It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:
In the National Post, Raymond J. de Souza discovers the aging crown jewel of VIA Rail’s passenger services, The Canadian, which VIA inherited from Canadian Pacific Railway when the country’s long-distance and intercity rail passenger services were merged into a single Crown Corporation in the 1970s:
Canadian Pacific FP7 locomotive 1410 at the head of The Canadian stopped at Dorval, Quebec on 6 September, 1965. The Canadian was Canadian Pacific’s premier passenger train before VIA Rail was formed.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.
What did I learn after four days and four nights, some 4,500 kilometres, from Vancouver to Toronto on board Via Rail’s The Canadian? Many things, as it happens.
I learned that The Canadian attracts train aficionados the world over for one of the last great rail journeys on one of the last great trains. The stainless steel rolling stock is 70 years old, the cars having been upgraded along the way, but still rolling as a living part of railway history.
Part of the cultural history Via Rail preserves is superlative meals thrice daily, served in fine style in the dining cars. Four dinners: rack of lamb, beef tenderloin, AAA prime rib, bone-in pork chop. Delicious desserts. Canadian wines and craft beers. Fish eaters and vegans also had options. The question arises ineluctably: Why is the Via Rail food between Montreal and Toronto so horrible?
Perhaps it would be too expensive; The Canadian in sleeper class certainly is. Expense was really the question in the 1870s.
“Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day?” asked Pierre Berton in his 1970 chronicle of that decision, The National Dream.
The cost of not building was greater, argued Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the price of remaining a sovereign continental country. Part of the financing was creative; the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Rupert’s Land to Canada, and Canada paid the contractors partly in free land.
Growing up in Calgary, I presumed that the greatest challenge was putting the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the mountains. And it is true that the most spectacular scenery on the route is the Fraser Canyon and the mountains of the Yellowhead Pass. (The Canadian now travels the northern route of the Canadian National (CN) Railway, not the original southern route of the CPR.)
Yet it was the Canadian Shield, thousands of lakes and muskeg atop the hardest rock on earth, that was the real obstacle. John Palliser, one of the 1860s expeditioners between Thunder Bay and the Rockies, reported back that while getting through the mountain passes could be done, the impenetrable land north of Lake Superior was the insuperable problem. And without getting around the Shield, Canada would be constrained, cooped up, with the prairies and mountains and west coast inaccessible.
VIA dome observation car on The Canadian in 2007. The best views are available from the domed seating on the upper level.
Photo by Savannah Grandfather via Wikimedia.
I’d always hoped to travel The Canadian at some point, but I was never able to afford the tickets at the same time that I had available time to travel, and there’s no hope I’ll ever be able to scrape up the money these days. According to VIA Rail’s website, the trip from Toronto to Vancouver would be between C$5860 to $9460 per person.
The Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) has been in RCN service starting in the mid-1990s and they’ve apparently done well for the navy in their intended role. Unfortunately, naval ships have a normal working life expectancy of 20-30 years, and the Kingstons are at the upper end of that range, so it’s not surprising that they will be taken out of service. It is a bit of a surprise that the announcement came on Thursday and two-thirds of the class will be paid off this fall, without a direct successor class of ships on the slipways:
The Kingston-class Maritme Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) HMCS Moncton in Baltimore harbour for Sailabration 2012.
Photo by Acroterion via Wikimedia Commons.
Starting this fall the Royal Canadian Navy will begin divesting of the Kingston-class vessels. Eight of the Kingston will be divested while four, Moncton, Yellowknife, Edmonton, and Nanaimo will remain in service for the time being.
Formal ceremonies will take place in Halifax for Shawinigan, Summerside, Goose Bay, Glace Bay and Kingston. Ceremonies in Esquimalt, B.C. will be held for Saskatoon, Whitehorse and Brandon.
The remaining four will be divested over the next three years:
- Yellowknife in 2026
- Edmonton in 2027
- Moncton and Nanaimo in 2028.
