Royal Canadian Navy / Marine Royale Canadienne
Published 5 Jun 2025🇨🇦 Honouring 80 Years of Courage at Sea ⚓
To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Battle of the Atlantic, the Hamilton Naval Association is proud to reintroduce a long-lost Canadian treasure: “All the Little Ships”.
Originally aired in 1964 on CBC’s Telescope, this rare film features recently retired Admiral Harry DeWolf aboard HMCS Haida as he tells tales not only of HMCS Haida but of “All the Little Ships” of the wartime RCN. Never-before-seen footage shot by Bill Pugsley, a wartime officer who resigned his commission so he could serve two years on the lower deck, as a gunner, and document it.
🎥 A story of sacrifice, memory, and Canada’s naval legacy — rediscovered. A special thank you LCdr Doug Martin (Ret’d, former CO of HMCS Star).
The opinions expressed in this video are those of the original creators and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Royal Canadian Navy. Any references to outside organizations, products, or services do not constitute endorsement or affiliation.
#WeTheNavy #CanadaRemembers #HelpLeadFight
June 6, 2025
“All the Little Ships” (1964 – CBC Telescope)
Juno Beach Landings | D-Day Normandy June 6, 1944
World War II – Epic Battles
Published 30 Jun 2021Juno Beach was assigned to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade. It was one of the five invasion beaches of Normandy on D-Day and the second deadliest beach after Omaha.
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June 5, 2025
The Liberals believe this time they’ll keep kids away from internet porn
Sometimes it’s hard to get a grip on what Liberals actually believe, as on the one hand they’re actively resisting pulling literal pornography out of school libraries (because it’s “LGBT friendly”) and on the other hand, they’re all gung-ho for yet another attempt to pass legislation that will try to prevent kids from seeing porn on the internet:
How does a website automatically, “responsibly” prove someone’s age down the end of an internet connection, without actually verifying their ID? Answer: It doesn’t. Obviously
There is another legislative effort afoot to keep Canadian children away from pornography. It’s well-intentioned effort, I suppose, but such efforts didn’t work very well when pornography was printed on glossy paper and distributed on VHS tapes and pay-per-view, so it seems particularly improbable in the internet age.
Bill S-209 is Independent (Liberal-appointed) Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s second attempt at a private member’s bill on the topic. It is predicated on the notion that it’s easier to verify age automatically than it used to be: “Online age-verification and age-estimation technology is increasingly sophisticated and can now effectively ascertain the age of users without breaching their privacy rights”, the bill’s preamble avers.
It is absolute rubbish, to the extent that even the Liberals under former prime minister Justin Trudeau seemed to realize it the first time it was tried. We can only hope Mark Carney’s Liberals are of similar mind. Early signs are not positive. The reappointment of Steven Guilbeault as heritage minister (now called Canadian identity and culture minister, for some reason) doesn’t bode well. He seems genuinely to dislike the online world on principle.
Or, maybe it does bode well. Guilbeault did a singularly terrible job trying to sell the Liberals’ anti-internet agenda in English Canada. I’m not sure he could give away ice cream in a Calgary heatwave. So if you think laws targeting “online harms” are doomed to fail at best — and could lead to dystopian outcomes — then maybe Guilbeault is exactly the fellow you want in charge.
When it came to online porn, the Trudeau Liberals seemed to have some sense of the Sisyphean proposition before them. Miville-Dechêne’s first attempt at a bill received support from MPs of all parties in the House of Commons last year, but the Liberal leadership cited privacy concerns in refusing to get behind it.
In large part that might just have been because Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre supported the idea and, to Liberals, anything Poilievre supports must obviously be a serious threat to humanity’s survival. But still, Trudeau was pretty unequivocal in rejecting the idea.
