On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney signed the Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement with B.C. Premier David Eby in Vancouver, then flew to Calgary to announce, beside Premier Danielle Smith, Alberta’s submission of a million-barrel pipeline to the Major Projects Office.

The Calgary stage supplied the spectacle. The Vancouver document carried the payload. It committed Ottawa to negotiate a legally binding framework grounded in the agreement’s principle that British Columbia should share in the “economic upside” of a project it also acknowledges the province does not want. An annual pipeline operator payment to British Columbia heads the list of mechanisms to be settled by Dec. 1.

Economist Jack Mintz rightly called the arrangement, in these pages, “extortion, plain and simple,” a Strait of Hormuz-style transit tariff. A royalty pays for the right to extract a resource that the collecting province owns. But B.C. does not own the resource and has no right to extract it; Alberta owns it in the ground and collects the proper royalty. Whatever a recurring payment would purchase, extraction is not it.

Mintz faults Ottawa for blessing a demand it should have resisted. That framing casts Ottawa as a bystander watching a province misbehave. While no toll yet exists, no amount is fixed, and no operator is bound, the record rather shows Ottawa is helping create the plan rather than merely observing it. What exists is a commitment to negotiate a pay scheme by a central government, never mind that its declared program runs the other way.

Let us recall the origins and fate of the scheme. Then-Premier Christy Clark thought of it first. In 2012, she set a fair share of the economic benefits as her fifth condition for any heavy oil pipeline crossing her province, and in 2017, she collected: Kinder Morgan agreed to pay British Columbia up to $50 million a year for 20 years.

Clark’s successors wanted more than a bargain with a company. In 2018, the Horgan government proposed a permit scheme built to control heavy oil moving through the Trans Mountain pipeline. The B.C. Court of Appeal ruled unanimously in 2019 that regulating an interprovincial pipeline belongs exclusively to Parliament, and in 2020, the Supreme Court dismissed the province’s appeal from the bench. The attorney general whose office carried that losing appeal was David Eby. The premier who signed the July 2 agreement is the same man. Eby is a master of consistent contortion.

The contortion has a fiscal logic. Eby has gone all in on liquefied natural gas to rescue B.C.’s strained finances, and the bet leans on Alberta more than he admits. That dependence helps explain his search for new revenue from Alberta’s petroleum economy.

As Falice Chin documented in March, drilling in the shared Montney basin is sustained by its liquids, above all the condensate that oilsands producers buy to dilute bitumen for pipelines. Producers drill for the diluent; the export gas is largely the byproduct. B.C.’s gas revenues, Chin notes, are “partially underwritten by demand from Alberta’s oilsands.”

Having conceded on gas and on the power of royalties, the premier has arrived at collecting from a resource his province neither owns nor produces.

The motive is Eby’s. The means are Ottawa’s. What the Constitution denies a province acting alone, a deal with the feds can place within reach. B.C. cannot pass a law aimed at making the pipeline pay; the courts settled that. But Ottawa, which regulates the pipeline, approves the project and owns the existing line, can make payment part of the new arrangement.

The July 2 text even recites that the federal government holds the authority to approve and build pipelines across provincial boundaries, then accepts that B.C.’s co-operation is conditional on the revenue commitments.

In effect, Ottawa has agreed to negotiate payment for exercising a power the Constitution assigns exclusively to Parliament. Ottawa wrote down that the power is federal, then agreed to negotiate a price for using it, payable to a province that holds no lawful claim. The Constitution assigns the jurisdiction to Parliament; the agreement nevertheless commits Ottawa to bargaining over its exercise.

Consider the timing. In June 2025, Bill C-5 became the One Canadian Economy Act, the statute behind the prime minister’s promise to strip all federal barriers from internal trade by Canada Day. A year and a day after that Canada Day, the same Carney government agreed to negotiate an annual charge tied to the movement of Alberta oil across British Columbia to the ocean. The statute lifts paper burdens from goods crossing provincial lines. The new agreement envisages a cash burden on oil, doing the same thing.

Let’s not expect the courts to fix it. In R. v. Comeau, the 2018 case concerning beer crossing provincial boundary lines, the Supreme Court read section 121’s promise of free admission down to forbid only measures whose primary purpose is restricting trade. Any government with a competent drafting team can recite another purpose. Still, a future challenger would enter the agreement into evidence, since money for passage, stated plainly as “economic upside,” is the very thing the section still forbids.

The presumption is already travelling well. At Charlottetown recently, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said he was “willing to entertain” an Alberta-to-Ontario pipeline. The remark made headlines as a concession, though Parliament holds the jurisdiction. The July 2 agreement reinforces the mistaken presumption that passage across a province is something to be negotiated rather than governed by constitutional jurisdiction.

Mintz is right about the nature of the thing. Where his account falls short is the exculpation of Ottawa, which convened the parties, accepted the principle, and fixed the deadline, against its own declared principles and a Supreme Court signal to uphold the B.C. legal decision. Those are the acts of a participant, not a bystander.

Confederation promised Alberta admission to a common market; the July 2 agreement opens negotiations over a never-ending fare. And although Eby is the one in covetous need, the toll booth is federal.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

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Who would have guessed that a print-on-demand publisher would be home to an unexpected surge of interest in old, long-forgotten comic strips?

That’s what is happening at Lulu Press, Inc., a privately held company with more than two decades of experience in book publishing.

