Hockey has entered into the Canada-U.S. trade war again. Not over tariffs on hockey sticks or President Donald Trump’s AI-generated meme of himself knocking down Prime Minister Mark Carney on the ice, but as part of the conversation surrounding the departure of American-born players from Canadian teams.

There hasn’t been a flood of players leaving, and plenty of players from the U.S. joined Canadian clubs in the off-season, but when elite players are involved — including three who played for this year’s Olympic gold-medal-winning Team USA — the moves are subject to extra scrutiny.

Asked to weigh in on the apparent American exodus in a pre-season interview aired by Sportsnet this week, the Edmonton Oilers’ Connor McDavid said he hopes it’s not because they don’t want to be in Canada.

“Canada and the U.S. has had a great relationship for years and years and years, and I hope that continues for a long time,” he said.

Without specifying any players who have left or want to, the Oilers captain reasoned it could be that players simply “don’t see the opportunity to win on that specific team.” He highlighted his organization signing Ryan Shea, from Massachusetts, and St. Louis native Trent Frederic this season.

“Americans still want to play in Canada,” he said. “At least, that’s the sense that I get. They want to play for teams where they see a future.”

Late last month, Michigan-born Winnipeg Jets goaltender Connor Hellebuyck made public his desire to waive a no-movement clause and be traded from the organization after only two years of a seven-year, US$59.5 million contract signed in 2023.

The three-time Vezina Trophy winner who is the league’s best goalie didn’t specifically say he wants out of Canada for a U.S. destination, nor did he provide a list of teams where he’d be willing to move, but NHL insiders believe he’s bound to land with a U.S. club.

After the Jets failed to make the playoffs last season, he made it clear he wants to compete for a Stanley Cup.

“That’s my goal, and that’s all I have left, and that’s what I want on my resumé,” Hellebuyck said in April, according to TSN. “I don’t play this game for the money. I don’t play it for the fame. I do it for my own personal fun and, you know, part of that is winning a Cup. So for me, I’m just looking at how I can get that. How can I get there?”

Should the Jets receive an acceptable offer for Hellebuyck from one of the league’s 25 U.S. teams, he’ll join Brady Tkachuk as the second player from the Team USA squad to be traded from a Canadian club to an American in recent months.

The Ottawa Senators sent their Arizona-born captain to the Florida Panthers on June 21, one of four teams the four-time All-Star submitted as destinations when he made it clear to management that he would not extend his contract before it expired in 2028, according to Sportsnet. The trade came less than two months after he said he was “fully committed” to the Senators and questions about his contract were becoming a “distraction,” Reuters reported.

The Panthers’ pedigree of back-to-back Stanley Cups and a chance to play with older brother Matthew — who’d requested a trade from the Calgary Flames in 2022 — were big draws for Tkachuk, according to NHL.com

Counting Florida-born defenceman Quinn Hughes, the number of departing players from the U.S. squad that defeated Canada in the February gold medal Olympic final rises to three.

The Vancouver Canucks traded the two-time All-Star to the Minnesota Wild on Dec. 12, 2025, after he indicated months earlier that he wouldn’t renew his contract, due to expire in 2027, TSN reported.

Michael Naraine, associate professor of sport management at Brock University, said NHL players may be drawn to certain U.S. clubs — the Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Vegas Golden Knights, or Dallas Stars, for example — for a “multitude” of reasons unrelated to the trade war.

“Would we be talking about this if not for the trade war? Probably not, but I think the trade war has certainly elevated the star players wanting out and not just wanting out, but wanting out to specific destinations,” he told National Post.

Part of it is the “glamour” of their preferred destination.

He said NHLers, like their NBA brethren, operate in an “isomorphic” or “monkey see, monkey do” way, in that when they see a friend or former teammate find success with a club, they’ll want to join them.

At the same time, for NHL players, moving to an American market affords them a degree of anonymity they might not find under the intense media and fan scrutiny in Canada.

“If Brady (Tkachuk) walks down Elgin Street in Ottawa, everyone’s gonna know who he is,” Naraine said. “Brady Tkachuk could walk down the streets of Florida and no one is going to know who the heck he is.”

Taxes are clearly a factor, with multiple states charging an income tax rate of zero per cent, he noted, which makes states like New York or Illinois, Democratic states with higher taxes, a less appealing destination.

On the subject of taxes, Naraine said many players are “spooked” by Toronto Maple Leafs’ John Tavares’ court battle with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Tavares argues that the millions of dollars he received for signing with the team were legitimate signing bonuses designed to entice him to come to Canada and therefore deserve special tax treatment. The CRA counters that they were really just salary dressed up as bonuses, meaning the player would owe millions more in taxes.

Should the CRA win and limit teams’ ability to offer those bonuses, Naraine expects smaller-market Canadian teams like Ottawa, Vancouver and Winnipeg will “really struggle.”

While that may not be the case for Hellebuyck, Naraine said the Tavares situation could prompt more agents to advise their clients that “maybe now’s the time to strike while the iron’s hot and get out, make things even keel, get to a place where you feel more comfortable.”

Naraine also posited that what’s happening with American NHL players is akin to a shift that took place in the NBA following the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Bonds were forged as the best U.S. players came together to dominate on their way to a gold medal, and two years later LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh reunited to form one of the NBA’s first super teams. Naraine thinks similar friendships were formed in the U.S. Olympic men’s team locker room.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if like three or four of these guys in a couple of years go, ‘look, let’s all go to Seattle, make bank, and live it up and just make a powerhouse squad’ or ‘let’s all go to L.A.’ or ‘let’s all go to Dallas,’” he said.

• Maple Leafs centre John Tavares tells court why he chose Toronto in tax battle over $77M deal
• Maple Leafs use tax cap on bonuses to 'entice' players to Toronto, ex-NHL star Patrick Marleau tells court

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This is an excerpt from Ash and Honor: The Untold 368 Minutes of 9/11, by American author Jeffrey Robinson. The book tells the story of the official response to 9/11 by North American authorities. This excerpt, drawn from multiple chapters, focuses on senior Canadian officials.

Jean Chrétien, the 67-year-old Canadian prime minister who’d led his Liberal Party to a parliamentary victory in 1993, lived at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, Canada’s equivalent of the White House. Built in 1866, the 35-room mansion was set on four acres in the fashionable New Edinburgh neighborhood, overlooking the Ottawa River.

With Parliament in recess, and all of his ministers out of town, he was working from home that morning.

Having suffered Bell’s palsy at the age of 12, making the left side of his face weaker than the right side, Chrétien spoke in a very distinct lopsided way out of the left side of his mouth, with a heavy accent in both French and English. It gave him a quality of being authentic, a tough, straightforward yet self-deprecating man who didn’t put on the airs of the intellectual lawyer and avid reader that he actually was.

He was also a man with deep political instincts. For example, he dealt with President Clinton by playing golf. And he dealt with President Bush by talking about baseball.

Coming downstairs from the residence just before 8:30 a.m., he walked into the ground-floor living room to greet the new premier of Saskatchewan, Lorne Calvert. They’d never met and were scheduled to talk about farm aid. But after the usual pleasantries, their meeting was cut short by an aide coming into the room to tell Chrétien that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Like so many people that morning, Chrétien thought, it must have been a small plane flown by a pilot who didn’t know what he was doing.

Then the second plane hit.

Calvert made his exit and Chrétien went to his ground-floor office to assess the situation. He and his aides sat and watched CNN, until he decided he was going to phone George Bush to express Canada’s sympathy and support.

His aides talked him out of it.

They convinced Chrétien there would be time for that tomorrow.

Right now, they said, the president is busy. Your call will only get in the way.

Chrétien agreed and, instead, tried to reach the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci. He’d been governor of Massachusetts when George Bush sent him to Ottawa. But that morning, Cellucci was on a plane heading back to Ottawa from Winnipeg.

The prime minister eventually got the deputy chief of mission on the phone and assured him that Canada was prepared to do whatever needed to be done.

The American diplomat was grateful.

When they hung up, Chrétien admitted that while the offer stood, there actually wasn’t much Canada could do.

Little did he know.

Reaching his cabinet wasn’t easy. They were spread out across the country, with some outside the country, in an era when email and smartphones weren’t plentiful.

Chrétien and his staff had mobile phones, clumsy early versions that, they often complained, didn’t work very well. So for the rest of the morning they stayed where they were, contacting the few people they could while watching on television as events unfolded in the States.

The one constant interruption was his Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) security detail. They kept trying to convince Chrétien to leave the residence and go to a safer place.

Chrétien refused.

They tried again a little while later.

He refused a second time, and then a third.

The Mounties pressed him whenever they could, genuinely concerned that he might not be safe. After all, no one knew if the terrorists were heading north of the border.

Or, worse, if they were already in Canada.

What Chrétien didn’t mention to his security detail, or anyone else at the time, was that he worried about the same thing.

One terrorist in particular concerned him greatly.

Now he began phoning everyone he could think of to ask if anyone knew about any possible ties between the terrorists in New York and the one that worried him, Ahmed Ressam.

If it turned out that Ressam had somehow been involved, this would not just be Jean Chrétien’s worst nightmare, it could be Canada’s as well.

—–

David Collenette, Canada’s minister of transport, got up that morning at five o’clock to fly with two members of his staff from Toronto to Montreal, where he was giving the welcome address to a conference held by Airports Council International.

This was the international trade group for all the world’s airport managers, which meant that everybody who was anybody in the airport business — more than 2,000 people from all over the world — would be there.

That included the airport managers from Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, Gander, Goose Bay, Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton, Charlottetown, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, and smaller airports all over Canada. All of whom would soon be needed home. Most of whom would not be able to get there.

Collenette was introduced to the crowd in the Palais de Congrès just after 8:30 and had only spoken for six minutes before he became aware of murmuring at the back of the auditorium.

He thought, am I that bad a speaker or are these guys just rude?

The best thing, he knew from experience, was to ignore them.

But the murmuring increased and began to spread throughout the audience. That’s when one of his officials came up to him, on stage — which visibly ticked him off — and put a note in front of him with eight words written in large caps: WIND UP YOUR SPEECH THERE’S BEEN A TRAGEDY.

Not knowing anything more than that, he excused himself and quickly left the stage.

One of the organizers replaced him at the microphone to announce they were suspending proceedings because there’d been an aviation incident.

Backstage, Collenette was met by his two aides, who tried to fill him in on what they knew, plus a press scrum demanding comments about what had happened in New York.

After nearly 18 years in Parliament, and having served three of those years as defense minister before coming to this post, he had considerable experience with press scrums. He was known, and appreciated by the media, as someone who would always speak his mind. This morning, though, he’d been caught off guard and the best he could come up with was, a small plane has crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. That’s all I know.

He did not say what he suspected. This sounded to him like a terrorist incident.

His aides tried to get him out of the building and into a car for the airport. They rushed him down an escalator. Reporters followed on his heels.

One of his aides, on the phone with their office in Ottawa, informed him there was a second plane and that the South Tower had been hit.

Worried that they might not be able to fly back, Collenette announced, we’ll drive.

The 125-mile trip would take over two hours.

He and his aides hurried into one of his department’s black vans. He told the driver, we’ve got to get back to Ottawa right away.

But the driver didn’t speak English.

The driver explained in French, I don’t know how to get to Ottawa.

Collenette wrote out the directions for him.

On the way, his deputy minister, Margaret Bloodworth, called to say that all U.S. airspace had been shut down. That the secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta, had closed America’s skies.

But no one had bothered to tell the Canadians.

Long before Collenette’s car reached the Ontario border, he’d checked with his department’s lawyer and was told that he had the authority to do what he wanted to do, which was to close Canada’s skies.

So he pushed that button and now air traffic in both countries was turned off.

For Collenette, that was the easiest part of the trip home.

Much tougher was figuring out, what the hell are we going to do with all the planes that can’t land in the States and are being dumped into Canada?

He didn’t know it then, but the final total would be 239 flights diverted to 17 Canadian airports with an estimated 33,000 displaced and sometimes very unhappy passengers.

What he did know was that, however many planes and passengers were on their way, they’d have to land somewhere. But all the airport managers Collenette needed to help make this happen were stuck inside the Palais de Congrès in Montreal and could be for days.

Sitting in the rear seat of that van, with a driver who didn’t know the way to Ottawa, David Collenette realized he didn’t have much time to figure this out.

—–

John Manley, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, was returning from a conference, flying with a small staff from Frankfurt, Germany, to Ottawa in the upstairs first-class cabin of an Air Canada 747.

Happy to be coming home, he was reading a book when one of the flight attendants approached him and asked that he follow her into the rear galley. Once they were out of earshot of the other passengers, she told him what little she knew about planes hitting the World Trade Center.

