OTTAWA — Conservatives are calling for the reversal of a military directive they say inappropriately censors religious speech at public commemorations.

New Brunswick Conservative MP Mike Dawson said it was an affront to the memory of the fallen that the Chaplain General’s 2023

Direction on Chaplain’s Spiritual Reflection in Public Settings

is still in place.

“I am ashamed that our government intends to restrict public expressions of faith in our military, or in plain terms, to ban prayer. It is cowardice to ask our sons and daughters to put themselves in harm’s way but refuse them the right to express their faith in God. To deny those who provide our freedom the right to openly pray is an insult to those who never came home,” Dawson

told the House of Commons

.

The directive, issued by then chaplain general J.L.G. “Guy” Bélisle in October 2023, compels chaplains to “carefully choose words that are inclusive” to all assembled, including atheists.

The order also restricts chaplains from wearing so-called “Faith Tradition” scarves, bearing religious symbols like crosses and crescent moons, at military ceremonies, mandating that all wear identical scarves adorned with the religiously neutral Royal Canadian Chaplain Service crest.

Bélisle said the changes were necessary following the

Supreme Court of Canada’s Saguenay decision in 2015

, which found that the state has a duty to uphold religious neutrality in public settings.

The then chaplain general tempered his own Remembrance Day address at Ottawa’s National War Memorial last year, prefacing his remarks as a “reflect(ion)” rather than a prayer.

Reverend Doctor Andrew Bennett, head of faith community engagement at faith-based think tank Cardus, says the directive misses the mark of religious neutrality by putting irreligion ahead of religiosity.

“To say that Canadian Armed Forces chaplains cannot speak about God or cannot pray at public ceremonies of remembrance is showing a lack of understanding of who is in the armed forces, men and women who serve this country, many of whom are religious and live out their faith,” said Bennett.

“They don’t put their faith aside when they join the armed forces. And so it is perfectly fitting that it’s ceremonies of remembrance when we remember the dead who are fallen for this country,” he added.

Conservative defence critic James Bezan echoed these sentiments in an email to the National Post.

”We should be encouraging Canadian Armed Forces chaplains of all faiths to offer benedictions and prayers, rather than order them to exclude faith-based prayers from their public remarks,” wrote Bezan.

Bennett said that faith has long been tied to military service, pointing to the old adage “there are no atheists in foxholes.”

“(The directive) dishonours those men and women who fell for this country in combat, when they were in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme or when they were fighting In the Pacific Theater at the fall of Hong Kong. You don’t think that they were praying that they would survive and see another day?” said Bennett.

Bennett said it’s “entirely in the power” of now Chaplain General Colonel Lisa Pacarynuk to reverse the directive.

Pacarynuk assumed the role in May, becoming Canada’s first female chaplain general.

Retired fifth-generation Canadian Forces veteran Bonnie Critchley, who ran as an independent candidate in the recent Battle River—Crowfoot byelection, said she felt the criticisms of the new directive were overblown, saying that it’s only natural for military protocol to change with the attitudes of those who serve.

“Your spirituality is your own thing. Religion tends to get messy. Yeah. And I am not a religious person person. I am a spiritual person. My own spirituality is my own … I absolutely do appreciate a spiritual tone versus a religious (one),” said Critchley, who recently retired after 22 years of military service.

Pacarynuk‘s office could not be reached for comment.

National Post

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Remembrance Day has been commemorated in Canada since Parliament

passed legislation

in 1931 to change the name of

Armistice Day

and establish Nov. 11 as the date to mark the occasion. Today, the government

describes

Remembrance Day as “the most unforgettable day” and

suggests

veterans are “passing the torch” to the Canadian population “so the memory of their sacrifices will continue.”

However, many veterans of the war in Afghanistan now feel their sacrifice in service to their country is forgotten. One main reason for this sentiment, according to retired corporal Bruce Moncur, is that no veterans of this conflict have ever been awarded Canada’s highest military decoration for valour.

Retired lieutenant-general Omer Lavoie told National Post that eight service members throughout the Commonwealth have received Victoria Cross medals for their service in Afghanistan. Four have been awarded by Australia, three by the U.K., and one by New Zealand.