Lulu was launched in 2002 by businessman Bob Young. He co-founded Red Hat Inc., a U.S.-based open-source software company which was purchased by IBM for US$34 billion in 2018. He was the CEO of PrecisionHawk from 2015 to 2017 and co-founded the monthly publication Linux Journal. He also served as Lulu’s CEO until 2021.

Young is also a well-known figure in Canadian sports. A native of Hamilton, Ont., he purchased the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2003 and remains its largest shareholder. He also owns the Canadian Premier League’s Forge FC and operates Hamilton Stadium, previously known as Tim Hortons Field.

(A quick anecdote. I had a friendly debate with Young at CH News’s Square Off on Sept. 29, 2005. The topic? Whether the CFL or NFL was the superior product. That’s when I still had serious reservations about the calibre of Canadian football. How times have changed!)

The successful entrepreneur started Lulu because he wasn’t able to arrange a book deal by traditional means. “Our founder, Bob Young, discovered publishing his amazing story through any of the traditional publishing houses was impossible,” according to the company’s website. “Determined to share his story, he employed a hybrid publisher but was frustrated, disappointed, and dissatisfied with the nominal results. At this point, he determined no one should have to share a similar experience, and Lulu was born.”

Lulu’s print-on-demand model helps explain why it works for specialized projects with potentially small audiences. Rather than requiring hundreds or thousands of copies to be printed in advance, books can be produced individually as they are ordered. Creators using Lulu remain the publishers of their work while the company provides the technology, printing and fulfillment. That makes it possible to publish highly specialized books without requiring a conventional large print run.

Lulu had reportedly published over two million book titles by 2014. This number has continued to increase on an annual basis. A case study published by David van Driessche for the PDF Association on July 9 suggested “Lulu users publish around 350,000 books per year, or roughly 1,000 books per day,” with an estimated “75 per cent of its business is in the United States, but the platform serves customers internationally and produces books as close as possible to the buyer.”

This includes comic strips, comic books and graphic novels. Lulu has published plenty of these volumes over the years. One notable example was the first collection of Aaron Johnson’s What the Duck, which started as a webcomic and was later picked up by Universal Press Syndicate and rebranded W.T. Duck.

The publication of older comic strips in the public domain on Lulu has really taken off in recent years. Here are a few examples.

Tom Heintjes, editor of the well-respected Hogan’s Alley magazine, produced a superb book, The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G., in 2024. This little-known strip, which appeared in a trade publication called Drug Topics from 1934 to 1948, was the first example in the comics of a female professional who owned and worked in a drug store. Betty faced everything from mobsters to con men, and still found some time to pursue romantic adventures. Heintjes’s exceptional writing and editing ensured this strip, which contained subtle dashes of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner, would never hide in obscurity again.

The Comic Strip Appreciation Group has published multiple volumes on Lulu. I recently purchased Railroad Red, a little-known strip created by David Marshall and Beaumont Fairbank that barely appeared in any newspapers during its short 10-month run in 1941. That’s a real shame: the story of Red Greene, a crime-fighting detective on the railways, is a well-drawn, well-written and well-done strip. Had there been a larger audience for Railroad Red, it could have had a much lengthier and more acclaimed run. What little was produced can now be widely read and permanently savoured.

Two other exquisite books focus on the early history of a strip that later evolved into the adventures of a spinach-eating sailor.

Kurtis Findlay, the online communications coordinator at the Library of American Comics, just released his first volume of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre. It’s a collection of the 1919 to 1920 dailies of this brilliant strip that focused on Olive Oyl, her brother Castor Oyl and her then-boyfriend Ham Gravy. This gag-a-day feature was very different from the environment that Popeye, Wimpy, Bluto, Swee’Pea, Alice the Goon and others would eventually dominate. Findlay is already off to a terrific start, and the next eight volumes in the series should be good fun to read.

Frank Tovar, a writer, director and filmmaker, has started his three-volume series on a specific storyline from Thimble Theatre featuring Castor Oyl. The first volume of “The Saga of Cylinda Oyl” largely focuses on Olive’s diminutive brother and the woman who would eventually become his wife. Tovar has an excellent essay about Segar and Thimble Theatre, complete with photos and artwork. While there will be some crossover with the Findlay series, it’s a unique entity that can easily be collected on its own.

Thanks to Young’s original vision for Lulu, a new avenue for old comic strips has been unexpectedly established. A wealth of knowledge is readily available for purchase and consumption, and there will surely be more books to come.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.

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Suddenly, everyone, and their grandmother, seems to be an expert on supply management.

That newfound interest is healthy. Canadians are finally examining the benefits, costs and contradictions of a complicated system affecting roughly one-quarter of the country’s agricultural economy.

A generation ago, few economists openly criticized supply management. Those who did faced fierce attacks, while the dairy lobby deployed a nationwide marketing budget approaching $200 million annually. Remember the Doug Gilmour milk advertisements? Today, the “Milk” logo appears on Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys through a multimillion-dollar sponsorship.

For years, criticizing supply management was almost politically taboo. Social media has changed that. Consumers can now see milk being dumped, compare Canadian prices with those abroad and question why Ottawa repeatedly compensates a protected industry.

Dairy farmers are not the problem. They operate rationally within rules created by governments and administered by marketing boards. But those rules should not be immune from scrutiny.