The duties of the Kingstons will be transferred to other vessels in the fleet. The AOPS have already taken over the OP CARRIBE and Patrol roles the last few years, while training duties will be moved fully to the Orca [class].
The new Remote Minehunting and Disposal Systems, being containerized can theoretically be deployed on any available vessel, and will be another role taken by the AOPS and the Kingston divest. They’ve already been doing MCM testing so that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
The remaining four Kingstons will likely continue to participate on things like OP REASSURANCE, which Yellowknife and Edmonton are currently deployed on until October as part of SNMCMG1.
In basic terms the AOPS will be taking over a majority of the Kingston‘s tasks, which they have been slowly adding to their belt already. To say there hasn’t been a slow transition would be ignorant of me.
Nor is this surprising. We knew this was coming. Its been an open discussion for a while. I expected we would hear something this year about the divestment plan, however I didn’t expect eight to be paid off right away.
That comes as a surprise to me, also dropping it out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting this to come at this time, so this is a rare moment of genuine shock for me. Of course the Kingston fleet isn’t in the greatest of shape.
Several haven’t sailed in years (I believe Whitehorse is on almost five?) and the decision to not do another refit was basically the death blow to the class as a whole.
Things get harder before they get better. It is better to divest now and have people available for the platforms that are working and in greater need than it is to try and stretch the Kingstons for a few extra years, nor was it deemed worth the ever-increasing cost to keep them in service.
The Kingstons will be replaced by the future Continental Defence Corvette. I expect as the fall comes that we will be hearing more publicly about the project. I was a bit surprised they didn’t bring it up in the Press Release given it’s not exactly a secret, although it was teased a bit.
Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.
As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:
“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.
I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.
The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.
Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.
My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.
I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.
I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.
Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.
In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.
Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.
We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.
I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:
… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.
I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.
But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.
Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.
So why? What explains this?
It’s Hollywood. It has to be.
Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.
But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.
It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.
Christianity has been in retreat across the western world for decades, with the United States being the laggard in abandoning the faith. Canada is closer to the western European rate of secularization. On Substack, Fortissax explains why it has become uncommon to find a believing Christian outside the US in response to a query on X about people turning to various neopagan faiths:
First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.
I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.
I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.
I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.
There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.
For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.
This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.
A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.
This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.
This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.
Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.
If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.
A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.
The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the majority of Christian priests and ministers have already made their peace with the inevitable extinction of their faith and far too many of them are actively working toward that end. Feminist and progressive currents move far more local Christian leaders than the message of the faith itself, hence any hopes of western Christianity reforging itself depend on a tiny minority of the clergy.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Harrison Lowman provides a detailed example of how the CBC prefers to present stories to Canadians — which signally fail to present a “360-degree view” because the CBC actively avoids including actual disagreement on any given topic:
THREAD: When you make complaints about patterns of bias or skewed reporting on the CBC, you are often met by CBC supporters who proceed to demand a list of examples.
When they don’t receive it immediately from you, they proceed to tell you you’re the biased one …. that “it’s in your head”. It feels like a bit of gaslighting to be honest.
So let me, as someone who has worked at the CBC, provide you a prime example of CBC coverage I think is glaringly biased and you can tell me what you think:
/1Earlier this summer, the CBC published this radio/TV story. The webpage version is headlined “Supervised drug site at Kingston prison has only had one visitor despite being open since 2023”
The story details a trial project where prisoners at a Kingston-area prison have been given the ability to inject, snort, or swallow the drugs they’ve smuggled into their cells under the supervision of a nurse.
The news hook is that only ONE inmate has visited the site since its inception more than a YEAR ago.
https://cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6802851
/2The CBC journalist then proceeds to interview three people: 1. someone running the program, 2. a retired academic expert sympathetic to the program wanting it expanded, and 3. a former inmate who was not in jail when the program started. All sources appear generally in approval of the pilot program.
In the story:
– At no time does the journalist speak to someone who sees this pilot program as the wrong approach. Keep in mind a recent Abacus poll shows a mere 19% of Canadians support expanding safe injection sites. (You’re literally ignoring the vast majority of the population here.)– At no time does the journalist reveal the cost of said program: a whopping $517,000 taxpayer dollars so that a SINGLE inmate could get high.