June 4, 2025
“Asshole Britain”
In The Line, Greg Quinn indulges in a bit of struggle sessioning about his earlier disagreements with the editors of The Line about Britain and Canada (protip: don’t search for images to go along with that particular headline, especially if you have “safe search” filters turned off):
Yeah, let’s go with an inoffensive photo of His Royal Majesty and his Canadian First Minister chatting in the Senate chamber, rather than anything remotely to do with the headline of this post.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
On February 12th of this year, I wrote in The Line about how my country, the United Kingdom, had “ghosted” Canada by refusing to come out strongly in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s egregious attacks on the country and his calls for it to become the 51st state. In writing that piece, I didn’t beat around the bush — I called the U.K.’s actions what they were at the time: cowardice and sycophancy.
Since February, there have been a few (many?!) developments in Canada’s — and the world’s — relationship with President Trump.
Not least among these are Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson’s depiction (or technically, implication) of the U.K. as “Asshole Britain”. As other regular Line readers will know, “Asshole Canada” or “Maximum Canada” is an idea the editors floated here some months ago, where they asserted that Canada should abandon its typical desire to be seen as a global do-gooder and simply assert its national interests, vigorously and unapologetically, and if other countries, even allies, object, well, to hell with them. Editor Gurney, in a recent podcast, cited the just-concluded visit of His Majesty the King to Canada to deliver the Throne Speech — the first time a monarch has done so since 1977 — as an example of that. Prime Minister Mark Carney issued the invite to the King despite obvious discomfort with the idea among senior officials in my government.
Carney didn’t care. The King is the sovereign of Canada, too, and Carney didn’t let British discomfort deter him.
I have to say that HM the King’s speech was a blinder and (in its own royal diplomatic way) left no doubt as to where His Majesty’s sympathies lie and how he supports Canada’s sovereignty and independence. Whether you are a royalist or a republican, the fact that HM the King made the trip and read the speech should be welcomed. And I entirely agree with the editors here — Canadians should and must ignore the comments from the U.K. Who cares? HM the King was acting in his capacity as Canada‘s monarch — the views of anyone in the U.K. (government or otherwise) are irrelevant.
I wish I could condemn Jen and Matt for their (again, implied) characterization of the U.K. — Britain has needed no urging to unapologetically assert its own interests in this revived era of Trump. But I can’t. They are absolutely correct. And every day that passes, I’m sorry to say that the U.K. becomes more and more “Asshole Britain” when it comes to its relationship with Canada and the U.S.
The reasons remain much the same as I identified before: cowardice and sycophancy. To that, I’d now like to add venality. We think we have a special relationship with the U.S., as demonstrated by our recent trade agreement — except the impact of that agreement is open to some question. We seem to be afraid of saying anything that might upset President Trump, in case he reacts. Although we fail to understand that upsetting the President does not follow a rational process. He could (and does) get upset and react extremely easily at the simplest and most unexpected of things.
The President continues to make unacceptable claims against Canada, including reiterating his call for it to become the 51st state shortly after the King’s visit concluded. His latest iteration of this includes claims that Canada could save U.S.$61 billion it “should” be charged for the so-called Golden Dome (what is it with adjectives and this President?) if it joins the U.S. This, of course, fails to grasp the simple strategic fact that if you want a defence shield like this over North America, then you’re going to have to use sensors and other infrastructure on Canadian soil. Is he expecting to be provided that land for free?
By continuing to refuse to stand up to President Trump and clearly express our support for Canada, we are submitting to his attempts to divide and rule those of us who remain like-minded. At its worst, we are now venal — selling out to the president.
Instead, we should be standing true to our roots — as defenders of the free market and democracy. We should be leading the way, and we should be building an alliance of those who continue to share our values.
That is what we should be doing. That we aren’t is nothing short of a disgrace.
Update: Fixed broken link to Greg Quinn’s article. Doh!
Arch-statist Mark Carney believes that Canadians “must earn their freedom everyday”
At The Intrepid Viking, Roxanne Halverson examines what Prime Minister Mark Carney means when he tosses off comments like “Freedom is something you earn everyday”:
CBC’s David Cochrane interviewing Prime Minister Mark Carney in Ottawa.
