The Social World

Tag: Canada

  • Are America’s women heading for the exit?

    Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave. That is four times higher than the 10 percent who wanted to quit the US in 2014. According to Gallup, which conducted the poll, nearly half the nation’s younger women have “lost faith in America’s institutions.” This disenchantment accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which enshrined the constitutional right to abortion.

    Younger American men are bearing up better. Only 19 percent share women’s distaste for the Donald, a 21 percent differential which is the largest recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2007.

    As they point out, the question is about the “desire” to relocate, so probably only a minority of the 40 percent will leave. Nonetheless, concludes Gallup, “the data indicate that millions of younger American women are increasingly imagining their futures elsewhere.”

    And where might that be? Canada is the first choice (11 percent) while 5 percent dream of a new life in New Zealand, Italy or Japan. Canada has that nice Mark Carney as its Prime Minister but be warned, women of America: our northern neighbor isn’t the same country that it was a decade ago.

    A report last year in the National Post was headlined “Sexual assaults, robberies surging in Canada’s cities.” The Trudeau administration had tried to blame soaring crime on the aftermath of the harsh Covid restrictions, but the Macdonald Laurier Institute’s “urban violent crime report” rubbished that theory.

    Crime of all types had been on the rise since 2016, particularly sexual assault, which had increased by 77 percent between 2013 and 2023. The Canadian media is curiously reticent to examine what is behind this surge, which has coincided with record levels of immigration. A clue perhaps might be found in the response to a parliamentary question asked earlier this year by Canadian Conservative MP Blaine Calkins. Troubled by the 31 percent increase in foreigners incarcerated in Canadian prisons, he wanted to know where they came from and what crimes they’d committed. The majority had been convicted of violent and sexual crimes, and the two countries most represented among felons were Jamaica and India.

    Something else that has increased in Canada in recent years is the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood. A report in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy warned that Canada was facing a “rising national security risk” from the shadowy Islamist organization. Its goal is to establish a global caliphate, and the institute expressed its concern that Canada has allowed the Brotherhood to “grow and spread radical Islamist ideology, often benefiting from federal funding.”

    With this in mind, if some American women find themselves going cold on Canada, what about Japan? In 2023, Japan was ranked 125th out of 146 countries in terms of gender equality (the US was 43rd and Italy 79th). The World Economic Forum report noted the low female representation in Japanese politics and industry.

    Furthermore, cases of sexual harassment on public transport have risen sharply in recent years — what the Japanese call “chikan,” or groping. Most incidents are committed by Japanese men against foreigners.

    So if not Japan, what about the dolce vita of Italy? Unfortunately, Italy is also experiencing a wave of sexual violence. Incidences have increased by 50 percent in the past five years, with crimes peaking in 2024.

    Some 43 percent of men convicted of sexual crimes were foreigners, prompting Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, to state that, “I will be called a racist, but there is a greater incidence, unfortunately, in cases of sexual violence, by immigrants.” She added that this was particularly true of those “who arrived illegally.”

    There are other options in Europe for American women. What about Paris, the City of Love? The smell of fresh croissants, the sight of Gallic heartthrobs. Oh la la! Alas, the real Paris bears no resemblance to Emily in Paris.

    Earlier this year, a French government report revealed that seven in ten women in the greater Paris region have suffered some form of abuse while traveling on public transport. Recently, an Egyptian man allegedly tried to rape a young woman on a train just outside the French capital and, as a result, a petition has been launched demanding women-only train cars.

    One could always try London, but women there are also demanding greater security on the city’s Tube network. Another phenomenon on the rise in both Britain and France is the segregation of the sexes as the Muslim population grows. In October, a Mosque in London organized a fundraising run that was open to everyone except women and girls over the age of 12. In November, a poll was published in France that revealed that 45 percent of French Muslim men and 57 percent of women under 35 practice some form of segregation, such as the refusal to shake hands or receive medical treatment from a person of the opposite sex, or to visit a mixed-gender swimming pool.

    In December 2015, Trump lamented what had become of Paris, making his remarks a few weeks after Islamist terrorists had slaughtered 130 people during the Bataclan attack. “Look at what happened in Paris, the horrible carnage, and frankly… Paris is no longer the same city it was.”

    He was right. Paris is no longer the city it was, and nor is London or some Italian cities, such as Milan, where, according to city councillor Daniele Nahum, “the antisemitic situation is becoming unmanageable.”

    The 40 percent of American women who dream of starting a new life elsewhere should take note. The grass in Trumpland might actually be greener.

  • The downfall of Thomas King, Canada’s most influential ‘indigenous’ man

    The downfall of Thomas King, Canada’s most influential ‘indigenous’ man

    It’s an awkward time in the upper echelons of the Canadian cultural establishment. It’s come to light that influential indigenous author and former broadcaster Thomas King, isn’t actually indigenous at all.

    It matters, because King has spent much of his 82 years claiming to speak on behalf of the indigenous peoples of North America, and his role in shaping Canadian perception of their First Nations has been enormous. His books have served as standard texts in Canadian schools and universities for over 20 years.

    Born in the US, King came to Canada in 1980 to teach native studies at the University of Lethbridge. His claim to be indigenous was made in all good faith, he says, believing on his mother’s say-so (but little other evidence, it seems) that his father, who abandoned the family early on, was part Cherokee.