Here are 10 myths Canadians should stop believing.

1. Dairy farmers are poor

Dairy farmers can be cash-constrained, but they are generally asset-rich. Once land, buildings, livestock, machinery and quota are included, many operations are worth more than $6 million. The real problem is that these inflated asset values make entering the industry almost impossible without significant family wealth or financing.

2. Supply management is saving the family farm

Canada had more than 90,000 dairy farms when supply management began. Fewer than 10,000 remain, and that number could approach 5,000 by 2030. The system has stabilized revenues for surviving producers, but it has not stopped consolidation. It protects farm income more effectively than it protects family farms.

3. Canadian dairy farmers receive no subsidies

Ottawa has provided billions of dollars in compensation following trade agreements with Europe, Pacific nations and the United States and Mexico. Canadians support dairy through administered prices, tariff protection, import restrictions and public payments. Calling these payments “compensation” does not make them any less of a subsidy. Dairy farmers also receive millions for “research.”

4. Trade agreements make every dairy farmer lose money

Opening part of the Canadian market does not produce an equivalent loss for every farm. Marketing boards can adjust quota as producers retire or leave the industry. Compensation has often been distributed without demonstrating actual farm-level losses. Public money should support genuine adjustment and competitiveness—not simply purchase political peace.

5. Ending supply management would automatically lower prices

There is no guarantee. Processing, packaging, transportation, labour and retail margins also determine grocery prices. Canadian processors nevertheless pay comparatively high prices for industrial milk. Reform could attract investment, improve competition and increase product variety, but anyone promising immediate savings at the dairy aisle is overselling the case.

6. Farmers alone pay for dumped milk

That is true in the U.S., not in Canada. Farmers initially absorb some losses through pooled revenues, but quota, prices and future production are subsequently adjusted. When boards instruct producers to discard milk, it is a system-level failure—not simply one farmer producing too much. If marketing boards control production, they must accept responsibility when their forecasts are wrong.

7. Milk dumping is unavoidable

Temporary surpluses are inevitable; dumping usable milk is not. Canada could create transparent reserves of milk powder and other storable ingredients, redirect suitable surpluses or expand processing capacity. Global demand for dairy protein is growing. Canada should be discussing how to process excess milk, not how to pour it away.

8. Canada has fully respected CUSMA

Before CUSMA, discounted milk classes 6 and 7 helped Canadian processors displace American protein imports and export surplus ingredients. CUSMA was supposed to end the practice, yet similar pricing continued through class 4(a). Canada also allocated much of its dairy import access to Canadian processors competing against foreign suppliers. Washington can be unreasonable, but Canada is not blameless.

9. Supply management guarantees food security

Domestic production contributes to food security, but protectionism is not the same as resilience. Dairy farms still depend on imported machinery, feed ingredients, animal-health products and packaging. Canada also lacks processing capacity for some dairy ingredients. A secure industry must be productive, innovative and able to adapt—not merely protected from competition.

10. Reform means abolishing the system overnight

Canada does not have to choose between preserving supply management unchanged and eliminating it tomorrow. A 15-year transition could lower industrial milk costs, help new farmers enter, strengthen processing and address quota values gradually. Farmers invested under government-created rules and deserve predictability, but fairness does not require permanent paralysis.

Supply management has delivered stable farm revenues, predictable production and relatively steady retail prices. Those are genuine advantages.

But it has also produced inflated asset values, high barriers to entry, expensive industrial milk, limited processing investment and recurring trade disputes. Its defenders cannot demand public compensation while claiming the system costs taxpayers nothing. Nor can they claim to be saving family farms while farm numbers collapse.

The greatest threat to supply management is not Donald Trump or American dairy farmers. It is the refusal of Canada’s dairy establishment to acknowledge that the system must evolve.

Canada should not let Washington dictate the future of its dairy sector. But neither should American pressure become an excuse to avoid reforms we should already be pursuing ourselves.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.

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Keeping gasoline prices low is now the United States’ “goal No. 1,” Vice President JD Vance says. But the Trump administration is pursuing an Iran strategy that is helping keep oil prices high.

As the war with Iran drags on and the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, Washington wants to intensify military and economic pressure on Tehran while bringing down gasoline prices ahead of the midterm elections.

Before the war, roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas shipments passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has embraced a long-term effort to inflict more damage on Tehran, despite growing domestic pressure ahead of the midterm elections, reported Alexander Smith of NBC News.

To increase that pressure, Washington threatened an indefinite naval blockade.

“Watch this space for more announcements coming next week,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Newsmax on Thursday. “We are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country.”

Oil prices rose Friday after the U.S. said its naval blockade of Iranian ports could continue “indefinitely,” reigniting concerns over energy flows through the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Washington threatened to intensify pressure on Iran, and oil prices moved in the opposite direction from where the administration wants them to go.

The head of Saudi Aramco says the world has lost 2.6 billion barrels of oil since the start of the war. According to Reuters, “this makes the current disruption the largest ever in cumulative terms apart from the 1979 Iranian revolution.”

President Trump nevertheless remains bullish. On Friday, the president alluded to a plan to declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory. “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated — pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” Trump told a crowd of law enforcement officers. “Essentially, that’s what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.”

U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth also told reporters Thursday that the U.S. could keep up its naval blockade of Iran “indefinitely” because “we’ll rotate ships in and out, as we have, and we’ll continue to” do.