It is surprising and disconcerting that so few pundits, commentators or even members of the Conservative Party, and for that matter are, not taking issue with a recent statement from our new Prime Minister in which he asserted, when talking about Canadians, that, “Freedom is something you earn everyday“.
Has anyone asked Mark Carney, this globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) acolyte, who is now Canada’s Prime Minister, what he meant when he made that statement? He made it during an interview with David Cochrane on CBC’s Power and Politics following on King Charles delivering the throne speech. He made the statement while talking about the great “crisis” Canada is and how his government has to get moving on major projects and our economy and solving the housing calamity. Of course he forget to mention that these problems are due to the policies of the previous Liberal government, for whom he was the financial advisor. He also does not explain that why, in the middle of such a crisis, his government has decided to take the summer off and not release of budget of any type, any time soon, but that’s another story.
Now, back to his claim that Canadians “must earn their freedom everyday”. Of course, Cochrane, being one of Carney’s main fanboys at CBC, didn’t probe any deeper to ask him what he meant by that statement. But it is a strange statement coming from the Prime Minister of a country where its constitution essentially says that individual freedom is a God given right. And given that Carney, with his recent visit to Rome to see the new pope, has made it clear that he is a devout practising Catholic, his belief in the Almighty is obviously not an issue. So again, what did he mean by that remark? Strange again, because just six weeks ago, before he was the Prime Minister, Carney posted the following statement on X.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the embodiment of our principles and our aspirations as Canadians. It must be protected — not wielded for political gain. Forty-three years on, the Charter remains strong — and it’s on all of us to defend it.
This apparently was in response to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s assertion that he would use the notwithstanding clause to override a judicial ruling against imposing consecutive life sentences on murderers, rather than concurrent sentences.
So given that, it would seem that Mr. Carney believes our rights regarding freedom are enshrined in the Charter. Carney, in his interview with Cochrane also maintained that Canada was still “the true north strong and free”. So then which is it when it comes to freedom from his perspective? Is it enshrined in the Charter, are we the true north “strong and free”, or must freedom be earned, and in what way?
June 3, 2025
Canadian immigration numbers go even higher in 2025
Although the new Liberal government in Ottawa made some slight noises about bringing immigration numbers back down to something closer to sustainable … there’s less than zero evidence that they actually meant it:
Despite all promises to the contrary, all the sudden and supposed interest in nation-building efforts that stretch from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to the Bay of Fundy, all the “Buy Canadian” horseshit lapped up by a portion of the electorate that votes like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, Canada’s once-in-a-generation betrayal of its labour market — and its very present and future — continued at pace to begin 2025.
The numbers are pants-shitting-ly grim.
The latest federal immigration data shows that Canada welcomed more than 817,000 newcomers in the first four months of 2025 when tallying up permanent and non-permanent streams.
Between January and April 2025, 132,100 people were granted permanent residency, while 194,000 study permits and 491,400 work permits (including extensions) were finalized by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. (Juno News)
At a time when 89% of Canadians under 34 have been beaten into believing that “owning a home is only for the rich” (Ipsos poll), along comes the worst summer job market in two decades to match the continued Liberal failure to course-correct on the mass-immigration, replacement-caste grift.
The two are of course inextricably linked.
With even the Bank of Canada speaking uncomfortable truths, that the foreign “student” surge and “temporary” foreign worker bacchanal lead to wage suppression and job displacement for Canadian workers, for 2025’s numbers to continue to blow through any semblance of well-meaning, sustainable targets, is as “bonkers” as it is seditious towards any citizen with an investment in Canada’s future.
The grift, the very lie, that “shortages” drive corporate Canada’s need for a basement-apartment economy has been disproved time and time again.
“All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada,” said Mikal Skuterud, labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo.
May 31, 2025
Depending on how you read the tea leaves, are all the signed treaties now to be ignored?
In The Free Press Rupa Subramanya discusses King Charles’s land acknowledgement at the start of the Throne Speech earlier this week:
Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
Canadians have a fondness for land acknowledgments, [NR: while some of us think they’re merely virtue signalling on steriods which will end up causing more mischief in the long run] which have now become common at police press conferences, on Air Canada flights, at hockey games, and even at a Taylor Swift concert.