Manley asked if he could speak to the pilot. She escorted him to the flight deck, where, given a headset, he listened to a live broadcast by Britain’s BBC World Service Radio.

The more he listened, the more queasy he became.

Sitting there, hearing what was happening in the United States, the name that kept running through his mind was Ahmed Ressam.

—-

Richard Clarke had been warning of an al-Qaeda attack for years.

He told President Clinton in December 1998 that al-Qaeda was preparing several attacks against America, which included hijacking aircraft. He claimed the attacks were being orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

He predicted that the attacks would happen around the millennium.

The Central Intelligence Agency concurred, separately and in unison, that bin Laden was turning his attention to the United States.

They were right.

With the millennium in mind, an attack was planned against Los Angeles International Airport. Mistakenly believing that the millennium began on January 1, 2000 — in fact, the actual date was one year later — an Algerian-born, al-Qaeda-trained militant set in motion a plan to blow up the airport on New Year’s Eve 1999.

He came to be known as the Millennium Bomber.

Arriving in Montreal in 1994 with a counterfeit French passport, he sought political asylum, was awarded the right to remain in Canada, committed benefit fraud, got thrown out, and came back and stayed illegally, committing petty crimes unhindered to finance himself while he plotted the attack. He flew to Vancouver, loaded a rental car with explosives, and, on December 14, 1999, took the ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, to Port Angeles, Washington.

He was stopped there by a keenly alert U.S. customs inspector, Diana Dean, who didn’t like the fact that the man seemed unusually nervous. He avoided eye contact with her, and when she asked what he was doing there and where he was going, his answers were evasive and inconsistent.

She ordered him into secondary inspection and found his trunk packed with explosives. And when he tried to escape, he was stopped.

In May 2001, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bomb a U.S. airport, possession of explosives, and membership in al-Qaeda.

After agreeing to cooperate with the government, he received a sentence of 22 years. When his cooperation suddenly stopped, that was increased to 37 years.

Dean was the hero who foiled the plot. But, unbeknownst to her, such an attack had been on the CIA’s radar for years.

Concerned about the idea that al-Qaeda was planning a series of attacks against U.S. targets, the agency’s Counterterrorism Center had frequently sent out alerts calling for heightened vigilance.

Based on those warnings, former agency managers maintain that several attacks had been thwarted. But one constant concern — reinforced by what they came to know about the Millennium Bomber — was just how long and undefended the U.S.–Canada border was.

The Millennium Bomber’s name was Ahmed Ressam.

—-

At 24 Sussex Drive, Jean Chrétien’s security detail, made up of specially trained officers from the RCMP, wanted to move him to a secure secret location.

Chrétien refused.

They insisted.

He refused again.

Eventually, he spoke with the head of the RCMP, Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

For the man widely known simply as Zac, this was an extremely busy time, shifting the RCMP from a national policing agency to becoming the primary source of national security.

It was Zac who raised the national threat posture and oversaw RCMP headquarters’ coordination with provincial divisions and other police forces, in addition to establishing an intelligence liaison with the FBI, the CIA, and other U.S. law enforcement.

At the same time, he strengthened the Mounties’ presence at Parliament Hill, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, and the seven U.S. consulates spread out across the country. He helped to secure nuclear facilities, military bases, key bridges, tunnels, and the nation’s energy infrastructure.

Chrétien told him the Mounties wanted him to leave the residence.

Zac agreed it would be prudent.

Chrétien restated that he would not be moving.

After a while, he asked Zac if he’d found any connection between the 9/11 hijackers and Ahmed Ressam.

Zac eventually came back to the PM to say no.

Chrétien spoke with John Manley as soon as he’d made his way home from Europe. What about Ahmed Ressam?

Manley said he couldn’t find a 9/11 connection.

He spoke with his justice minister, Anne McLellan.

What about Ressam?

Nothing.

He spoke with his solicitor general, Lawrence MacAulay.

What about Ressam?

Nothing.

One of the most experienced politicians in the world, Jean Chrétien didn’t have to be reminded that if a connection was found, the public response would be ugly.

Especially the response that would be coming from the Americans.

What’s more, even his staunchest denials of a connection would trigger calls of cover-ups.

Many people around Chrétien quickly rallied to his side.

In a classified cable to him from an overseas ambassador, he was warned that both the Canadian and American press would use the Ressam case to create a Canadian connection to 9/11, and that he had to get out in front of it.

The cable advised: Now is the time to put out quick, decisive messages to key U.S. media on the extensive network of cooperation that exists between Canadian and U.S. security, immigration, and customs authorities and the ways in which those already strong ties have been further reinforced since Ressam.

Even Chrétien’s Privy Council secretly warned that he needed to take control of the news cycles that were associating Canada with Ressam and the 9/11 hijackers. Not just in the States but also in Canada.

Chrétien knew that was necessary, but almost as soon as the second plane hit the South Tower, he also knew there would be politicians in the States, and the media in both nations, who would rush to link Canada, Ressam, and 9/11, no matter what the truth.

Representative Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of a House immigration subcommittee, labeled Canada a Club Med for terrorists.

Janet Napolitano, who would later serve as President Obama’s secretary of homeland security and was at the time U.S. attorney for the district of Arizona, implied that some terrorists were known to have entered the U.S. from Canada.

However, when she was specifically pressed about the 9/11 hijackers, she backed down, admitting that her previous comment was not correct.

But the worst of them was Senator John McCain, who would not back down.

In one of the greatest fabrications of 9/11 — of which there were all too many — he stated, categorically, that some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada.

Leading the charge against McCain from Canada was none other than Giuliano Zaccardelli, who quickly became the public face of Canadian security cooperation with the United States. He openly, loudly, and categorically rejected any and all claims that some of the hijackers had entered the U.S. from Canada.

Adding insult to injury, when Chrétien finally got George Bush on the phone to express his condolences and offer any help Canada could give him, Bush didn’t bother to say thank you for taking in all those diverted planes and passengers.

—-

Sitting in the back seat of the van racing back to Ottawa, David Collenette knew that if a jet crashed into the tallest building in New York, it was not an accident. That if a pilot was in trouble, he could either get back to an airport or ditch in the water surrounding the island of Manhattan. So for the next two hours, most of it on Highway 417, he was on his phone, understanding that he needed to make decisions that might put one part of his country in potential danger in order to protect the other part.

It was his deputy, Margaret Bloodworth, who announced the news to him that the FAA had halted all flight operations in the States. That they’d ordered all aircraft out of the sky.

He was angry.

That the Americans did this without consulting the Canadians, he couldn’t believe the disrespect.

That was a problem.

Bloodworth now suggested that all aircraft in Canadian airspace should also be ordered to land.

This had never been done before. It was never even an option in any emergency planning scenario. No one at Transport Canada knew how to manage this.

He dialed Chrétien to consult with him before he ordered the Canadian skies shut.

Chrétien told him that he didn’t need to be consulted; what Collenette was doing was absolutely right.

Collenette thought, maybe the Americans should have consulted with us before shutting everything down.

As far as he knew, the Americans had never done this before.

What’s more, he told himself, they almost certainly had no idea how to manage it. After all, it’s one thing to clear the skies of nearly 5,000 planes. It’s another thing to know where to land them. Especially planes coming across the Atlantic bound for U.S. cities.

He and Bloodworth were in agreement that in closing U.S. airspace, the FAA clearly hadn’t stopped to think what that meant to Canada.

Or to all those planes crossing the North Atlantic.

Or to all those passengers in those planes whose lives were going to be disrupted.

Or to the many airports in Canada that would have to figure out what to do with all these people.

That’s when he heard that a third hijacked plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

No one could say how many planes had been, or were about to be, hijacked. Nobody could say when the attacks might end.

The Americans ordered pilots in hundreds of planes over the North Atlantic, if they had the fuel, to turn around and go back to Europe.

But that still left something like 260 planes that didn’t have the fuel, or were already close to North American landfall.

They had to land somewhere. And with U.S. airspace closed — and the American authorities warning that any plane violating U.S. airspace could be shot down — Collenette realized they needed to land in Canada.

Compounding his worries, Collenette had no idea if any of those planes landing in Canada had been hijacked, or could be hijacked. He had no idea who was on any of those planes. He had no idea where a potential attack might be coming from.

He and Bloodworth decided they had to assume there were problems in at least some of the planes coming to Canada.

—–

Throughout his drive back to Ottawa, David Collenette coordinated with his deputy Margaret Bloodworth.

They decided that the obvious spots for planes coming from Europe were East Coast airports, and that those planes needed to be grounded as quickly as possible. They also needed to keep planes away from Canada’s most populated areas, not just Montreal and Toronto but also the big cities of central Canada.

They agreed that after attacks in New York and Washington, other cities would be likely. That the terrorists wouldn’t go back to New York, they’d target other population centers, which could include Toronto and Montreal. Because they’d attacked Washington, it couldn’t be ruled out that they might target Ottawa.

Collenette worried that, even if Toronto and Montreal weren’t their targets, if a plane coming across the Atlantic and into Canadian airspace was carrying hijackers and they could somehow reach Toronto, it wasn’t very far in a large airliner from there to Rochester or Buffalo. Same for Montreal. From there, hijackers could get to Boston.

They decided they needed to put planes down as far away as they could and settled on Gander, St. John’s, Stephenville, and Goose Bay. Planes could also be brought into Halifax because the airport was far enough away from the city center.

But with that plan came a giant headache. There wasn’t much room at those smaller airports to park wide-bodied planes, and the runways would quickly turn into giant parking lots.

They calculated that 226 wide-bodied jets needed to land, and as big a landmass as Canada was, it just didn’t have enough runway and taxi room for all those planes.

But those were the cards they’d been dealt by the Americans, and those were the cards they had to play.

They had to figure out how to get enough customs and immigration officers to those airports, and maybe even medical people, because 33,000 unexpected guests were landing in Canada.

And they needed to be treated as guests. Even if nobody knew who those people actually were.

Collenette made the decision that once a plane landed in Canada, the passengers could not be let off. At least, not until they were properly screened. Then they’d have to leave their checked baggage on the plane. Once they were allowed off, if they were allowed off, they would be permitted to take one carry-on item.

After all, they didn’t know whether terrorists and hijackers were flying in. Collenette and Bloodworth had to believe that some people arriving on those planes might be.

And they had to be prepared for the real possibility that some of them were.

—-

By the time Dave Collenette made it back to his office in Ottawa, Margaret Bloodworth had fully manned the SitCen — Situation Center — and it was busier than he’d ever seen it.

The ministry’s hub for managing emergencies and coordinating with airports, air traffic control centers, and other federal agencies during a transportation crisis was a windowless, secure room on the 14th floor of the ministry’s office block. On a normal day, there might be seven people manning the room.

Now 20, 30, sometimes 40 were in there.

The room consisted of six desks, each with multiple computer screens. At the back was the aviation desk, next to that the Marine desk, and then the land desk. In the middle of the room was the SitCen director’s desk. In front of him was the flight communications desk and the security communications desks.

Facing them, on the front wall, were large screens showing flight tracking, other maps, real-time data, and news feeds.

Because there were so many people coming in and out, he and Bloodworth created a separate path system to control who could be there.

And it was still overcrowded.

It was the SitCen that coordinated airspace closures, worked on where diverted planes would be landed, and coordinated with agencies that were now vital for all this to happen, such as the RCMP, NAV CANADA, and other federal ministries.

It was also, somewhere in the SitCen, where someone came up with a name for the diversion of those planes and the handling of those passengers.

They called it Operation Yellow Ribbon.

—–

Jean Chrétien said he wanted to go to Parliament and address the Canadian people.

His staff agreed that would be a good idea and said they would work on a statement right away.

Chrétien said no, don’t worry, I know what I want to say.

He was not going to minimize what was happening in the States, but he felt his immediate role was to reassure Canadians. He had to be careful not to create any panic. That meant he wouldn’t say too much. That meant he would be measured and just right.

He went over it with his staff in the car to Parliament Hill.

When they got there, he was surprised to find it roped off.

A car with a package in the front seat was illegally parked and the police were going to blow it up.

Chrétien looked at it from far away and thought about the consequences of blowing it up — talk about sending a panic signal to the country — and felt intuitively that someone had made a mistake about parking.

The police insisted they needed to be prudent.

Chrétien said, leave it alone.

It turned out that he was right. A tourist had parked in the wrong place and the package in the front seat was a souvenir of Ottawa.

In his brief comments, Chrétien expressed condolences and sorrow; said that Canada stood with the United States; said that his government was working with communities to accommodate travelers stranded in Canada with food, shelter, and care; offered his full cooperation with America; and added that no one yet knew the identities of the attackers.