    Whether it was in good faith or not, when King came to Canada, he was able not only to dine out on his purported indigeneity, but to make it the central facet of a lucrative career. He taught indigenous studies, but also wrote books about being indigenous. They were acclaimed and assigned to curriculums across the country, partly, perhaps, for their quality of writing, but chiefly for their subject matter and authorship. Shakespeare was crowded out of the classroom, but there was still room for Thomas King.

    Awards and literary prizes were heaped upon him, including some earmarked for First Nations writers; this is Canada after all, where every government form invites you to check the First Nations box for preferential treatment. His work made it to radio and screen, and he became a darling of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, hosting The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour and appearing as the first indigenous speaker at the prestigious Massey Lecture series. His promotion to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2020 recognized him for “enduring contributions to the preservation and recognition of Indigenous culture, as one of North America’s most acclaimed literary figures.”

    King was about to break into the world of opera with an adaptation of his Indians on Vacation novel when news broke that he was, after all, just an ordinary writer like everyone else – and the Edmonton Opera decided to cancel.

    It seems there had been rumors for years that King wasn’t really indigenous. In the end, it was the genealogists at the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds who got to him, an indigenous organization dedicated to outing “Pretendians,” though King says he doesn’t deserve to be classed with that group, because his was an honest mistake. He accepts the Tribal Alliance findings, he announced in an op-ed published in Canada’s Globe and Mail – a masterpiece of damage control that seemed to leave most readers feeling not outraged but sorry for him, if the comment section is any indication.

    When you look at the cultural impact of his work, however, it’s hard to be sorry that he has now been discredited. The work of Thomas King is not calculated to spread peace among the nations.

    Take this bit from The Inconvenient Indian, which was for a time one of the most widely read books in Canada: “Whites want Indians to disappear, and they want Indians to assimilate, and they want Indians to understand that everything that Whites have done was for their own good because Native people, left to their own devices, couldn’t make good decisions for themselves.” Er, all white people want this? How does he know?

    Or this tendentious passage, about the attitude of Europeans to natives: “By the late 19th century, the Indian Problem was still a problem… Yes, most of the tribes had been safely locked up on reservations and reserves. Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying numbers from disease and starvation. Yes, all of this was encouraging…”

    Far more egregious is King’s treatment of residential schools. He alleges, without a source, that “up to 50 percent” of the estimated 150,000 children who attended residential schools in Canada “died from disease, malnutrition, neglect and abuse.” But this now appears to be wildly inaccurate. According to subsequent research presented by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of which King would certainly have since seen, the proportion of children who died of any cause while attending residential schools was between 2 and 4 percent. That’s an enormous difference. A journalist in 2017 called him out – but this writer was unable to find any acknowledgement of the error.

    This is propaganda, not history. Yet The Inconvenient Indian was read and reviewed favorably everywhere. And consider the consequences: how quickly Canadians believed the unsubstantiated mass grave narrative that swept through the media in 2021, and how easily the Canadian government shrugged off anti-Christian attacks and said the anger which led to the burning of over 100 churches was “understandable.” Even today, a Canadian MP wants to make “downplaying” the residential schools deaths a criminal offense.

    King says he’s not going to apologize for sincerely presenting himself as indigenous. All right, but what about an apology for saturating Canada with ahistorical propaganda? That would be far more to the point.

  • Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

    Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

    The most powerful intelligence alliance in the world is breaking up. In January, Donald Trump restricted intelligence-sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. Then in March came the so-called “Ukraine intel blackout,” an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. And last month, the Dutch said they were scaling back intelligence-sharing with America over fears of “politicization.”

    Trump tends to treat intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips. But by holding information back, he’s weaponizing the very trust that built the western alliance and sustained the power of the Anglosphere. The “Five Eyes” – the spying network that comprises the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – is not a commercial arrangement. It can’t survive if its members start haggling over access.

    There are good reasons for Trump to be wary of the Five Eyes. British and Australian agents, after all, were at the heart of the Russiagate saga which did so much to derail his first administration. More broadly, the alliance allows governments to spy on their own citizens through one another’s networks, sharing the results without technically breaking their own laws.

    We like to believe our governments need warrants, oversight and law to reach into our private lives. In truth, the invasion of privacy in the West takes place on an industrial scale. Almost every phone call, search and message passes through a web of monitoring that’s rarely acknowledged and almost never constrained by law. Its defenders insist this cooperation keeps the West safe. Its critics call it institutionalized hypocrisy. Both are right to a degree.

    American law forbids the National Security Agency from targeting US citizens without a warrant. British law requires GCHQ to obtain one under the Investigatory Powers Act. So the NSA collects on Britons. GCHQ collects on Americans. Data is exchanged. It’s a system built on plausible deniability. Each agency claims it is merely receiving “foreign intelligence.” The scale of the intelligence-gathering and analysis is staggering.

    The US’s NSA alone intercepts hundreds of millions of text messages, emails and call records every day. Under its “Upstream” and “Prism” programs, the agency taps the world’s main fiber-optic cables and demands user data directly from US tech giants. Britain’s matching operation, GCHQ’s “Tempora,” stores three days of transatlantic internet traffic at any one time, with metadata retained for a month. Australia’s Signals Directorate monitors entire oceanic cable systems linking Asia to the Pacific. Canada’s Communications Security Establishment sits astride the Atlantic routes into North America, feeding bulk intercepts into shared databases that analysts in all five countries and beyond can query.

