OTTAWA — Canada’s fiscal watchdog suggested to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that Ottawa should need House of Commons approval to change or eliminate long-held fiscal targets, as the Carney government did just weeks ago.

Jason Jacques, the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), told the Senate finance committee that Ottawa had used its debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio as one of its key “fiscal anchors” for the last three decades and that this government had described it as a key gauge for fiscal sustainability as recently as this fall.

But in early November, the debt-to-GDP anchor was thrown overboard.

In responding to a question from New Brunswick Senator Krista Ross, Jacques suggested that the federal government should need parliamentary approval for such a move, similar to what is required to raise the debt ceiling.

“It’s a change in fiscal policy which wasn’t discussed meaningfully on Parliament Hill,” Jacques told committee members. “It happened without any discussion.”

The interim PBO’s comments mark his latest criticism of the Carney government’s fiscal policy. The PBO, an independent officer who scrutinizes government raising and spending of tax dollars, told a parliamentary committee last month that there’s only a 7.5 per cent chance that the government will hit its target of reducing Canada’s deficit-to-GDP ratio over each of the next few years.

That, along with balancing the operating budget within three years, is one of the government’s two remaining fiscal anchors. The third, the debt-GDP ratio was dropped in last month’s federal budget.

John Fragos, a spokesman for Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, said the government is operating in line with international norms in that the government chooses its fiscal anchors, and then Parliament votes on budgets that reflect those anchors. In this year’s case, Fragos said, MPs voted to pass the budget bill.

Jacques, who has already established himself as a clear voice on federal finances in his three months on the job, earlier described the government’s spending as “stupefying,” “shocking” and “unsustainable.”

He also criticized the federal government in a report earlier this fall for using an “overly expansive” definition of investments that will help the government hit its first fiscal target.

The Carney government’s first budget, released last month, projected an average deficit of $64.3-billion between this fiscal year and 2029-30, more than double what was projected about a year ago in the 2024 Fall Economic Statement. The budget also forecast a deficit this year of $78.3-billion, the third-highest in Canadian history and the largest ever in a non-pandemic year.

In a report Tuesday, the PBO also said that the government’s Build Canada Homes program is expected to lead to only 26,000 new Canadian homes over the next five years, which is a tiny fraction of what the government says is needed.

The federal Liberals’ vowed to increase house construction to 500,000 a year over the next 10 years during the federal election campaign earlier this year. That would mean more than double the number of housing starts compared to what is now expected for each of the next few years, and a level of residential construction not seen since the boom years following World War II.

Canada has been facing a housing crunch, caused by a number of factors. On the supply side, the key barriers include access to land in the right places, lack of skilled trades, and, of course, rising costs.

Scott Aitchison, the Conservatives’ housing critic, said the Carney government still has no plan to build the homes that were promised and criticized Build Canada Homes as unnecessary. “In fact, it’s making things worse.”

According to The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a crown corporation that acts as the country’s national housing agency, the supply shortage will be with us for a while. CMHC recently forecast that the total number of housing starts this year will be about 237,800, down from 245,367 in 2024. Despite all of the attention on this issue, the agency also forecasts a drop to about 227,734 next year and 220,016 in 2027.

National Post

• ‘Low probability’ the Carney government will hit any of its fiscal anchors, says budget watchdog
• Fiscal watchdog accuses Ottawa of exaggerating investment spending

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It was the return of Bruce Willis’s childhood stutter that gave his wife Emma Heming Willis her first hint that something was wrong.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I realize that was a symptom,” she told an audience in Toronto on Tuesday.

Bruce Willis, 70, had long since overcome the speech impediment that once saw him tagged with the mocking schoolyard nickname “Buck Buck,” in 1960s New Jersey.

But this returning stutter, which coincided with other communication problems in his late sixties, was a sign of the progressive aphasia, or loss of language, that would later be diagnosed as a form of dementia.