That last part wasn’t true. But there was so much uncertainty about what was happening in the States that even his staunchest political opponents let that one slide.

And while his political allies felt he’d gotten it just right, especially in his not wanting to spread any fears and worries, those opponents would say that his remarks were too brief and not substantial enough.

In the weeks to come, they were not about to give him a pass.

Especially if it involved Ahmed Ressam.

Media coverage would zero in on Ressam, using that to challenge Chrétien on immigration and refugee policies, and on national security.

How did Ressam get into the country with a false passport? How did he maintain his refugee status after getting arrested so many times for petty crimes? How did he get back into Canada after being thrown out? What about his associates who were still in Canada? What did Canadian intelligence and the Mounties and the local police in Montreal know, and when did they know it? What did they know now about other extremist networks in Canada? How vulnerable was Canada to foreign terror cells?

Ressam was in jail on 9/11 and had been for nearly two years.

But what about his association with any of the terrorists who’d blown up the United States?

Who else was still in Canada waiting to do the next 9/11?

—–

Yellow Ribbon took off slowly.

David Collenette and Margaret Bloodworth had agreed that all the incoming planes would be sent to the most remote airports, landing them as quickly as possible and keeping them far away from Canada’s most populated areas, such as Montreal and Toronto, and the capital, Ottawa.

After all, if hijackers on planes coming to Canada assumed they’d lost their primary target in the United States, what was stopping them from finding a new target in Canada?

But landing all these diverted planes in remote airports was a double-edged sword.

The more remote the airport, the fewer people there to handle this influx of passengers. There weren’t enough customs agents to process 33,000 passengers spread out over eastern and northern Canada. Nor were there anywhere near enough immigration agents.

Without those people in place, they couldn’t let passengers off the planes.

Then, what about food? And personal items like medicines?

And clothes? If passengers couldn’t get their luggage, and they were stuck for several days, what were they going to do?

And what about accommodations? There weren’t enough hotels.

They all needed someplace to sleep. They needed cots and blankets. Many needed prescription drugs. Babies needed diapers and formula. They all needed food. And they would all want to use computers and cellphones to get in touch with loved ones.

Every airport would also eventually need enough fuel to get all those planes back in the air again and on their way home.

Then, what were these people stranded at these remote airports supposed to do all day? They weren’t prisoners. They needed to be treated like guests. Could the local authorities provide tours and entertainment and things to keep these people from going stir-crazy?

This was a nightmare in the making.

But the SitCen, together with the entirety of Transport Canada, Canadian Forces, Canada Customs, Canada Immigration, the RCMP, local law enforcement and emergency services, the prime minister’s office and his cabinet, hundreds of local airport officials, and literally hundreds of local community authorities all pulled together, working overtime to provide everything anyone imagined the passengers would need.

It all came down to this: How do you care for and feed 33,000 people from 238 planes when you don’t have enough resources already in place and those people don’t want to be where they are?

Operation Yellow Ribbon took off slowly, but once it began, it flew.

—-

Canadians called what they did that day Operation Yellow Ribbon, evoking a welcoming sense of safety, care, and compassion.

Perhaps understandably, in Ottawa, both Jean Chrétien and David Collenette thought that at some point George Bush might publicly say thank you for stepping up, for taking in all those planes and caring for all those passengers.

It never happened.

That bothered Collenette.

The way he put it, when the world came calling on Canada, we opened our doors.

From Ash and Honor: The Untold 368 Minutes of 9/11 by Jeffrey Robinson. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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OTTAWA – The economic impact from U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest series of presidential proclamations targeting trade with Canada will not have significant impact on the Canadian economy, according to economists.

“I think the overall effect might be limited,” said Trevor Tombe, economist and professor at the University of Calgary. “Adjusting what products are covered by the tariffs isn’t something that should be, in my view, interpreted as escalation.”

On Tuesday evening, Trump announced import bans on certain Canadian goods , including some alcoholic beverages, from being imported to the United States.

The orders from Trump also ban some dairy products and motorcycles, while adding more products to the list of Canadian exports subject to 50 per cent tariffs that came into effect last month.

Trump also removed 50 per cent tariffs from several products, including toilet paper, cement, bedsheets and salt. The bans will come into effect at the end of this month, and the modification of tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 will take effect on Sept. 15.

“They realized they had hit things that they shouldn’t have, and so they took about $1.7 billion dollars off their list, added different products, almost as a one-for-one swap,” said William Pellerin, international trade partner at McMillan LLP, noting that the newly added items on the tariff list amount to about $1.8 billion.

Pellerin, like Tombe, said Trump’s latest announcement should not be interpreted as a major escalation in the trade conflict between Canada and the U.S.

However, one industry that is set to be hit the hardest is the Canadian alcohol industry, with outright bans on Canadian alcohol products.

Tombe said the ban will impact 90 per cent of Canadian alcohol exports to the U.S., adding that roughly 13 per cent of Canadian alcohol production is exported to our southern neighbour.

It is the first time Trump has used import bans, which Capital Economics economist Stephen Brown interprets as bad news for the possibility of resolving the trade dispute and renewing the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).

“Nonetheless, Trump’s willingness to impose an import ban is further evidence, if it were needed, that these latest measures are about inflicting economic pain rather than raising revenue,” said Brown, in a note to clients.

“That calls into question our assumption that the sides will eventually resolve their broader differences around the USMCA, leaving the agreement in limbo and at risk of breaking down entirely,” he added.

Brown estimates the bans will impact just 0.25 per cent of Canadian exports to the U.S.

Pellerin said the import ban sounds like tough language, but he noted that much of the products that are subject to the ban, were previously hit by the 50 per cent Section 338 tariffs.

“In many cases, that 50 percent tariff effectively worked as an import ban already, right?” he said.

Tombe said the U.S. action is mimicking the alcohol bans carried out by provincial liquor boards in Canada.

Pellerin said while the macroeconomic impact might be limited, new products added to the Section 338 list of tariffs could be devastating for some companies.

“That’s catastrophic,” he said. “That business will see its sales potentially go to zero in the United States,”

Pellerin said that will be mean layoffs.

Tombe said trade uncertainty with the U.S. will continue to have a lasting negative impact on the Canadian economy.

“We’re about two per cent smaller as an economy than what was projected to be at this point,” he said. “That’s because of the uncertainty.”

Tombe said that uncertainty contributes to a drag on investment and hiring decisions.

The federal government has promised $7.5 billion in aid to help businesses and workers deal with the impacts of tariffs.

Brown said the 50 per-cent tariffs imposed by the U.S. will lead to a 0.4 per-cent hit to Canada’s GDP, with the federal government’s fiscal cushion only partially offsetting the drop in economic activity.

“While this should be partly offset by the Canadian government’s increased fiscal support for the affected firms and workers, there would also likely be a negative effect from delayed investment and hiring among other firms worried about the prospect of future U.S. tariffs,” he said, in a note. “As a result, Canadian GDP is likely to stagnate or even contract in the fourth quarter if the tariffs remain in place. ”

National Post

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When Monica Spoletini tells people she was born on Sept. 11, 2001, “Nine times out of 10 I get a look and … nine times out of 10 the second question is ‘on the year? On 2001?’

“And I just smile and (say) yep,” she says.

2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the hijacked airplane strikes on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the crash of a fourth plane in Pennsylvania. All told, the attacks claimed the lives of 2,977 people , including 24 Canadians .

On that same day, as many as 13,238 people were born in the United States. It’s not known exactly how many Canadians also took their first breath Sept. 11, 2011, but Statistics Canada says average daily births in September in that period numbered 1,067 .

Among those Canadians were Monica and her twin brother, born in Chestermere, Alta. Both will turn 25 on Sept. 11. Spoletini now works as a hairdresser in Edmonton, where her family moved when she was 12. (Her brother declined an interview.)

Neither twin has yet visited the 9/11 memorial in New York City; however, they were acquainted with the events of 9/11 from a young age, because their father read them articles about it, says Monica Spoletini.

“(He) wanted to educate us a little bit (about) why everyone knows our birthday so much and why it’s so recognized,” Spoletini says.

One of her most vivid memories is of an old article that her parents framed on the wall, featuring her family. “I would say maybe (we were) eight or nine years old, and we could really understand why” it was so significant.

Christopher Rutkowski was born in Oshawa, Ont. on Sept. 11, 2001.

He says some of his friends believe he is a reincarnated 9/11 victim. “I was born about six hours before the first plane hit. And I have a birthmark on the right side of my face.” His friends theorize that he was initially a financier working in the towers. “I didn’t make it (out alive) — and then, ‘real Christopher’ was born.”

Rutkowski has visited the memorial at the site of the World Trade Centre three times, the most recent visit in August.

“I never realized the gravity of my birthday until the first time my dad took me to New York when I was 10 years old,” he says. He also visited on his 15th birthday.

With his father, he went to the Ground Zero museum, which he recalls displayed “steel columns and pillars and escalators (from the site)… and people’s stories and phone recordings.”

Rutkowski, who calls himself a “big reader,” says he has spent years expanding his home library dedicated to 9/11 to properly commemorate the event.

The Spoletini twins, who had planned to visit the site some years ago, were delayed when COVID struck. Now that they lead independent lives, coordination is a bit of challenge, Monica Spoletini admits, adding that “it definitely is something that the two of us want to do together.”

The challenge of being born on 9/11 has been difficult for some.

For instance, “My family pretends it isn’t a thing. My birthday, I mean,” one person wrote on Reddit. “I was born in NYC, actually between the time the first and second towers were hit. My parents were pretty scarred (sic) by it so we just pretend I don’t have a birthday.”

Another posted: “My best friend was born on the date. She gets a lot of sympathy aww’s and, “Oh, honey” comments. She does joke that our high school has an assembly for her birthday every year though so … ”

“My daughter was born on 9/11/2001 a few hours before the 1st plane hit. First few birthdays were rough for the family and we didn’t celebrate day of but by now we do. I think it makes her feel kind of special being born that day. But she shows respect and knows the significance of the tragedy,” wrote one mom.

For his part, Rutkowski believes in balancing both aspects of the date — taking joy at being born, yet honouring the victims of the tragedy: “It’s a double-edged sword in a sense.”

Spoletini feels the sadness too. But she also believes in a purpose: “I was raised religious, so normally… my parents would say: ‘there was a reason God brought you into the world on that day.’ I also believe in God, but I also do believe in the universe as well.

“I do think, you know, the universe or God, or whoever’s outside of us, brought us here on that day too. To… teach us.”

Both have major plans for their birthdays.

For the Spoletinis, it is the time for a family reunion, and, says Monica, “I’m planning … to realize that I’m actually 25 years old and that my brain is fully developed and that I’m grown up.”

Rutkowski, on his third visit to the site last month, stopped in at Fire Engine Company No. 65, which was among the first to respond to the disaster. Rutkowski met New York firefighters at the station during one of his earlier visits too.

He is also training to run a 5K obstacle course to honour the victims of 9/11 and demonstrate resilience: “(T)his will be my first year doing it.”

And he concludes: “If things are going bad or I’m having a bad day, you know, people have had a lot worse days or the bad doesn’t last forever or there’s always going to be some sort of good in something bad that happens.

“And so, it’s taught me to be patient and full of gratitude.”

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Andri Ruel, 19, a recent graduate of Garneau Catholic Secondary School in Ottawa, wasn’t impressed with his history classes in high school. “I really, really hated anything to do with Canada because it was just so boring. It was constantly the same thing over and over again,” he says.

“We had the War of 1812 and that’s pretty much the interesting part of our history, according to me, at least.”

Sophie Peterson, 15, now in Grade 10 in that city’s Canterbury High School, agrees: “It’s interesting the first year, and then it’s sort of the same stuff again and again, because Canada was really only made in one way.”

Catherine Gauthier, 17, poised to study health sciences at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., liked high school history, but says in large part that was because of the teacher. “I think I just got lucky, if I’m being honest,” she says.

Learning Canadian history, for many students, isn’t their cup of maple syrup. And provincial governments aren’t forcing them to study very much of it. In some places, students are required to take only one history course in high school.

That worries Paul Bennett, director and lead researcher at the Halifax-based Schoolhouse Institute and a senior fellow on education policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank. “History is disappearing under our feet in schools across Canada, particularly in high schools,” he said in a recent interview.

“We have a U.S. president that’s threatening to make us the 51st state,” yet Canadian students aren’t getting an introduction to their past that fully explains the seriousness of that threat, he says.