Maintaining the blockade while trying to contain oil prices has made the Strategic Petroleum Reserve central to Washington’s response. Created after the 1973-74 oil embargo, the SPR is the U.S. government’s emergency crude oil stockpile.

Crude oil stocks in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to their lowest levels since January 1983. The SPR has tumbled below 300 million barrels for the first time since it was filled in the early 1980s, according to Department of Energy data released last week.

The U.S. committed in March to release 172 million barrels from the SPR in response to the disruption. The EIA projects the reserve will fall to around 243 million barrels once the release is completed.

Washington is therefore drawing down America’s emergency oil reserve to protect consumers from an oil shock that its own strategy of maintaining the blockade is helping prolong.

But there are questions about how much more oil can safely be withdrawn. The U.S. Government Accountability Office warned in May that ageing infrastructure and a growing maintenance backlog were putting the SPR’s operational capability at risk. It also found that, as of December 2025, more than a quarter of the SPR’s crude oil inventory was unavailable for drawdown because of construction and cavern outages.

The U.S. Energy Department says at least 70 million barrels must remain in the reserve to safely manage the caverns. Amos Hochstein, a senior energy adviser to President Joe Biden, says that is far too low.

“Don’t believe the people out of the government that are saying the SPR can go to 70 million barrels. It’s nonsense,” Hochstein told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last Thursday. At that level, the reserve would be depleted to “the point of never resurrecting it,” he added.

The Energy Department disputes warnings about the caverns. Department spokesman Ben Dietderich said claims that the SPR’s storage caverns are at risk of collapse as oil is drawn down are false, Spencer Kimball reported.

There is a limit to how much oil Washington can withdraw, while the administration says the blockade could continue indefinitely. If that happens, high prices themselves could eventually reduce demand as consumers and businesses cut consumption.

There are already signs of weaker demand. Both the International Energy Agency and OPEC have cut their forecasts.

“Our forecast for global oil demand in the second half of 2026 is reduced by roughly 550 kb/d [thousand barrels per day] versus last month’s Report, as the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupts international supply chains and curtails product availability,” says the IEA in its latest oil market report, released Wednesday. “Elevated fuel prices are putting further downward pressure on oil use.”

OPEC also cut its demand forecast for 2026 on Wednesday. Unlike the IEA, OPEC still expects demand growth, although its outlook was slashed to 580,000 bpd, down from the 780,000-bpd growth expected in its July report.

Weaker demand could eventually help bring oil prices down. But it would come at a cost to consumers and the economy.

If Washington maintains the blockade, it risks keeping oil prices high. If it tries to offset those prices by drawing down the SPR, it consumes a strategic reserve that cannot be used indefinitely. And if it waits for weaker demand to bring prices down, American consumers and the economy bear the cost.

As long as Hormuz remains blocked, Trump’s objectives work against each other.

And with the midterm elections approaching, Washington is running out of time to decide which matters more: maintaining maximum pressure on Iran or bringing gasoline prices down.

Toronto-based Rashid Husain Syed is a highly regarded analyst specializing in energy and politics, particularly in the Middle East. In addition to his contributions to local and international newspapers, Rashid frequently lends his expertise as a speaker at global conferences. Organizations such as the Department of Energy in Washington and the International Energy Agency in Paris have sought his insights on global energy matters.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to look at this poll and understand something simple: People will not accept a gas tax hike in September.

New polling shows 63 per cent of Canadians oppose the federal government’s plan to hike fuel taxes next month.

Carney suspended the federal fuel tax in April to give Canadians a break at the pumps, saving 10 cents per litre of gas and four cents per litre of diesel.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation pushed for gas tax cuts for decades because cutting taxes is the simplest, fastest and easiest way for governments to make life more affordable for everyday working people.

Federal fuel tax relief also makes life more affordable for all Canadians every time they buy anything trucked to store shelves, a point even the federal government acknowledges.

“Cutting the tax on gasoline and diesel,” according to the prime minister’s office, “will reduce operating costs for truckers and businesses in the food, agriculture, housing, construction and delivery sectors.”

Making it cheaper for truckers to deliver goods to the store makes it more affordable for Canadians to buy those goods once they get there.

But relief is about to disappear. Carney plans to crank the gas tax back up on Sept. 8, just as Canadians are driving their kids back to school.

Canadians don’t support the gas tax hike. Most Canadians across all demographics—gender, age, and province—oppose the increase, according to Leger polling. The demographics that typically support Carney’s Liberals, women and people 55 and older, are more likely to oppose the gas tax hike. Among Canadians who’ve made up their mind, 71 per cent oppose the gas tax hike.

The rising cost of living remains the dominant issue facing Canadians, according to recent analysis from Abacus Data. And whether Canada is in a recession or not, the state of the economy is a top concern for people. Cutting gas taxes helps on both fronts.

Cutting gas taxes lowers costs and that means “businesses can hire more workers, confidently build and export more products to global markets,” according to the PMO.

Eliminating the gas tax for a year would save a family fuelling up their minivan once a week more than $350. If that family has more than one vehicle or drives longer distances for work, the savings get even larger.

If Carney is serious about affordability, he shouldn’t stop at leaving the suspension in place. He should go further and permanently eliminate the gas tax.

Here’s how Carney can do that without ballooning the debt: Stop overspending.