In 2022, Willis announced his retirement after a singular Hollywood career as a classically hunky leading man and top tier action star, from Moonlighting through Die Hard, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense. Soon after, he was formally diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, the most common type of early onset dementia.

It was such a life-changing moment for his wife, as well as for Willis, that she refers to it as their diagnosis, a terrible new knowledge that put an unwieldy scientific name on the constellation of cognitive symptoms that have slowly robbed Willis of his language and his independence.

“I left with a diagnosis I didn’t understand. I couldn’t pronounce it,” Heming Willis said. She had no resources, no hope, just a clinical acronym and a follow-up appointment. “Early on it was very lonely. I carried a lot of grief. I continue to.”

In the few years since, Heming Willis, 47, has fashioned for herself a public advocacy mission as a caregiver to an action hero, and an inspiration to other people caring for loved ones with dementia, Alzheimer’s and other progressive brain diseases.

It is a hard job to take on. Heming Willis has said it has been particularly hard recently to see backlash to the decision to move Willis into a nearby second family home in Los Angeles, where he lives with a full-time team of support workers.

Heming Willis has two young daughters with Willis, Mabel, 13, and Evelyn, 11, whose experience of their father’s disease began in their childhood and is lasting into their adolescence. Now, the children visit him frequently at the second home, for breakfast and dinner, but the arrangement allows them to have playdates and sleepovers at their own house, to keep things as normal as possible.

Heming Willis said she knows Willis wants their children to live in a home that is set up for what they need, not just for him.

Heming Willis grew up in California, the only child to a single mother after her parents divorced when she was young. She and her mother moved to England, where she began a modelling career that eventually saw her return to New York as a successful commercial model. She married Willis in 2009.

She recently published a memoir focused on her role as what she prefers to call a “care partner.” It is called The Unexpected Journey, and she describes it as the book she would have liked to read that day she learned the name of Willis’s disease.

In a moderated chat at the Women’s Brain Health Summit in Toronto on Tuesday morning, Heming Willis told host Jeanne Beker about a neurologist who once told her that caregivers sometimes die before their sick loved ones, and they typically only end up asking for help far too late.

“It was such a wake up call for me. I did not realize that caregiving could be so harmful to your health,” Heming Willis said. Asking for help can feel like failure as a caregiver, she said, but really it is a sign of wisdom and strength.

In a brief discussion with National Post, Heming Willis said she took similar advice from the book Floating In The Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer’s. It was published in 2021 by Patti Davis, the daughter of Nancy Reagan and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994 and died ten years later.

She said Davis’s book helps give caregivers permission and a reminder to keep caring for themselves as they care for someone else. One specific piece of advice she uses when the whole thing seems overwhelming is to give herself thirty minutes to rage, cry and despair. “And then I move on,” she said.

This is common advice to the loved ones of people diagnosed with serious progressive diseases because it often points to a problem that caregivers themselves do not easily realize.

Compared to a dementia diagnosis, a caregiver’s struggles do not seem like the most obvious problems. But the urge to care, to sacrifice one’s self, to prioritize the seriously ill person above everything else, all of these factors can lead caregivers to ignore their own well-being. They risk being consumed by someone else’s illness.

Caregivers can end up feeling “unseen, unsupported,” Heming Willis said. As frustrations mount with a progressive disease, and as minor symptoms proceed to major ones, caregivers often need to be explicitly reminded that “you are not a failure,” she said.

Caregivers are also forced into the role of educators, to explain to others what is happening, even as they themselves are still learning. Heming Willis suggested keeping pamphlets or other information available to share with people, to ease the caregiver’s burden of explaining the same thing over and over again to worried loved ones.

That duty to explain is often felt most acutely with children. Children have different questions at different ages. Their worries change not only as their parent’s disease progresses, but also as they themselves grow up.

Heming Willis did not want dementia to be discussed in their home in “hushed tones,” she said. “I wanted to talk about his disease,” she said, and she didn’t want her children’s lives to be “clouded” by grief, fear and silence.

