LP_468x60
on-the-record-468x60-white

France's President Emmanuel Macron (R) shakes hands with Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney (L) as Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer (C) looks on before the start of the North Atlantic Council plenary meeting at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in The Hague on June 25, 2025.

OTTAWA — Even before it hits the 2014 NATO target of two per cent, Canada is committing to a new NATO target of boosting its defence and military spending to five per cent of its GDP — or $150 billion each year in total — within ten years.

Following a two-day NATO summit in the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed Wednesday that the alliance of European countries, the U.S. and Canada had agreed to significantly increase the sizes of their military and boost defence infrastructure spending within a decade.

 Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney (C) poses for a photo with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (R) and Netherlands’ Prime Minister Dick Schoof (L) on the second day of the 2025 NATO Summit on June 25, 2025 in The Hague, Netherlands.

The new target, which was the product of significant pressure by U.S. President Donald Trump, will be split in two portions: 3.5 per cent dedicated to military spending and 1.5 per cent on defence infrastructure investments.

During an interview with CNN Tuesday evening, Carney said the new target — should Canada ever hit it — means the government will eventually be spending roughly $150 billion per year on defence. “It’s a lot of money,” he acknowledged.

During a press conference Wednesday, Carney said that the target is designed to respond to current and growing threats from Russia and other hostile countries. But he said the target could be adjusted in years to come and the geopolitical situation evolves.

 Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney (R) and his wife Diana Fox Carney arrive for a social dinner at the ‘Huis ten Bosch’ Royal Palace during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Heads of State and Government summit in The Hague, on June 24, 2025.

“We are protecting Canadians against new threats. I wish we didn’t have to… but we do have to and it is our core responsibility as government,” Carney said.

“The fact that we’re united, the fact the United States is fully behind this, the fact that we’re working together is going to reduce the threat environment 10 years from now,” he added.

Earlier this month, Carney promised that Canada would hit its 2014 NATO commitment of dedicating two per cent of its GDP to defence spending by the end of the 2025-2026 fiscal year.

 Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a meeting with Netherlands’ prime minister at the Catshuis on the sidelines of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Heads of State and Government summit in The Hague on June 24, 2025.

More to come.

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.


Private Heath Matthews of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, awaiting medical aid after night patrol near Hill 166. Date: June 22, 1952.

In the photograph, the young soldier looks past the camera lens. Blood stains his face from shrapnel wounds. Grenades hang from his belt, his rifle is beside him. He is leaning against sandbags, but appears somehow coiled for action, resting but not at ease, his expression enigmatic, as if he had just witnessed something barely believable for the first time.

His company had just made a fighting retreat, under mortar attack from Chinese forces, from a patrol near Hill 166 west of the Jamestown Line in Korea, near the present day border between North and South. Two Canadians were killed, and two dozen injured.

It was the early morning of June 23, 1952, and as he waited for medical aid at this field clinic, Pte. Heath Bowness Matthews originally of Alberton, P.E.I., a signaller with Charles Company, 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, was becoming an iconic figure in Canadian history.

The photographer looking at him, Sgt. Paul Tomelin of Alberta, had arrived in Korea with the 25 Canadian Public Relations Unit as an experienced chronicler of war, with battleground experience in the Second World War in Europe, where he was also a stretcher bearer.

Tomelin had been assigned to this patrol, but could not use a flash at night, so he photographed tracer fire during the fight, then waited near the aid post for casualties. He noticed Matthews and raised his camera, starting to focus on the seam of his shirt, to ensure he was also focused on those eyes. He would later recall Matthews showed an expression of disgust, as if about to turn away from the intrusion. Tomelin gestured, asked him to please stay, and squeezed the shutter.

“And the strange part of it is, that normally a picture as important as that one seemed to be, I would take a second one. But somehow or another I felt that it was there. And it was there,” Tomelin said, according to a first-person account in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Tomelin would later write in the Ottawa Citizen: “Based on my research of published war photographs, I claim this is the only face of war photograph of its kind that expresses the soldier’s feeling of awe, bewilderment, confusion, despair, exhaustion, fear and gratitude for having survived.”

Both photographer and subject are dead, and both lived to old age, but their public legacy is this image that unites them and “captures something both timeless and awful,” said Timothy Sayle, a historian of international relations at the University of Toronto. “These photos capture something that resonates with us,” he said.

Today, 75 years after the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, with invasion of the South by the North, then quickly spiralled into a stalemated proxy war by United Nations allies against communist expansion, the photograph stands as a photojournalistic masterpiece, on a level with the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima in 1945 or the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on Victory over Japan Day.

Like those famous photos, it is not without a little controversy of its own over the circumstances of its taking, and over the degree to which a photographer observes or creates his scenes (Tomelin asked Matthews to stay put, so it is in that sense a posed portrait), even about who the subject is (that last controversy is now settled; it is Matthews). But like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, this photograph titled The Face of War and preserved in the Library and Archives Canada, also has a rare capacity to evoke deep meaning in the Canadian psyche, and to somehow convey a universal human experience of war. This young man could have been anyone.

Unlike the other iconic war photos from the Great War and the Second World War, however, this photograph is an icon of a conflict that is overshadowed in Canadian remembrance, even sometimes forgotten, lacking both the apocalyptic grandeur of the world wars and the proximity of Afghanistan in national Canadian memory.