But nothing has caused more commotion than the spectacle of King Charles III opening the 45th legislative session of Parliament on May 27 with a land acknowledgment, when he declared from his throne: “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. This land acknowledgment is a recognition of shared history as a nation.”
People will point out that King Charles’s speech was written by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s government (true) and that as the monarch he was being respectful to Canadian traditions (fine). But there is something deeply funny about the literal King of England talking about the lands his predecessors brutally conquered centuries ago like they’re still up grabs.
Kicking off Parliament with a speech is a time-honored tradition, but it’s rare for the monarch to deliver it in person, and is normally delivered by the governor general, Canada’s official stand-in for the king. The reason the king was there was to push back against the idea that Canada is for sale.
“There is no better way to assert Canada’s sovereignty than by inviting the sovereign,” said Philippe Lagassé, a constitutional expert at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. “Carney invited the king as part of his renewed emphasis on Canadian nationalism rooted in our institutions and history.” (Unlike the U.S., which broke from Britain in 1776, Canada remained a colony until 1867, when it became a constitutional monarchy with a British-style parliamentary system and the UK monarch as head of state.)
Lagassé added that Carney’s invite to Charles was also likely done to “leverage President Trump’s affection for the king in Canada’s favor.”
Trump may love the monarchy, but Canadians have traditionally been indifferent towards it. But that’s changing, thanks to Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric.
According to a recent poll, 66 percent of Canadians now believe the monarchy helps set the country apart from the United States, up from 54 percent in April 2023. In 2023, 67 percent thought the royal family should have no formal role in Canadian society; today, that number has dropped to 56 percent.
In his speech, King Charles didn’t mention Trump by name, but the subtext was hard to miss: “Canada faces another critical moment. Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination, and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the government is determined to protect.”
“U.S. libertarians [are] the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has”
In the National Post, Colby Cosh sings the praises of American libertarians for their work in trying to dismantle some of Donald Trump’s dubiously Constitutional extensions of presidential power:
The James L. Watson Court of International Trade Building at 1 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
Photo by Americasroof via Wikimedia Commons.
The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a decision Wednesday that annuls various salvos of surprise economic tariffs, including ones on Canada, that have been enacted by President Donald Trump since his inauguration in January. I won’t lie to you: I had the same initial reaction to this consequential news that you probably did, which was “Hooray!” and then “Huh, there’s a U.S. Court of International Trade?”
This court is surely unfamiliar even to most Americans, no doubt because much of its work involves settling issues like “Do hockey pants count as ‘garments’ or ‘sports equipment’ under customs law?” Nevertheless, the CIT does have exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving U.S. trade law. It’s just that no president has ever before rewritten the tariff schedule of the republic in the half-mad fashion of a child taking crayons to a fresh-painted wall.
The American Constitution, from day one, has unambiguously assigned the right to set international tariffs to Congress. Congress is allowed to delegate its powers to the president and his agents for limited or temporary purposes, but it can’t abandon those powers to him altogether. Defining this legal frontier is what the CIT was asked to do, and their demarcation of it will now swim upward through higher appellate courts (its decision has been put on hold in the meantime).
The lawsuit was actually two parallel suits raising overlapping objections to the tariffs. One was brought forward by 12 U.S. states, and the other was filed by a group of tariff-exposed American businesses, including manufacturers of bikes, electronics kits and fishing equipment. The latter set of plaintiffs was roped together by the usual posse of heroic libertarians and legal originalists, including George Mason University law prof Ilya Somin.
About 24 hours after Trump originally announced the “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs, Somin quickly blogged about how insanely unconstitutional the whole idea was, and concluded his article essentially by saying “I’m darn well gonna do something about this nonsense”. I don’t mean to suggest he deserves primary credit; I only intend to call attention, once again, to U.S. libertarians being the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has.