In an article in Policy Options, Bennett called for a “complete curriculum reset.” It’s “fair to assume (students) have little or no knowledge of critical events of U.S. pressure on Canada, such as the American invasion of Quebec in 1775, the War of 1812, the 1911 election reciprocity debate, the nuclear warheads controversy of the 1960s or American pressure to join the Iraq war in 2003,” he wrote.

Many educators agree schools should devote more time to teaching history. But there is disagreement on how much — and whose version of — history to teach; which methods — or mix of methods — is best; and which skills students should learn through their history courses.

A debate with new momentum

The issue has a history of its own. During the era of the Quebec referendums and Meech Lake negotiations, historians such as Jack Granatstein and Bob Davis argued for more compulsory history classes.

One camp wished to see Canadian history teaching become more diverse and multicultural, focusing more on the lives of workers, immigrants, First Nations and minorities; another argued to continue or boost nationalist, Eurocentric traditions, including the study of military campaigns, elections, wars and global relations.

The Donald Trump era abruptly reignited the debate. An Ipsos poll for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in 2025, shortly after the U.S. president’s annexation threats began, found more support among younger Canadians than other age groups for the notion — under certain conditions — of joining the United States.

“An alarming proportion of those … didn’t see the threat posed by Trump and Manifest Destiny . They had no idea what Manifest Destiny is, so how can you confront it?” Bennett says.

What, then, do Canadian teens know of their history? National Post asked a half-dozen high school students or recent grads two questions: “Who was the first prime minister of Canada?” and “What happened in Halifax in 1917?”

One gave a lightning-fast response on the prime minister: “John A. Macdonald.” Another said: “Holy, I should know this.”

Among the other four, two got it right when hints were given. Two more confessed to learning about the first prime minister but couldn’t remember. “It’s been too long,” said one.

On the Halifax question, one student answered correctly that the 1917 explosion that levelled much of the city and killed up to 2,000 people involved “two boats crashing into each other and causing a major blast.”

Two more students provided correct answers, and two more were unsure.

Who’s teaching what?

Part of the challenge of teaching history in Canada is that the primary and secondary school history curriculum varies by province.

• In Ontario , students now must study history for three years. They learn pre-Confederation history in Grade 7, followed by post-Confederation to the First World War in Grade 8. After that, they cover all of the 20th and early 21st century in Grade 10.

• British Columbia requires students to take interdisciplinary social studies courses that feature history along with geography, law, economics and other subjects. In Grades 11 and 12, one social studies course is mandatory, but students pick from several options, such as Francophone History and Culture or Asian Studies.

• In Alberta , students take no dedicated history courses between Grades 7 and 12, as history is embedded in mandatory social studies. There are three history-focused high school electives in Alberta, but only one of them concentrates on Canada.

• In Manitoba , Grade 4 students are introduced to the history of the province as part of a broader social studies course. Canadian history is mandatory in Grades 5 and 6, while world history is studied in Grade 8. Students re-examine the entirety of Canadian history in Grade 11.

• In Saskatchewan , no history classes are offered in middle school, but mandatory social study classes from Grades 6 to 9 feature some history. In high school, students choose between social studies, Indigenous studies and Canadian history in Grades 10 and 12. They must take at least one.

• Quebec ’s curriculum features two mandatory Canadian history courses in Grades 9 and 10 (secondaire III and IV, according to Quebec specifications), which cover Canadian history from discovery to the modern day. In primary school, history is taught alongside geography and civics.

• Nova Scotia ‘s curriculum features four mandatory history courses in middle school and one more history-focused Canadian Studies course in high school.

• New Brunswick requires students to study just one history class between Grades 9 and 12, which can be either national or global in scope.

• The territories draw heavily from the Prairie and B.C. curriculums.

Then it gets political

The politics of history in the classroom can be sensitive, depending on where you are in the country.

Alberta is a recent example. Attempts to overhaul the social studies curriculum in 2018 and 2020 spurred anger. In the first instance, the NDP government of Rachel Notley was accused of ignoring key points of the province’s and Canada’s history. When the United Conservative Party government launched its own overhaul in 2020, critics accused the Conservatives of minimizing the role of Indigenous peoples, and of hiring curriculum workers with racist attitudes.

In a commentary in the Edmonton Journal in 2021, Christie Hurrell, a public education advocate and volunteer with Support Our Students Alberta, decried “the narrow perspective the draft takes,” writing “the mentions of Indigenous histories and world views are a token effort; there is no mention of francophone histories or perspectives; the LGTBQ+ community is absent; non-Abrahamic religions are omitted; and there is no discussion of human rights at all.”

Even when the province adjusted and unveiled its updated proposed K-6 curriculum ideas in 2024, some experts felt they were outdated.

At the time, Carla Peck, director of Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future — the first national study of social studies and history education since the 1960s — told the Edmonton Journal that some topics, such as taxes or the Supreme Court, weren’t right for the grade they had been assigned, and criticized teaching proposals she said relied too much on memorization of facts.

Today, the revised curriculum “ignores all current research on what it means to teach history,” Peck said in a recent interview.

Meanwhile in British Columbia, students study the history and contemporary issues of the First Nations. “I think that gave me a more comprehensive understanding because it was focused on one particular topic,” says Julia Bohnen from Vancouver, now a third-year psychology student at Huron University in Ontario.

“If you were to ask me about First People’s issues in B.C., I would say I have probably a better understanding of that than I have on any of the topics that I focused (on) for one month in a Grade 8 social class.”

Indigenous History was “a huge gaping hole in the curriculum” when he was kid, says Andrew Moore, a former history and social studies teacher from Ashbury College in Ottawa, and now CEO of the tutoring startup CustomAILab . Today, he says, “You have to teach the Indian Act. You have to teach residential schools, the ‘60s Scoop. So those are important topics that we teach now that give our students a better understanding of Indigenous history and a little bit of sympathy.”

On that point, however, Claire Masson, the Ottawa mother of Andri Ruel and his brother, Alexandre, 17, says that for her children, Indigenous history education did not always land well: “I know for them, they feel like it’s just the same narrative, the same story is repeated across different courses. And so, it makes you kind of … pull out because I think at first it’s interesting and then you’re like, OK, I heard this.” Andri says that while that what was done to Indigenous people was “horrendous,” the way it was taught to him was “repetitive.”

In the Maritimes, the emphasis on history can be quite different from what students study in the West.

“I grew up in Nova Scotia,” Peck says. “We learned all about the Halifax explosion. This was a very significant event in not only Nova Scotia, in the Maritimes … But in British Columbia, they don’t learn about that. Instead, they learn about the Komagata Maru incident, and we didn’t.”

And in Quebec, history has always been taught in the context of being a minority surrounded by anglophone traditions and culture.

Colin Coates, president of the Canadian Historical Association and a professor at York University, Glendon Campus, in Toronto, says that during his tenure at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in 1990s, “francophone students would (often) see the history of Canada through their understanding of their own identity” as an oppressed minority.

There is still a knowledge barrier between the French- and English-speaking parts of the country, he adds.

“Students in English-speaking Canada today have even less exposure to French Canada,” he says. And to this day “there are relatively few resources available for teaching about anglophone Canada in French.”

“History has always been vulnerable to manipulation by government,” notes Moore of CustomAILabs, adding that while this vulnerability is more prominent in autocratic one-party states, “democracies are not exempt from this.”

The classic example of how history teaching continues to change is, of course, the case of Sir John A. Macdonald.

“If you are an Aboriginal Canadian, you have excellent reasons to see John A. Macdonald as a villain,” says Moore. “The decisions that he made that affect you to this day were pretty negative, and that perspective is completely understandable.

“There were other things that John A. Macdonald did that had a really dramatic impact on the growth and development of our country. Would we have had a Canada without John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier hammering out an agreement between 1864 and 1867?” Moore asks. “Maybe. Who knows? … The fact is that they did it. And we do have a country … that was an achievement that many Canadians also have a right to celebrate.”

Facts exist independently of their interpretation, he says, and “we can argue about the meaning” provided that our argument is “based on a more or less agreed upon set of facts.”

Peck raises concern about the “content game”: “There’s always going to be somebody” who will stay upset about not including a particular date or event in the curriculum.

Challenges in the classroom

What counts as history teaching in our schools? And what constrains it?

Social studies, in many cases, are meant to include some Canadian history — at least in theory. In practice, Bennett says, even Ontario’s designated history classes are rarely fully dedicated to history.

James Pedrech, a former history teacher and a member of the London (Ontario) District Catholic School Board, confirms this: “Schools and teachers sometimes have to get creative in terms of when geography and history are taught.” They might lump both Grade 7 and 8 history curriculum into one year, and Grade 7 and 8 geography into the other, for instance.

Under the current system, the biggest constraint is time and attention, says Rachel Collishaw, president of the Social Studies Educators Network, and a history teacher with 20 years of classroom experience. “The fact is, you can’t cram everything in, and you’ve got 15-year-olds in front of you. There’s a reality of how much a 15-year-old is going to be excited to learn about history.”

World history also faces the time crunch. In Ontario, it is an elective half-credit course, available in Grades 11 and 12, but it still must cover 60 centuries of human history from the Stone Age to Silicon Valley, in just 75 minutes per week. “It’s going to be an overview. We’re not going to get into the detail of everything,” Collishaw says.

Peck raises another challenge: Often teachers must deliver subjects for which they have no professional training, including history.

“I think that we often do teachers and students a disservice when we say to somebody, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re a great science teacher, but I need you to teach social studies next year,’” she says. “The curriculum only gets us so far, and it’s what teachers do in the classroom that brings that curriculum to life.”

Yet another pressure on enthusiasm for history, Bennett suggests, is the steady rise of “skills mania.”

“Many of our students are taught by their parents — and I would say in our culture broadly — that high school should be vocational training,” says Moore. “That when you go to high school, you’re … plotting out, which lily pads do I have to jump on to be an engineer or get my business degree or, you know, to earn a livelihood. And that has produced some very smart people who are profoundly ignorant about really important things.”

Politicians have also pushed vocational training over humanities. Earlier this year, for instance, Ontario Premier Doug Ford told post-secondary students : “You have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs … You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”

The focus on “transferable skills,” while not inherently detrimental, has clouded judgment, Peck says. “Everybody loves a metric to be able to measure things, but, in my mind, we’ve lost the true purpose of education, which is about human flourishing.”

Mix-and-match history

Asked whether they know about The Seven Years’ War, the Expulsion of the Acadians or the War of 1812, all of which are part of the Ontario history Grade 7 and 8 curriculum, Ottawa sisters Sophie Peterson, 15, now in Grade 10, and Emma Peterson, 18, entering Toronto Metropolitan University, say they learned about some of these events either from elective global history courses or from disciplines entirely unrelated to history, such as music — not from mandatory history class.

Sometimes, kids are getting tidbits of history in interdisciplinary social studies courses that mix “historical bits and pieces” with other disciplines, says Collishaw. “It really gives students a strong grounding in what it means to be a human in the world.”

F or Sophie Peterson, music turned out to be one discipline that offered a window into the world of history. “I learned about most of the battles, the wars, the important things that would really affect a bunch of people through music history,” she says.

Pedrech taught a student who wanted to be an architect. “Can you learn about ancient history through studying Egyptian architecture versus Greek or Roman or Japanese architecture? You bet you can, right? And so, I think the same thing is true for music, math, science,” he says.

The mix-and-match approach doesn’t impress Bennett. “Historical snippets ripped out of context and captive of the present moment will not rescue reason or save liberal democracy.” He argues that history as a school subject should empower students “with knowledge about Canada, its history,” to help them “shape the future of that country.”

This goal is different from citizenship education more broadly, which he says “is motivated by engaging students in making them politically active, getting them engaged in causes, and showing that they’re socially conscious.”

Philosophical differences

All of which brings us to an ongoing philosophical battle about how history should be taught.

The “history as narrative” school says, generally, that students should be learning names, personalities and dates involved in major events, with explanation and description, depending on the student’s learning level.

The “thinking historically” school is less concerned with timelines and memorizing facts, and more focused on encouraging students to explore and analyze social or cultural context around historical events.

Under the “narrative” school, for instance, study of Canada’s role in the First World War might involve learning when and why Canada entered the war, what main actions it took or battles it engaged in, who was in charge and what the impacts and results of our involvement were.

The “thinking historically” approach might focus on a specific aspect of a Canadian soldier’s experience, say, life in the trenches. It might entail study of soldiers’ letters home, or the changing role of women. It might focus on the role played by Indigenous soldiers or Black regiments.

Exemplifying the debate is Bennett, on the one hand, who defines the role of history in the curriculum by its function of “knowledge-building,” covering a comprehensive grasp of historical events, causes, and consequences, embedded in a unified narrative that still permits divergent perspectives.