That no Victoria Cross decorations were received throughout a 12-year commitment during which more than 40,000 Canadian military members deployed for the mission does not sit well with many Afghanistan veterans, Moncur said.

“Yes, we feel forgotten,” he said.

He is part of a campaign to have certain valour awards reviewed and potentially upgraded to the Victoria Cross in response to this prevalent sense of forgotten sacrifice.

Moncur, who deployed to Afghanistan in 2006, says he has advocated for military veterans for about 15 years. As founder of the non-profit

Valour in the Presence of the Enemy

, he has spearheaded a campaign since September 2021 to have Afghanistan veteran Private Jess Larochelle’s valour decoration upgraded to the Victoria Cross.

“Ever since I heard Jess’s story,” Moncur told National Post, the issue “has always been in the back of my mind.”

Then Lt.-Col. Lavoie commanded 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group in southern Afghanistan in 2006 when a substantial contingent of Taliban insurgents ambushed the strongpoint manned by Larochelle and his unit. Lavoie recalls that he happened to be in the area on battlefield circulation that day.

As he was writing the recommendation for Larochelle’s military valour decoration in Afghanistan after the incident, he remembers thinking to himself, “This may turn out to be the first Victoria Cross awarded in the Canadian military since the Second World War.”

But it was not to be. Instead, Larochelle was one of twenty recipients of Canada’s second-highest military decoration awarded for service in Afghanistan.

The

citation

for the Star of Military Valour Larochelle received recalls, “Although he was alone, severely injured, and under sustained enemy fire in his exposed position at the ruined observation post,” he “aggressively provided covering fire over the otherwise undefended flank of his company’s position.”

Moncur is adamant that Larochelle’s actions that day in October 2006 at Strong Point Centre in Kandahar warrant the Victoria Cross. He also believes the issue is about more than just one medal.

Upgrading Larochelle’s Star of Military Valour, he says, “would be for all of us.”

Lavoie echoed Moncur’s sentiment. He suggests upgrading select existing decorations, like Larochelle’s, would bring “a sense of accomplishment for all Afghanistan veterans.”

He said this is especially the case because the highest award for valour has

never been awarded

since this decoration was

redesignated

as the Canadian Victoria Cross in 1993. Its predecessor, the British Victoria Cross, was

awarded

to 81 Canadians for acts of valour in combat from the South African (Boer) War (1899-1902) to the Second World War (1939-45).

The most recent recipient for Canada was Lieutenant Robert (Hammy) Hampton Gray, who was

awarded

the British Victoria Cross posthumously for combat action that occurred in August 1945. The Canadian version of the highest military award for valour has never been awarded — including for nearly 15 years of combat action in Afghanistan.

Master Warrant Officer William “Willy” MacDonald said that many veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan still grapple with the abrupt end to coalition operations due to the

disastrous withdrawal

from the country by the U.S. in 2021.

With the Taliban

reestablishing

its rule and meeting little resistance as it

chased away

security forces the NATO coalition spent years training, many veterans of the conflict in Canada and beyond now struggle with doubts regarding what was accomplished after nearly two decades of service and sacrifice.

Those emotional “wounds are still healing for many of us,” said MacDonald. He suggests that upgrading one or more valour awards to the Victoria Cross would “would do a lot to bring the Afghanistan mission back to the public spotlight.”

Moncur agrees. He highlighted the experience of Victoria Cross recipients in other Commonwealth countries as well as more than a dozen recipients of the Medal of Honor in the United States.

“What we’re asking for is the respect and honour that other countries give to their soldiers,” Moncur said. “Victoria Cross and Medal of Honor recipients are revered in their countries. But that hasn’t happened in Canada for Afghanistan veterans.”

This is why Larochelle’s Star of Military Valour has become a particular point of emphasis for the organization Moncur founded as well as the broader movement to upgrade certain decorations. “If what Jess did doesn’t merit the Victoria Cross,” Moncur said, “it’s hard to know what does.”

Although Larochelle

died in August 2023

due to medical complications from injuries he sustained on deployment, reevaluating and upgrading his award is, according to Moncur, “one thing the government can do” to honour his memory and the service of thousands of other Canadian military members who served in Afghanistan.

Despite widespread support for the movement to have certain individual decorations reconsidered and potentially upgraded, some veterans remain concerned about attempts to override determinations that were made long ago by senior military officials.