Today, Willis is “surrounded by love and support,” Heming Willis said. She and Willis have a close blended family with Bruce’s three adult daughters from his marriage to actress Demi Moore: Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah.

At the Women’s Brain Health Summit in Toronto, Heming Willis told the audience they are all “pulling through as a family,” and she feels “blessed to be on this journey and to navigate this with him.”

• Bruce Willis retires from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia
• ‘People are nervous’ about visiting dementia-stricken Bruce Willis: Emma Heming Willis

OTTAWA

— A Liberal cabinet minister pushed back on Tuesday against accusations that removing a provision that shields individuals from a hate speech conviction should they express a statement based on a religious belief amounts to an attack on religious freedom. 

Marc Miller, a Montreal MP recently promoted to cabinet by Prime Minister Mark Carney, has served as chair of the

parliamentary

justice committee.

The newly minted minister responsible for Canadian Heritage and Official Languages said as a person of Christian faith with “very, very deep beliefs,” he does not believe a religious text should be used, “to escape from committing a hate crime,” or make a claim that hate was being promoted “in the name of a religious text.”

“I think if you talk to people of faith and even religious leaders, they would see that this is really something that makes sense,” Miller said on his way into the Liberals’ weekly cabinet meeting.

“Nobody should be committing a hate crime in the name of religion.”

The

parliamentary

justice committee is where amendments are expected to come forward to remove the religious defence that exists for the offence of the “wilful promotion of hatred.” It would come through changes to a piece of government legislation, which the Liberals have struck a deal with the Bloc

Québécois to pass. 

As first reported by National Post,

the Liberals and Bloc have teamed up to see them amend Bill C-9, known as the Combating Hate Act, by removing the religious defence exemption from the country’s hate speech laws and maintaining the rule that to lay a hate propaganda charge, a provincial attorney general must provide consent.

Critics have raised concerns about the bill in question for its proposals to create new intimidation and obstruction offences, which civil liberties and other advocates warn raise the risk of police action against lawful demonstrations because some may find protests to be disruptive or offensive.

Anthony Housefather, also a Liberal MP from Montreal who currently sits on the justice committee, called the legislation “an incredibly important bill,” which he says supports calls that have come from Jewish communities, who have been dealing with the police-reported rise in antisemitic violence.

Housefather, who cited his past public support for removing the religious opinion defence, said he supports the Bloc’s push to see it happen.

“This is saying that hate speech, which you’ve declared as a criminal offence, can be defended by good faith religious belief. I don’t believe that when you use hate speech, inciting someone to cause harm to another identifiable group, that should be saved by a good faith religious belief,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

The bill, as originally presented, did not contain any changes to the religious defence exemption to the country’s hate speech laws.

However, the Bloc

Québécois has for years pushed for the religious defence contained in section 319 of the Criminal Code to be scrubbed, with its party leader, Yves-François Blanchet, who confirmed the deal in a statement on Monday, saying that speech which “incites hatred” is criminal, whether or not it is said under “the guise of religion.” 

The section in question permits the propagation of hateful or antisemitic speech if the speaker expressed “in good faith” an opinion “based on a belief in a religious text.” The defence specifically applies to the offence of the “wilful promotion of hatred” and the promotion of antisemitism, which criminal law defines as “condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”

The Quebec party has pointed to the comments made by Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui, who called for the extermination of “Zionist aggressors” during a public prayer back in 2023, as part of a demonstration related to the Israel-Hamas war.

Opposition Conservatives have vowed to fight the proposed changes to the religious beliefs defence, with party leader Pierre Poilievre calling it an “assault on freedom of expression and religion.”

Poilievre and other Conservative MPs slammed the proposal by circulating on social media a clipped section of remarks Miller made during the justice committee on the issue.

Miller on Tuesday accused Conservatives of “defending” individuals such as Charkaoui.

Charkaoui was never ultimately charged for his comments after an examination of evidence reviewed by Quebec prosecutors.