Korea was an ideological war, an episode of the Cold War. Freed from Japanese colonization after the Second World War, Korea was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. No one on the United Nations side that Canada joined was fighting to liberate North Korea. This was a proxy war against communist influence. Negotiations to end it began almost as soon as the fighting started. There was no satisfying victory, just a stalemate that continues more or less to this day. Andrew Burtch, the post-1945 historian at the Canadian War Museum points out that it was first nicknamed the Forgotten War in the popular press in 1951, before it even ended.

By the winter of 1952, a few months before this image was taken, the back and forth of the early dynamic fighting was largely settled, Burtch said. The North’s initial offensive had been turned back. The pushback had been pushed back in its turn by China, supporting the North. The battlegrounds had become fixed into static defence lines along hills separated by no man’s land in the valleys. It had become, Burtch said, “a war of patrols.”

The Chinese were seasoned fighters, skilled in ambush tactics, and many patrols ended in disaster and fighting withdrawals for the United Nations side, as in the case of Matthews’ patrol, in which Cpl. P.J. Nolan and Pte. W.F. Luxton were killed in action, according to the unit’s contemporaneous war diary, provided by Burtch.

The Canadians who fought were a new generation of soldiers, many of them too young to have fought in the Second World War, including Matthews who enlisted for Korea at age 18, but old enough to be inspired by the cultural appreciation of those who did.

It was also a new era of wartime news photography, said Jonathan F. Vance, who teaches Canadian military history, its commemoration and social memory at Western University. People had become used to seeing powerful images on newspaper front pages, and many of the military controls put in place about what could be shown were developed in the Second World War, mindful of photography’s power to shape public opinion.

It is a military tradition full of problems. For example, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and The Falling Soldier from the Spanish Civil War have long been suspected of being staged. Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag, depicting Russian soldiers in Berlin in 1945, was similarly exploited for Soviet propaganda, with its journalistic details obscured, such as the identity of the soldiers. A Canadian Battalion Go Over the Top, depicting soldiers climbing from a trench in 1916, was widely published as a real battle but was in fact an earlier training exercise. At least Wait for Me, Daddy, the famous 1940 image of soldiers deploying from British Columbia with a little boy running after his father, is more or less what it appears to be. For the rest, reliability sometimes stands in inverse proportion to fame.

 “Wait for me, Daddy” 1940 by Claude P. Dettloff.

“A lot of most famous war photos are not what we once thought they were,” said Vance. “I think they were done for propaganda purposes in mind, so if they weren’t perfect in the first instance, they had to be made perfect.”

But the Matthews portrait was different. “It was simply a record of an individual at a time,” Vance said. “It’s not propaganda because I’m not sure what it would be propaganda in favour of.”

Curiously, the effect is almost to render him anonymous, and the scene timeless and placeless. The subject has no identifying kit, no badges or shoulder stripes. It would take an especially keen eye to read any information in his grenades or rifle. He could be anyone. Vance said that is its strength.

It also admits of different readings. The most common is something like the shell shock of the Great War or the “thousand yard stare” of Vietnam, the physical manifestation of psychological trauma in dark, heavy, almost unseeing eyes.

“But also, if you come at it differently, you see a guy exhausted after a job well done,” Vance said. “You don’t know if the battle went well or poorly, what side won, what was behind the fight. It’s a personal visceral glimpse at war but it’s essentially value neutral.”

“You can read anything into it that you want, which is its power. There’s no fixed meaning,” Vance said.

“It’s got that Mona Lisa quality where you don’t quite know what he is thinking,” said Burtch.

When it was published in newspapers across North America, the photo quickly became famous as “The Face of War.” A Montreal Star story on July 4, 1952, for example, ran the caption: “Blood, grime and bone-deep weariness etch the face of Pte. Heath Matthews, 19, of 2315 Hingston Avenue, in this picture taken after he completed a combat patrol in Korea with the 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment. Pte. Matthews, son of Mrs. Maude Matthews, was reported wounded June 24. His injuries were not believed serious.”

Many years later, in 1994, a Korean War exhibit at the Canadian War Museum would bring to light the minor controversy over the soldier’s identity.

Pte. Herbert Norris of Kingston, Ont., was also a signaller in Charles Company in Korea, and had been giving talks about the war and identifying himself as subject of The Face of War. This came to wide attention through media coverage of the exhibit, including the museum’s presentation of a framed print to Norris at a gala. Faced with a growing scandal, the museum looked more closely into it, and based on evidence from archives, police facial recognition experts, and the confirmation of both Tomelin and the person who processed the film, concluded they had made a mistake. The Face of War was Matthews.

It left Norris feeling disrespected, he would later tell the Kingston Whig-Standard. He was not the only Korea veteran to feel this way. Even during the war, when U.S. President Harry Truman called it a “police action,” rather than a war that had not been formally declared, many veterans of Korea felt their contributions were inadequately respected.

“That really stuck in the craw of a lot of veterans to hear it characterized that way,” Burtch said.

 Members of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry carry a wounded soldier from battle during the Korean War.

Korea was an unpopular war, and Sayle said it was a main reason the Democrats lost the 1952 U.S. election. It was especially worrying to Canada, though in a slightly different way, Sayle said.