    The alliance’s reach extends into almost every form of modern communication – mobile networks, satellite relays and social media platforms. Few of its targets are terrorists or spies. The agreement that started this system, known as UKUSA, was signed in 1946. It has never been ratified by any legislative body and remains classified in full. What we know comes from leaks, court rulings and declassified scraps. Over the years, the network has quietly expanded beyond its original five members to include associate and “third-party” partners in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These extensions, often referred to as “Nine Eyes” or “Fourteen Eyes,” have turned the alliance into a sprawling global surveillance web, linking western intelligence agencies through shared databases, cables and monitoring systems that cover the planet.

    The Five Eyes were born of Churchill’s idea of “the English-speaking people,” bound by language, law and a shared sense of moral purpose. Yet the values that once made Five Eyes a moral community have fractured. Today, the alliance binds countries that no longer see liberty, privacy or speech in the same way. In Britain, police arrest citizens for online “hate incidents.” In Canada, the government froze protesters’ bank accounts. Australia’s diplomats helped ignite an FBI investigation into a US presidential candidate.

    The secrecy and the overreach are real, but Trump’s crusade against Five Eyes is not about curbing surveillance. It’s about dominance over the system. At the start of the year, the President began starving Washington’s allies of intelligence they’d once taken for granted. Then screenshots from a White House Signal chat appeared online, revealing private exchanges between senior aides discussing US military options in Yemen, shared by allies. The breach exposed not only sensitive operations but also the chaotic way Trump’s team handled classified material. British and Australian intelligence officers were said to be furious, prompting allies to scale back contributions. Former GCHQ staff described a collapse of confidence among the Five Eyes intelligence services.

    London and Canberra have since formed smaller, closed sub-groups to coordinate without US participation. Canada, meanwhile, has scaled back its contributions after Trump publicly threatened to expel it from the alliance altogether, following months of tariff disputes. Inside Washington, intelligence veterans describe an atmosphere of suspicion not seen since the Cold War.

    For Trump and his allies, the intelligence alliance is not a bond of friendship, but a nest of unelected bureaucrats, the “deep state abroad.” To him, distrust is not paranoia but prudence. He views the exchange of intelligence as a transaction and intelligence itself as a commodity. That’s not altogether wrong. The Five Eyes alliance has always been transactional, a system of barter between intelligence services, trading data for access, reach or favor. Trump’s battle is not against the surveillance itself. He is targeting the independence of allies who refuse to submit. Intelligence does not obey the laws of supply and demand. It depends on the unspoken belief that what is shared will not be politicized. Once that trust collapses, the value of the intelligence collapses with it. Trump is destroying Five Eyes by destroying the trust that underpins it. Whether that’s deliberate or not is hard to say.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The unbearable wokeness of the Canadian military

    The unbearable wokeness of the Canadian military

    “I think the question that needs to be asked is: what kind of military does Canada even want?” Dallas Alexander has been all country-star cool until I ask about his former employer. Now his voice takes on a more earnest tone.

    We’ve talked about the song the veteran-turned-singer considers his best – “Child of this Land,” a ballad about growing up in the remote Fishing Lake Métis Settlement in northern Alberta – and we’ve discussed which is the fan favorite: same, he says, or maybe the more upbeat “Can’t Blame My Bloodline.” To my mild surprise he doesn’t mention “Adios Amigo.” The song, with its catchy (and ominous) refrain, references the record-breaking sniper shot taken by Alexander’s team in 2017. Fired during the Battle of Mosul, the bullet traveled 2.2 miles before taking out an ISIS combatant who had just scrambled out of a window with an AK-47.

    Back then, Alexander was a sniper with the elite Joint Task Force 2, a Canadian special ops unit on a par with America’s Delta Force and Britain’s SAS. But the Canadian Armed Forces were already beginning to lose their way, pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion at the expense of effectiveness – and only a few years later, Alexander would be hounded out.

    Today, Alexander is unimpressed by General Jennie Carignan, the head of Canadian defense, who appeared on TV earlier this month with a tearful public apology for systemic racism. Alexander, who is Métis and served for 17 years, doesn’t think the military is systemically racist, as he understands the word “systemic.” He’s nuanced about it: racism, he says, can appear in any large group, especially in an aggressive workplace like a military unit or sports team, with “very get-after-it types of people.” But, “I don’t think the answer to any of it is a general – supposed to be in charge of a fighting force – crying on TV.”

    It began when Alexander was still fighting with Joint Task Force 2. “It was starting to trickle in, you needed to do an Indigenous awareness course. And I was like, what the hell does this have to do with a special operations unit? And I’m Indigenous.” Gender awareness courses were next, then other sensitivity training, all eating into time previously spent on combat training.

    The Canadian military has been struggling with recruitment and retention, and I remark that leadership seems to think that going down the sensitivity route will attract more people. “They’re going to get the people that they ask for, that’s all… recruiting might go through the ceiling,” but it’ll be “just a bunch of people that want to go in and be sensitive and get free money.”