The federal fuel tax brings in about $6 billion annually, according to a 2025 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. If Carney stuck to the spending numbers in his own budget, he could more than cover that.

In November, Carney’s budget said the government would spend $588.3 billion this year. Six months later, his budget update showed spending increasing to $594.8 billion—$6.5 billion over his own plan.

If Carney just stuck to his own budgeted spending, the government would have more than enough money to cut the gas tax for a full year without borrowing a cent more.

The cost of the federal bureaucracy is projected to increase by $10 billion this year, according to the PBO. And Ottawa spends about $11 billion annually on corporate subsidies.

Cutting spending in those three places alone would cover the cost of permanently scrapping the gas tax, with billions left over.

Carney has listened to Canadians before on unpopular tax hikes. After all, his government axed the consumer carbon tax the Liberals had charged for years, following widespread opposition from taxpayers.

Carney should again listen to the clear majority of Canadians and cancel his September gas tax hike.

Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a public policy analyst specializing in government accountability, taxation, and fiscal waste. He holds a Master of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Calgary.

The post Carney should kill the upcoming gas tax hike first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Remembrance Day does not belong to the military bureaucracy. It is a civic ritual that includes a military component. It is part of the foundation of this country’s culture, a part no military command office should have authority to amend unilaterally.

Yet the military bureaucracy has presumed to do so. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, chaplains will stand before cenotaphs facing a choice no 20th-century predecessor faced. The crowd will have just sung an anthem asking God to keep our land glorious and free. The ceremony will close with God Save the King, a sung prayer. Between those two invocations, the chaplains, under written orders, may not say what everyone around them is permitted to sing.

On July 29, Military Personnel Command issued Instruction 03/26, replacing a 2023 direction that bound only chaplains. The new instruction binds every member of the Canadian Armed Forces. Where prayers were once offered, from parade squares to Remembrance Day, it requires a “spiritual reflection” instead: no religious language, with references to God as the first example of what must go.

Section 4.9 preserves regimental prayers as classroom history only: members may study the prayer but they may not say it where it was said for a century. A prayer studied but never spoken is a museum exhibit. Shakespeare makes the same point in another context. Henry V turns on the feast of a saint and an appeal to Providence: “God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.” Strike the saint and the prayer, and the speech collapses into a staffing complaint.

The instruction’s principles fare no better than the Command’s taste. Neutrality demands all this, it insists, then lists exceptions: Indigenous practices, “some of which contain spiritual elements,” may enter military settings for cultural and educational purposes.

The traditions of the God of Moses and Saint Paul aren’t devoid of spirituality. Nor is Christian prayer merely religious language. Yet the Command treats Christian liturgy as though it were something else. A liturgy is the public work a people does together before the God it names. Strip away God, and all you have is programming.

The real principle rests on a self-induced delusion: one tradition counts as a Charter hazard and another as a reconciliation asset.

The Instruction’s authors conjure a legal footing: a 2015 Supreme Court ruling about a praying mayor coercing citizens, stretched into a gag on the one office the state created to pray. The footing is imaginary, one more delusion in the set. No court ordered this. A bureaucrat chose it, and Parliament was never asked: no bill, no committee, no member rising to speak.

A Remembrance parade is military; the mourning is not. Widows, veterans and towns participated in building this tradition for a century, and the people keep it.

Those of us who pray for our soldiers and remember our fallen know the liturgy: the Last Post, the silence, the prayers, Colonel McCrae’s poem, the Royal Anthem. We stand our children in the sleet and teach it to them, as Shakespeare promised: “This story shall the good man teach his son.”

A bureaucracy that mistakes its inheritance for a compliance risk contradicts its own stated principle. Rewriting a national rite without asking Parliament and its people demonstrates that it cannot be entrusted with this tradition.

For that reason, Parliament should strip it of any custody over public remembrance.

Civil society can take care of it. The Royal Canadian Legion organizes the national ceremony in Ottawa. Let the Forces march in it as honoured guests, under the nation’s liturgy, prayers included. A country’s civil memory takes no orders.

When King Charles, himself the head of a Christian church, read the Throne Speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the gesture “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country.” The Crown, the anthem, the chaplain’s prayer: one inheritance, all of a piece, alongside the Constitution. His predecessor pronounced Canada the world’s first post-national state, and the premise still governs the Command.

If the traditions that formed this country cannot survive ceremonies with their own military, what sovereignty are Canadians summoned to defend? Only the state itself remains: sovereign on its own account, untied from any inheritance, undelegated by any people conscious of itself as a people. That is sovereignty as state-worship.

Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. Nowhere is that partnership more real than at a cenotaph. Strip the prayers, and Remembrance dissolves into an HR function with rifles and fanfare, commemorating sacrifice in language vetted to mean nothing.

An institution that permits no God above itself breaks with the Constitution and has already told you what it worships. A country that turns its back on the traditions of its most tradition-bound institution turns its back on its own identity.

Nobody voted for this. It arrived by command. Parliament can send it back.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

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The forced sterilization of women in 21st-century Canada? Is that even possible?

Apparently, it is. According to a 2022 Senate report, Canada has a long history of using sterilization to reduce births in First Nations populations and other marginalized groups.

In June, the federal government responded to these findings by passing Bill S-228 to criminalize sterilization procedures done without consent. Physicians can now be charged with aggravated assault and face penalties of up to 14 years in prison if patients claim they didn’t give valid consent.