– Nor do they speak to someone who says (as many in the public would rightly ask) if given the cost and almost non-existent use, whether it’s worth continuing the program, or whether there’s a better way to spend this money within the corrections system- rehabilitation etc.
/3
Instead the CBC journalist exclusively focusses on the “barriers” to using the jail drug program, implying this all that can change- ie. look at making it easier for the inmates to use drugs.
The coverage, highlighting barriers:
– implies that they should operate at night, because it’s current hours “don’t line up with when inmates want to get high.”;
-In the written version of the article: source: “They’d prefer to take drugs during their free time after supper.”– That prisoners need to be allowed to smoke crystal meth as part of the program.
– That prisons need to make it so using the program won’t mean users getting unwanted attention from fellow inmates, officers…etc.
/4Last week, CBC News’ general manager and editor in chief Brodie Fenlon said:
“The job of a CBC News journalist is to report facts, to proportionately surface the variety of viewpoints that exist about those facts, to provide context and counter narratives where they exist, and to ensure credible analysis is in the mix. The goal is to give you a 360-degree view of a story so you can draw your own conclusions.”
“… We don’t shy away from contrarian views or perspectives that challenge orthodoxy.” “The best journalism often involves facts and viewpoints that challenge our own worldview.”
In what world is this a 360 degree view of this story? In what world is this a story that challenges orthodoxy?
Instead, this coverage appears to tell viewers the CBC approves of safe injection sites … for criminals, and doesn’t prioritize taxpayer $ waste in its coverage.
With this story, CBC is just clearly not meeting their own journalistic standards, and are failing to adequately inform the public.
There’s your example. Tell me I’m wrong.
The CBC must do better.
I plan to launch a complaint with the CBC ombudsman. It won’t be my first.
https://cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/cbc-news-platforming-1.7580219
Among the responses was this one from Andrew Kirsch:
I wrote the 1st ever memoir about being a Canadian spy. It was a National bestseller but largely positive about the org. I desperately tried to get on CBC (and TVO) to promote it. They weren’t interested. A while later my ex-colleague wrote a memoir about her career with a focus on institutional racism at CSIS. She was interviewed and her book was featured all over the website. I don’t want to take anything away from the other book. I just felt like mine was also a Canadian story worth telling.
To emphasize, these are just strong rumours and have not been formally announced or confirmed by the Department of National Defence or the Canadian Armed Forces:
Let’s start with the major aspect of today’s rumours, restructuring. This has been a hot topic for the last few months and one I have been very hesitant to put in here due to the conflicting and volatile information.
However with plans approved in the last few weeks, as well as going though about four different people for verification, I think I’m finally in a position where I can confidently put this out there.
The new army will be centered around three [two?] divisions, broken down between the regular, reserve, and a support division. The working designation for these two new Divisions are the 6th and 7th.
The 6th Division will be comprised of:
- 1 CMBG
- 2 CMBG
- 5 CMBG
- 1x Light Infantry Regiment
- 1x Fires Brigade
- 1x Protection Brigade
- 1x Sustainment Brigade
The 7th Division will be the reserves and rangers and has been, at least in some documentation, been referred to as the “Continental Division”. I sadly don’t have much on the Seventh.
This is the info that I have as of now. I am still working on gathering more details but this is the basic structure of how the future army will look. Obviously some of you were expecting more, and hoped to see something more radical done.
Some of you will be very happy with this and how straightforward it is. It is a plan that makes sense and is within realistic expectations. As always, we take these as speculation and not as fact. Plans can change but I am fairly confident that this is the active plan.
For Project 44, Nathan Kehler describes the role of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division as the western-most part of Montgomery’s 8th Army landings on the southern tip of Sicily:
In the days leading up to Operation Husky, the Canadian contingent suffered two major losses – one in leadership and one in logistics. Though the landings would ultimately succeed, these events cast a shadow over the operation before a single boot touched Sicilian soil.
