CHARLOTTETOWN — Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comments Thursday that the response to the “threat” of U.S. antagonism to Canada is “unity” among the regions were backed by several premiers at the first minister’s meeting in Charlottetown.

Carney made the remarks as he joined the premiers in the conference that began Tuesday. On Monday, the Trump administration announced new 50 per cent tariffs on targeted Canadian imports , ostensibly in retaliation over barriers in Canada, including tariffs on U.S. autos and provincial alcohol boycotts.

The recent U.S. trade actions are “unilateral (and) unwarranted,” Carney said Thursday.

“We know in our bones today, that our unity is our greatest strength,” he said, comparing the moment to the push for Confederation that began in 1864 as a bulwark against American expansionism. He said it’s “clear that we are in a stronger position than we were when this trade war started 18 months ago.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters he was counting on Ottawa to manage the situation.

“It’s a Team Canada approach led by the prime minister, and that’s what we’re going to focus on,” Ford said. “We’ll take his lead, and we all have to be united.”

“You know, it’s very hard to deal with President Trump when he changes his mind every single day,” Ford said. “One day, the prime minister is with him side by side, and next thing you know, President (Donald) Trump turns on him like a rabid dog.”

He said he expects a response soon to the latest tariffs, which follow several other trade actions against Canada from the White House over the last year. Ford said earlier this week that he thinks Canada “need(s) to be on the offence” against the Trump administration, and has raised again his preference for blocking energy and potash exports to the U.S.

“I don’t expect to strike today, but hopefully, in the next two weeks,” Ford said Thursday. He said his province is willing to put “everything on the table” in response to the latest tariff threat.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has suggested a less combative approach with the U.S. in reaching a final trade agreement, nevertheless expressed support for the call for unity among the provinces and Ottawa.

“Both Doug and I agree wholeheartedly on that,” Moe told reporters.

Carney named “nation-building projects” as an example of why he believes Canada has gotten stronger in the face of U.S. trade aggression. He mentioned the announcement this morning that the federal government is providing $5.9 million for planning work to support a new undersea electricity cable project between New Brunswick and P.E.I.

“New Brunswick is the Maritimes’ energy hub,” said New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt. Her province’s investment in nuclear energy has led to her province being a major energy provider to the Maritimes.

LIVE: Meeting with Canada’s Premiers • EN DIRECT : Rencontre avec les PM provinciaux et territoriaux https://t.co/6KrePXtJB9

— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) July 23, 2026

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To announce one of the largest drug busts by weight ever in Ontario on Thursday, and the disruption of a sophisticated cross-border smuggling operation, the Ontario Provincial Police and partner forces laid their haul out for the cameras at Windsor’s City Hall.

Here was 1.7 metric tons of illegal drugs, roughly the weight of a mid-sized car, mostly cocaine and methamphetamine, but also some opium and oxycodone, with a retail value of about $139 million. It had been smuggled into Canada in otherwise legitimate commercial truckloads across the bridge from Detroit, in what police called a “broker-style” transportation model with truck drivers who were allegedly in on the scheme and profiting from it.

“This work is never done,” said Windsor Police Service Chief Jason Crowley, but it’s “a very large dent in someone’s business.”

The visual centrepiece of the press conference, however, which also involved federal and local law enforcement agencies, was not the plastic-wrapped bricks of drugs, but a rare antique Finnish anti-tank rifle, the Lahti L-39 .50 calibre, developed for use against Soviet forces in the Second World War, and with no legitimate modern civilian application. It was among 17 firearms seized in recent police raids in the Windsor and Toronto areas.

“The fact it is in the hands of organized drug traffickers is concerning,” said OPP Chief Superintendent Mike Stoddart of the Organized Crime Enforcement Bureau.

More than a dozen other seized long guns were also on display. Police also seized cash, ammunition, prohibited weapons such as brass knuckles, one vehicle, high end jewellery, money counters and electronic devices. One image released by police showed a brick of cocaine stamped “019.”

“It’s an impressive visual,” Crowley said of the drugs haul, and it is physical proof of a crime network with “multiple tentacles throughout North America…. This runs very deep and it’s disturbing, to be honest.”

Crowley said this demonstrates his officers are not just combatting local crime in Windsor, but international organized crime that extends into the rest of Ontario and Canada.

“We are cutting them off at the source,” Crowley said.

The various senior law enforcement officers emphasized the cooperation and mutual support necessary to take an investigation like this from its origin in January 2025 to the celebratory announcement of seized drugs and criminal charges.

They cited operational and tactical support from police forces in Toronto and Peel Region, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

But the bust also comes at a tense moment for cross border relations at Windsor, a major port city for the transportation of goods to and from the United States. Until now, that trade crossed the border mostly by the Ambassador Bridge, soon to be a century old. Much of that transport traffic is set to switch to the newly constructed Gordie Howe International Bridge, which has been the subject of high-stakes last-minute diplomacy and deal-making over tariffs and tolls with the Trump administration, to which Canada has recently signed a controversial “proposed agreement in principle.”

The new bridge “will certainly change the dynamics,” said Southern Ontario Regional Director General Michael Prosia of the Canadian Border Services Agency. It will be the “most futuristic” in terms of contraband detections equipment, he said, and it will be of keen interest to law enforcement how traffic and smuggling patterns change.

Stoddart of the OPP said much of this haul in drug shipments could be traced back to the southwestern United States, and so it stands to reason that Mexico is a source country, both for the trans-shipment of South American cocaine and the illicit production of methamphetamine, but he declined to detail any information about specific cartel connections.