    When Covid hit, with its protocols and mandates, the troops felt they were being used as a testing ground; the government wanted to “be able to go to the world, or to the rest of Canada, and say: look, this group of people were 100 percent compliant.”

    Alexander thinks that if every person in JTF2 at the time who didn’t want to be vaccinated had stuck to it, their unit might have gotten away with it. The government would have had to cancel the whole Tier 1 special operations program – and Alexander thinks that wouldn’t have happened. But there was a lot of pressure. “People got scared for their mortgages and their next positions.” Many caved; those who, like Alexander, held their ground were eventually forced out. He thinks the elite units took a gigantic hit at this point. “A lot of people that were very experienced in tons of operations, leaders, aggressive, what you need in a force like that,” left. “And like the cliché of an action movie, if I had to pick a team to go do some crazy mission, every single person I would add to that team is out of the military right now.”

    How good was the Canadian military, before all this? “Second to none,” Alexander says of his unit. They trained and competed a lot with Delta in the US and though the Canadian special forces have nowhere near the same money and equipment, Joint Task Force 2 “kicked ass.”

    If Canada wanted to turn things around, what could be done? “If I was in charge of the military in Canada tomorrow,” Alexander says, “I mean, this is gonna sound terrible, but I’m gonna say it anyway – I would cancel almost every part of the military and build a robust special operations unit and intelligence-gathering unit. And that is all that we would have. The rest would be volunteers to help within Canada. And that’s it.”

    I ask him about PTSD. Alexander says he thinks a lot of veterans go through a similar cycle, becoming disillusioned when they “realize that the government… is corrupt and immoral.” He firmly believes soldiers need to know what their own morals are before heading out on deployment and “if someone tells you to do something against that, you tell them to go to hell.”

    “Everyone says that’s not how the military works,” he says. But Alexander believes in morals. For him, they always came before orders. “Call me a bad soldier. I don’t really care. But I don’t have debilitating PTSD because I stuck to my morals.” He says a lot of young guys who go into the military early are put into situations for which they are unprepared. Then once they grow up, they have a lot of regrets that they have to work through. Moral preparation “isn’t popular because it makes soldiers harder to deal with. Instead of just taking some stupid order, you’re like, wait a minute… but I think it’s needed if you want to get out the other side and be able to sit peacefully at the dinner table with your family.”

    What does Alexander think of the Canadian government offering euthanasia to vets asking for help with PTSD? “To me, that’s insane,” Alexander says. “It’s insane that that is a place where the government thinks it should be stepping in, offering to kill people who are its own citizens. I think it’s very weird. And especially people in vulnerable positions… it’s sickening.” Why pick on veterans in particular? “I mean, you look at it, it saves them a lot of money, that’s for sure. But I don’t know. It’s not a good enough reason, in my opinion.” Mine neither.

    Alexander is pursuing his music career in Nashville now, where he’s making tour plans for 2026 and has founded Music City Gun Club for artists and musicians to go shooting with special operations instructors. He likes Tennessee. “I’m super happy and grateful for all that happened, because I’m way better off now,” he says. That said, speaking with Alexander, it seems to me that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Of his own songs, his favorite is “Child of This Land.” And that, in a way, says it all.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Anne of Green Gables perfected the kitchen mishap

    Anne of Green Gables perfected the kitchen mishap

    There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables.

    Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce.

    On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified. In awful technicolor, recent events replay before her: how days ago, instructed to cover the sauce in the pantry, she forgot; how the next morning, remembering, she came back, only to find floating in it a mouse which had raided its last larder. How, horrified, she fished out the deceased with a spoon, disposed of the corpse and gave the spoon a thorough scrubbing, but forgot all about the contaminated sauce – until the fateful moment when Marilla carries it in, warmed up, to serve their ritzy guests with the dessert.

    Throwing caution to the wind, Anne rises in her place and shrieks before the assembled company, “Marilla, you mustn’t use that pudding sauce. There was a mouse drowned in it. I forgot to tell you before.”

    The silence that descends is punctuated only by the look Mrs. Chester Ross gives Anne and the fiery complexion of Marilla, whisking away the pudding sauce.

    The joy of this vignette is that it goes beyond a simple food flop into the realm of social irony. We don’t just have a mishap; we get to be onlookers as several different kinds of mishap occur in quick succession, under the horrified and ritzy nose of Mrs. Chester Ross. Why this situation, doubtless excruciating for its main actors, should be so entertaining for everyone else, remains one of the little mysteries of human nature.

    In late-Victorian Prince Edward Island, creatures in the food are a decided solecism. “Are you sure there ain’t a spider in that cream jug, Kate?” inquires the catty Cousin Ernestine in Anne of Windy Poplars. “I’m afraid I saw one when you poured my cup.” “We never have spiders in our cream jugs,” is the ominous response, and the kitchen door slams. How different from the social setting aboard ship with Patrick O’Brien in the Georgian era, where the lesser of two weevils, emerging from the crumbs of the captain’s meal, is appreciated and praised.

    Better-known in Anne of Green Gables is the disaster of the liniment cake. Anne, eager to impress the new minister’s wife who’s coming to tea, bakes a vanilla layer cake that is, to all external appearances, a showstopper.