“If you don’t have a narrative, you can’t tell the story of your country,” he says. “I learned that from my colleagues in Quebec … their curriculum has a very, very clear Quebec nationhood focus.” The benefit of that, Bennett said, is that “an amazing percentage of Quebec students can tell their story … they have taught us a great deal about the power of narrative.”

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm for the narrative approach. Claire Masson, mother of Andri and Alexandre, says history was an ordeal for her when she went to school. “When I remember what a history class is, I felt like it was a focus on facts … Whatever it was, when did it happen? Who was it? It was a recitation of facts. Actually, I couldn’t do it,” she says.

Peck, in contrast to Bennett, exemplifies the “historical thinking” school. She agrees that “if young people know their past, they will be well equipped to act as citizens in their communities.” However, there has been a shift toward also “getting kids to do history: to work with artifacts, to work with sources, to help them understand … how do those things actually get created?”

For example, says Collishaw, “One of the projects that we did, that many teachers do across the country, is looking at the lives of Canadian soldiers who were involved in World War I and World War II.”

“The students are confronted with conflicting information,” she says, and must “think through the problem” to reconcile the evidence and make conclusions.

“Students are going to forget individual little facts,” says Pedrech. “We’re humans. We’re not going to remember every single thing we learn in history class. But if we leave (students) with that kind of (historical) thinking … I think that’s excellent. It means you now have a way to approach the world, a way to make sense of information in the past.”

Isabelle Miranda, 17, in Grade 12 at Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, cites a Grade 10 history class where students got to design money. They were given a choice of four historical time periods to depict. She picked the Liberation of the Netherlands and the first woman appointed to the Senate for her project. She says the exercise allowed her to explore events and people not covered by the curriculum in-depth.

Dealing with actual artifacts, like looking at old family photos, is supposed to spur students’ curiosity about the past and how we choose which stories we tell. “We want students to learn how to become the storytellers themselves by looking at photographs and diary entries and letters and newspaper articles and to try and figure out what happened in this event or what happened on this day,” Peck says.

But this teaching approach puts “the cart before the horse,” argues Bennett. “Knowing your history is a precondition for being able to meaningfully apply historical thinking, to truly understanding any problem and its origins.”

Still, there is merit in historical thinking, Moore says. “I think the most important thing that we teach students in our history classrooms is how to evaluate a claim … I think that that skill of learning primary, secondary source evaluation isn’t taught anywhere but in our history classrooms, but it is critical to responsible citizenship.”

A few years ago, Peck’s team conducted a national youth survey, the results of which, she says, are still being finalized for official publication. Based on analysis to date, she says “students who are engaged in what we call historical thinking activities in the classroom are learning history in deeper ways. They see the meaning behind history, they understand its importance and, importantly, they start to make connections between why learning the past matters for themselves today.”

“We did a unit on the American Revolution in my socials 9 class and we watched (the musical) Hamilton and had to analyze a song from Hamilton as a part of our course,” recalls Bohnen. “I think there is a lot of benefit in linking the past to the present and teachers and curricula that are able to do that, I feel, are particularly relevant and land better with students.”

Bohnen says that although she does not “maybe have the most robust understanding (of history)” as a science student, “if I had like weekly quizzes of dates and names, I can assure you that I would not today remember what I was quizzed on when I was 12 years old.”

“Do I remember more about the Boston Tea Party because we sang songs about it? Yes.”

Common national standards?

Does Canada need a consistent national standard for history education? According to Bennett, having at least one mandatory Canadian history course “in all its diversity and complexity reflecting a range of perspectives” across the country would be desirable.

That is unlikely to materialize on its own. Peck says it has been extremely difficult to develop a common curriculum framework for social studies and history.

“You’re not going to win that battle to try to have a unitary educational system. It’s just baked into the Constitution, particularly from the point of view of Quebec,” agrees Coates.

“Is that a failure? No, I don’t think so,” Peck says, adding that “learning history is also about figuring out what is relevant to folks in the context in which we’re teaching.”

“If we want to share an equal society with others who are not like us, it requires us to accept or embrace those differences … And you know what? Our students are a lot better at doing this than the adults that I know are,” Moore says.

Bennett agrees that the crux of Canadian identity has always been “unity out of diversity,” and that education should represent that, by allowing for regional differences in content and teaching methods.

But he says it is important to do two things: first, “restore basic knowledge-building,” which involves spending more time learning the facts; and second, rebuild a national narrative that is unifying, but also allows for diverse perspectives.

Ideally, students are “part of constructing that identity” says Pedrech. “I think that’s why it’s important to have many voices and stories in that narrative.”

“The challenge is that there is no single narrative,” says Moore. “The story of Canada looks different from the perspective of a woman who grew up in the 1950s or an Indigenous kid who was taken from their home in the 1960s.”

But he also does not rule out that it is possible to bridge this challenge. “You try, to some extent, to get a narrative of core facts that is fair to everyone. And then through their research projects, students look at those from multiple perspectives,” Moore says. “You allow students to do a much deeper dive on specific topics that interest them.”

If a student is asked to write an essay on whether the first Canadian prime minister was a hero or a villain, “they’re going to have to go into both sides, and they’re going to understand that he was complicated … there was a lot going on there. And that requires them to look at the evidence and come up with a conclusion,” says Moore.

What parents can do

One of Canada’s biggest history enthusiasts is Craig Baird. Postmedia reached him in Blomidon Provincial Park along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, where he was travelling the country with his dog, Berton, named after a famous Canadian popular historian.

Baird, active on social media with frequent historical snapshots about the country, is host of the almost eight-year-old Canadian History Ehx podcast . “Everything that I’ve learned with Canadian history, I’d say 98 per cent, I learned on my own,” he says. In his experience, the best way to express a grand national narrative is through “focusing in on a smaller story on an individual,” which is what his snapshots often do.

It’s not the only way, he notes. His mission, however, is “to reach the regular person out for a walk or out for a jog or on their morning commute … I keep things simple and I keep things relatable and personal.

“We need to tell more Canadian stories.”

Even simplified narratives in popular culture are an important part of learning history, Baird says. “We never make movies about our war heroes or anything like that,” he said, offering rare exceptions such as The Rocket (2005) or Passchendaele (2008)

“If we don’t tell our stories … then we will start having generations of people who are being raised on the stories that Americans tell,” he cautions.

An example: Tommy Prince was one of the most decorated First Nations soldiers in the Second World War and in Korea. “He was a member of the Devil’s Brigade, and he was the most decorated member of the Devil’s Brigade. The things that he did were astonishing. He was an incredible soldier.

“But when the Americans made (the movie) The Devil’s Brigade, they omitted him completely,” says Baird.

“It is up to parents nurture” interest in history, he says. “Instead of taking a trip to the lake, take a trip to the city and go to a museum or go to a historical site.” Even “talking to older people in a community” can be a big step forward.

Catherine Gauthier, at Queen’s University, knows what he means. “My mother was very invested in our education outside of school as well,” she recalls. “So, when other kids had PD days or snow days when I was in elementary school, we would have museum days. We would go to Ottawa and visit the history museum or the art museum, or sometimes we would go to the NAC (National Arts Centre) … You get one day off a month and you’re going to the museum.”

Moore turns to the U.S. for a lesson. Americans are ” just as smart as they’ve ever been,” but “they haven’t been taught history properly. And that means when they see politicians making outlandish claims, they don’t stop and say, ‘What is your evidence for this?’”

This makes for a gullible voter, Moore suggests. History, he says, “is a story, but it is a story that needs to be evaluated and critiqued and looked at.'”

We may wonder whether history as a curriculum subject is all that important. Perhaps the loss of it is not that lethal. Perhaps there were societies that succeeded without it. Perhaps they even prospered.

But then again, without studying history, how would we know?

Main image: Wounded Canadians take cover behind a pillbox during the Battle of Passchendaele in November 1917. (Colourized by the Vimy Foundation and Canadian Colour.) Photo by Canada Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada

An Ontario man found not criminally responsible twice for stabbing two people in the back multiple times in the span of a decade has been granted a series of day passes even though he’s still deemed a “significant threat to the safety of the public.”

Muneeb Ali Ghawar — who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and cannabis use disorder “in remission in a controlled environment” — was found not criminally responsible (NCR) in February 2024 for aggravated assault and wearing a disguise in his latest stabbing attack one year previous at a cannabis store in Hamilton.

The Ontario Review Board (ORB) heard Ghawar walked into Sweet Releaf Cannabis around midday on Feb. 3, 2023, wearing a mask and a trapper hat pulled down low. When a female clerk moved to ring up the weed he asked for, Ghawar got behind her.

“He pulled out a knife and began stabbing her with it in the back. She was stabbed upwards of seven times and suffered a severed bicep and collapsed lung amongst other injuries,” said a recent decision from the independent tribunal that regularly reviews the status of individuals found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder.

When another employee screamed and went to call 911, Ghawar ran from the store. Detectives later identified Ghawar using surveillance video from his previous visit to the cannabis operation when he wasn’t wearing a mask. He was arrested six days after the stabbing.

Ghawar has been experiencing mental health symptoms for many years, and he is now under the jurisdiction of the review board for a second time, said the Aug. 28 ORB decision.

The first time he was declared NCR was for a 2014 attack in which he stabbed an acquaintance five times in the back and torso. He remained in hospital until March 2016, when he was discharged to live with his family.

“Mr. Ghawar was compliant with his medication, met consistently with the outpatient team, and maintained stable mental health. He was granted an absolute discharge on February 11, 2019,” the ORB ruling said.

He lived with his parents until the February 2023 stabbing.

Ghawar reported that he started using cannabis at the age of 15, stopped for a time, then started again in August 2019.

“He resumed using cannabis during the time he was living with his parents,” said the ORB decision.

Ghawar was ordered detained last year at St. Joseph’s Healthcare, with privileges allowing him to enter the community of Hamilton under indirect supervision.

Indirect supervision means the patient agrees to periodically check in with the hospital and a designated person on the clinical team knows the patient’s whereabouts at all times.

At his most recent ORB hearing, the panel “concluded that Mr. Ghawar remained a significant threat to the safety of the public and that a detention order was necessary and appropriate. With respect to the additional privileges suggested by the hospital, the panel determined that it was appropriate to include in the disposition seven day passes accompanied by an approved person, and seven day passes indirectly supervised with a pre-approved itinerary.”

Ghawar had been treated by a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression since 2012, according to his hospital report.

“In April 2014, Mr. Ghawar stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, and his mental health symptoms intensified almost immediately. According to his family, Mr. Ghawar became very anxious and irritable, and would refuse to leave the house alone. The parents advised that they did not see anything in his behaviour to suggest he was capable of assaulting anyone on the day of the index offence in May 2014.”

Ghawar has a criminal record that includes assault, mischief, break and enter and assault with a weapon.

A September 2023 psychological assessment indicated Ghawar “expressed delusional thought content, such as the victim of the index offence was ‘selling bad cannabis to kids in order to draw them into sex trafficking,” said the ORB decision.

“The conclusions from the assessment were that Mr. Ghawar has limited intellectual abilities and experiences significant impairment in neurocognitive functioning which is likely the result of his mental illness and substance use.”

When he was examined after his latest stabbing, Ghawar “acknowledged longstanding auditory hallucinations, and displayed indicia of paranoia and grandiose delusions. Mr. Ghawar also acknowledged that he had stopped taking his medication prior to the index offence and was smoking marijuana.”

Ghawar “has remained mentally stable the past couple of years,” said the ORB decision.

“There has been no evidence of mood disorders or psychotic breakthrough. He engages appropriately with co-patients and staff and is always pleasant and polite during interactions.”

Ghawar’s urine tested positive for pot on April 12, 2025. He denied it, suggesting a cigarette had been laced with cannabis.

He tested positive again for cannabis use twice last December.

“He again denied using cannabis, and suggested that the positive result was from others smoking cannabis around him,” said the decision, which notes staff detected “a strong odor of cannabis coming from his jacket” this past February and found what appeared to be pot in his pocket.

Ghawar suggested someone must have placed it there, said the decision.

“Mr. Ghawar used cannabis as recently as July 6, 2026.”

His “persistent use of cannabis is a significant risk factor,” said the ORB decision.

“He was using cannabis at the time of the first index offence in 2014, and at the time of the current index offence in 2023. He became extremely psychotic and committed very violent offences that could have resulted in the death of either victim.”

Ghawar visits his family regularly, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to move back in with them, said the decision, which notes he was living with them at the time of both stabbings.

According to his psychiatrist, Ghawar’s “insight into his psychotic symptoms, the need for treatment, the effects of cannabis use, and his risk for violence is limited.”

Meanwhile, Ghawar’s parents want to take him to Pakistan to get married.