It may seem like a logical response to the problem. Except, it isn’t. All it does is place a contentious legal covering over medical interactions between doctor and patient.

The Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice claims as many as 12,000 to 15,000 people have been sterilized without consent since the 1890s; some as recently as 2025. (There is no way of knowing the accuracy of those figures or obtaining a breakdown of numbers by year). Class-action lawsuits claiming forced sterilization are already underway in certain provinces (B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec) and there is little doubt that more will follow.

Once the legal foundation is formally laid, patients will be running to law firms in the hope that money will ease their pain. The Saskatchewan suit of 50 women is seeking reparations of $7 million per case.

The Canadian Medical Association, which has publicly apologized to the Indigenous people for not meeting appropriate standards in their medical care, supports the bill (at least in public) as part of its reconciliation efforts. Understandably, however, obstetricians and gynecologists, the doctors who perform sterilization procedures, are concerned.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC) has raised legitimate fears that consensual sterilizations could later be claimed as “forced.” Others could claim they were talked into the procedure or told it was medically necessary when it was not.

The SOGC believes the bill could have a “chilling effect” on its members as they respond to patients inquiring about such procedures. Actions taken during life-threatening emergency care are exempt from the law. Still, realistically, there is no guarantee of protection once legalities have even the slightest potential to override clinical judgment.

Consequently, the SOGC quite rightly states that Bill S-228 is not the answer.

Most notably, it fails to address the real problem—systemic racism. Jailing doctors is not going to change the cultural inequities that persist in health care.

How can we hold doctors and medical institutions accountable without criminalizing medical procedures?

Two words: Patient rights.

A better solution for all parties (patients, doctors and health-care institutions) is to consider this within a framework of patient rights based on standardized and agreed-upon principles that govern the interactions of health-care providers and patients.

For example, the principle of informed consent means doctors are accountable to provide all information to the patient, including risks, benefits and alternatives. Patient autonomy gives patients the right to be actively engaged in their own care, including shared decision-making. Patient rights hold both doctors and patients responsible for maintaining a non-discriminatory and respectful environment.

These rights (and others) should be acknowledged as key elements that underlie every health-care system and every doctor-patient relationship in Canada. Patients need to know them; doctors need to acknowledge them when interacting with patients.

When rights are violated, there should be an open and transparent system of accountability for health-care providers and institutions. It should be easy for patients to access and capable of dealing with complaints and medical errors in a timely fashion. That keeps the majority of medical concerns outside the courtroom.

Patient rights govern health care in many nations, but they remain largely unknown in Canada. Most provinces have a tacit statement about patient rights, but the rights vary considerably in terms of the language used, the degree of accountability and the effectiveness of their implementation. In some cases, they are almost impossible to access. Some have a legal basis, while others are merely suggestions for best practices. There are no standardized rights across Canada.

Forget the criminal charges. Deal with systemic racism. Reset the parameters of care in the doctor-patient relationship by creating a robust, standardized and national statement of patient rights. Develop local systems that hold doctors and institutions to account when errors arise and rights are violated. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, make sure that both patients and doctors know the rules and what to do when they are broken.

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. A Vancouver-based researcher and communications specialist, she has written more than 1,500 published columns, articles and reports on health care, bioethics and public policy. She is the author of Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Healthcare Crisis and the forthcoming Patient Rights: Restoring Trust in Canada’s Healthcare System.

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Conspiracy theories thrive in ignorance. While Christians recognize the Ten Commandments, few know the seven Noahide laws meant for all humanity, and this unfamiliarity breeds dangerous misunderstanding.

Evangelical podcasters and YouTube personalities have manufactured fear around this November’s International Noahide Congress in Jerusalem. The Brit Olam gathering will bring delegates from around the world to formalize the Noahide movement, but Christian broadcasters paint this as a sinister plot threatening Christian lives through fears of some global movement imposing these laws on them.

The claim that the Noahide movement poses a threat to Christians is not merely mistaken. It is a conspiracy theory built on ignorance of Jewish law, selective readings of ancient texts and fear of a small religious movement.

Noahides, or Bnei Noach (“children of Noah”), are non-Jews who follow seven universal commandments that Jewish tradition teaches God gave humanity. They prohibit idolatry, blasphemy, murder, theft, illicit sexual relations and eating flesh taken from a living animal, and require the establishment of courts of justice. Jewish tradition traces six of these principles to Adam and the seventh, prohibiting the eating of flesh taken from a living animal, to Noah after the Flood. Jewish tradition regards non-Jews who follow these universal laws as “Righteous Gentiles.”

Organizers say the Nov. 2–6 congress will establish an international Noahide organization, including a founding charter, six continental councils and an international rabbinical court, or Beit Din. Organizers also say the modern Noahide movement numbers in the tens of thousands globally, making fears of world domination laughably disproportionate.

Creating a religious organization does not give Noahides legal authority over Christians.

Christian critics fear Noahide law because of its prohibition against idolatry. Yet they champion displaying the Ten Commandments, which also forbid idolatry, in courthouses and schools across America. Moses holding the Ten Commandments appears among historical lawgivers depicted in the U.S. Supreme Court courtroom. State capitols showcase the Decalogue. Christians campaign to teach the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Canada’s Christian communities likewise elevate the Ten Commandments, though not to the same public degree as in America.