The Christian Legal Fellowship, a national association representing Christian lawyers and law students, has spoken out against the proposed removal of the religious defences provision, warning it could lead to a chilling effect on speech. Its executive director has also argued that those with minority opinions deserve protection from criminal liability.

Both the National Council of Canadian Muslims and Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, two national advocacy groups, have also raised concerns about the changes, warning it could lead to greater censorship and amount to an “attack” on places of worship and religious schools.

Miller said on Tuesday, “I respectfully disagree.”

Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s office has previously said it would be “

inappropriate to speculate” on any proposed changes to its bill, which is set to undergo clause-by-clause review. 

The minister was not immediately available to speak to reporters on Tuesday. The justice committee is set to meet later that afternoon.

-National Post

-With files from Christopher Nardi

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The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has started a 30-day

consultation period

on a proposed change that would let international travellers arriving at Canadian airports skip their CBSA check-in before leaving Canada for another destination.

The initiative is called the Free Flow International-to-International Transit process or ITI. The CBSA says the change “would continue to ensure a high level of security while providing travellers with a more efficient transit process.”

The proposed change would require airlines to collect additional information on passengers, including their final destination and the date and time of their arrival into Canada. Airlines would then share this information with the CBSA.

“This would allow the CBSA to confirm that travellers have left Canada on their scheduled international flight,” the agency said in a press release.

The change is part of the government’s

Red Tape Review

, which was launched in July. It calls on federal departments and agencies to review their regulations, including how they are administered, with the aim of removing duplication between agencies, streamlining inefficient or complicated processes and paperwork, and allowing new products, services or technologies into the Canadian market.

“These proposed regulatory changes enable the CBSA to make its processes more efficient and services more effective, while maintaining the strength and security of our borders,” the agency said.

The proposed changes have been published in the

Canada Gazette

, and the CBSA plans to collect feedback between now and Dec. 29.

The idea is not new. In 2018, the CBSA launched a similar ITI pilot project, which is currently operating at airports in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Last year some 744,000 passengers were processed this way, up from 737,000 the year before.

“Under the ITI pilot project, travellers transiting internationally through Canada disembark from their inbound flight, scan their passport at an ITI-specific kiosk, and proceed directly to the international departures area,” the agency said. “Documentary requirements remain unchanged; transiting travellers must hold the proper immigration authorization to transit through Canada, including a Temporary Resident Visa or an Electronic Travel Authorization.”

However, the proposed change eliminates the need for either a CBSA officer or a kiosk, since the airline would have already provided information to the CBSA.

“Such a model would improve the economic competitiveness of Canadian airports as transit hubs and improve Canadian airlines’ access to the transit market,” the agency said, adding: “It will allow the CBSA to maintain the safety and security of our border by shifting frontline resources away from known transiting travellers and towards higher-risk activities.”

• Wrong turn at the Canadian border leads to felony charge for U.S. man
• Don’t bring your guns: CBSA tells Americans travelling to Canada for U.S. Thanksgiving

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The Canadian publisher of the Franklin the Turtle children’s book series condemned U.S. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s use of the normally friendly anthropomorphic animal’s image in a “violent” meme posted to social media.

On Sunday, Hegseth shared the doctored image of Franklin — decked out in U.S. military gear — leaning out of a helicopter and firing a rocket launcher at one of three smaller boats below, each loaded with cargo and armed individuals.

The fake book is titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, likely a reference to U.S. strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific oceans undertaken by President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months.

“For your Christmas wish list…,” Hegseth captioned the post, which has more than 168,000 likes and 24,000 shares as of Tuesday morning.

For your Christmas wish list… pic.twitter.com/pLXzg20SaL

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) December 1, 2025

In a statement issued Monday, Kids Can Press said the character “is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy and inclusivity.”

“We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values,” it wrote.

pic.twitter.com/uYUF68eDyI

— kidscanpress (@KidsCanPress) December 1, 2025

The original series was started by author Paulette Bourgeois and illustrator Brenda Clark in 1986 and includes 29 books. Sharron Jennings took over writing in the early 2000s, and she and Clarke produced a further 25 books.