“This would be an arranged marriage to a woman he has not met,” said the ORB decision, which notes his psychiatrist “expressed concern that bringing another person into the family home would increase the stress at a time when Mr. Ghawar is struggling with cannabis use.”

• Schizophrenic man who killed his mom has cannabis ban removed to see how he handles it
• Drug ban lifted for Ontario man who stabbed 83-year-old stranger while on drugs

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In a video address on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that the ongoing trade conflict with the U.S. “will come at a cost” — but he didn’t say how much.

He made the comments the same day that Canadian counter-tariffs on $28 billion worth of U.S. imports came into effect, with the new levies of between 15 and 50 per cent impacting a long list of U.S.-made products from toilet paper and cutlery to motorcycles and refrigerators.

These tariffs are a response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s 50 per cent tariff on $28 billion worth of Canadian goods imposed on Aug. 22, after trade talks between Canada and the U.S. broke down last month.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called on the prime minister on Tuesday to share what the impact of the counter-tariffs on Canadian consumers would be, saying in a video shared to social media : “Every single mother, small business owner, and senior should know what they will pay in these new counter-tariffs.”

Here’s what economic experts are saying about the potential cost.

What will counter-tariffs on U.S. products cost Canada?

Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, estimated in an analysis published by The Hub that Canada’s counter-tariffs carry a $4 billion hit to Canadian consumers, which will fall hardest on lowest-income households.

His report suggests that households earning under $30,000 a year will lose more than 0.5 per cent of their disposable income as a result of retaliatory tariffs, which is three times larger than the hit on households earning above $150,000. Meanwhile, he says families with kids face costs of roughly $250 per year from the tariffs while those without kids face costs of less than $170.

Tombe previously spoke to National Post’s Rob Breakenridge and explained that Canada’s counter-tariffs “are very much a tax on ourselves.”

“Ultimately this is a tax on a purchase decision that a Canadian has made, either a Canadian household or individual, or a business buying an import from the U.S.,” he said. “And that means that, for the most part, tariffs are paid by Canadians, not Americans.”

How will counter-tariffs impact Canada?

Joseph Steinberg, professor of economics at University of Toronto, said that estimating the impact of the new counter-tariffs starts by looking back at March last year, when Canada imposed 25 per cent tariffs on $30 billion of U.S. goods.

Steinberg told National Post that those tariffs, which remained in place until September 2025, were focused on consumer products, meaning they visibly raised prices for Canadian consumers. Despite this, he said, that is a way of doing tariffs “that is going to cause the least economic harm for our economy.”

“The best estimates indicate that those measures increased the inflation rate here in Canada by about half a percentage point during the period in which those tariffs were in force,” he added.

However, the latest counter tariffs are instead focused on “intermediary inputs,” such as insulated conductors, construction machinery parts, and freight trailers, to name a few. What this means is that the cost of production for Canadian firms will increase.

“These companies respond by raising the prices of the products that they sell here at home, and in some cases by laying off workers or shrinking how much they produce. It’s going to hurt the economy more than tariffing consumer products will,” Steinberg said.

Retail prices

A Bank of Canada report published in May looked at how retailers adjusted prices during the six months Canada imposed 25 per cent counter tariffs on U.S. products last year. It found that prices for goods that were subject to counter-tariffs increased by about 6 per cent more than those of non-tariffed goods — or roughly one-quarter of the 25 per cent counter-tariff — adding roughly 0.3 percentage points to consumer price inflation.

However, Loblaw CEO Per Bank shared on LinkedIn on Tuesday that he expects roughly half as many products as last year to be impacted by counter-tariffs, which he says is “good news.”

The challenge, he added, “is that tariffs on some impacted products could be much higher, reaching up to 50 per cent in certain categories.” The impact will also be more concentrated, he said, in categories including health and beauty and paper.

“Consumers will not see prices rise in the short term,” Steinberg said of this round of counter-tariffs. “This is going to be a slower burn.”

Small businesses

Both Steinberg and Tombe agree that it is Canadian businesses, rather than consumers, that will feel the effects of the counter-tariffs first. In fact, a Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) survey found that 49 per cent of business owners are affected by the Canadian counter-tariffs, with 28 per cent reporting major negative impacts.

Affected importers estimated the median monthly financial impact of both the U.S. and Canadian tariffs to be $55,000, with 40 per cent saying they will absorb most of the tariff-related costs.

And 11 per cent of importers affected by the Canada-U.S. trade war said they would stop being financially viable if the trade war lasts three months or more.

Jobs

Tombe previously put Canadian job losses as a result of U.S. 50 per cent tariffs at an estimated 87,200, while Steinberg said he expects Canada’s retaliatory measures to be “at least as harmful as that.”

Tombe previously told National Post that his estimate amounts to roughly 4 per cent of total employment, which is “not a recession-scale shock, but certainly for the individuals involved, a pretty significant cost to be borne.”

Federal debt

At the same time as the counter tariffs were announced, Ottawa also unveiled a $7.5 billion aid package for firms and workers impacted by the trade war.

Tombe previously told National Post: “If we’re not paying for that through taxes, then we’ll be paying for it through higher levels of public debt.”

How quickly will Canadians feel the impact of counter-tariffs?

Unlike the counter-tariffs Canada imposed last year, economic experts agree that it will take longer for Canadian consumers to feel the effects of the current retaliation.

Tombe said that the immediate hit is felt by businesses instead of consumers “because about 75 per cent of the affected trade will be in the form of industrial supplies and capital goods.”

Steinberg agreed. “The hit to prices will be slower to build, because it’s going to have to work its way through the entire Canadian supply chain,” he said.

“But eventually it will be larger because it will affect not only imported products but domestically produced products too.”

• Rob Breakenridge: Carney must be honest about the cost of counter-tariffs
• Carney says he's not 'escalating the conflict' as Canada hits U.S. with retaliatory tariffs

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Canada-U.S. trade tensions are at a fever pitch after U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled a series of executive orders on Tuesday banning some alcoholic beverages and dairy products from being imported to the United States.

Trump’s announcement came in response to Canadian retaliatory tariffs that went into effect this week on nearly $28 billion worth of U.S. imports, which were part of a tit-for-tat escalation in the trade war between the two countries.

National Post reached out to Charles Benoit, trade counsel for the Washington-based Coalition for a Prosperous America, a U.S. advocacy group that champions tariffs and industrial protection. Benoit argues that more home market protection — not freer trade — would benefit both the United States and Canada.

The following Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.

From your perspective, why did the Canada-U.S. trade talks break down?

Charles Benoit: What they’ve really coalesced around is harmonization of the steel, aluminum, and automotive tariffs. Ambassador (Jamieson) Greer was explicit about this in his big interview with CBC — that’s the U.S. line. And Prime Minister (Mark) Carney has made this about Canada’s ability to have other trade deals, which lines up with what Greer was more specific about: harmonized steel, aluminum, and automotive.

Those were the three big Section 232 actions that were launched back in the first Trump administration, so it makes sense why those three sectors were chosen.

I think the big thing to look at is — what has Mexico done that Canada hasn’t? Mexico’s not negotiating any new FTAs (free trade agreements). Canada’s still negotiating an FTA with India, for example.

At one point, the language of the (now scuppered Canada-U.S. interim deal was), “At least consult with us before you commit to duty-free cars, steel and aluminum tariffs in new FTAs,” and that seems to have been too far for Carney.

If you had to really pick one thing that caused Canada to walk away, I think it’s that. I think that they wanted the ability to offer unlimited duty-free on steel, aluminum, and automotive, specifically in their India FTA.

Your coalition campaigned against a prospective deal to reduce U.S. tariffs on Canadian downstream aluminum. Why?

A core constituency of our group is metal fabricators. We represent all sorts of industry and also agriculture, but we’ve got this backbone of metal fabricators.

At the end of the day, cross-border price competition doesn’t work when metal costs a lot more in the United States. For aluminum, it’s off the charts. We made the decision as a country to tariff primary aluminum, and as a result, aluminum is a dollar a pound more in the United States than in Canada or Mexico. You just can’t compete with that spread.

One of the things that was on U.S. offer in the Canada deal was reducing the tariff on downstream aluminum goods. From what was reported, the tariff concession went from 50 per cent to 25 per cent for Canadian aluminum goods.

If an aluminum extruder, or anyone working with aluminum in America, is paying a dollar a pound more, 50 per cent on the downstream product — on an aluminum billet or can sheet or whatever — just barely gets you to even competition with Canada and Mexico, because you’re paying so much more for the metal.

Cutting the tariff to 25 per cent for Canada — and if Canada got that deal, Mexico would get the deal — would have been immediate offshoring of all downstream aluminum fabrication in America. So, 100,000 jobs gone. That’s what drove us to be a vocal opponent.

Do you see tariffs on Canada primarily as leverage to win concessions from Ottawa, or as long-term protection for U.S. industry?

The point is not to get concessions from Ottawa. Chasing exports is a bad policy.

To win market access, you’re inevitably sacrificing one producer’s home market sales for another producer’s export sales. Any time you win market access for one of your producers, the other country inevitably demands the same. You’re trading away one domestic producer’s ability to sell in their own market for another producer’s ability to sell to export.

Take Canada dairy: I don’t want to see Canadian dairy farms close so that Stellantis can maybe get another few years out of that Brampton facility for exports. It’s a terrible trade for Canada.

I’m trying to explain why both sides lose from free trade. Free trade drives global consolidation. If Canada gives up more dairy access, the dairy farmers aren’t going to win. They’re just going to go out of business immediately.

In the same way, when aluminum is a dollar a pound cheaper in Canada, if we give up access on aluminum extrusion, we’re just offshoring our guys. That’s all it is. It’s consolidation to where costs are lowest, and that’s a race to the bottom that hurts both countries.

But many Canadian firms have U.S. plants, and U.S. manufacturers rely on Canadian inputs. Why target Canada rather than focusing tariffs on China or other non-market competitors?

We do not support retaliatory tariffs. We support sectoral tariffs for protection. We don’t support the 338 action . We don’t want that. It’s making reshoring more difficult, and a lot of our members are being hurt.

No manufacturer is making investments because they expect retaliatory tariffs to stick around. They freeze up economic activity, or they cause some sort of rush which then leads to a lull. It’s all bad.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are really bad. Appliances are a big one. Canada doesn’t make appliances. Why are they tariffing American appliances? It comes at a really bad time for American appliances because if you walk into a Costco, a lot of them are from China or they’re Chinese brands from third countries.

The tariff war is bad. We do not support retaliation. We don’t support chasing exports.

Is the Trump administration’s approach a negotiating tactic, or a broader rejection of the old North American free-trade model?

I really lament the situation. Canada has been badly served by free trade, like the United States. They’ve both been done terribly.

Automotive is the easiest example. In the United States, we were down to only half the cars sold here being assembled here. Canada has lost almost 50 per cent of its vehicle assembly in just the last decade. Canada has similarly lost over a million vehicles, which is way more significant for Canada.

We’re both losers here. The U.S. decided enough’s enough. Now, that’s really tough for Canada. Canada has lost so much to Mexico, and then to have the U.S. say, “Well, we’re done. We’re tired of losing” — it’s a very, very tough position for Canada to be in.

The (United States Trade Representative) was willing to give Canada a better deal on automotive. Reportedly, the deal that was on offer to Canada was the same 15 per cent that applies to Europe, Korea and Japan, but with a carveout for U.S. content. That’s technically a better deal. It probably wasn’t enough to sustain vehicle production in Canada. I accept that. So, that’s a really tough spot.

If I’d been Carney, I would have said, “Look, if we accept this deal, we’re just losing all vehicle assembly. We can’t do that.” I would have asked for something like 600,000 cars a year, where it’s a one-to-one number and it’s duty-free.

That would have been the move for Canada. We didn’t oppose the automotive deal with the U.K. last year, which had a similar quota structure. With quotas, you understand exactly what we’re giving up and what we’re gaining.

So what should Ottawa do now?

Dial it way down.

I would have told the provinces to knock it off with the formal (alcohol) ban, because that’s clearly really irritated (the United States Trade Representative), and I understand it. California wine growers are not anyone to be trifled with.

I would have sought a quota deal for as many units — whether it’s 600,000, 700,000 — as they could be truly duty-free to the U.S. as possible. That’s what I would’ve done if I was Carney. I think Canada would be in a much better place.

Canada could get so many economic wins by capturing its own market. Stelco is Canada’s second-largest steel mill, and most of the Canadian steel market belongs to overseas Asian imports. Why doesn’t Canada try to get some of that back for its own mills?

Hyundai and Kia, the European OEMs, do a lot of business in Canada, but have no Canadian assembly. If I were prime minister, that would be unacceptable.