The Death of General Salmon
On July 2, 1943, Major-General G.G. Salmon, commander-designate of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division for the Sicily campaign, was tragically killed when his Hudson aircraft crashed near Barnstaple, Devonshire, shortly after takeoff from Hendon Airfield. Also on board were several senior officers, including Rear-Admiral P.J. Mack, the Canadian naval force commander, and Lt.-Col. C.J. Finlay, the newly appointed senior logistics officer for the division. All were killed.
Major General Guy Simonds, commanding 1CID.
General Salmon had been hand-picked to lead Canada’s first major amphibious campaign. His death, just days before the invasion, shook the command structure. With no time to replace him formally, Major-General Guy Simonds was appointed in his place. Simonds was known for his drive, discipline, and tactical focus. The loss of Salmon meant an abrupt shift in leadership style and planning assumptions on the eve of battle.
Sinking of Canadian Troop Ships
Only days later, Canadian forces suffered another blow. Between 4–5 July, as convoys moved across the Mediterranean from North Africa toward Sicily, Axis submarines attacked Allied shipping near the Algerian coast. Three ships were torpedoed: the St. Essylt, City of Venice, and Devis.
While the first two sinkings resulted in relatively few casualties, the loss of the Devis was severe. Carrying 261 Canadian troops, the ship was hit and engulfed in fire. Fifty-two Canadians were killed, with many trapped in the holds below deck. In total, the convoy lost over 500 vehicles and 40 guns, along with critical headquarters and signals equipment. Divisional Headquarters suffered particularly heavy equipment losses, forcing last-minute improvisation in communications and command coordination.
Despite these losses, the Canadian Division adapted quickly, and the operation went forward as planned. These early setbacks, however, underscore the high cost and uncertainty of even reaching the battlefield in the Second World War.
Canadian Beaches
On 10 July 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division landed in southeastern Sicily as part of Operation Husky – the Allied invasion of Europe’s “soft underbelly.” The division’s assault was split across two main beaches: “Roger” Beach to the east and “Sugar” Beach to the west of the village of Le Grotticelle. These beaches formed the right flank of the British Eighth Army’s landings.
General Simonds’ plan for the Canadians was a two-brigade front:
- The 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade would land on Roger Beach and push inland to destroy a coastal battery near Maucini, seize the Pachino airfield, and establish contact with nearby British forces around Pachino town.
- The 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade would land on Sugar Beach, clear beach defences, support the adjacent British Special Service Brigade landing on the far left, and advance north past the Pantano Longarini marshes.
- The Special Service Brigade (British Commandos) would land west of Punta Castellazzo, eliminate enemy resistance in their zone, and cover the Canadians’ western flank from elevated ground north of the marshes.
The landings were scheduled for 2:45 a.m., with Commandos hitting the shore ten minutes earlier. Objectives were clear: knock out coastal defences, secure strategic positions, and quickly link up with Allied forces to expand the beachhead.
The Landings
Despite rough seas from a storm the day before, the landings went ahead as planned in the early hours of 10 July 1943. Just after 1:00 a.m., British Commandos began landing west of the Canadian sector, encountering only light resistance. By 1:34 a.m., the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade – the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry – were heading for Sugar Beach under covering fire from naval guns, including the 15-inch guns of HMS Roberts.
Navigation errors caused the Seaforth Highlanders to land to the right of the Patricias, reversing their intended order. But the heavy surf helped carry landing craft over a false beach, and both units came ashore with minimal opposition. They quickly cleared light beach obstacles and scattered Italian machine-gun posts. By 3:00 a.m., both battalions had successfully landed and were advancing inland toward their objectives.
On Roger Beach, however, the 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade faced delays. Their assault relied on DUKWs and landing craft (LCTs) arriving from Malta. When these were delayed, Brigadier Howard Graham initiated a backup plan, switching to Landing Craft Assault (LCAs). Confusion and the heavy swell caused further delay, with some units landing as late as 5:30 a.m. – nearly three hours behind schedule.