    Unseen in the background, however, Fate is quietly slipping lead into the boxing gloves (not my own expression; P.G. Wodehouse’s). The vanilla jar from which Anne poured the cake’s flavoring had been refilled with anodyne liniment, a vile-tasting herbal remedy. Anyone who’s been convinced to try Buckley’s Syrups (advertised as “the taste people love to hate”) will probably sympathize with the feelings of the poor minister’s wife, adjured to try a slice as Anne had made it especially for her. She can’t keep a poker face and the truth comes out, to Anne’s extreme embarrassment.

    Despite these scarring incidents, people generally eat like kings in the Anne series. It’s all such comfort food, too. They’re constantly roasting chickens, fetching strawberry pies out of the pantry, and coming home of a winter’s evening to the smell of roasting ham and buttered toast.

    Anne’s first taste of ice cream comes at the Sunday School picnic. They make the dessert right there and then in the old-fashioned, pre-electricity way, with the sweetened cream in a tin liner, placed in a bucket of salted ice and churned by hand until frozen. “Sublime,” is Anne’s review.

    Though nowhere in Prince Edward Island can be called far from the sea, the delight of freshly caught fish only comes up in Book 5, after she marries Gilbert, now a doctor, and moves to a fishing town. The highlight of their first meal is the sea trout given to them by Captain Jim. “They’re fresh as trout can be, Mistress Blythe. Two hours ago they were swimming in the Glen Pond.”

    Anne outgrows her trials with baking; her chocolate cake recipe is to become the envy of her best friend Diana, who guiltily sneaks slice after slice as they picnic together, slimming regime notwithstanding.

    Anne is also fortunate in securing the culinary services of her loyal housekeeper Susan Baker, who knows her way around a mixing bowl, feathering “an orange-frosted cake with coconut” without a second thought and who fills the pages of the later Anne books with monkeyface cookies, gold-and-silver cake, jam roly-poly, stuffed leg of lamb and apple crunch pie.

    In L.M. Montgomery’s world, the good eat well and like it; the bad do neither. Aunt Mary Maria, the nightmare guest who comes to visit and never leaves in Anne of Ingleside, is entirely unappreciative of the culinary delights proffered for her enjoyment and does her best to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment as well.

    At Christmas dinner, her running commentary is as follows: “White meat only, please. (James, eat your soup quietly.) Ah, you are not the carver your father was, Gilbert. He could give everyone the bit she liked best. (Twins, older people would like a chance now and then to get a word in edgewise. I was brought up by the rule that children should be seen and not heard.) No, thank you, Gilbert, no salad for me. I don’t eat raw food. Yes, Annie, I’ll take a little pudding. Mince pies are entirely too indigestible.”

    This frightful relative stays on for months and months, appreciating nothing yet dropping dark hints about selling her home and moving in with them forever. Politeness prevents Anne and Gilbert from showing a blood relation the door.

    In the end, it’s a birthday cake that finally drives out their unbidden guest. Enraged by the 55 candles revealing her age to the party guests, Aunt Mary Maria packs up and stalks out, “forgiving everybody with her last breath.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Why bother banning US booze in Canada?

    Why bother banning US booze in Canada?

    You know what they say about America: beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain. But its fruited plains – specifically its vineyards – and amber waves of grain aren’t doing her neighbor to the north much good at the moment – at least not in the beverage department.

    In the Loyalist province of Ontario, just as in la belle province of Québec, no California wines have graced the store shelves for more than half a year. American tipple is out. As far as eastern Canada is concerned, the minions of Francis Ford Coppola crush grapes in vain, all is quiet along the Yakima and it matters not whether pinot noir still reigns supreme in the Willamette Valley. Ask not for whom the Napa flows; it’s not for thee.

    Last spring, as part of a pushback against Trump’s tariffs, a number of provinces, including Ontario, Québec, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, put a ban on the sale of American alcoholic beverages. The move didn’t soften the Trumpian heart, nor did it weaken his resolve. But it did leave Canadian consumers scratching their heads, wondering why all the rum was gone from the Kraken shelf.

    It had, as it turned out, been strong-armed off the displays, along with California wine and Tennessee whiskey. It was not, as in Pirates of the Caribbean, used to build a massive distress-signal fire, but packed sternly away into warehouses on pallets, sealed in layers of plastic wrap and red tape. Shops weren’t even allowed to sell off the stock already imported.

    Alberta, growing into its future role as the voice of Canadian common sense, soon rescinded the ban, but others – notably Ontario, whose short-sighted premier Doug Ford came up with the plan in the first place, and Québec – stayed stuck on the program.

    How times change. Once, America was the country dumping tea into the harbor, prohibiting alcohol, pouring Champagne down the drain and generally playing havoc with the nation’s drinking supply. Back then, Canada sat cheerfully up north, light-hearted and reasonable, sipping on tea, whiskey, bubbly and anything else it fancied, while happily expanding its national economic activity to bootlegging and the manufacture of ginger ale.

    Indeed, if it weren’t for the American temperance movement, Canada Dry might never have gotten off the ground. Its ginger ale sold well in Prohibition-era America, because the extra sugar in ginger ale was just the thing to cover up the taste of bathtub gin.