May 30, 2025
Senate to once again try to pass internet age verification and website blocking
Some ideas are so horrible that they never, ever die. The Canadian Senate nearly got an age verification and website blocking ban into law during the last Parliament, and as Michael Geist discusses, they’re not giving up now:
“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the Canadian monarch and consort, or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920.”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.
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. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).
Bill S-209 creates 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. The previous bill used the term “sexually explicit material”, borrowing from the Criminal Code provision. This raised concerns as the definition in the Criminal Code is used in conjunction with other sexual crimes. The bill now features its own definition for pornographic material, which is defined as
any photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region or, if the person is female, her breasts, but does not include child pornography as defined in subsection 163.1(1) of the Criminal Code.
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.
May 29, 2025
The King of Canada
In the National Post, Colby Cosh tweaks the berries of the tiny number of dedicated Canadian republicans:
King Charles III and Queen Camilla, official portrait by Millie Pilkington.
The Post and other Canadian organs have been full of conscious praise for our unusual absentee monarchy lately, what with the King being in the capital to give the throne speech in person. But Canadian republicans must be hoping that our people will instinctively reject the spectacle, and at least see the genuine need for that blessing without which no sovereign state can hope to be taken seriously — a president.
There are rumblings about behind-the-scenes diplomatic tensions between Canada and the United Kingdom over the royal visit, rumblings which the Sunday Times (of London) put in print this weekend. The crux of the story is that Canada and the U.K. are not quite using the same playbook in dealing with the volatile and cutthroat Trump administration.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is applying lots of soft-soap, using Trump’s fondness for the British monarchy and its highly ornamented nature as a means of getting special treatment in trade negotiations. Meanwhile, Canada and its government hope to use the presence in Canada of Canada’s King as a subtle way of asserting independence, determination and strength as we bear the economic blows of Trumpian whim.
And — wait for it — the crazy part is, THOSE TWO KINGS ARE THE SAME EXACT DUDE. WHAAAT?
To a republican, this seems like a mystery concocted to obfuscate a logical weakness in the system. No doubt they see it just the same way an atheist looks at the centuries of early Christian debate over the Holy Trinity. It’s not exactly as though the U.K. and Canada are at war, or as though there is any overt disharmony between the two states. But the monarchists have to concede at least this much: when mutually sovereign countries have a shared head of state, you do in fact end up with the exotic possibility that George XIV of Canada might one day, in theory, have to issue a declaration of war on George XIV of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is baked into the improvised post-Imperial ontology of our government and of Britain’s.
This is why Canadian monarchists are so fussy about the independent constitutional footing on which the Canadian Crown rests. We do this, implicitly insisting that our system of government was reinvented in 1931, while at the same time arguing that the advantages of monarchy include antiquity, historical continuity and the preservation of a special bond between Commonwealth realms. Perhaps we are sneaky imperialist (or racist) hypocrites. Perhaps we just feel that those advantages are legitimate and important, and that the Statute of Westminster is an optimum compromise that preserves them while guaranteeing our sovereign freedom of action in the interplay of governments.
May 28, 2025
The Throne Speech
On his Substack, Paul Wells reports on the first Throne Speech delivered by the reigning monarch since the 1970s:
Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
We’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, or I guess, since the new PM is said to prefer British spellings, Charlye Brownne with Lewsey’s Foote Ball. Each generation of Canadian leadership tries to find a new way to make throne speeches exciting. These attempts are forever doomed, because no generation of Canadian leadership is exciting and because the format — a statement of intent from a dignitary who is forbidden to harbour autonomous intent — tends to short-circuit the delivery.
This time the delivery mechanism was the King of Canada, Charles Philip Arthur George, popping over from his secondary residence at Buckingham. His French tops Mary Simon’s, though his Inuktitut is shaky. He did his best to sound excited, or resolute, about the CBSA’s “new powers to examine goods”.
A quarter-century ago the reliably impish John Fraser told me he was preparing a book called Eminent Canadians that would survey recent developments in four Canadian institutions. The institutions he’d selected were the office of the Prime Minister; the Globe and Mail; the Anglican Church; — and here Fraser urged me to guess the fourth. Canadian institution? I dunno, the armed forces? The NHL? “The Crown”, Fraser said with a twinkle. Thus was I prepped for this week’s extended round of you-know-he’s-really-the-king-of-Canada browbeating.