Despite the setbacks, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and the Royal Canadian Regiment landed successfully. The Hastings had one reserve company land 5,000 yards off target in the Commando sector but regrouped without major issue. Both units met minimal resistance. The RCR encountered light shelling from the Maucini battery, but naval gunfire quickly silenced it.
By 6:45 a.m., all three lead brigades had secured their assigned beachheads, with support units and armour – including Shermans from the Three Rivers Regiment – beginning to land. The 48th Highlanders of Canada and The Edmonton Regiment followed their respective brigades ashore, some accompanied by pipe bands.
Opposition during the landings was light overall. Many Italian defenders withdrew as the naval bombardment and confusion of the assault overwhelmed them. However, isolated machine-gun fire and limited artillery shelling still resulted in several Canadian casualties, primarily on Roger Beach.
The pre-invasion loss of ships to enemy submarine or air attack was taken fully into account during the weeks before the convoys set out. But as with all military planning, the enemy gets a vote too.
Michael Geist discusses the rush of the Canadian and other governments in the west to try to impose one-size-fits-all age verification schemes on the internet:
The Day I Knew I Was Old 😉 by artistmac CC BY-SA 2.0
When the intersection of law and technology presents seemingly intractable new challenges, policy makers often bet on technology itself to solve the problem. Whether countering copyright infringement with digital locks, limiting access to unregulated services with website blocking, or deploying artificial intelligence to facilitate content moderation, there is a recurring hope the answer to the policy dilemma lies in better technology. While technology frequently does play a role, experience suggests that the reality is far more complicated as new technologies also create new risks and bring unforeseen consequences. So too with the emphasis on age verification technologies as a magical solution to limiting under-age access to adult content online. These technologies offer some promise, but the significant privacy and accuracy risks that could inhibit freedom of expression are too great to ignore.
The Hub runs a debate today on the mandated use of age verification technologies. I argue against it in a slightly shorter version of this post. Daniel Zekveld of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada makes the case for it in this post.
The Canadian debate over age verification technologies – which has now expanded to include both age verification and age estimation systems – requires an assessment of both the proposed legislative frameworks and the technologies themselves. The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House of Commons. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. Once Parliament resumed, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back as Bill S-209.
The bill would create an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations can rely on three potential defences:
- The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
- The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
- The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).
Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.
Following its established pattern, the Canadian government will seek any possible path other than economic reality, especially when it comes to things like mandating that all vehicles sold in Canada must be EVs by 2035:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK
It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.
Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was a big fan of the attention-getting promise. Especially if it was a pledge timed well into the future when he was unlikely to still be around to be held responsible. Carbon reductions too ambitious to be realistic. Budget targets too unlikely to be believed. Statist planning projects that tended increasingly to the surreal.
Mark Carney is left with the detritus and the problem of what to do about it. As prime minister he’s already acted on a few of the problematic leftovers, ditching the carbon tax even though he’d previously supported it as a good idea; scrapping an increased tax on capital gains although the Treasury could certainly use the money; “caving,” as the Trump administration so tastefully put it, on a digital services tax that was a bad idea to begin with but pushed through by the Trudeau government anyway.
There’s an argument to be made, and not a bad one, that each retreat was the right move for the moment. And if there are mistakes that need abandoning, the early days of a new government is proverbially the best time to do it.
But righting wrongs has confronted Carney with a new predicament, in that there are so many Trudeau-era wrongs that need righting. Washington was still in the midst of its victory dance over its digital tax triumph when Canada’s auto industry came along to plead for similar treatment from Ottawa, insisting automakers couldn’t possibly meet previously-set electric vehicle targets and urging the new Liberal government to backtrack post haste.
Carney hosted the session with Canada’s chief executives for Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. Brian Kingston, chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, was blunt in identifying the targets set for electric vehicle (EV) production as the main topic.
