because of the protest vote.

Lukaszuk never intended for his campaign to lead to a referendum question; he’d hoped Premier Danielle Smith would pose his question — “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?” — to the Alberta legislature instead, putting the issue to rest. Instead, Smith’s government made it easier for the APP’s referendum to happen, so Lukaszuk is now switching gears.

“We need to pivot our Forever Canadian campaign from a signature-gathering campaign into a fully fledged referendum campaign,” he said, noting that it’s now “obvious the premier is going to call a referendum in the new year.”

When asked whether Smith is likely to call a referendum on separation in 2026, her office simply pointed to the law.

“Alberta has a citizen-initiated referendum law that allows concerned citizens to put forward policies for referendums,” Smith’s press secretary, Sam Blackett, wrote by email. “If there is support for independence, that process is the proper avenue for citizens to bring it forward for all Albertans to have a say on.”

Elections Alberta’s decision to approve the APP’s question means Rath and his team have until early January to appoint a financial officer and begin collecting signatures. They will then have four months to get 180,000 signatures, he said.

If a referendum is held on separatism and even if, however unlikely, a “Yes” prevails, the legal matters are far from over.

Putting a pin in the constitutionality question only sidesteps the issue, according to Adrienne Davidson, assistant professor of political science at McMaster University.

“It may not be necessary for a question to be constitutional,” she wrote by email, noting that it was just the legislative requirement previously set out by the Citizen Initiative Act.

“But at some point, a referendum like this will have to contend with the fact that it undermines Indigenous treaty rights in Canada.”

That alone may not halt the march toward independence, Davidson admitted. But any successful referendum would place an obligation on both the government aiming to secede and the federal government “to work with Indigenous nations to preserve their rights as the Constitution stipulates.”

In other words, a referendum on separation may happen, and it might even succeed, but then the real legal wrangling begins.

— With files from Rahim Mohamed

National Post

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

The Mexican government announced the seizure of dozens of high-end motorcycles, drugs and Olympic medals on Wednesday, following raids that appear linked to former Canadian Olympian-turned alleged drug kingpin Ryan Wedding.

Multiple agencies raided and searched four homes in Mexico City and the State of Mexico, “related to a former Olympic athlete and one of the 10 most wanted fugitives by U.S. authorities,” according to

a joint statement.

Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder, was not named specifically, but is the only person on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list who would fit the description.

Officials said the investigation into a “former athlete” helped them identify the properties related to illicit activities, with enough evidence to support court-issued warrants.

In addition to methamphetamine and marijuana, agents also seized 62 motorcycles, two vehicles, art, documents, ammunition and two Olympic medals.

It’s not clear whose medals they are or for which sport they were awarded. Wedding never stood on the podium for Canada, having finished 24th overall in the giant slalom event at the 2002 Games in Utah, his only Olympic appearance.

The operations were led by members of the attorney general’s office, the Mexican Navy, and the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), along with the Ministry of Defence and the National Guard.

Following his athletic career, authorities allege Wedding became involved in organized crime, ultimately building a sprawling narcotics network accused of trafficking large quantities of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States and Canada.

In March, the 44-year-old from Thunder Bay, Ont., was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list on charges that include running a continuing drug enterprise, drug trafficking, and orchestrating multiple murders connected to his alleged organization.

Authorities also allege Wedding has strong ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and uses cryptocurrency to launder illicit proceeds.

In November, the reward for information leading to his arrest was increased to $15 million.

U.S. and Mexico officials believe he is hiding somewhere in Mexico.

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

There are two kinds of Canadians whose unusual views about the importance of Jesus in Christmas celebration place them in quirky but significant minorities, according to a new poll.

First, there’s the 10 per cent of Canadians who do not believe in God at all but nevertheless think it is important to remember Jesus at Christmastime.

The second group is the 18 per cent of Canadians who affirm a belief in a god but do not think it is important to remember Jesus at the festival of his birth.

These demographically curious Canadians emerge from a new poll about belief in God and the importance of Jesus in Christmas celebration.

The rest of the poll results align with previous studies about the place of God in Canadian minds, at Christmas and throughout the year.

It shows 54 per cent of people say they believe in God, 32 per cent say they do not, and 14 decline to say. Men and women are within two points of each on the question, but there is significantly greater belief among the over 55 age group (60 per cent), and less among the under 35 (48 per cent). Provincially, belief in God runs from a low of 42 per cent in Quebec to a high of 69 per cent in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The poll shows, for example, that a slim majority of 51 per cent of adult Canadians (children were not consulted) believe it is important to remember the role of Jesus when celebrating Christmas. People under age 35 are more divided and a slim majority of Quebecers feel it is not important, said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the poll by Leger. It was conducted online through a panel survey of 1,723 respondents between Dec. 19 and 21.

Jedwab said its most striking finding is what he calls the “ambiguity” about why Christmas is celebrated in the first place, whether as a major Christian holy day about the coming of Jesus, or as a major modern civic winter holiday about the coming of Santa Claus.

He also sees clear evidence of “the desire to de-Christianize Christmas in the spirit of state secularism.”

In terms of the unbelievers who still want to see Christ in Christmas, Jedwab sees their responses as stating a view not so much about themselves as about society, less about their personal beliefs and more about what Christmas should be today as a major civic holiday, given what it originally or traditionally was in the past.