This throne speech was like many before it, though out of deference for the deliverer it was on the short side, 21 pages tucked inside wide margins. In substance it was a paraphrase of Mark Carney’s already-semi-legendary Single Mandate Letter for cabinet ministers. There were sections on redefining Canada’s relationship with the United States; on internal trade; on crimefighting and national defence; and on “spending less and investing more”, which, I mean, we’ll see.
The mandate letter seems to have supplanted the Liberal election platform as the main blueprint for Carney’s action. The two aren’t wildly incompatible, but the mandate letter/throne speech is streamlined and puts stuff in different order.
I saw two surprises big enough to make me write today, but first I want to point to a few elements that are worth noting in the less-surprising stuff. That’s right, I’m trying to be useful, not just smart-assed, so here’s a way to thank me. […]
First, Carney (through His Majesty) makes claims for the “new economic and security relationship with the United States” that seem unrealistic. He expects “transformational benefits for both sovereign nations”. But surely any cross-border negotiation can only be, at best, an exercise in damage control? Any security costs that would be newly borne by Canada would represent a net cost. Trade arrangements short of the substantially free trade we’ve enjoyed for 40 years will also represent a net cost. The point of seeking “one Canadian economy” and taking relations with third countries more seriously is to offset the cost of a degraded Canada-US relationship, no?
Under “more affordable”, the throne speech repeats campaign promises for income-tax cuts and cuts to GST on new homes. The list of tangible financial benefits to individuals doesn’t go much past that. “The Government will protect the programs that are already saving families thousands of dollars every year. These include child care and pharmacare.” “Protect” is an old Ottawa word meaning “not extend”.
The goals for the “one Canadian economy” now include “free trade across the nation”, at both federal and provincial levels of government, “by Canada Day”. Which is 34 days away. The staffing and mandate of another new entity, a single-wicket “Major Federal Project Office”, may end up mattering more to this government’s success and Canada’s prosperity than the name of the PM’s next chief of staff, so put an asterisk next to that.
The government repeats a mysterious claim I’ve found shaky since Carney became a Liberal leadership candidate. It “will take a series of measures to catalyse new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes for Canadians. The scale of the Government’s initiative will match the challenges of our times and the ambitions of Canadians.” The challenges of our times, at least, are large.
So again: if the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund and the Freeland-Sabia investment tax credits are sufficient to catalyse (British spelling) new investment, why duplicate them?
And if they haven’t worked, why keep them?
May 27, 2025
Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.
May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.
Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.
Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.
All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.
The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.
Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.
The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.
As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:
“According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”
Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.
There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.
May 25, 2025
Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version
Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):
“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.
Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …
… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.
[…]
Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
QotD: Cancellation of the Avro Arrow and destruction of the prototypes
On Friday, February 20, 1959, 14,000 employees were immediately fired and sent home, after a project they had been working on since 1953, was abruptly cancelled. That project was the military, supersonic, advanced interceptor, the Avro Arrow. The company they worked for, A.V. Roe Canada Limited, had come into being just after the war, with the express purpose of designing and building both commercial and military aircraft in Canada. Its subsidiaries included Avro, responsible for developing and building the platform and Orenda, for developing the engines.
The first project of this new company was the C-102 Jetliner, the first commercial inter-city jet to fly in North America in 1949, and the second [civilian] jet to fly in the world, behind the trans-oceanic British Comet. After being test flown successfully for three years and with potential orders pending, the Jetliner project was cancelled, allegedly in favour of committing all company resources to the development of the military sub-sonic CF-100. The Arrow was to be the successor to the latter, designed to intercept and destroy if need be, incoming supersonic bombers coming across the North Pole, from the then Soviet Union.