“The EV mandate itself is not sustainable. The targets that have been established cannot be met,” he said on arriving for the meeting. Afterwards he told Politico‘s online news site, “At a time when the industry is under immense pressure, the damaging and redundant ZEV mandate must be urgently removed”.
In the National Post, Chris Selley points out that it was literally just the media who got their panties twisted up over flying the Canadian flag during and after the Freedom Convoy protests in 2022:
One of the stupidest arguments to emerge during Canada’s pandemic experience was the idea that by flying the Canadian flag, the Freedom Convoy types had ruined the Canadian flag for everyone else. And that Canadians, as a result, were hesitant to display the flag lest they be thought of as anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers or outright Nazis.
It’s not true, and the idea was completely absurd. If you’re driving through, say, Vermont and see the stars and stripes flying on someone’s front lawn, do you assume they supported the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol? When you see the St. George’s Cross waved at an English soccer game, do you assume the flag-waver supports the English Defence League? When you see the French tricolour do you instantly think of Marine Le Pen and the far-right Front National?
You don’t, because that would be stupid. People advancing causes that they feel to be of national importance tend to deploy national flags. Rarely are those causes universally supported. Few causes are.
At the time I ascribed the narrative mostly to COVID-induced hysteria. The Globe and Mail‘s and Toronto Star‘s comment pages always reflect a somewhat, shall we say, limited perspective on Canadian society. But the pandemic trapped opinion writers behind their keyboards and in their online echo chambers more than ever before. It was febrile. People across the political spectrum went just a bit nuts, and I don’t exclude myself.
But with the pandemic behind us, with the keyboard class mostly resigned-to-happy with how it went (better than America is all that really counts, right?) I was a bit surprised to see this narrative exhumed, dressed up in a Hawaiian shirt and dragged around town for Canada Day in triumph. The narrative: We have our flag back!
“The dissidents stole our flag,” Gary Mason wrote in the Globe. “They flew our flag from their trucks. They hung it over their encampments. By the end, many Canadians associated the red-and-white Maple Leaf with the so-called Freedom Convoy.
The Canadian Rangers, one of the least-known parts of the Canadian Armed Forces, are a mainly Inuit reserve force operating in the Canadian north. They’d been equipped with WW2-era Lee Enfield rifles since the 1940s and the weapons were getting too old to perform the task so the CAF’s procurement folks settled on a Finnish rifle manufactured under license by Colt Canada. The Rangers, operating primarily as small patrols or as individuals, didn’t need the high firepower of a modern infantry rifle and the harsh climate they work in meant that a bolt-action rifle was desired. Bolt-action rifles are not new technology, so you’d think the CAF procurement would have been pretty straightforward, but no, they managed to miss something critical in the specifications they issued for the contract. And because the rifles met the published specifications, it’s on the CAF rather than the manufacturer to make sure that the weapons are safe to operate by the Canadian Rangers:
A Canadian Ranger handles the military’s new C-19 rifle. Shortly after the rifles were sent to Ranger units, red dye from the stocks started appearing on the hands of the soldiers when the weapons were exposed to wet conditions. (Credit: Canadian Armed Forces)
Canadian Rangers who use their new rifles in the rain are finding their hands covered in red dye because the stocks on the weapons can’t handle moisture, according to newly released military records.
The problem was discovered in May 2018 as the new C-19 rifles were initially being distributed to Canadian Ranger units as part of a $32.8-million contract with Colt Canada. The .308 C-19, which is equipped with a red stock, replaced the Lee Enfield .303 rifle that had been used by Canadian Rangers since 1947.
Under the contract, the new rifles were required to withstand extremely cold temperatures in the Arctic as well as moderate-to-high humidity in the coastal and forested regions of the country.
“Obviously from a health and safety perspective having dye released onto the skin is not a good situation,” Arthur Hall, who is with the Department of National Defence’s small arms program, noted in a May 9, 2018 email regarding the C-19.
Further complaints continued to come in from Ranger units who also found the stocks were cracking.