Col. Ryan Jurkowski retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 2023 after 30 years of service, including multiple deployments to Afghanistan. Now a PhD war studies candidate at the Royal Military College, focusing on civilian-military relations, he said, “you can’t rewrite history” when evaluating decisions from the past.

Jurkowski is also concerned about setting a precedent that could lead to more red tape that ultimately distracts from the warfighting mission of the military. This movement to upgrade certain awards might be “for all the right reasons,” Jurkowski said, but we should be concerned about the possibility of “increasing the bureaucracy of the (Canadian Armed Forces).”

Even so, Jurkowski wonders whether factors not directly related to individual citations and decorations impacted decisions by honours and awards committees and caused the sacrifice of some to be undervalued.

Canada’s overall mission in Afghanistan, which lasted from 2001 to 2014, was divided into

three main operations

: Apollo (2001-03), Athena (2003-11), and Attention (2011-14). The first was marked by intense but sporadic combat operations, while the last focused primarily on training Afghan security forces in Kabul.

The bulk of the heavy and sustained fighting occurred during Operation Athena, including 2006 when Larochelle deployed as part of the battle group commanded by Lavoie.

According to Jurkowski, troops encountered “completely different perspectives and completely different experiences in different phases” of the mission in Afghanistan. Both his combat deployments were during Operation Athena, with the renowned

Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry

.

“There has never been anything like the intensity of combat operations” during early in Operation Athena since Korea, according to Jurkowski. Heroic actions such as Larochelle’s solo stand at Strong Point Centre were relatively early in the Afghanistan mission.

This may have led senior leaders to be reluctant to approve a Victoria Cross, even if it was warranted on an individual basis, since it was impossible to know then what would happen in theatre later.

Lavoie also expressed concern regarding revisiting past decisions for valour decorations. He said at first, he felt “conflicted.” He served on honours and awards committees during his time as a military officer and said that “no one believes in the sanctity of the chain of command” more than he does.

An internal committee appointed by Department of National Defence

has already determined

that none of the 20 awards reviewed from the Afghanistan mission “should have received a different decoration, and that all awards respected the intent and criteria for the Star of Military Valour.”

Although deference to previous determinations is certainly warranted, Lavoie now supports the idea of appointing a commission. This is, at least in part, because he believes “there was a bit of reticence” to approve a Victoria Cross among senior leaders within the ranks during the early phase of combat operations.

He also points out there is precedent for revaluating military decorations among Canada’s closest allies. According to Lavoie, awarding a Victoria Cross to Larochelle or other potential recipients would bring “a sense of pride and accomplishment for all Afghanistan veterans.”

Moncur also emphasized during an interview the precedent of allied militaries appointing review commissions like the one he is currently proposing here in Canada. A

petition

he initiated in July calls on the government to establish an independent board “to review Afghanistan veterans’ cases where evidence suggests Victoria Cross criteria were met.”

The parliamentary petition, which is sponsored by Liberal MP Pauline Rochefort and closes for signatures on Nov. 20, states that “Afghanistan veterans feel their sacrifice has been forgotten, despite Canada’s significant commitment and casualties.”

With so many Afghanistan veterans expressing a sense that their service and sacrifice to Canada has been forgotten, Moncur believes the government must establish an independent review to consider whether certain valour decorations should be upgraded to the Victorica Cross.

“If you can’t do this” for Afghanistan veterans, Moncur said, “then you can’t do anything for us.”

• Unbelievable stories of Canada’s Victoria Cross winners
• Who will be first? The Canadian Victoria Cross has never been awarded

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The families of Canadians killed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, are urging Ottawa to leverage its diplomatic and economic weight to lead a global campaign to sanction and dismantle the terrorist organization and to pursue justice against Iranian officials accused of sponsoring it.

In a statement released after a meeting between Prime Minister Mark Carney and family members from the Association of Canadian Families of the Victims of October 7th, the group described its two proposals as steps “not only toward justice, but toward preventing future atrocities.”

The first call to action asks Canada to spearhead an international effort at the United Nations to formally sanction Hamas, similar to the blacklisting of ISIS and al-Qaeda. The Association said Carney’s experience “as an international economic authority” positions him to coordinate sanctions disrupting the terrorists’ financial and logistical networks and to rally “like-minded nations” to join the effort.