    Canadians are just as easygoing as they used to be, but it’s now their leaders’ turn to launch into political theatrics, loudly banning American drinks until morale improves. As most Americans don’t worry a huge amount about Canada, let alone what people drink here, the main audience for this little bit of performative whimsy is, sadly, the citizens of Canada. It’s a virtue-signal, intended to make Canadians feel – every time they go grocery shopping – that Something is Being Done, however pointless.

    If you try to buy American products online from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (the Crown corporation that controls the import and distribution of alcoholic beverages) you’re told, rather sanctimoniously, “This US product is no longer available in response to US tariffs on Canadian goods. Check out our recommended Canadian alternatives.”

    Supporting Canadian winemakers and distilleries (and there are some very good ones, such as Grey Monk in BC or Eau Claire Distillery in Alberta) is not the problem. It’s the hypocritical pretense that the government is helping Canadians, when actually, it’s capitalizing on one more petty method of controlling them. As the Jack Daniel’s man said, why not simply impose a counter-tariff?

    Still, they can go ahead and ban it if they want to. The Canadian smuggling tradition is too good to lose. Canadian author Farley Mowat recounts in The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, published in the 1960s, how he was invited to participate in a smuggling venture running alcohol between Saint-Pierre and Miquelon and Newfoundland. As Mowat was, in his own words, in favor of anything that takes the mickey out of duly constituted authority whenever that authority intrudes on the freedom of the individual, and (also in his own words) in favor of inexpensive booze, he agreed.

    The local lads on Saint-Pierre helped him prepare his craft: on the sailboat deck, they installed wooden troughs to hold the crates – hinged, so that with the simple pull of a rope, the cargo could be jettisoned in case of visitation by the coast guard.

    In the dark of night, the crates were delivered to the boat and installed in the troughs, each one lashed to a heavy sack. The practice was to tie bags of fisherman’s salt, known as “insurance,” to the smuggled goods. If the crates were thrown overboard, the heavy bags of salt would drag them down to the bottom of the sea. In 15 to 24 hours, depending on the size of the bag, the salt would dissolve and the crates would pop back up to the surface, ready to be collected by any boat that happened to be lingering in the area.

    Out they sailed toward the shore of Newfoundland, ill-gotten goods lashed to the hinged contraptions on deck, keeping a weather eye out for the cops. Sure enough, the RCMP boat roared down upon them in the fog, siren wailing horribly. Mowat and his pal hurled themselves upon the ropes, tossing everything into the sea.

    They were greeted with self-satisfied smiles from the constabulary, who noted that not only had they tossed their cargo unnecessarily, having made it safely into international waters, but that they, the fuzz, were on to the salt bag game and intended to lie in wait on that very spot until each and every crate floated back up. “And we’ll sink every last one of them!” they promised.

    Mowat and crew headed off despondently to the shores of Selby’s Cove, where they were greeted with wild enthusiasm. As it turns out, their operation was only a decoy, and the jettisoned cargo consisted of rocks, attached to sacks not of salt, but of sand. The real operation arrived on shore a few hours later: three boats packed to the gunwales with kegs and cases of smuggled alcohol.

    In the subsequent rejoicings, it is hard to say if anyone spared a thought for the poor coast guard officers, eyeing the waters that never give up their dead.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Ontario’s Reagan ad was a moronic mistake

    Ontario’s Reagan ad was a moronic mistake

    The on-again, off-again relationship between Canada and the US is off-again, again.

    In the latest chapter of this perpetual saga, US President Donald Trump announced on October 23 that trade negotiations between the White House and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had been “terminated.” Two days later, he went back to his Truth Social account and stated, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10 percent over and above what they are paying now.” To top it all off, Trump told reporters on Monday that he won’t be meeting with Carney “for a while.”

    What caused the President’s reaction? An old Ronald Reagan radio address, of all things. The Ontario government spent around $75 million creating a one-minute television ad for American networks. Parts of Reagan’s April 25, 1987 radio address on free and fair trade with Japan can be heard in the background of the advert. The reason that Ontario premier Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative government used these audio clips was to make a point about tariffs and trade.

    It’s no secret that Reagan was largely opposed to the use of tariffs and spoke out strongly against them. “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,” the late president said, in part. “The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”

    Reagan also addressed the reality of short-term tariffs to help create a level economic playing field. “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works – but only for a short time,” he said. “What eventually occurs is: first, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets.”

    The Ontario government used Reagan’s exact lines from his radio address, and didn’t artificially reconstruct them. That’s fine, of course. The lingering question is why they did something so foolish in the first place.

    To begin with, the placement of Reagan’s lines in his radio address were shuffled around a bit. Here’s one example. The opening of the Ontario television ad contained Reagan’s point about tariffs being used for a short time in a perceived patriotic fashion. That particular paragraph occurred in the middle of his radio address. As someone who has written columns and political speeches, I can tell you the placement of certain ideas and theories is both intentional and critical to understanding the meaning behind it. Other professional writers would tell you the same thing, if they were being honest.  

    More than 600 of Reagan’s radio addresses were compiled in the 2001 book Reagan in His Own Hand. They were written in pen, contained few edits and followed a particular pattern, theme and cadence. It didn’t matter if he was discussing domestic policy, foreign policy, communism, capitalism, or even Halloween and Christmas. You can see it in every line, clause, paragraph and train of thought. 