“The issue is that when exposed to moisture the red dye in the stock will run, and will discolour the hands of the user,” Luke Foster of the Directorate of Soldier Systems Program Management, pointed out in a July 3, 2018 email. “This is also an indication that the stocks are not properly protected from the elements.”
One report from an officer assigned to the Rangers noted he took his new rifle outside in the rain for only five minutes before returning indoors. Once back inside he noticed the weapon was dripping red dye. “I held the weapon for approximately 5-10 mins and it stated to stain my hand,” Captain T.M. Collier wrote in a May 9, 2018 email.
The documents, acquired by the Ottawa Citizen, were released under the Access to Information Act.
Department of National Defence officials, however, say it will be up to taxpayers to cover the costs of replacing the stocks on the 6,800 new rifles. That cost is estimated to be up to $10 million.
Canada has never fought a direct war against the United States. However, before confederation (1867) when Canada became a self-governing dominion, the territories that would later form that dominion, which had been under the control of the British, engaged in a small number of military conflicts with the United States (or as they were known previously, the Thirteen American Colonies). The total is four, if we only count significant engagements which involved organized forces. Economic wars, or trade disputes, are another story. We’ll get there.
The Aroostook War (1838–1839) drew no blood. The conflict concerned the Maine-New Brunswick border and was resolved amicably by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. A quarter of a century later the Fenian Raids (1866–1871) saw the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood make multiple non-state sanctioned attacks in British North America in an effort to sway Britain to withdraw forces from Ireland.
The other far more consequential military struggles between the two North American friends and neighbours occurred first in the late eighteenth century, and second in the early nineteenth century. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), which saw limited involvement of areas north of the 49th parallel, British North America thwarted a particularly serious invasion by the Americans in 1775 known as The Battle of Quebec.
It was fought during a snowstorm on December 31, 1775 (one of few battles fought in such miserable conditions during the revolutionary war). The American intention was to conscript the British colony, which today forms the province of Quebec (and also included parts of Ontario) into their struggle against the British. The Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies had earlier that year begun rebelling against British taxation and governance. They surmised that the French-speaking Quebec settlers, disaffected with the imposition of British rule as it was laid out in the 1763 Treaty of Paris (which ended the Seven Years War), would join the American cause. A significant miscalculation, to say the least.
The battle was fought on two fronts against a British garrison of 1800 soldiers led by British commander, Governor Guy Carleton. The combined total of American troops was only 1200. The first front was commanded by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, who led his troops in an attack of the Lower Town from the south. The second assault occurred from the north and was led by Colonel Benedict Arnold (who would later become an infamous American traitor).
Montgomery and several officers were killed instantly on their initial advance. This sparked a retreat amongst his remaining soldiers. Arnold had slightly more luck. His army penetrated northern defences but were stymied in the narrow streets of Quebec. During fighting Arnold was wounded, after which he handed the command to Daniel Morgan. After hours of fighting, Morgan and his men were forced to surrender. The Americans lost the battle decisively ensuring Quebec would remain a loyalist stronghold.
The second of the two significant conflicts involving British North America and the Thirteen American Colonies was the infamous War of 1812 – a more well-known period of antagonism between proto-Canada and her American neighbours.
Here is a topline summary with some extra history concerning the U.S.-Canada border (the world’s longest undefended border), from Terry Glavin:
The War of 1812 — which the Americans still pretend they won — was officially concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Then came the Rush-Bagot Pact of 1817 and the Convention of 1818, which set the border at the 49th parallel.1
The War of 1812 took place during Britain’s struggle against Napoleonic France. The two most famous Canadian battles from this tragic conflict were the Battle of Queenston Heights and the burning of York (now Toronto) – British troops would even the score of the latter by burning Washington D.C.
The war was unpopular. Like today, there were too many bonds between the Americans and proto-Canadians. But also like today, with Canada and the United States once again bickering over trade and various political interests, the disagreements were accompanied by a reluctance to engage in hostilities.