The Korean War was “exceptionally significant” in international relations, Sayle said. It transformed European security. It led to the deployment of Canadian and American forces in Europe with NATO, anticipating conflict with the Soviet Union.

“The actual continental commitment begins because of the attack in Korea,” Sayle said.

So Canadians were alarmed to see American forces bombing defenceless villages in Korea, and came to wonder whether they would also fight that way if hot war came again to Europe. The concern reached the cabinet level, and Sayle shared a declassified message from Canada’s minister of national defence to his American counterparts, warning of the “magnificent ammunition” for enemy propaganda and the risk to military morale posed by using heavy artillery and large bombers against villages; by naming missions things like “Operation Killer;” and by using racist slurs for South Koreans, the same ones that would later be notorious among American soldiers in Vietnam.

There is a valid argument to be made that Canada was fighting to protect South Korea, Sayle said, but the way the conflict played out “robs the war of any satisfying heroic narrative, especially because it ends in armistice rather than true peace. There’s no closure for the public. There’s no celebration, no Victory in Korea day,” Sayle said.

Over the following years, as Korea slipped from immediate memory into modern history, there was another shooting war in Southeast Asia that coloured its remembrance. Korea was in that sense “in the shadow of Vietnam,” Sayle said.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when there was an “explosion of memory” of the Second World War, as Sayle puts it, this sharpened the contrast with Korea, leaving its veterans sometimes overlooked, out of the Remembrance Day spotlight.

“Just because of the historical nature and context I think we can understand why it was forgotten, but that doesn’t excuse the forgetting of these veterans and their experiences,” Sayle said. As this photo illustrates and reminds, any individual soldier’s experience of war is “indivisible,” Sayle said.

Seventy-five years since the forgotten war began, this photo is still able to convey that experience, and to imprint it in the Canadian memory.

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.


The boiler room at Paragon's offices in Toronto, where Antonio Palazzolo and other telemarketers contacted clients and potential fraud victims.

A Toronto-area conman skipped his sentencing hearing in a U.S. court, for helping swindle more than $21 million from hundreds of victims, after prosecutors alleged he kept scamming people even after his arrest and guilty plea.

Antonio Palazzolo, 67, did not appear in U.S. federal court in Cleveland on May 8, when he was expected to be sentenced for the large, sophisticated investment swindle pulled by a gang of Toronto-based conmen.

What was supposed to be his long-delayed sentencing hearing after his guilty plea in 2022 turned into an abrupt five-minute session when Palazzolo failed to join Judge J. Philip Calabrese, two U.S. prosecutors and his own lawyer in court.

Calabrese said an arrest warrant would be issued, making him a fugitive.

If Palazzolo had shown up, he would have heard prosecutors tell the judge that the U.S. government no longer supports a reduced sentence because “he has continued to engage in similar fraudulent conduct since pleading guilty in this case,” according to a government memo filed in court a week before the hearing.

Prosecutors said Palazzolo kept pulling an almost identical fraud as the one he pleaded guilty to while he remained free in Canada on an unsecured US$20,000 bond while awaiting his sentencing.

As his hearing approached, three victims contacted U.S. authorities, two claiming he had ripped them off for big bucks and another that Palazzolo was trying to defraud him as recently as late April, the judge was told.

One victim showed the government an invoice from Palazzolo for US$10,000 for a pink diamond dated April 24, according to court records. That’s just two weeks before his scheduled court date.

Palazzolo’s sentencing in Ohio was scheduled after his wire fraud conspiracy conviction from his time as a crooked salesman with Paragon International Wealth Management, Inc., a Toronto firm where he went by the alias John Carson. He and other conmen duped victims in Canada and the United States into buy coloured diamonds for much more than they were worth.

The great Paragon swindle and its cavalcade of conmen is the focus of

an in-depth investigative feature

in National Post published last summer, called Jack of Diamonds.

The new allegations say that after a Toronto police raid on Paragon’s Finch Avenue West telemarketing offices in 2018, Palazzolo kept tricking gullible investors into sending him huge sums for low-value stones using his own company, called Pavillion Diamonds International.

Alleged victims complained to investigators of a scheme that played out the same as the one pulled at Paragon.

Customers were contacted by phone and convinced to make a small purchase of a pink diamond and were later lied to about how much that gem had increased in value in order to convince customers to send much larger sums of money — over and over — in hopes of a promised big payday that never came, court was told.

 A ring seized by police from a vault in Paragon’s office.

After a series of payments from one new complainant, the customer’s adult daughter became concerned and discovered his involvement in the Paragon fraud. She then secretly recorded a phone call with Palazzolo, prosecutors said. On the call he allegedly said he was the owner of Pavillion Diamonds.

She asked him if the name Paragon meant anything to him. He allegedly told her he had worked there but had been “exonerated” from any wrongdoing. She then called the FBI. Palazzolo’s contact with that complainant allegedly stretched from 2018 until 2023, which was after his guilty plea.

Another customer said he was convinced to spend US$115,000 in April 2022 on a diamond that a Pavillion salesman promised would double in value within a year, prosecutors alleged.