The second request urges Ottawa to launch a structural investigation into Iranian officials involved in arming, training, and funding Hamas, and to prosecute them under Canada’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act. Such action, the families said, would “demonstrate Canada’s leadership in the global fight against impunity.”

Beyond foreign policy, the families connected their demands to growing domestic concern about antisemitism and foreign-inspired hate. Statistics Canada data show hate crimes have doubled in the past five years, with Jewish Canadians remaining the most targeted religious group.

The families said action equals memory.

“We honour those we lost by working together to combat antisemitism, hold perpetrators accountable, and build a safer, more just world.”

Seated with Carney last week were Raquel Look and Alain Haim, the mother and father of Alexandre Look, a 33-year-old Montrealer killed while defending others at the Nova music festival, and Jacqui Rivers-Vital, the mother of Adi Vital-Kaploun, a 33-year-old Canadian-Israeli murdered in her home while protecting her two small sons. After she was slain in front of them, her children — four-year-old Negev and six-month-old Eshel — were kidnapped but later released.

Look and Vital-Kaploun were among eight Canadians murdered that day.

The group thanked Carney for meeting with the families and for his “clear and unequivocal statement of solidarity with victims of Hamas terrorism.”

“We are grateful to the Prime Minister for taking the time to listen to our stories and for recognizing the humanity and heroism of our loved ones,” the group said.

Following the meeting, Carney shared an image of himself and the parents on X, writing:

“Their remarkable strength in the face of unimaginable grief is a testament to the resilience of the Jewish people,” he wrote. “My message to Jacqui, Raquel, and Alain: Adi and Alexandre will not be forgotten. Not by me, not by our government, and not by our country.”

Today I met with the parents of two Canadians murdered by the terrorist organisation Hamas on October 7th, 2023.
 
Their remarkable strength in the face of unimaginable grief is a testament to the resilience of the Jewish people. My message to Jacqui, Raquel, and Alain: Adi and… pic.twitter.com/YNhpaWYcpF

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) November 7, 2025

The meeting comes as Carney’s government adjusts its approach in the Middle East, balancing firm condemnations of Hamas with support for humanitarian efforts in Gaza and criticism of Israeli leadership. In July, Carney said Canada would formally recognize the State of Palestine, conditional on democratic reforms, a move

opposed by the families at the time. 

Carney has also been critical of Iran’s destabilizing role

in the region by sponsoring terrorism.

• Iris Weinstein Haggai: Canada disgraces the memories of Hamas’s Canadian victims, including my mother
• Hamas victims’ families ask Canadians to oppose recognition of Palestinian state

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.

Author and activist Cory Doctorow wants you to understand why online digital platforms are failing users, and he’s fighting for a better internet. “Enshittification” — a word he coined to describe the degradation of online platforms and services — is the slightly profane albeit funny title of his latest book.

Outspoken, prescient and very clever, Cory has spent a quarter of a century explaining abstract digital concepts to non-geeks like me. And now he’s whipping heads across North America, the U.K. and Portugal, in a fast-paced book tour.

When we connect online for this conversation, Cory appears on my computer screen, game for a deep-dive into the state of the digital world, but visibly weary. He’s just landed in Seattle for an event; the next day, he’s off to the Vancouver Writer’s Festival. From there, it’s the red-eye flight to Montreal to deliver a keynote for The Attention Forum: Govern or be Governed conference, hosted by Montreal’s Centre for Media, Tech and Democracy. Evan Solomon, a creature of legacy broadcasting and now Canada’s minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, features large at the Montreal confab.

Despite the fatigue, this 54-year-old defender of freedoms in the electronic frontier is laser-focused and remarkably witty. Born in Toronto, and now living in Los Angeles, Cory isn’t just spewing stories of digital woe. He’s paying close attention to what’s unfolding in Canada in the tech and AI sectors, knows what’s not working and why, and has ideas on what can be done to not just fix the bugs but re-imagine digital public infrastructure.

First question from me: “What does enshittification look like in Canada?” (Try saying that word without chuckling). The country had several opportunities to lead as a global digital force to be reckoned with, Cory agrees, and in his view, “we dropped the ball on market concentration.”