National Post has contacted all three for additional comment.

On Monday night, the Pentagon seemed to support Hegseth’s decision.

“We doubt Franklin the Turtle wants to be inclusive of drug cartels… or laud the kindness and empathy of narco-terrorists,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement provided to National Post.

Democrats were also quick to call out the meme, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who said Hegseth “is not a serious person.”

“He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons, and last night he’s putting out, on the internet, turtles with rocket-propelled grenades,” Kelly told reporters on Monday, per

CBS News.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, meanwhile, called Hegseth “a national embarrassment.”

“Tweeting memes in the middle of a potential armed conflict is something no serious military leader would ever even think of doing,” Schumer said, according to

The Washington Post

.

Representative Adam Smith of Washington questioned why someone would joke about killing people.

“And this is your response to tweet out some joke about a cartoon turtle,” Smith told reporters, as reported by

NBC News

.

The meme came two days after

The Washington Post

first reported that Hegseth had given a direct order for a second strike to eliminate two survivors following a first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September.

Hegseth pushed back, calling it

“fake news,”

and insisting the strikes are “lawful under both U.S. and international law.”

“As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,’” he wrote on X.

“The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during

Monday’s press briefing

that the commanding officer for the operation, Adm. Frank Bradley, was “well within his authority and the law” to ensure the threat was eliminated.

Later Monday, Hegseth also suggested Bradley was the one who made the call.

“I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” he

wrote on X.

• As U.S. blows up drug boats, embargoed Venezuelan oil sails unhindered in Caribbean
• Trump says boat strike off Venezuela killed six narco-traffickers: video

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While it’s been acknowledged for some time that visceral fat — belly fat —that wraps around internal organs is a health hazard, new research suggests it’s particularly dangerous to the male heart.

Researchers who studied advanced cardiovascular MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of 2,244 adults aged 46 to 78 without known heart disease found that abdominal obesity — an unhealthy hip-to-waist ratio —  is associated with worrisome patterns of “cardiac remodelling,” more so than overall weight alone.

The findings “highlight the need for personalized risk assessment in obesity-related cardiovascular disease,” the authors wrote in research presented at this week’s annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.

Canadians are experiencing “high and growing levels” of fat stored around the waist and stomach,

Statistics Canada

reports. From 2022 to 2024, nearly half (49 per cent) of adults aged 18 to 79 had a waist circumference above the threshold for abdominal obesity, meaning greater than 102 centimetres for males and greater than 88 cm for females).

The National Post reached out to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Erley, a radiology resident at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany to break the findings down. The conversation, via email, has been edited for clarity and length.

What made you interested in exploring abdominal obesity’s effect on the heart?

Obesity is very common in our modern society, about to replace smoking in terms of costs and health-care consequences. However, we still don’t really know if obesity has independent effects on the heart, because obese people often also suffer from other cardiovascular risk factors, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

We also don’t really know if the effect of obesity on the heart is different for men and women, although men and women suffer from different types of obesity. Males generally tend to be more obese and tend to have more visceral obesity, which is sometimes described as ‘beer belly.’

I wanted to find an answer to these questions using a population-based trial, which is based here in Germany, the Hamburg City Health Study.

What was known before your study about obesity’s impact on the heart’s anatomy?

The effect of obesity on the heart has been studied previously, also in population-based studies. However, there have been discrepancies in the results.

Most studies predominately classified obesity according to BMI and they found that a high BMI is associated with cardiac dilatation.

Fewer studies investigated ‘visceral’ obesity according to WHR (waist-to-hip ratio), and some did not find a different effect of visceral obesity compared to general obesity.

Moreover, many studies used echocardiography (an ultrasound test that checks the heart’s structure and function) to investigate how obesity impacts the heart’s anatomy, which is broadly available but does not allow for further tissue characterization.

What did you find on MRI scans in people with a high BMI versus those with abdominal (high waist-to-hip-ratio) obesity?