In June 2024, long after his guilty plea, Palazzolo allegedly contacted that customer again with an offer to sell the diamond for a payout. There was a catch. The customer had to first purchase another diamond for US$63,700 because the purported buyer wouldn’t purchase anything less than two carats of diamond weight.

The man sent him the money, court heard.

Prosecutors said the government could no longer support lowering Palazzolo’s recommended sentence for accepting responsibility, as often happens when someone pleads guilty.

“A defendant’s commission of new crimes related to the offense of conviction while on bond is inconsistent with acceptance of responsibility,” James Lewis, Assistant United States Attorney, wrote in the prosecution’s sentencing memo. “Given that Palazzolo has continued to engage in similar fraudulent conduct since pleading guilty, the government opposes Palazzolo receiving any reduction for acceptance of responsibility.

“The impact of this crime on Paragon’s victims was profound.”

Palazzolo was born in Rome, Italy. He got married at the age of 23 and had two children.

After living in several countries, he moved to Canada in 1991, court heard. He completed high school in Toronto and lived in Pickering, just east of Toronto, at the time of his arrest.

At a hearing in 2022 in Cleveland when he pleaded guilty on a video link from Canada, he said he didn’t have a job.

“I am helping my wife in her business,” Palazzolo said at his sentencing hearing. “We are formally separated, but we live in the same house. So, I help her with her business, and I do everything at the house.”

Palazzolo’s wife’s business is an online jewelry store, court was told.

At that 2022 hearing, prosecutors itemized his duplicity and scamming while working at Paragon, and listed huge payments gullible victims put on their credit cards and sent by wire transfers. After hearing it all, the judge asked him: “Are all those things true? Did you do those things and say those things?

“I did,” said Palazzolo.

“I’m here trying to make amends for what happened, and I’m trying to cooperate in every possible way that I can,” Palazzolo told the judge back then.

The stage seemed set for an easy sentencing process.

A pre-sentence report for Palazzolo, however, calculated an unexpectedly high sentencing range for him — much harsher than for his co-conspirators in the Paragon fraud, even before the government moved for a tougher sentence because of alleged new frauds.

James Gagliardini, the founding boss of Paragon,

was sentenced to 54 months

in a U.S. prison in October; Michael Shumak, another founding partner,

was sentenced to 60 months

in February.

 Paragon founder James Gagliardini.

Jack Kronis, a career conman who was a star salesman at Paragon after his long history in multiple frauds in several countries,

was sentenced to 37 months

in November. Edward Rosenberg, another salesman,

was sentenced to 34 months

last month.

Palazzolo seemed to be expecting similar treatment. Instead, the guideline range fell hard on him. The low end was calculated at 108 months, which is a stiff nine years in prison. The high end was 135 months, more than 11 years.

In his sentencing memo to the judge, filed before the aborted sentencing hearing, Palazzolo’s Cleveland lawyer, Michael Goldberg, complained of the disparity in sentencing guideline ranges for other members of the Paragon gang.

“Mr. Palazzolo has less culpability than several co-defendants who received sentences below Mr. Palazzolo’s guideline range,” Goldberg wrote.

“He was not an organizer or leader of the scheme. He is less culpable for the losses caused by the scheme than several co-defendants who received sentences below Mr. Palazzolo’s guideline range.”

Goldberg also said that Palazzolo accepts responsibility.

“He is remorseful for his actions. He understands that restitution will be part of his sentence, and intends to do everything he can to repay his victims for their losses,” Goldberg wrote.

Goldberg declined to comment to National Post when asked about his client not showing up at his sentencing hearing. So did the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI, citing the ongoing nature of the case.

There is no evidence that Palazzolo has returned to U.S. custody. No new information has been filed in court in his case.

Prosecutors said the amount of money swindled from Paragon’s victims attributed to Palazzolo was about US$1.5 million dollars.

U.S. court documents spell Palazzolo’s alleged company as Pavillion. There is a lawsuit filed in Ontario court that alleged a diamond investment fraud against Palazzolo and a company with a slightly different spelling,

Pavilion Diamonds International.

• Email:

ahumphreys@postmedia.com

| Twitter:

AD_Humphreys

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.


Former Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole appears as a witness at a standing committee on procedure and house affairs on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023.

OTTAWA — More than 250 prominent Canadians have signed a letter calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to dial up the pressure against Iran.

The letter,

sent by pro-Israel group

Allies for a Strong Canada, urges Carney to take decisive action to counter Iran’s “malign influence” on the Middle East and broader global landscape.

“In light of Iran’s persistent aggression, including its support for terrorist organizations and its attempts to undermine stability in the Middle East, we urge Canada to take a leadership role against it in the international community,” reads the letter.

The letter calls for Carney to tighten sanctions on Iran’s regime, root out Iranian agents operating on Canadian soil and bar fleeing Iranian officials from taking refuge inside the country.

Signatories include former foreign affairs minister John Baird, Retired General Rick Hillier and ex-Conservative leaders Rona Ambrose and Erin O’Toole. It also includes former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, former Alberta premier Jason Kenney and former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall.

Michael Westcott, the executive director of Allies for a Strong Canada, told National Post that the fight against Iran belongs to Canada as much as anyone else.

“Whether it was the recent threats against (ex-justice minister) Irwin Cotler, or the

shooting down of Flight PS752

that left 55 Canadians dead, Iran is bad for Canada and bad for the world,” said Westcott.