This contradiction reveals the absurdity: Christians fear the Noahide prohibition against idolatry while celebrating a similar prohibition in the Ten Commandments. Observant Jews might reasonably wonder why mostly non-Jewish societies elevate commandments given specifically to the Jewish people while reacting with suspicion to seven principles Jewish tradition regards as universal.

More seriously, critics cherry-pick Talmudic passages and present them as evidence that Christians could be executed for idolatry under Noahide law.

The Talmud records rabbinic debates, disputes and deliberately extreme hypothetical scenarios designed to explore legal principles. The conspiracy theorists take complicated and sometimes disputed questions in Jewish law, strip away their legal and historical context and present the result as evidence that Christians are threatened with execution.

Jewish authorities have also wrestled with Christianity and the Trinity for centuries. While Judaism maintains an uncompromising commitment to God’s unity, Jewish sages have differed over how Christianity should be classified. Christian theology has not simply been treated as equivalent to the ancient pagan idolatry condemned in Jewish texts.

The conspiracy theory also ignores how Jewish capital law actually developed. Even where the Torah prescribed death penalties, Jewish law erected massive procedural barriers. Courts required two independent eyewitnesses who had warned the perpetrator beforehand and observed the offence directly. Circumstantial evidence did not justify execution. The Mishnah called a court “bloodthirsty” if it executed one person in seven years.

Modern Jewish legal scholars emphasize that these provisions primarily expressed the gravity of offences and established maximum legal sanctions rather than encouraging executions.

Whatever one thinks of ancient religious law, that is a long way from the picture being circulated of Jews preparing an international legal system to execute Christians.

For two millennia, Jews generally focused on survival rather than on evangelizing universal ethics. Persecution and marginalization often prevented Jews from openly teaching these traditions to outsiders, sometimes under threat of severe punishment or death.

That began to change in the 17th century, when English jurist and scholar John Selden found universal Noahide ethics within Jewish legal texts. A contemporary of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, Selden drew extensively on rabbinic scholarship to develop an understanding of laws applicable to humanity generally rather than to Jews alone.

That history matters. Noahide law is not some new ideological project invented by modern Jews seeking authority over Christians. Christian European scholars studied and debated these ideas centuries ago as part of the development of natural-law thought.

Many modern Noahides are former Christians with Christian families and friends who seek universal harmony through peaceful persuasion, not Christian persecution.

Creating unjustified panic over a small religious population convening an international meeting represents a genuine tragedy. It transforms an obscure religious and ethical tradition into evidence of a global plot by stripping ancient texts of their historical and legal context.

Christians are free to disagree with Noahide theology. They are free to reject Jewish interpretations of idolatry, revelation or religious law. But disagreement is not evidence of persecution, and an international Noahide conference is not evidence of a plan to impose Jewish law on Christians.

Christians should study these laws and their history rather than spreading unfounded conspiracy theories. The Noahide movement promotes universal morality and peaceful dialogue, goals Christians should welcome rather than fear.

Joseph Quesnel is the founding director of the Canadian Foundation for Universal Ethics Education. A seasoned journalist and policy analyst with over 15 years of experience, he has provided expert testimony to both the Senate and the House of Commons on public policy.

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No clear winner may have emerged on the battleground in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, but away from the battlefield, Big Oil has emerged as one of the conflict’s biggest beneficiaries. And that is creating a political headache for U.S. President Donald Trump.

“They made too much money, too much money,” Trump said last week, referring to U.S. oil majors ExxonMobil and Chevron. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price.”

Major oil companies reported exceptionally strong second-quarter profits for 2026 as the war with Iran disrupted energy supplies and sent oil prices soaring.

Eight of the global oil majors amassed profits of US$93 billion in just three months, according to the Guardian. Their combined profits were almost double the nearly US$50 billion recorded during the same period last year.

The eight companies—Saudi Aramco, BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, Chevron and ExxonMobil—made more than US$700,000 in profit every minute during the quarter, the Guardian estimated.

ExxonMobil doubled its profit to US$14.5 billion. Chevron reported US$12.2 billion. Shell reported adjusted earnings of US$9.8 billion, while BP’s adjusted profit surged to US$5.7 billion.

Saudi Aramco also emerged as a major beneficiary despite the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, its preferred export waterway. The strait is one of the world’s most important oil routes, normally carrying oil volumes equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption.

The blockage forced Saudi Aramco to reroute shipments away from Hormuz. Yet the Saudi state oil company still registered a 44 per cent jump in net profit to US$32.69 billion.

Gasoline prices remain an important political issue in the United States, particularly with the midterm elections only a few months away. The national average for regular gasoline reached US$4.07 a gallon on Aug. 13, compared with US$3.16 a year earlier. If prices at the pump remain high, Trump and the Republicans could pay a political price.

The impact is not limited to the U.S. Canada is a major oil producer, but crude is traded in a global market. Higher international oil prices are also driving up gasoline prices for Canadian consumers.

In late June, Trump ordered the U.S. Justice Department to investigate oil companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, over gasoline prices. “Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “If Retailers don’t do this, big problems lie ahead!”

But getting prices down while oil companies are enjoying extraordinary profits is easier said than done.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act in March, and similar calls have been heard in Europe. Such a tax is designed to capture excess profits generated by extraordinary external circumstances, with the proceeds redirected to consumers facing higher energy costs.