You’ve got a top Canadian steel mill and a top Canadian steel fabricator begging the government: “We’re dying from Asian imports. Why don’t we try to get some of our own market?” All these new pipelines, they’re going to be made with Chinese steel. If it’s not Chinese, it’ll be Korean.

What would an off-ramp from the current tariff conflict look like?

I would support the president just saying, “Canada’s had enough,” and removing the whole 338 action right away. I don’t think it’s helping anything.

I have the same advice for Canada: drop the retaliation. Unilaterally drop it. I know it’s probably politically harder for Carney to do, but I do kind of think it’s a mess of his own making.

Both sides should just unilaterally decide that they’re above this mess and drop retaliatory actions.

The U.S. needs its sectoral tariffs, and much like with U.K., a quota deal on autos seems reasonable for both countries. I would urge Canada to hold the line on dairy.

You are a tariff advocate, but you oppose some tariffs, including the U.S. tariff on primary aluminum. How do you decide where tariffs make sense?

You take everything product by product.

For aluminum, I think we should abolish the tariff on primary aluminum. We’re not getting the smelters without a long-term government power deal. Or unless the government builds them.

That’s the only reason we ever had a competitive domestic industry — in the 1940s, the government built 10 smelters, and they became Reynolds Aluminum and Kaiser Aluminum and so forth.

Quebec got it right. They offer the power deals, which they can do because they own the hydro. The Massena smelter in New York only exists because it gets a public-power deal from the New York Power Authority, which owns the dams.

So, for aluminum, no tariffs on primary. For steel, the tariffs are working, although there’s always room for improvement. The administration needs to roll up its sleeves and dive into these things product by product.

Critics say tariffs become permanent protection for incumbent companies without necessarily delivering investment or competitiveness. What safeguards would you want?

Domestic market competition is so important.

The steel tariffs are easy because we’ve got competition up and down. Thanks to electric-arc furnaces and mini-mills, we’ve got over 100 market actors just in primary. And thousands of fabricators. We’ve got a competitive market in steel, and we don’t need to offshore metal fabrication for any metal.

Primary aluminum is the other side of the spectrum. That’s one where competition policy matters. You need a domestic competitive home market. That’s the goal. But it’s a long ways off.

I want an abundant, prosperous country, so I look at real output. For aluminum, we’re at a 75-year low — less than 700,000 metric tons of aluminum smelted. Four smelters. That’s terrible, and it’s not getting better. As for steel, how many tons of steel are melted and poured in the U.S.? Down over a decade. How many cars have we assembled? A million less.

Those are the hard numbers. You have to look sector by sector.

What is your broader vision for Canada-U.S. trade?

Top line, I would love to see both countries pursue economic self-reliance.

We got along extremely well in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century when we both kind of agreed that we don’t want to trade with each other. That was not an antagonistic time. It’s modern global rules-based trade that creates all this antagonism, where people are trained to think of tariffs as a sanction.

Both countries should pursue economic self-reliance. To the extent we have trade deals, I think they should be managed trade — outcome-focused. Like the U.K. automotive deal.

Canada has done us a solid by offering the template. In NAFTA and USMCA, people don’t appreciate this, but the U.S. and Mexico went duty-free on everything. Canada didn’t, mainly because of dairy and supply management.

That’s why, if you look at the text of USMCA, there’s an Appendix 1. Canada said a hard no on supply management. Because Canada kept milk, and I believe eggs and a couple of things; the U.S. kept its sensitive things like sugar and peanuts. We still have a hard quota on Canadian peanut butter imports, for example, just like Canada has its dairy quota.

That’s great. That’s the model. To the extent we have agreements managing trade, it should look like USMCA Appendix 1.

National Post

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The Trump administration has announced that Canadian road salt and cement will be removed from import tariffs as of Sept. 15., earning the gratitude of Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins.

U.S. communities that share the border with Canada rely heavily on Canadian rock salt to keep winter roads safe, according to Maine TV news station WABI .

Collins, a five-term incumbent, says exempting those two items was something she lobbied for, reports the news outlet.

“I appreciate the Administration’s announcement that it will exempt road salt and cement from U.S. tariffs. In my communication with (U.S. Trade Representative Jamison) Greer and (Commerce Secretary Howard) Lutnick, I focused on road salt and cement as two products crucial to Maine that would be severely affected by these tariffs,” she said.

Collins explained that Frenchville, a small Maine town on the Canadian border, would incur U.S.$10,000 in extra costs for road salt. And one Maine cement company owner would pay U.S.$150,000 each month because of the tariff.

The Trump administration agreed to swap Canadian rock salt and cement for new duties on all-terrain vehicles, certain cheeses, and motorboats, reports WABI.

Meanwhile, in an August 27 statement , Collins expressed her appreciation for Canada’s decision to remove seafood and fish products from its retaliatory tariff list. “These tariffs would have caused tremendous harm to Maine’s lobstermen, disrupting one of their most important markets during the fall fishing season,” she said.

She also advocated for improved trade relations with Canada, based on the two countries’ historic ties: “Canada is not China. Canada is one of our closest allies and largest trading partners. Our economies are inextricably linked, especially in the border regions. Continuing with these tariffs will harm Maine families, small businesses, municipalities, manufacturers, and farmers.”

This past weekend in an interview with Politico , Collins said the White House doesn’t understand how the trade war with Canada is affecting Maine.

“I think the administration has very much underestimated the impact on Maine families, on small manufacturers, on our agricultural products,” Collins said in an interview. “And that’s what I’m trying my best to educate them about. They look at this issue as a macro issue. And in fact, the micro impact on a state like Maine is considerable.”

Collins has been an ongoing critic of the tariffs on Canada, reports Politico, noting that she had spoken on the Senate floor about the close economic relationship between Maine and Canada ahead of a symbolic vote against earlier tariffs last year. And she, with other Maine Republicans, was quick to push back on Trump’s decision to impose 50 percent tariffs on Canada in July.

Canada is Maine’s largest trade and investment partner, according to the Maine International Trade Center (MITC), a public-private partnership between the state government and private sector. Roughly 40 percent of all Maine’s goods exports go to Canada, MITC estimates. That includes agricultural goods and pulp and paper, but these businesses are expecting a severe drop in demand.

Meanwhile, this shift on rock salt and cement may serve to boost Collins’ chances at reelection in the U.S. fall mid-term elections.

National Post previously reported that pollsters and analysts have speculated her political fortunes could fade in the wake of the ongoing trade war.

The Democrats have been framing the race in Maine around affordability — a major issue across the board for all voters —and in Maine and other border states, Trump’s tariff policies could have an adverse effect on Republican efforts to similarly frame the issue.

• A Republican senator could be one of the first political victims of Trump's tariff war
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Maureen Basnicki, her car stuffed with frames swaddled in blankets and bubble wrap, finally found a good spot to park in midtown Toronto just as artist John Coburn emerged from his studio to help unload.

“This one is special,” she cautioned, touching the thickest frame. Inside the deep shadow box sat a U.S. flag folded into a tight triangle, its white stars on deep blue cloth identical to those seen in a thousand movie scenes of American military funerals.

Although the folded flag is a marker of death, neither of them seemed unsettled, perhaps because their whole enterprise that day was spawned by murder. Death and destruction were how they met and this recent reunion was to prepare for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in history.

Maureen Basnicki, 75, has the misfortune of being Canada’s best-known 9/11 widow after her husband, Ken Basnicki, was one of thousands killed in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. John Coburn, 69, became woven into the fabric of 9/11 through his extraordinary artistic venture among the rubble of Ground Zero in New York City.

Next week marks a grim anniversary, an observance of a milestone remembering one of the most cataclysmic and stressful days of modern history, when al-Qaida terrorists, a jihadist group, hijacked four U.S. passenger airliners and used them as deadly weapons. Two were crashed into skyscrapers in the heart of New York, one into the Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. military, and a fourth crashed in a field before reaching its target when passengers tried to take back control of the plane.

For the world, 9/11 changed global politics, security, travel, policing, privacy, social cohesion and much more, but for the families of the victims, it reshaped everything else.

Twenty-five years later, its impact is still felt. Twenty five years. The importance of this anniversary isn’t so much its milestone number, but the substantive passage of time it signals. It reminds Maureen an entire generation had not yet been born on 9/11; that generation Z has no personal memory of it, and she fears they won’t grasp its enormity.

Alongside dealing with her personal trauma, Maureen has been using those years to solve that conundrum, and trying to tilt the legacy of 9/11 from just the evil toward something good. In the process, she has become a prominent champion for victims, public safety and prevention of mass violence. She has forged new law, sparked awareness and even changed Canada’s calendar, but — always the advocate — she says more needs to be done.

If 25 years is long enough to forget, it is long enough to create change.

“It wasn’t just my life that changed,” she said, “it was all of us that changed.”

Horrors of Sept. 11, 2001

Ken Basnicki was 48 and had never been to New York City.

He was the Canadian marketing and sales rep for a U.S. tech firm that specialized in financial transaction processing. Ken had recently been promoted and was invited to an international finance technology conference in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

The conference was at an exciting venue, high up in one of the distinctive twin towers marking New York’s skyline. Once the world’s tallest, the skyscrapers were each 110 stories, with their iconic presence flowing from height rather than beauty.

“He didn’t want to go to New York. He was there to network, as they say in business, to introduce himself in his new capacity,” Maureen said. “He was going into management so that he could spend more time with his family, ironically.

“Ken reassured me, he said, ‘Maureen, this is going to give me more time with you.’” Ken left for New York on Sunday afternoon after he and Maureen planned a date night for when he returned.

Maureen was a flight attendant for Air Canada. The next day, Monday, she left Toronto as well, working a flight to Frankfurt, Germany.

Around 8:30 a.m., New York time, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, Ken joined about 80 other delegates at the conference on the 106th floor of the North Tower in the World Trade Center. Breakfast was being served.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11, which had been hijacked by five terrorists shortly after takeoff, was flown into the northern face of the North Tower, crashing into floors 93 through 99 and destroying all downward exits for floors above.

At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, similarly commandeered by five terrorists, was flown into the South Tower.

It was almost 3 p.m. in Germany when the first plane crashed in New York.

Maureen, along with the rest of her flight crew, was staying at a hotel in Mainz on a layover, waiting to staff a return flight to Canada. The hotel by the Rhine River was popular with flight crews; employees from Air Canada, United and American airlines were all staying there.

Maureen was unaware of what was unfolding across the sea. In her hotel room, she tuned the TV to CNN, a travel habit to catch English-language news. She was jolted by scenes of an aviation disaster and as she watched, she felt her life begin to crumble.

“I watched with horror what was happening, knowing that Ken was in New York.” She needed to reach him and hear he was safe. Ken had a cellphone, uncommon at the time, but she did not.

“I ran down to the lobby and there was a buzz around the hotel. I gave the concierge woman the number of Ken’s cellphone and I said, ‘Call this number. My husband’s in the World Trade Center.’ I had such a look of horror on my face that nobody questioned me. She didn’t even hesitate. She called that number and I got his voice-mail message.”

Maureen then called her mother. “I said, ‘Mom, something horrible has happened.’ She didn’t even let me finish. She said, ‘Where are you, dear?’ And I said, ‘I’m in Germany, Mom.’ She said, ‘Can you come home?’ So, my heart sunk and I said, ‘Oh, Mom, have you heard from Ken?’ And she said, ‘Yes, we have, he called his mother.’

“So, then I had optimism again. And I said, ‘What did he say?’ And she told me honestly, that he said, ‘Mom, something horrible has happened. I’m on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. The room is full of smoke and I don’t know how I’m going to get out.’

“So, you can only imagine,” Maureen said, her voice trailing as emotion — even with edges sanded by 25 years — caught her.

At 9:37 a.m., the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. At 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa., as its passengers mounted a fight against their hijackers.

At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower of the World Trade Center also collapsed.

Trapped overseas

Maureen went searching for her Air Canada flight director.

“I grabbed him by his collar and I said, ‘I want to go home. I’m booking off.’ That was a term we used for unable to work. And I said, ‘I need to go home. Ken is in the World Trade Center.’ And he sat me down gently and he said, ‘Maureen, you can’t go home right now. The skies are closed.’”

Shortly after the third airliner hit the Pentagon, U.S. airspace had been completely shut down for the first time in history.

Arriving aircraft were ordered to turn around and land wherever they could. Canadian airspace was shut soon after, except for landing diverted U.S.-bound planes; 239 flights that had passed the halfway point were rerouted to 17 airports in Canada, requiring towns and cities to absorb 33,000 stranded passengers in what was called Operation Yellow Ribbon.