Similar to previous studies, we found a high BMI is associated with bigger heart chambers, indicated by increased cardiac volumes (the amount of blood the heart holds and pumps) and an accompanying hypertrophy (thickening of the heart muscle).

Abdominal or visceral obesity, on the other hand, was associated with a proportionally greater hypertrophy but smaller heart chambers.

This form of remodelling, where the heart muscle thickens but does not enlarge, is called ‘concentric remodelling’ and we know from previous studies that this form of remodelling is prone to lead to heart failure. (In a release, Erley explained how, when the inner chambers become smaller, “the heart holds and pumps less blood,” messing with the ability of the heart muscle to properly relax.)

This association was more prominent in males than in females in our study.

What might explain the gender difference?

Males tend to suffer from obesity at a younger age than females due to the protective effect of estrogen on the female metabolism. Therefore, the male heart is exposed to the effects of obesity longer than the female heart.

What is important is to detect this type of remodelling before any symptoms occur, such as shortness of breath, in order to radically intervene.

As a radiologist, I think that it is important to consider the effect of abdominal obesity when we see concentric remodelling in cardiac magnetic resonance scans.

Nowadays, we have a broad variety of therapeutic strategies to tackle visceral obesity and it’s important to address obesity as a ‘pathology,’ just like arterial hypertension and diabetes.

Patients and clinicians should take obesity (particularly the accumulation of abdominal fat) just as seriously as those other pathologies.

National Post

• Your body fat percentage is killing you, not your BMI, study suggests
• Obesity in Canada jumped almost 8% after onset of pandemic: CMAJ study

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OTTAWA — Conservatives say a deal between Liberals and the Bloc Québécois to remove a religious exemption from hate-speech laws in exchange for passing a bill targeting hate and terror symbols is an “assault” on freedom of speech and religion.

But the Bloc Québécois said the change was necessary to help prosecute rising hateful and antisemitic rhetoric, often made under the guise of exempted religious speech.

Both parties were

reacting to a National Post report Monday

that the governing Liberals and opposition Bloc had agreed to add an amendment to Bill C-9 removing what is frequently referred to as the “religious exemption” in exchange for the Bloc’s support for the legislation.

Currently, the law exempts hateful or antisemitic speech if the speaker expressed “in good faith” an opinion “based on a belief in a religious text.”

The Bloc has pushed for years for the religious exemption to disappear, even tabling a bill in 2023 to that effect. At the time, the Quebec party pointed to comments by Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui calling for the extermination of “Zionist aggressors” during a recent public prayer.

“Speech that incites hatred is a criminal act, regardless of whether it is uttered under the guise of religion or not,” Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said in a statement Monday confirming the deal with the Liberals.

“Our amendment will require the government to act to counter such hate speech, which has been on the rise since the beginning of the conflict in the Middle East, and will at the same time contribute to ensuring greater religious neutrality of the State,” added the Bloc’s justice critic Rhéal Éloi Fortin.

The Bloc’s efforts were supported by many Jewish and LGBTQ organizations, but was criticized by free speech advocates and various Christian groups as an attack on freedom of speech and religion.

That criticism was reprised by the Conservatives on Monday following National Post’s report on the deal to remove the religious exemption.

“

Liberal-Bloc amendments to C-9 will criminalize sections of the Bible, Quran, Torah, and other sacred texts,” Poilievre wrote on social media.

“Conservatives will oppose this latest Liberal assault on freedom of expression and religion.”

Conservative Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner called on all other parties to oppose the amendment to C-9.

“

This is an unprecedented assault on Canadian religious freedom and must be stopped. Everyone, of all political stripe must get behind this

,” she wrote on social media.

As part of the deal with the Bloc, the Liberals are also expected to back off plans to eliminate the need for a provincial attorney general’s sign-off to pursue a hate-propaganda prosecution. The move will likely be supported by both the Bloc and Conservatives.

Quebec’s Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, who has called on the federal government for years to remove the religious exemption defence, celebrated the deal between

Liberals and Bloc on social media

.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

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