    Why didn’t Reagan didn’t put those ideas about tariffs up front? It was likely because he thought they weren’t as critical as other concepts. Ontario’s decision to open the ad with them changed the meaning of his radio address. That’s unacceptable in my view. It’s also part of the reason why the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute is so irritated with the ad and feel it “misrepresents” Reagan’s remarks, along with the fact that they weren’t contacted for permission to use the clips. 

    Meanwhile, the Ontario government decided to poke the bear and irritate Trump in the middle of important trade negotiations. That was pretty moronic, too.

    While it’s true that the President wasn’t initially bothered by the ad, this changed over the course of a few days. It’s not the first time this has happened to Trump in his presidency, by any means. There could be several reasons the President changed his mind about the ad. Perhaps he had second thoughts after letting it stew for a few days or his advisers turned him against it. Regardless, Trump doesn’t take kindly to what he perceives as criticism or ridicule of his ideas and policies. One has to always be aware of this during a negotiation with him.  

    Ford heavily contributed to this situation. The Ontario premier originally employed a tough but reasonable approach in dealing with the Trump White House when the tariff battle started, but he’s gone off the rails as of late. Why? He knows that many Ontarians (and Canadians) are frustrated with Trump’s tariffs and leadership, so he thinks that it’s to his political benefit. This is in spite of his PC government being well ahead in the polls and not needing to poke the bear. Diplomacy, thy name definitely isn’t Doug Ford.

    Guess what? It backfired. The Ontario ad was quickly pulled after Trump pushed back. While some political experts and Ontario ministers were quite pleased with the response and publicity, the PM was seemingly not among them. “There were a series of very detailed, very specific, very comprehensive discussions… up until the point of those ads running,” Carney told reporters at the ASEAN summit in Malaysia. What a mess that the Ontario government has made.

  • Trump’s World Series wind-up

    Trump’s World Series wind-up

    It’s thanks to good old Yankee bravado that baseball’s most important fixture is called the “World Series,” even though it’s a thoroughly North American affair.

    Yet Major League Baseball, like the National Hockey League, is not restricted to the US – Canada joins in, too. Tonight, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays will compete against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of what should be a thrilling World Series, and the now-familiar Canadian-American sporting rivalry has been given added spice thanks to a certain man who happens to be President of the United States.

    Last night, Donald Trump, who relishes abrupt announcements, abruptly announced that he was suspending trade negotiations with Canada. The reason? He was deeply annoyed by a television advertisement, paid for by the Province of Ontario, which replayed some old footage of Ronald Reagan condemning tariffs as a recipe for economic catastrophe.

    “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Trump replied on his Truth Social platform. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

    In another post, Trump declared that the ad was fraudulent. He said it had been broadcast in order “to interfere with the decision of the US Supreme Court,” which is currently pondering a big legal challenge to the President’s tariff agenda.

    The advert has clearly been troubling him since at least Tuesday, when he said “I see foreign countries now, that we are doing really well with, taking ads ‘Don’t go with tariffs!’ They’re taking ads. I saw an ad last night from Canada. If I was Canada, I’d take the same ad also.”

    It’s always hard to tell if Trump is ever truly enraged or merely playing mind games for headlines and leverage. But he seems oddly determined to wind up America’s second biggest trading partner – and neighbor. He has said, repeatedly, that he thinks Canada should become America’s 51st state, and his blustering on that front helped Mark Carney, the impeccably globalist former governor of the Bank of England, win an election and become the country’s prime minister. Carney’s victory was widely put down to the “Trumplash,” the global reaction to the Donald’s obnoxious tariff agenda.

    But the relationship between the United States (the superpower) and Canada (its more European neighbor) is more intimate and complicated than mere policy. Trump’s dismantling of NAFTA – the free trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico – and his replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is one of the important and under-discussed aspects of his two-terms as Commander-in-Chief. USMCA is still mostly in effect, despite Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel, automobile parts and lumber.

    Will Trump continue to use tariffs as a tool in his push for full annexation? Or is he just toying with the sporting hype around the World Series? We’ll probably never know. The Dodgers are favorites to win, by the way, and – despite what Sean Thomas says about American sports – I think we should all tune in.

  • Justin Trudeau kisses Canada goodbye

    Justin Trudeau kisses Canada goodbye

    Justin Trudeau has finally found something he can’t bankrupt – a washed-up pop star. The former prime minister, now liberated from the burden of office, was recently spotted aboard Katy Perry’s yacht in California, sharing a kiss so theatrical it would have been cut by a good director.  

    But Trudeau was always drawn to drama. The kind with lighting, makeup and someone else footing the bill. His life has become a soap opera, though not the kind with decent writing or respectable ratings. There was the recurring racist phase, the peace-and-love phase, the power-and-profit phase and now the Malibu make-out phase. Once hailed as the fresh-faced heir to liberal idealism, Trudeau swiftly dissolved into a puddle of melodrama and moisturizer. 

    His years in power left Canada poorer, angrier and more divided than at any point in living memory. He preached virtue but practiced vanity. He championed empathy while governing with arrogance. He turned Canada – long admired for moderation – into a running gag on the world stage. 