“The Competition Bureau has, through almost all of its history, until last year when we got a new bill out of Parliament, been, I think, the weakest competition bureau in the world,” Cory declares, emphatically. It’s hard to refute his assessment: The merger of Shaw and Rogers, two very large telecoms in Canada, was made official in 2023, the year before Canada’s competition law was modernized.

“Wouldn’t you think, at the very least, Canada would have a robust domestic network platform available by now?” I ask. Gander Social, a made-in-Canada social media platform, designed as an alternative to large U.S.-based companies, is only now being beta tested.

“There are any number of people who would like very, very much to host a few thousand of their friends on a little Mastodon or Blue Sky server that can talk to all the other ones, and everyone can be in a conversation,” Cory counters.

“We don’t all have to be on the same server,” Cory continues. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Amazon outage, it’s that putting everyone on the same server is an incredibly bad idea, right? So we can all be on different servers in the same way we’re all on different email servers, drive on different roads. We have to live in different cities; we don’t all have to be in the same place to all talk to each other and be part of a single digital network. That’s what networks are, right?

“You know, what we don’t have, the lacuna in this plan, the thing that we need public investment in, is not the bicycles on the road, it’s the bike lanes, it’s the infrastructure, and it’s the kind of thing the private sector can’t do well,” he asserts. The pain points for small businesses, communities, large businesses, cooperatives or any entity wanting to host a social media platform, Cory suggests, include things like security audits and content moderation tools.

He also recommends “some mechanism to ease people’s passage off (existing) social media and onto a new platform.” Right now, Cory explains, “you have people building these new platforms and wondering how the people on the old platforms are going to get there. This is like West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Germany, without thinking about how they’re going to get over the wall. Except that, we built the wall. We are the ones maintaining the wall. The wall is made entirely of law. The wall could be torn down with an act of Parliament at the stroke of a pen.”

In the recent federal budget, funds were allocated to support large-scale sovereign public artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, made-in-Canada AI tools and an office of digital transformation.

Cory has other suggestions — very bold ideas — for Ottawa to shore up our nation’s sovereignty in the digital world. “We just have to legalize reverse engineering,” he pitches, “so that we can modify these products, right?” without having to get permission from the people who make the tech. Then, he proceeds to enumerate the many ways American tech companies use digital blocks to rig the game.

My lawyer-brain is being triggered here. I believe in rule of law; the last thing I want to do is endorse theft. Some people believe that’s how Huawei killed Nortel, but I keep that thought to myself.

“You cannot make an ad blocker for an app. You cannot modify your phone so it uses a third-party app store,” he continues. “When Facebook takes the news out of your feed, you can’t modify that app so it puts the news back in your feed. When American printer companies mark the price of ink up to $10,000 a gallon, you can’t modify your printer to use generic ink.”

“If you really want to get back at Elon Musk, don’t bitch about the Nazi salute,” he chuckles, “Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak Teslas so that all the software upgrades, all the subscription features, can be had for one price that is between you and a mechanic in Canada without one dime going to America.”

“Make it legal…to jailbreak Teslas!” My brain is throbbing.

Cory’s exploding with facts and figures and ideas; at times, he speaks so quickly, I ask him to repeat himself. “In CUSMA (Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement),” he reiterates, “there’s a rule that says it is an unfair trade practice to add to your procurement RFP a provision that says you have to disclose source code, algorithmic details.” He’s recommending that Ottawa renegotiate that rule.

“Twenty years ago today,” he reports, “we saw the first filing in a Florida court by someone who wanted to see the source code for the breathalyzer that he said falsely claimed he was driving drunk, right? And I think that’s a perfectly fair thing to do, right? If they did a blood test, you’d be able to audit the results, right? If there’s software involved, you should be able to audit the software. Otherwise, there is no legitimacy to that process.”

Cory’s also saying very provocative things about AI. His most-memorable quip: “AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.” While he sees the merits of AI to support the work of radiologists or lawyers or software engineers — or nearly anyone — he doesn’t believe AI can do the job. “But,” he warns, “an AI salesman can 100 per cent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI.”