There is precedent. The European Union imposed a windfall tax on oil profits after energy prices surged following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Not surprisingly, industry leaders strongly oppose the idea. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told analysts that windfall taxes are a “misguided policy” that penalizes businesses that attempt to stay successful despite the oil industry’s volatile booms and busts.

“We cancelled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax,” Woods said. “And in fact, we’re suing because we don’t think that’s a legal taking for the industry.”

Politically speaking, it may not be easy for Trump to tax the oil majors. Big Oil remains one of the most powerful lobbying interests in Washington. The oil industry has traditionally strongly supported Republicans, with fossil-fuel interests contributing heavily to Trump and Republican-aligned campaigns.

Trump has said the oil majors are making “too much money.” But taking them on could have political fallout.

The Iran war has given Big Oil an extraordinary financial windfall. For Trump, the question now is whether criticizing those profits will be enough if gasoline prices remain high as the midterm elections approach.

Toronto-based Rashid Husain Syed is a highly regarded analyst specializing in energy and politics, particularly in the Middle East. In addition to his contributions to local and international newspapers, Rashid frequently lends his expertise as a speaker at global conferences. Organizations such as the Department of Energy in Washington and the International Energy Agency in Paris have sought his insights on global energy matters.

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Title: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Author: John Green
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
Publication Year: 2025
(Available from Amazon)

When I picked up John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis, I expected to revisit memories of the disease that nearly killed me as a child. Instead, the book reminded me how thoroughly Canadians have forgotten tuberculosis, even though it remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.

When I was three years old, I spent a year and a half in a tuberculosis (TB) sanatorium fighting for my life. I had pulmonary TB and TB meningitis, a combination that was often fatal. That was more than 75 years ago, but I still remember the sanatorium, especially that it was filled with children fighting for their lives. Some of them did not survive.

When I first saw the title of Green’s book, I thought he had exaggerated. Surely tuberculosis was not “everything.” But after reading it, I came to appreciate how profoundly TB has affected humanity over thousands of years. It remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing more than 1.3 million people every year, mainly in developing countries and in Canada’s North.

Today, however, tuberculosis is rarely discussed in Canada. That was not the case when I was a child. Parents warned their children not to play with youngsters who had recently been released from sanatoria because they feared they might catch this dreaded disease. Their concerns were understandable.

Green’s book explains many important facts about tuberculosis.

One example involves James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the steam engine. Green recounts how Watt tried to develop a chemical treatment for TB, then commonly known as “phthisis,” from the Greek word meaning “wasting” or “consumption.” His efforts were driven by personal tragedy. His daughter, Jessy, died of tuberculosis at age 15 in 1794. A few years later, his son Gregory also died from the disease. Watt’s family was far from unique. Tuberculosis affected countless families and societies.

Green also describes evidence that tuberculosis existed in the Americas long before European settlement. Archaeologists have found the remains of Indigenous people with bone lesions that indicate TB infection. It is believed infected seals may have introduced the disease to the New World, challenging the commonly held assumption that virtually all major infectious diseases arrived with European explorers and settlers.

The book also explains what we now know about tuberculosis itself. TB is caused by an airborne bacterium that can infect people with weakened immune systems.

Green argues that the world we live in has been shaped by this bacterium. In comparison, the COVID-19 virus never came close to producing the deadly effects of the TB bacterium, even though our political and medical leaders often spoke as though COVID would become far worse.

Green explains that the first effective drug against tuberculosis, streptomycin, was developed only in the late 1940s. Fortunately, I became one of the experimental subjects in the early clinical trials. Although the drug had several serious side effects, I escaped the worst of them. Since streptomycin was introduced, however, more than 150 million people have still died from tuberculosis. Green argues that many of those lives could have been saved with proper treatment.

He also explains why tuberculosis remains difficult to control. About one-quarter of infected people recover without treatment. Others die quickly, while some live with the disease for years before it becomes fatal. Still others recover after months or years of treatment.

Tuberculosis is difficult to kill because the bacterium has a thick, fatty cell wall that often prevents white blood cells from destroying it. The immune system frequently surrounds the bacterium, isolating it inside a calcified tubercle where it can survive for years. If a person’s immune system later weakens, the disease can become active again.

The same thick cell wall also slows the ability of drugs to kill the bacterium. As a result, successful treatment often requires many months, and patients were commonly treated in sanatoria for extended periods.

Another reason patients remained in hospital was that streptomycin had to be injected into large muscles, usually the buttocks. I remember a nurse asking me which side I wanted the injection. Both sides were already sore from previous injections, so I told her I did not want it on either side. My request, of course, was politely ignored. Today, I am grateful those painful injections helped save my life.

This book appealed to me because I lived through tuberculosis, but it will also interest anyone curious about how bacteria and viruses have shaped people and societies.

While reading it, I often thought about the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the strategies governments adopted to slow its spread.

COVID was a far less dangerous disease than tuberculosis, yet the political and medical response was dramatically different.

Everything Is Tuberculosis is a short book that reminds readers of the continuing impact of a disease many Canadians rarely think about today. It also raises questions about how our political and medical leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, we are better off today than we were during the height of the pandemic, but we never know when another dangerous pathogen will emerge. Hopefully, our political and medical leaders will be better prepared.

Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He is the co-editor with Mark DeWolf of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report and co-editor with William Brooks of The Peril of Woke Schools and the Value of Traditional Education. 

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