These people are “outliers” who are making an observation about Christmas rather than expressing a personal conviction, Jedwab said.

These people might be cultural traditionalists who just happen to be atheists. They might simply like the idea of Christmas as a culturally unifying festival with religious origins. They might be high-cultured aesthetes who appreciate the time-honoured ritual of song and scripture without personally endorsing the metaphysical extravagances of supernatural belief. Or they might just be the sort of person who prefers Christmas hymns like Adeste Fideles and Joy To The World to Jingle Bell Rock and All I Want For Christmas Is You. These attitudes are evidently common, the poll shows. During Advent, it is mainly the devout who line the pews. But on Christmas, the old timey bells and smells draw a more theologically diverse crowd.

People who believe in a god but do not think it is important to remember Jesus at Christmas are more common, at 18 per cent.

One possible explanation for this apparent contradiction is that these people believe in a different, non-Christian god or gods, and their thoughts about Christmas as a civic holiday are just more in line with prevailing secularism.

Or maybe they believe in the Abrahamic God and are just not Christians, but rather Muslims or Jews, who regard the historical Jesus of Nazareth differently, not as the central figure and not as the deity.

Some of them are likely Christian-adjacent people but not the ardent faithful or those who do not go to church on Christmas.

For some, Christmas happens in the mall, not at mass. For them, Jesus does not enter into it.

A margin of error cannot be calculated for a panel survey like this, but a poll with a sample size of 1,723 respondents would have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The survey results were weighted according to the 2021 census.

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

LEITH, Ont. – The first thing you notice at Tom Thomson’s grave in winter is the little cluster of paintbrushes bursting like flowers through the snow.

Look closer and you read that it is in fact three graves, also containing the great painter’s infant brother James Brodie Thomson and maternal grandfather Kenneth Mathison.

Sweeping the snow off the base reveals painted rocks frozen into place, little tributes from pilgrim artists to this rural churchyard northeast of Owen Sound, Ont. Beneath the ice, probably, are coins and pebbles, as is the tradition, likely some from Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park where Thomson died in the summer of 1917, in circumstances that have passed from mystery into history and beyond into national myth.

A few paces away is the little church, built in 1865 as the Auld Kirk, with its single stained glass, a little round window above the pulpit that was originally just plain glass in the austere Presbyterian style. The graves all face the rising sun. The window faces the other way, northwest toward the prevailing winds off Georgian Bay. Across the road is the farm where Thomson grew up, now an equestrian centre.

This is the stained glass that this year is on the National Post’s Christmas front page. It is the paper’s festive journalistic tradition, many years running, to choose a notable Canadian stained glass and tell its story.

For example,

last year’s was from St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church

in Halifax on the first Christmas after it closed, where original stained glass windows were replaced after they were blown out in the 1917 Halifax Explosion. In 2006, it was from Christ Church Anglican in nearby Meaford, Ont., notable for being assembled out of shards of broken stained glass collected by a military chaplain from damaged churches in Second World War Europe.

This one has had fame before, even aside from the fact that Canada’s greatest painter, and the victim of the most legendary death in the Canadian wilderness since Sir John Franklin, rests outside under an old English oak. This window was even a Christmas stamp once.

But the funny thing about “Nativity Scene,” the 52 cent Christmas stamp put out by Canada Post in 1997, is that this is not a nativity scene at all. That’s no newborn baby. He’s standing up with a full head of hair. He’s ready for Grade 1. He’s closer to the Finding in the Temple than to the Nativity.

But this is to quibble. The keepers of the church refer to it as the “Holy Family” window. Like Thomson, its story is of a person who died too soon, and whose memory lives on in art.

In 1952, the window was donated to what was then the Leith United Church by Laura Webster of Toronto, in memory of her daughter Frances Pauline Webster, who died aged 23. Ellen Simon designed it, and Yvonne Williams rendered it in stained glass, both of them prominent Canadian visual artists and collaborators on many church projects on grander scales than this one.

The Historic Leith Church has been restored and is more of a concert and ceilidh venue now, with a few weddings and the odd funeral, a regular Christmas service and one or two others.

Thomson’s gravestone calls him simply a “landscape painter,” which almost undersells his achievements as a painter of wind you can see and waves you can hear. He vanished at the peak of his talent into a wilderness lake, taking up a sanctified place in Canadian art. Whether that was by malice, suicide or accident remains the alluring mystery that sustains his fame, and brings tourists here to this gravestone, though usually in summer.

In any other case it would be crass to even mention that a gravesite might actually contain a casket full of sand. But that is one important strand of Thomson’s legend, widely believed but not uncontrovertibly demonstrated, that his body in fact remains in Algonquin Park, where it was first buried after he was found floating eight days after he disappeared in high summer.

Pete Telford, chairman of the Friends of Leith Church, points out the references in the window, the seagulls over the Christ figure’s head as if flying in from Georgian Bay, and under his left arm, the unmistakable shape of a pine tree in Thomson’s style.

It is a subtle nod to the national significance of this remote and holy place, something a visitor might not see but would definitely recognize.

“It is until you notice it, then you can’t take your eyes off it,” Telford 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.

Source: National Post (Politics)

Click here for more Canada

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

From America, with love?

Can independence really prevail?

Click here for more Alberta

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

Click here for more Canada

loonie politics

premium content