    Spare a thought for his ex-wife, Sophie Grégoire, and their three teenage children, who must now watch their father prance around the Pacific like a man auditioning for a midlife-crisis cologne ad called “Hubris.” These are the years when a father’s guidance matters most, yet Trudeau seems intent on performing adolescence rather than parenting it. The family he once paraded for photo-ops has been abandoned, collateral damage in a career built on self-adoration. 

    It’s a fitting metaphor for his time in office. Trudeau inherited a stable nation and left behind a shattered one. Under his leadership, Canada’s national debt doubled, small businesses suffocated under regulation and housing became an impossible dream for a generation. The middle class – once his favourite talking point – was gutted. Canadians now pay more taxes for fewer services, while the political elite grow fatter and smugger on their own sanctimony. 

    Trudeau sold himself as a feminist reformer. But under his watch, women faced soaring living costs, record food insecurity and a healthcare system closer to Congo than Canada. He vowed to unite the country. Instead, he governed like a leader allergic to accountability, dividing Canadians into obedient followers and ideological foes. Those who questioned his mantras or mandates were branded extremists. When truckers protested, he branded them fascists, then froze their bank accounts. The man who looked like he could play the next Bond ended up acting like a Bond villain, just with better hair and worse judgment. 

    And for what? To preserve his ego. The Emergencies Act he invoked wasn’t about protecting Canadians but punishing them. He turned a protest into a purge, revealing that beneath the charm and charisma lurked a control freak of the highest order. 

    Canada became a cautionary tale. A country built on freedom slid into tyranny, cheered on by citizens too polite to protest. 

    Foreign policy fared no better. He alienated India, annoyed China and amused the world with a conveyor belt of photo ops and platitudes. Diplomacy became his favorite vanity project, each summit another red carpet. When the flashes faded, so did Canada’s influence. Trudeau was never taken seriously abroad because, deep down, he never took the job seriously. 

    And now, shirtless and shameless, he’s chasing pop stardom by association. As for Perry, her own decline mirrors his – from pop princess to self-parody. Once the voice of youthful rebellion, the part-time astronaut is now a Vegas lounge act in search of validation. Together, they are a duet of decline. Two faded brands clinging to each other in the hope of renewed relevance. He’s the patron saint of performative decency. She’s the high priestess of performative empowerment. Together, they are the unholy alliance of fame and fakery. 

    Trudeau’s defenders will say his love life is his business. Perhaps. But this is a man who never met a camera he didn’t flirt with, who turned politics into performance and leadership into lifestyle. Privacy was never his language. Every grin, every tear, every contrived display of humility was a stage cue. Even now, his post-political life plays out like a poorly written sequel – Love Actually meets Keeping Up with the Kardashians. 

    Canada deserved a statesman. It got a showman. He entered office promising “sunny ways” and left behind a long winter of division, delusion and decline. 

    While the Liberal Lothario suns himself on borrowed yachts and chases pop stars past their prime, Canadians are left with the mess – higher taxes, weaker freedoms and a fractured sense of nationhood. He didn’t just betray his voters; he betrayed his family, his vows and the quiet dignity that once defined his country. The tragedy of Justin Trudeau isn’t that he lost power. It’s that he was ever given it in the first place. Katy Perry sang about fireworks, but with Trudeau, everything ends in flames.

  • The Freedom Convoy trial has disgraced Canada’s justice system

    The Freedom Convoy trial has disgraced Canada’s justice system

    In a disgraceful conclusion to a disgraceful trial, Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been sentenced to 12 months of house arrest and 6 months of curfew (with credit for the 49 days Lich has already spent in jail) – plus 100 hours of community service.

    An ironic addendum. For in the packed courtroom on October 7, there was likely not one person who has served the community with greater generosity than the two defendants.

    Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

    They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

    But it’s quite the opposite. Though left-leaning outlets have portrayed the sentence as light, compared to the outrageous seven and eight years of jail time demanded by the Crown, any conviction and sentencing of the obviously innocent Lich and Barber only serves to confirm that Canadians with the wrong political views will not receive equal treatment before the law.

    We all know that in Canada, axe-wielding saboteurs, railway blockaders, rioters, traffic disruptors and violent protestors have escaped without so much as arrest, as long as the government views their cause with complaisance.

    Can you believe that Lich was convicted for saying things like “hold the line”, “stay united” and “don’t give in to fear”? Dangerous words indeed. And Barber? He was convicted for telling truckers not to honk unless their trucks were raided – this was defiance of the court order against honking. Three weeks of protesting, all recorded on thousands of devices, and those were the only charges that could be made to stick? It’s a good thing they didn’t try jaywalking.

    Thankfully, Lich’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, says they are seriously considering an appeal of her conviction, on grounds that “constitutionally protected freedom of speech which encourages peaceful assembly should always prevail over any rights to the enjoyment of property”.

    There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

    If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain.

    They inspired a movement that made the government look bad in the eyes of the world, they challenged its pandemic management and the government was forced to back down. Now the government wants to make an example of them – whatever the cost.

    And the cost, so far, has been $21 million. That’s how much tax money Doug Ford and his government have spent to date on prosecuting Lich, Barber and others involved with the trucker protest. His targets are all working-class people of modest income. Many have lost their livelihoods because of the drawn-out legal proceedings against them.

    The only way they have been able to afford a defense and cover the cost of travel to and from the Ottawa court, is through donations from the public. This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

    This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

    Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.