Signatory Kaveh Shahrooz, a lawyer and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said that Carney must acknowledge the existential threat Iran presents to ally Israel.

“It is important that Canada’s government begin from the premise that Israel, like every other state, should have the right to firmly defend itself against continuous and credible threats to its very existence.”

Carney called for diplomatic solution on Sunday after news broke that the U.S. had executed strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites in support of Israel.

“While U.S. military action taken last night was designed to alleviate (a nuclear) threat, the situation in the Middle East remains highly volatile. Stability in the region is a priority,”

wrote Carney in a statement

.

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 daily newsletter, Posted, here.


Suspected cocaine seized at the Blue Water Bridge on June 12, 2025.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) announced Thursday that it had made “a significant seizure” of cocaine at the Blue Water Bridge port of entry in Point Edward, Ont.

In a press release

, the agency said that on June 12, a commercial truck arrived from the United States at the Blue Water Bridge port of entry and was referred for a secondary examination. The Blue Water Bridge connects Point Edward, Ont., with Port Huron, Mich., and lies just north of Sarnia, at the southern tip of Lake Huron.

During the secondary inspection of the trailer, border services officers, with the assistance of a detector dog, discovered 161 bricks of suspected cocaine in six boxes. The total weight of the suspected narcotics was 187 kg, giving it an estimated street value of $23.3 million.

The CBSA then arrested Karamveer Singh, 27, of Brampton, Ont., and transferred him and the suspected narcotics to the custody of the RCMP. Singh has been charged with importation of cocaine, and possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The investigation is ongoing.

“The CBSA takes its border protection responsibilities very seriously and our officers work diligently with the RCMP to prevent smuggling across our borders,” said An Nguyen, director of St. Clair district operations for the CBSA. “This is the fourth time a significant amount of cocaine coming from the United States was seized at the Blue Water Bridge this year.”

The CBSA notes that, to date this year, its officers have seized a total of 978 kg of cocaine at Southern Ontario ports of entry.

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.


An Iranian woman in Tehran holds a poster with portraits of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (L) and late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.  Canada's youngest adults are more likely to think it wouldn’t be good for Iran's regime to collapse and be replaced, according to a new poll conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies.

As tensions returned to a simmer between Israel and Iran amidst a ceasefire agreement, a new poll conducted before

the shaky armistice

found that far more Canadians are distrustful of Iran than those who have faith in the Islamic Republic.

But data from a Leger Marketing poll for the Association for Canadian Studies poll showed that younger generations are more apt to trust Iran and think it wouldn’t be good for the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to collapse and be replaced by new leadership.

The polling also attempted to gauge whether respondents “think that Iran wants the destruction of the State of Israel,” with 71 per cent believing that to be the goal, and even 59 per cent of the 18-24 cohort.

Jack Jedwab, the Association’s president and CEO, said that despite the younger generations’ different perceptions of the conflict, it points to Canadian public opinion being closely aligned with that of the U.S. and NATO.

“We’re hearing from the prime minister (Mark Carney) in terms of how he positions himself, which is closer to the view of the U.S., I would suggest,” Jedwab told National Post.

“That’s not speaking to what actions the U.S. has taken in the past four or five days. I’m just talking strictly in terms of the perception of Iran and Iran’s position in these global conflicts.”

Carney, who’d previously

reaffirmed that Canada respected Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran as hostilities began in mid-June

, said after U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend that Canada also stands against Iran developing a nuclear weapon and

called for a diplomatic resolution to the unrest in the broader Middle East.

 Israeli emergency services and security officers evacuate a body from the rubble of a building hit by an Iranian missile in Beersheba in southern Israel on June 24, 2025.

Overall, ACS found that only 12 per cent of all respondents see Iran as trustworthy, compared to 52 per cent who felt it wasn’t. Trust was highest among the 18-24 group (34 per cent) and decreasingly lower across each age group, culminating with a mere 4 per cent of those over 65.

“There seems to be some very important differences in the world vision or the way in which the younger cohorts have a different view of the nature of these conflicts and how they position the protagonist,” said Jedwab, noting that data extrapolated from the employment status showed students (27 per cent) were also more apt to trust in Iran than any other age group.

“They seem to have a much softer view on Iran’s intentions and the intentions of the Iranian regime.”

He reasons that it relates to how and from where that group is receiving the news that informs their opinions.

“All the alternative narrative, not the majority narrative, seems to be really sort of more attractive to people in that youngest cohort and to students,” he added.

The youngest cohort also appears to be the most conflicted, too, with an equal 34 per cent believing Iran is untrustworthy, and 32 per cent who were unsure or chose not to answer, aligning with the national average of those who responded the same (36 per cent).

“They’re very split on the issue,” Jedwab surmised.

The generational opinion gap was evident, too, when respondents were asked if a change of government would be a good thing for Iran; only 34 per cent of those identified as students agreed, compared to more than 50 per cent in all other employment status — 71 per cent among the self-employed and retirees.

The 18- to 24-year-olds didn’t stray far from their elders in the view that Iran’s goal is to destroy Israel, however, with 59 per cent in agreement.