From Pierre Burton’s War of 1812:
At the outset, it was a gentleman’s war. Officers on opposing sides met for parlays under flags of truce, offered hospitality, exchanged cordialities, murmured the hopes that hostilities would quickly end.2
No matter what time period we are examining, we can never forget that Britons, Canadians and Americans are all first cousins. Yes we disagree from time to time, sometimes we even fight. But always over some unfortunate political dispute, and never for each other’s annihilation.
In 1812, for a variety of reasons, the Americans, especially a minority of hawkish elites in Washington, felt they had no other choice but to invade the north. Some of them felt it would be easy. An aggravating factor concerned Britain’s support of Indian tribes in the north west, at a time when the Americans were aggressively expanding into that region. But also, during their imperial contest with France, the British were impressing sailors in the American navy (forcing them to join British forces), because they considered them traitors of the British crown. Further, they blocked key trade ports under Napoleon’s control, disrupting trade between America and France.
Isn’t it curious how trade so often appears as the rift in Canadian-American relations? Further examples include: the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 which allowed for free trade of natural resources between the American and British colonies. However, the Americans abrogated that treaty in 1866 partly out of frustration at perceived British support of the confederacy after the Civil War. A post-confederation trade war with the Americans ensued after Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald adopted the National Policy in 1879, which imposed high tariffs to protect Canadian industry. Triggering the Americans to respond with tariffs of their own.
James Pew, “Canadians and our ties to Americans”, Woke Watch Canada, 2025-03-30.
1. Because of the day that’s in it – by Terry Glavin
2. Pierre Berton’s War of 1812.
In Quillette, Tristin Hopper provides some excerpts from his book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, published earlier this year:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.
This is the story of how, in 2019, Canada became the first (and, to this day, only) country to declare itself guilty of committing an ongoing genocide against its own citizens.
To outsiders, who (correctly) view Canada as a humane democracy, the tale will seem bizarre. But to Canadians, there was a certain twisted political logic to it — at the time, at least.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, back when my country was still ruled by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s progressive elites bought into then-ascendant social-justice manias with a born-again fervour that was arguably unmatched in any other nation. This was a time, readers will recall, when college students were busily confessing their internalised white supremacy and racist thought crimes to one another on social media. Seeking to ingratiate his Liberal Party with this young demographic, Trudeau extrapolated their cultish movement on a national scale.
His rhetorical style became increasingly manic, as one social-justice slogan led to another; with each being rapturously liked and retweeted on social media. In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide.
In this regard, Trudeau’s first truly epic act of national self-incrimination took place at a 2019 women’s conference in Vancouver. The PM had just been handed the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a probe he’d authorised as a means to investigate the high rates of homicide committed against Canada’s female Indigenous population.
As it turned out, however, the MMIWG report authors’ most prominent demand had nothing to do with the technical details of criminal investigation. Instead, they were focused on language: They wanted homicides targeting Indigenous women and girls to be described as an ongoing “race-based genocide” perpetrated by Canadian society at large.
Murder wasn’t the government’s only instrument of genocide, the authors claimed. Higher rates of Indigenous heart disease and suicide attempts were also described as foreseeable results of Canadian policies that are “explicitly genocidal”.
Canadians tend to feel guilty about the genuinely shameful way their country treated Indigenous peoples at many historical junctures (more on this below). Because of this high baseline guilt level, it is often seen as taboo (especially among journalists) to push back against even the most obviously counterfactual claims made on behalf of Indigenous peoples. And the MMIWG report was a case in point: the inquiry’s insistence that Canada was in the midst of an active genocide was reported uncritically by most media outlets.
Some public figures did speak out against this hyperbolic use of language — such as Roméo Dallaire, the retired general who’d been in Rwanda during that country’s (actual) genocide in 1994. Yet Canada’s most important public figure — Trudeau himself — accepted the inquiry’s conclusions without reservation; even if this meant that he was now signalling his status as leader of a nation that, day in, day out, under his own watch, was committing a genocide against its own population.
“Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls experienced amounts to genocide,” he told his Vancouver audience. Trudeau then paused for nine seconds to accommodate his desired reaction — which consisted of cheers and applause.
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