While those diverted passengers, mostly Americans, were buoyed by safe refuge and a heartwarming Canadian welcome, Maureen was stuck in Germany and falling apart.

“I was trapped overseas. Without sounding dramatic, you know, the crew had to keep me from swimming across the ocean. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. All I wanted to do was get home and be with my children.”

Ken and Maureen were living in Toronto’s west end in 2001, and they rarely travelled at the same time so that one of them was home for their two children. This time, however, with their son Brennan having turned 16 and their daughter Erica 21, they made their travel plans. Brennan was waiting for his dad to return so he could get his driver’s licence. Erica was starting her second year of university in Toronto studying journalism.

With all flights cancelled, however, all Maureen could do was talk to her distraught children on the phone over four painful days.

“We each played a sort of game in our phone calls, saying if anybody could get out from the 106th floor, if anybody could escape, it would be Ken. He was a physically fit guy, and that number of stairs wouldn’t have been something he couldn’t handle.

“I pretended to my kids to have hope that he would be one of the survivors … I still wanted to believe in my mind that he had escaped, but I knew in my heart that my husband was dead.”

Despite medication, she could barely sleep.

“I was wide awake with the television on. I kept watching TV because I wanted to see him in the crowd of survivors. Looking back, maybe that wasn’t a good thing because it’s not something that I can erase from my mind.

“I’m being graphic here, but the 106th floor was referred to as the jumper floor, it’s where people chose to jump from the (burning) tower. And the fact that he was on the jumper floor is also not something that I can erase from my mind, although I do everything possible not to dwell on it.”

By the time Maureen was back in Canada, the global importance and overwhelming interest in 9/11 meant the Basnicki family’s grief was never particularly private. It took a toll and much adjustment.

For Maureen, her time as a flight attendant was over.

“It wasn’t a fear of flying,” she said. “I loved my job as a flight attendant. It was the trauma that prevented me from going back to work.” A therapist she was sent to by the airline’s insurance company told her to return to work six weeks after 9/11, Maureen said.

“When she suggested that going back to work was like getting back up on a horse, that it would be good for me to get back in an airplane, I looked at her and I said: ‘An airplane was used as a weapon to murder my husband.’”

The aftermath of 9/11

Looming alongside grief was the reality of finances. Without either of the couple’s income and facing a growing list of costs from Ken’s death, she felt she was drowning all over again.

“It was very expensive being a victim of terrorism,” she said.

In the United States, families of the victims have access to a wide range of support and assistance. The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which was reopened in 2011, is still settling claims for U.S. families and first responders with more than US$18 billion already spent.

The quirk of geography put the Basnicki family in a tough spot. As Canadians living in Canada, they were not eligible for most of the U.S. funding. Most of the other Canadians killed in the attacks were living in the United States.

Nor was there the same machinery of sympathy and care in Canada that had erupted in the United States to help survivors and victims.

Some months after the attacks, Maureen was notified by a courier company that a registered envelope was waiting for her. She drove out alone to pick it up and opened it at the counter.

“It was Ken’s death certificate, and it said, cause of death homicide, no body found. I had no warning, no support with me. I was so shocked that they had to call me a taxi to take me home and I had to come back to get my car the next day.”

On another day, she answered a phone call from a New York City police official who told her they had found something in the wreckage that had belonged to Ken. She was asked if she would come and retrieve it.

She flew to New York and was handed Ken’s plastic AT&T calling card, which was used in those days to reduce the cost of long-distance phone calls. “The card was burnt on the edges but, sure enough, you can read Ken’s name, Ken Basnicki. And it’s comforting. Those kinds of things are comforting,” she said.

“What is even more shocking is that eventually, I believe it was around a year later, I got my first shipment of body parts. Suddenly body parts were found and it made his death certificate invalid. Who has ever heard of an invalid death certificate? And so, I had to reapply for another death certificate because it was now inaccurate.”

As recovery efforts continued through the massive rubble at Ground Zero, where the towers had tumbled, she would be notified four times over several years that DNA testing had identified more of Ken’s remains. The remains revealed the devastation of the attack.

“They could fit in a cigar tube,” she said.

“I had to go through a funeral parlour both in the U.S. and Canada — at each end — and I had to pay for both and pay for each shipment.”

Every discovery brought fresh pain and new expenses. Ken’s gravesite near Collingwood, where the family had moved, was dug up each time for a small addition beneath Ken’s tombstone, comprised of two dark granite pillars mimicking the shape of the twin towers. Maureen said she plans on joining him there someday.

Eventually, she called the New York medical examiner’s office and asked that no more remains be sent. Subsequent discoveries were instead sent, along with remains of other victims, to an underground repository at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York.

2,977 people killed, including 24 Canadians

There were 2,977 people killed in the terror attacks on 9/11, including 24 Canadians and a few others with close ties to Canada. Most of the dead — 2,753 of them — died at the World Trade Center, including those who had been in the towers and those who were passengers on the planes. Ken is one of 1,654 victims who officials have positively identified remains for — the latest identification was announced just last week.

After some victim compensation money arrived from the U.S. about three years after the attacks, Maureen heard from Ottawa. It was not an offer to help her; it sought to tax her.

“They wanted to tax the fund money. They wanted to treat it like winning a lottery,” she said. “I had to fight the federal government.” While U.S. lawyers were clamouring to help U.S.-based victims for free, in Canada, Maureen said her legal fees on both sides of the border were about $180,000.

Maureen found her tasks as a victim in Canada onerous and confusing and her support and assistance scant.

She eventually realized that remembering 9/11, talking about Ken’s murder, meeting with other victims, and doing interviews was her safety net rather than an anchor. She had found new purpose.

“I remember all these things being thrown at me, and I remember thinking, there’s no way anyone should be put through what my family and I were. And I’ve got to do my best to make changes for future victims of terrorism or anybody (who) suddenly finds themself traumatized in mass murder. In my mind, it was going to happen again, and I didn’t ever want to be saying, ‘I told you so’ and have us not prepared.

“I’m the kind of woman who goes to a movie and wants a happy ending,” she said. “But there’s no happy ending to 9/11. There’s no finality. There’s no closure, for me, at least, not yet. It’s a constant daily battle for me, really. But I wake up with a purpose, and that purpose is for all of us to never forget.

“But how can we get people to remember it?” she said.

“I wanted an appropriate way in Canada, because certainly the memorial down in New York is terrific. It’s powerful and I can go there. But in Canada, I never wanted it to be treated like just an American event with an American solution. It was a global event.”

Sept. 11 proved the world could change in a day. She wondered what good could happen in a day if people just made the effort. She took inspiration from the Canadian response on 9/11 after the attacks.

“It occurred to me that people don’t want to embrace hate and horror. People don’t want to celebrate wars they haven’t won or anniversaries that are hard. We haven’t won the war against terror, but that day didn’t just take the life of my husband, it was an attack on our values.

“And I decided to concentrate on our values and the outpouring of kindness and humanity that ensued from the general public. It was just amazing. And I wanted to dwell on the goodness of mankind.

“Which would you rather go to, a funeral or a celebration of life?”

She started advocating for Sept. 11 to be a day of gratitude and service, a day for helping others and thanking those who serve — not just their country, but their own communities.

In 2011, the Canadian government formally recognized Sept. 11 as the annual National Day of Service. In Ontario, it was made the annual Provincial Day of Service in 2022.

“Service Day is just celebrating Canadians coming together and helping each other, regardless of who you are and regardless of what happened. It’s a Canadian value that we cherish. I want these values celebrated,” she said.

As Maureen recounted her story inside John Coburn’s Toronto studio, the artist sat mesmerized, his hand sometimes covering his mouth in horror even though he has heard it before. Every time, something new stands out, he said.

Maureen and John share a mission.

An artist at Ground Zero

New York had long been John’s muse. Over many years, the Canadian artist prowled the city drawing its hotels, parks, neighbourhoods and people in his loose, stylish sketches that capture an essence in a few strokes of ink. Two years before 9/11, John sketched the towering skyline of the twin towers.

When the attacks brought those towers down, he felt compelled to return. Beside a Ground Zero barricade, he watched five construction workers coming out a door and he slipped in behind them before the door shut, he said.

“I walked five blocks (through) empty canyons and complete silence and found myself at the north end of Ground Zero and it was unlike anything I had visually ever looked at,” he said. He started sketching as if on autopilot. “I was in there for half an hour drawing and a police officer saw me and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you’ve got to leave,’” John said.

“And out of my knapsack, I pulled a photocopy of my 1998 sketch of the towers and showed him and I said, ‘I don’t know why, but this is a journey I needed to do.’ And he looked at it and he could barely speak and said, ‘You do what you need to do,’ and walked away. So that started the journey.”

Over three weeks he sketched where the towers had stood, and then the churches and firehalls and surrounding buildings, capturing the places and faces of those who came to help and to grieve. He sketched first responders, construction workers, clergy, and families of victims. He documented the wreckage and resilience.

One spot John sketched at was St. Paul’s Chapel, a historic church across the street from the towers. The church was built in 1766 but somehow was spared when the towers fell, and it became a place of refuge and rest for recovery workers and volunteers. A chaplain there looked at John’s drawings and suggested they could carry a message of healing.

John published 37 of his sketches in a private book that was given to the families of the victims, called Healing Hearts. He met Maureen when he was trying to arrange the book on the first anniversary. It was an idea she supported.

A few years afterward, John’s studio was gutted by fire overnight. One of the few things Toronto firefighters salvaged from the wreckage was a leather portfolio containing his original 9/11 sketches. They were partially burned, some badly, but their core remained. Seeing them now, each neatly framed but scorched or burnt, if you didn’t know John’s story you might think it was an artistic flourish to echo the destruction in Lower Manhattan.

John’s artwork, like Maureen’s story, has gained its own momentum.

He donated 27 of the scorched drawings to the permanent collection of the 9/11 Museum in New York City on the 15th anniversary.

Ten of his drawings were recently flown to Toronto from the museum by the U.S. Consulate. Bolstered by additional works from private collections, they form a 9/11 exhibit running until Sept. 12 at the 918 Bathurst Centre in Toronto. As his art was being prepared for shipping from the museum, he was invited to New York to film a news documentary about it.

It was artwork and related items that Maureen was delivering to John’s studio for his show and for a National Service Day dinner she was hosting, that sparked their recent reunion.

Twenty-five years after 9/11

Since the 9/11 attacks, Maureen’s advocacy has taken her places she could not have imagined. In 2002, she and her children visited the Vatican and met with Pope John Paul II. In 2013, she travelled to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay to watch military court proceedings against accused 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others. The trial is still not resolved and will continue June 8, 2028.

She co-founded the Canadian Coalition Against Terror, an advocacy group to combat terrorism and support victims of terrorism. An eight-year campaign led to the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, a law allowing victims to sue attackers and supporting foreign states for financial compensation in Canada’s courts. The coalition has since rebranded as Secure Canada and expanded its mandate to include a wide range of public safety concerns.

“Let’s just say I’m giving it my all this year for the 25th,” she said, and added that it will be nice if someday she can feel her work is done. “After the 25-year mark, I’m really hoping that Canadians will refresh their memory, and younger Canadians will understand the role that Canada played and continue to understand that our world changed on 9/11.”

There is, however, an inescapable feeling about remembering 9/11 this year. This milestone happening now makes it more conflicted. Harsh rhetoric between Washington and Ottawa has been anything but friendly, with U.S. President Donald Trump belittling and insulting Canada, issuing punishing tariffs and threats, and the Canadian response of “elbows up” leave the warmth of the long-lauded relationship tattered.

Maureen knows it. John knows it.

Both feel the shift. For many Canadians, polling suggests, seeing the Stars and Stripes, like those on the folded flag presented to Maureen by the City of New York while Ground Zero still smouldered, doesn’t evoke the same sentiment it did. Feeling warm about America isn’t as easy now.

“I feel the difference for sure,” Maureen said.

“The politics of the day is dividing us, and it saddens me greatly. But I’m trying not to be political. And really, it was a terrorist attack. The terrorists didn’t respect borders; they didn’t know what religion you were or what your citizenship was. And I think we should reflect and hopefully come together to remember the friendship and the co-operation that we had then.”

Remembering Sept. 11, she said, can remind the United States how good a friend Canada has been, and how good it was to have friends when you’re hit and hurting.

“Not only do I want to remind Americans what we did post-9/11, but I want to remind Canadians what happened that day.”

She hopes this anniversary does both.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | X: AD_Humphreys

Main image: Maureen Basnicki — who lost her husband, Ken, in the World Trade Center terror attack — in Toronto artist John Coburn’s studio on Aug. 16, 2026. Photo by Jon Blacker/Postmedia News