The poll also found that those who trust Iran are less likely (60 per cent) to concur with the regime’s collapse and replacement, and almost evenly split (49 per cent to 51 per cent) on whether Iran wants to destroy Israel. Those without trust in Iran were more confident of both sentiments (75 per cent and 83 per cent).

The poll was conducted June 20-22 and canvassed 1,580 adults. While a non-probability sample panel survey such as this doesn’t have a margin of error, a similar probability sample of that many respondents would have a margin of error of plus/minus 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20

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.


Premier Danielle Smith speaks at the 2025 Rotary International Convention to welcome countries from all over the world at the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary on Saturday, June 21, 2025.

OTTAWA — David Parker, the founder of conservative activist group Take Back Alberta, said on Monday morning that, by the end of the day, Albertans would know the strength of the province’s budding independence movement.

“It’s not great,” he

tweeted shortly before midnight

, as the

last of the results

trickled in from Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills.

The rural Alberta riding, one of three up for grabs in Monday’s provincial byelection, was closely watched for

a potential separatist breakthrough

.

In the end, the two pro-independence candidates on the ballot took home a respectable 19 per cent of the vote, but fell short of both major parties.

According to preliminary results, the UCP’s Tara Sawyer won easily with 61 per cent of the vote with NDP candidate Bev Toews taking home 20 per cent, edging out Republican Party of Alberta leader Cam Davies by 365 votes.

Davies told the National Post that the third-place finish won’t break his spirits.

“I see a lot of talking heads and pundits and pollsters that are all quite vigorously calling for us to pack it in. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news for them, but we’re just getting started,” said Davies.

He said

going into the byelection

that he was aiming for about 20 per cent of the vote.

Davies, who favours Alberta becoming an independent constitutional republic, concedes that the Alberta Republicans’ name and red colours may have tethered it too closely to U.S. President Donald Trump.

“(The branding) certainly did cause questions about what we were,” said Davies.

“Did it leave an opening for others to spread misinformation? Absolutely it did.”

Davies pushed back against assertions throughout the campaign that he wants Alberta to enter the U.S. as the 51st state, a claim he flatly denies.

Davies, who lives in south Red Deer, said he’ll be running in the next provincial election but hasn’t decided which riding he’ll contest.

Wildrose Loyalty Coalition candidate Bill Tufts finished well behind the top three with just over one per cent of the vote.

Most of the riding overlaps with Olds-Didsbury, where pro-independence candidate Gordon Kesler won

a surprise byelection victory

in 1982, becoming the only separatist to ever sit in Alberta’s legislature.

Pro-independence candidates won a

combined six per cent

of the riding’s vote in the last provincial election.

Jeff Rath, a lawyer with the pro-independence Alberta Prosperity Project, said that the easy UCP win was a testament to party leader and Premier Danielle Smith’s continued popularity with the party’s grassroots.

Rath says this popularity extends to the majority of the UCP’s base

that supports Alberta independence

.

“Even at APP events, when Danielle Smith’s name gets mentioned … people applaud and they’re very supportive of her,” said Rath.

Rath said that the province’s separatist movement is “appreciative” of Smith’s move in April

to lower the threshold

of signatures needed to trigger a referendum on independence.

He also said he expects Smith to come out in favour of independence once it’s advantageous for her to do so.

“She’s a pragmatist,” said Rath.

Thirty-five per cent of UCP voters view Smith as a separatist, according to a recent poll from Pollara Strategic Insights.

Rath said he wasn’t concerned by the Alberta Republicans’ showing in Olds, and didn’t think the Alberta independence movement needs a new party considering how comfortable most of those voters are with the UCP.

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 daily newsletter, Posted, here.


Roads across parts of the United States are reportedly buckling due to extreme heat.

A video shows the moment a vehicle was launched into the air as a heat wave reportedly caused the road to buckle in Missouri, a state in the Midwestern region of the United States.

It was captured by Cape Girardeau resident Albert Blackwell on June 22, with temperatures that day reaching 92 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 34 degrees Celcius,

according to the National Weather Service

.

“Everyone was in shock, myself included,” said Blackwell to National Post over email on Tuesday. “I’ve seen small buckles, but never anything like this. Just two seconds later and that car probably would have been rolled.”

Blackwell, who runs a local weather page, said he had previously taken a video of the initial buckle in the road and noticed cars scraping their front ends. While he was in the area, he had about 20 minutes before he had to pick his daughter up from work, so he decided to go back to get a better view.

“I had no idea the road was about to buckle even more,” he said. “I wasn’t filming long when the road popped sending the car airborne. I then stopped recording and called it in to authorities to get the road closed.”

The driver of the vehicle had pulled over and Blackwell said he went to check on its occupants. Crews in the area worked to repair the damage,

local news station KFVS 12 reported

.

The driver was “understandably shaken,” said Blackwell.

“She had no chance to stop. Her car looked brand new before this. The landing did some damage to her vehicle,” he said, adding that the full extent of the damage would need to assessed.

There was a passenger in the car as well who was also confused by the event, said Blackwell, although the passenger remained “very calm.”

“You get the moisture underground, and everything kind of comes together. It’s just, everything swells up and has nowhere to go but up,” assistant director for the Cape Girardeau Public Works Department Brock Davis told KFVS.