The Arrow was a sleek, twin engine, delta winged aircraft embodying many advanced features such as fly-by-wire controls, titanium and magnesium alloys for light weight and resistance to frictional heat, transistorized electronics and an advanced engine, the Iroquois. While some other aircraft may have included some of these advanced features, what made the Arrow unique was that all of them were built into this one singular aircraft.
Adding insult to injury, the five flying preproduction aircraft, including all technical documentation, tooling and jigs and fixtures and others in various stages of assembly, were ordered destroyed. Why was a project being hailed by aviation experts around the world, suddenly cancelled? In the absence of clear facts and in the presence of rumour and innuendo, debates have raged back and forth as to the reasons, sparking a series of myths and misconceptions about the entire affair.
In 1988, the late Canadian historian, Professor Desmond Morton, lamented the fact that he could not obtain any government archival documents on the Arrow, assuming they even existed. Out of interest, I decided to try my own hand in this endeavour. Since then I have uncovered and have had declassified thousands upon thousands of records including many Secret and Top Secret, ranging from memos, reports both scientific and financial, to minutes of meetings and letters. The list includes some from the United States and Great Britain as well.
Those documents which I deemed more critical, I have either quoted from or have reproduced in my books, with full references. Following is a discussion of some of the myths and misconceptions that the documents have helped clarify.
Arrow Destruction
Perhaps one of the most enduring myths is that the destruction of the completed Arrows and all else, was ordered by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, due to his hatred of the President of A.V. Roe, Crawford Gordon. Alternatively, it has been argued that it was Gordon who had everything destroyed as a spite against the Prime Minister. Neither account is true.
The government records from the Department of National Defence clearly show the order to destroy came from the Minister of National Defence, George R. Pearkes, after receiving that recommendation from Hugh Campbell, Chief of the Air Staff, and after conferring with numerous others including the Deputy Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Department of Defence Production. The documents contain the signatures of those involved, all of whom would later deny publicly having any knowledge of the destruction, leaving the Prime Minister to be subsequently vilified for it. In fact, the paper trail ends with Minister Pearkes. The matter was not discussed with the Prime Minister at all.
Even today, when the Department decides to dispose of something – it does not matter if it is an aircraft, a tank, a ship or some other equipment – there is no need to seek approval or even advise the Prime Minister as to the manner of its disposal. In fact, all departments dispose of their equipment through an arm of the government. At the time it was called Crown Assets Disposal, but today it is renamed GC Surplus. The name may change yet again.
Palmiro Campagna, “The Avro Arrow: Exploding the Myths and Misconceptions”, Dominion Review, 2025-02-20.
May 24, 2025
Forget it, Fraser Institute: as Trudeau explained, there’s no business case for Canadian LNG
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on a recent Fraser Institute study on the benefits of expanding the production of Canadian liquid natural gas, but as the meme might put it, the feds don’t want benefits, they want to eliminate Canadian LNG production:
A new report says that if Canada really wanted to save the climate, the most effective thing it could do would be to sell as much natural gas to Asia as humanly possible.
The 46-page study, published on Thursday by the right-leaning Fraser Institute, is premised on the notion that Canadian natural gas exports could singlehandedly reduce Asian dependence on coal.
If Canada could double its LNG production, write the authors, it would divert enough coal from Asian power plants to stop 630 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
For context, that nearly represents Canada’s entire carbon footprint. According to the most recent figures from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country was responsible for 694 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2023.
“Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide,” the report says.
The Fraser Institute’s calculation is based on the simple fact that natural gas is an easy substitute for coal, and can produce the same amount of energy with far lower emissions.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration maintains a ranking of fossil fuels by the quantity of emissions they produce for every one million BTUs (British Thermal Units) — roughly the amount of power needed to heat a standard house for several days.
Generating one million BTUs by burning coal will produce between 93 and 103 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Doing the same with natural gas will produce just 53 kilograms.
Canada currently produces about 17.9 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Most of this is consumed domestically, while 39 per cent is exported, mostly to the United States via pipeline.
The Fraser Institute calculated that if Canada could double production and “send the surplus … to Asia”, it could potentially supplant more than 200 million tonnes of coal every year.