Cory’s mastered the art of communicating big, complex ideas in entertaining ways. Although his ideas are jarring, I recognize, with all his banter, he’s challenging us to understand the facts about the digital world and ask tougher questions, including, perhaps most significantly: If we comprehend the extent of the rent extraction by Big Tech, “is the juice worth the squeeze?”

• He’s 28. And doesn’t expect we’ll hit net zero this century
• Calgary gets the dynamic mayor it needs

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Ottawa is exploring a Canadian entry in the famously popular Eurovision song contest, suggesting cultural participation would help deepen our commercial relationship with the Europeans.

The item in question was all the way down on page 182 in the federal budget. Under the heading “Protecting Our National Broadcaster,” is the following recommendation:

“Budget 2025 proposes to provide $150 million in 2025-26 for CBC/Radio-Canada to strengthen its mandate to serve the public and to better reflect the needs of Canadians. The government will explore modernising CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate to strengthen independence, and is working with CBC/Radio Canada to explore participation in Eurovision.”

The press secretary to the Office of the Minister of Finance and National Revenue told National Post in an email: “We are actively exploring Canada’s inclusion at this time.”

He added: “Eurovision, as you know, commands a global audience — and would give Canada a venue to share its proud cultural and musical talents with the world at a time when deepening relations with European partners is imperative.”

Dr. Karen Fricker, an adjunct professor at Brock University and Canada’s preeminent expert in the Eurovision Song Contest — “My phone is ringing off the hook,” she said when National Post finally reached her Friday afternoon — says there could be something in that.

“I think that there’s a broader context for this in the current kind of destabilization of the global order, and the U.S.’s aggressive behaviours and dismissive attitudes towards European entities like NATO,” she said. “Canada has an opportunity here to really flex this idea of being European, whatever that means. And not the U.S.”

National Post has reached out to CBC for more information but did not receive a reply by press time.

A spokesperson for the Department of Finance Canada told National Post after the budget announcement: “Further details will be announced in due course.”

“Several government sources have confirmed to the CBC that this is coming from the Prime Minister,” Fricker said. “And he indicated through a tweet in May that he knows the contest.” Mark Carney’s years spent living in Britain would have given him greater exposure to the annual contest.

Great to meet @AlboMP : the only world leader who can discuss spirituality, the global economy, Vegemite hygiene & how Go-Jo was robbed at @Eurovision in one go. With the same values & ambitions 🇨🇦 & 🇦🇺 can help shape a fairer, more prosperous world https://t.co/0b5x0n0cBb

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) May 18, 2025

In an

interview

with Global News on budget day, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the Eurovision proposal was at the behest of “the people who participate,” suggesting that the European organizers may have reached out. He added that Eurovision is “a platform for Canada to shine. This is about protecting, also, our identity.”

Fricker said participation in the contest wouldn’t be a moneymaker — for one thing, there is no cash prize for the winner — but it needn’t break the bank, either.

“Ireland disclosed how much it spent this year on Eurovision, and it adds up to about $575,000,” she said. “You have to pay fees to the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) to join, and then there’s the money to get an act together and get your delegation to where the contest is going to be. And next May it’s going to be in Vienna.”

Cost and geopolitical considerations aside, Fricker is all in for Canada taking part, for a simple reason. “I think it would fun!”

Her biggest concern has to do with perception: “Is it well known enough for the Canadian public to get behind it?”

Australia, one of the other non-European participants,

joined in 2015

as a special guest of the contest, and then kept coming back, though it has never won. But Fricker notes that the contest was already popular there.

“We haven’t been showing it for decades here, as was the case in Australia,” she said. “People who come from European immigrant backgrounds might know it. I feel like youth culture kind of discovered it during the pandemic. But to average Canadians … do they know about this thing? Do they care?”

Either way, participation would seem to be Canada’s for the taking. Australia’s inclusion 10 years ago raised some eyebrows. “There was a lot of talk about it at the time,” Fricker said. “Like, this was completely bizarre. It’s the other side of the world.”

She continued: “But it’s become a regular contender, and has done very well, come very close to winning a few times. So if Australia is doing it as an associate member, it would seem that Canada could too, if the EBU welcomes them to come.”

• Adam Pankratz: Eurovision viewers back Israel against out-of-touch elites
• Carney’s budget includes $150M boost for CBC and plan to ‘explore participation’ in Eurovision

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.