As of Tuesday morning, a heat advisory is still in place for many cities in the state, with daily heat index values of 100 to 107 degrees Farenheit, or nearly 38 to nearly 42 degrees Celcius. The advisory is expected to remain in effect until Friday evening.

Roads in other states also reportedly suffered from the heat. Around 50 incidents of “pavement buckling due to extreme heat” were reported over the weekend in Wisconsin,

per local news station WISN 12

. There were also reports of roads buckling in South Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska,

according to Fox 8 News

.

In general, extreme heat warnings and heat advisories have been issued in many parts of the eastern U.S., per the National Weather Service.

 A woman drinks from a water bottle as she makes her way in New York City on June 23, 2025.

“When temperatures rise to certain values, the physical composure of many items will naturally start to break down or change,” the

Weather Network reported

.

Meanwhile, in Canada, some provinces are also

feeling the heat

.

Ontario Provincial Police closed down part of Highway 402 in the Plympton-Wyoming area, east of Sarnia, due to “unsafe road surface conditions,” it said in a post on X on June 22.

Environment Canada has issued heat warnings for parts of Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec as of Tuesday morning.

In cities such as Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, the weather agency says humidex values of 40 to 45 degrees Celcius are expected.

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.


Sean Lenworth Anthony Spence, a Jamaican man sentenced to life in prison for an

A Jamaican man sentenced to life in prison for an “execution style” killing north of Barrie in 2007 will get a shot at early release under Canada’s “faint hope clause.”

Sean Lenworth Anthony Spence didn’t pull the trigger, but he planned the murder of Jonathan Chambers over $52,000 Spence blamed him for losing in a drug deal Chambers arranged. Spence was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years for kidnapping and killing Chambers, who had introduced Spence to buyers who pretended they were in the market for 1.5 kilograms of cocaine, but then paid with fake money and escaped with the drugs.

After serving more than 15 years of his sentence, Spence applied to Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice for a “faint hope” hearing before a jury so he can ask that his parole ineligibility period be reduced.

“While it is ultimately up to a jury to determine whether or not Mr. Spence may apply for parole sooner than the 25 years imposed as part of his sentence, I cannot say that his application is doomed to failure. On a balance of probabilities there is a substantial likelihood that the application might succeed,” Justice Mark Edwards wrote in a recent decision out of Barrie.

“Mr. Spence’s application is granted, and a jury shall be empaneled to hear his application.”

Chambers was killed March 7, 2007.

“Two vehicles were stopped on the side of a country road north of Barrie,” said the judge’s decision, dated June 18.

Spence was in one vehicle. Four individuals, including Chambers, were in the other.

“Mr. Chambers exited the vehicle and was then shot in the head by Andrew Turner. The two vehicles left the scene. Chambers was dead at the roadside. His body was discovered later that day,” Edwards wrote.

“Everyone in the two vehicles (was) eventually caught and charged. Three of the individuals pled guilty to manslaughter. One of the individuals pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder. Mr. Spence was tried on a charge of first-degree murder in a judge alone trial. He was convicted on that charge and sentenced to the mandatory term of life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for 25 years.”

The decision notes Spence had been sentenced to four years for a previous robbery where he used an imitation firearm and wore a disguise.

Spence successfully appealed that conviction, but the Crown took his case to the Supreme Court of Canada and won on Dec. 2, 2005, restoring his conviction.

However, Spence was out on bail, awaiting the Supreme Court decision, and he went on the lam. It wasn’t until September 2008 that he was arrested in the United States in connection with the killing of Chambers.

While Spence did not pull the trigger, his trial left “no doubt that the execution of Mr. Chambers was done at the direction of Mr. Spence. The killing of Mr. Chambers arose out of the loss of $52,000 that Mr. Chambers had caused, or had an inability to account for, to Mr. Spence,” Edwards said. “Mr. Spence developed a plan that effectively resulted in the kidnapping of Mr. Chambers and getting Mr. Chambers into a car and then ultimately to the site of his murder.”

In court documents, Spence often goes by the first name Lenworth, rather than his given forename of Sean.

Spence was “the driving force behind the drug deal that was catalyst to this murder,” reads a summary of the Crown’s position. “That Mr. Spence had a motive to kill as a result of the failure of said deal and that he ordered that Jonathan Chambers life be terminated as a way to save face and to send a message.”

Spence, 46, “is not a Canadian citizen and if he is released, he is subject to a deportation order,” the judge said in his recent decision.

Spence lived with his parents in Jamaica until he was 12, “when he moved to Canada to live with his grandparents,” Edwards said. “He was primarily raised once he was in Canada by his grandmother although he moved in with his father as a teenager.”

His 2024 “psychological risk assessment report indicates that Mr. Spence’s plans … would have him returning to Jamaica where his family apparently owns a farm controlled by one of his brothers. The same report indicates that Mr. Spence hopes to rebuild his life in Jamaica by working towards postsecondary education.”

Spence stayed out of trouble in prison.

“There is no evidence that he has ever been subject to periods of disciplinary segregation,” said the judge. “For all intents and purposes Mr. Spence has a clean discipline record which is in stark contrast to his criminal record prior to his incarceration.”

A psychological risk assessment from last year placed “Spence in the low moderate to moderate risk category for general recidivism in the high-risk category for violent recidivism. Mr. Spence had a long-standing history of criminal behaviour and had a violent criminal history leading up to the current offence that occurred when he was 27 years of age.”

Spence worked while in prison, furthered his education, and “has also participated in a number of programs aimed at his rehabilitation,” said the decision.

Spence “has been active in his religious faith and a letter from Imam Habeeb Alli, the Muslim faith chaplain at the Beaver Creek Workworth Institution notes as follows: ‘I am willing to engage with him on his understanding of the faith upon reintegration. Mr. Sean Spence is a caring person and remorseful of his previous crimes. I support him for faint hope clause as this will help them reintegrate into society as a law-abiding citizen earlier than the given date.’”

One of Spence’s guards at Beaver Creek, Shirley Osei, has worked with him for about three years.

“Mr. Spence is described by officers as a model offender who exemplifies good behaviour and follows all institutional rules and policies. Spence has remained incident and charge free since I started working on his unit and is not seen as being a part of the offender subculture,” Osei wrote in a letter of support.

“Lastly, I strongly believe that Spence is a motivated individual who is doing whatever it takes to rehabilitate back into society and to return home to his family.”

The court saw victim impact statements from Chambers’ father, mother, sister, and brother. “All of the statements speak to the continuing impact that the murder of Mr. Chambers has had on his family,” said the judge.

The victim’s mother, Nancy, told the court “Jonathan’s death left a void that can never be filled. How do you heal a broken heart is my question. The pain of losing him was heartbreaking. There is no escape from the memories of his absence from the holidays that he loved so much should have echoed, to the milestones he never reached. He was robbed of his future, and we were robbed of his presence.”

The court heard that “Crown counsel largely opposes Mr. Spence’s application for three reasons: the gravity of the offence; Mr. Spence’s lack of remorse; and the fact that Mr. Spence if released and deported would avoid a significant part of the sentence originally imposed on him and would have no supervision once he is deported to Jamaica.”

If Spence “is ultimately successful in his faint hope application and thus allowed to apply for early parole, the subject of deportation and any subsequent supervision are matters that the Parole Board of Canada will ultimately have to consider in relation to the risk to the public,” said the judge.

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.


Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sharren Haskel, at Toronto's Queen's Park on June 4, 2024.

OTTAWA — One of Israeli’s highest-ranking politicians says she understands that many people could be feeling déjà vu as the West faces another war in the Middle East over the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

The Toronto-born Sharren Haskel, now Israel’s junior minister of foreign affairs, was herself a young enlistee in Israel’s armed forces (specifically the border police) when then U.S. president George W. Bush and a coalition of allies invaded Iraq in 2003, vowing to destroy weapons of mass destruction, that were later found to be non-existent.

And she’s not a fan of war, she said.

“I’ve seen things that I don’t wish anyone to see,” Haskel, 41, told National Post on Monday.

“I’ve been in positions that I would never want my own daughters to be in.”

But public opinion studies have documented

an “Iraq War hangover”

driving anti-war attitudes among millennials, born between 1981 and 1996.

A 2019 Ipsos study study tracking

more than 16,000 millennials

across 16 countries, including the U.S., found that three-quarters believed that most wars could be avoided. Respondents from war-affected countries were more hopeful than others that future wars could be avoided.

But Haskel said that Iran poses a much graver threat today than Iraq did two decades ago.

“The two cases are extremely different,” she said, noting that Iran’s advanced

nuclear enrichment and ballistics missile programs

have been well-documented by several international bodies and governments, and that they pose a “double existential threat” to international security.

Prior to this month’s Israel and U.S.-led attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated that Iran

had enough raw material

for nine nuclear weapons.

Haskel said that the fear of a repeat of the disastrous Iraq war has made the U.S. and other Western countries too hesitant to use force against an intransigent Iran.

“We’ve seen in recent years, and because of (Iraq), how the international community have been chasing up a diplomatic solution,” said Haskel.

“But unfortunately, this enemy that you’re facing was growing to a monstrous size while deceiving the international community.”

Iran signed what looked to be a breakthrough nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers in 2015, but it has

repeatedly violated the terms

of this agreement. The

IAEA reported in 2023

that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was 30 times more than the maximum permitted under the agreement.

Haskell encourages younger adults who were hung up on the surface-level similarities to 2003 invasion of Iraq to take a longer view of history.

“I would try and lead them to spend a little less time on social media and read a few more history books. In particular, books about the years leading up to the Second World War,” said Haskell.

“When people say that history repeats itself, it’s very clear during these times as well … the European countries (after the First World War) were so desperate to avoid another world war that they tried to convince themselves that what the Nazis were saying wasn’t really what they were saying.”

One prominent politician who’s given voice to his generation’s war-skeptical sentiment is 40-year-old U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

Vance, who was deployed to Iraq in 2005,

later called the war “disastrous.”

He’s since called for the U.S. to limit its exposure to foreign conflicts, such as

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

.

The vice president said over the weekend, after the U.S. bombed

three Iranian nuclear sites

, that the U.S. was not at war with Iran but “

with Iran’s nuclear program

.”

Haskel said she didn’t have a problem with Vance’s description of the U.S.’s involvement in Iran.

“I think you should ask the Americans to make the Americans’ case,” said Haskel.

National Post

rmohamed@postmedia.com