The Toronto Police likewise declined to provide details on the Toronto-based organized crime group that was involved.

Charges were announced against 21 people, all but two of whom have already been arrested and either released with future court dates or remain in custody, some pending bail hearings, others having been remanded in custody until future court dates. One was already in custody on another matter. Two people remain at large and are the targets of active manhunts in the Windsor area, where they are known to police. The 102 charges against these people include conspiracy to import cocaine, trafficking cocaine and heroin, and various firearms charges including careless storage and possession of restricted weapons.

Stoddart said these charges and seizures represent harm prevented, lives protected, and organized crime disrupted.

“Project Bay is a powerful example of how intelligence-led policing and inter-agency collaboration can deliver significant results. This investigation began as the result of information obtained by the Windsor Police Service and evolved into a complex operation spanning multiple jurisdictions across Ontario. Working closely with our policing partners, we were able to dismantle a network that was moving dangerous drugs and firearms into communities across the province and putting public safety at risk,” Crowley of the Windsor Police Service said.

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Police in Hamilton, Ont., say they arrested a youth in connection with a stolen vehicle investigation after finding a telltale fast-food restaurant receipt in the car.

In a press release , police said the investigation began early Tuesday morning with reports of an abandoned vehicle blocking a live lane of traffic in the area of Highway 8 and King Street East, near the city’s Cathedral Park.

Police Constable Matteo Ramundo arrived at about 7:50 a.m. to find an unoccupied black Ford Explorer with its hazard lights blinking.

“At the time, we didn’t know it was stolen,” Ramundo told National Post in an interview. “I ran the license plate of the vehicle, and it came back as stolen out of Halton Region.”

Ramundo then did a standard search of the vehicle. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “There was a bunch of stuff thrown around, which was the original owner’s belongings, which we typically see when they rummage through these cars. And then on the driver’s side of the vehicle I noticed that there was a piece of paper. It ended up being a receipt for the McDonald’s that was literally 500 metres away.”

The date on the receipt was July 20. The vehicle had been stolen a week before that. Ramundo headed for the golden arches.

“And usually, when I’ve seen similar occurrences like this, they always go through the drive-through,” he said. “They don’t actually walk in. And now, with all these drive-throughs having great video footage … the staff at McDonald’s were extremely helpful and cooperative with me. They told me I could go in the back and rummage through the camera footage to see if I found anything helpful.”

He did. “I saw the exact same vehicle going through the drive-through the prior morning, and then you can see the driver very clearly. I recognized him because I’ve had previous occurrences with him, and from similar dealings.”

After a standard call for backup, Ramundo’s next stop was the youth’s house. It had been just two hours since the vehicle had been abandoned.

The 16-year-old male suspect, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, was arrested and charged with one count of possession of property obtained by crime over $5,000, and one count of failure to comply with a youth sentence order.

Ramundo described the youth as “very laid back” and “cooperative” during the arrest. “He asked if he could see the video,” the officer recalled. So I showed him the video … and he goes, ‘Bro, from the McDonald’s? Are you kidding me?’ So I had a good laugh when he said that.”

Hamilton Police said in its statement: “This investigation serves as a reminder that even seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence can play a critical role in identifying suspects and advancing police investigations.”

A little serendipity doesn’t hurt either. Ramundo knew the youth in question and was able to identify him immediately. He’d also just spent several months working on a stolen-auto project, looking into the rise of thefts and how to combat them.

“I’m glad that I was the one that got to do it because I find a huge interest in stolen autos particularly,” he said. “So it helped in this instance as well.”

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OTTAWA — B.C.’s premier argued Wednesday for blocking the U.S. from accessing Canada’s critical mineral supply in response to tariffs on his province’s lumber exports and other sectors.

B.C. Premier David Eby said at the first ministers meeting in Charlottetown that it was “inexplicable” for the U.S. to destabilize Canadian export industries, including forestry, while trying to gain greater access to Canada’s mineral wealth.

“We can’t have a country, on one hand, attacking one group of families and workers, while hoping to have access to the resources in Canada that the rest of the world wants,” said Eby.

He pointed to the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, regularly meeting with top Canadian mining executives and calling for co-operation while the White House continued to crank up economic pressure on other industries.

Eby’s comments come after the Trump administration announced a new wave of 50 per cent tariffs on a range of targeted Canadian goods , starting Aug. 19. The White House said the tariffs were in response to Canadian trade actions, including provinces boycotting U.S. alcohol, Canadian tariffs on U.S. autos, and restrictions on dairy imports.

The list of newly targeted goods includes several forestry products made in B.C., including wooden furniture and tableware.

Analysts say the new tariffs are expected to hit Ontario, Quebec and B.C. the hardest, while leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan relatively unscathed. The latter two provinces have not been boycotting American alcohol. But Eby has said there’s “not a chance in hell” his province will put U.S. booze back on the shelf.

According to one estimate, 13.7 per cent of B.C. exports will be affected by the tariff, the highest proportion of any province in Canada.

Eby strongly suggested he was willing to leverage B.C.’s critical minerals as part of a national response to the newly announced tariffs. Several provinces have mines or projects for critical minerals, including B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

“If the prime minister calls British Columbia and says he needs support with some big sticks to have conversations at the table, then we’ll be there,” said Eby.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford suggested Tuesday that Canada block exports to the U.S. of oil and potash , a vital agricultural mineral used in fertilizer, in response to the new tariff threat. The idea was quickly shut down by Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, whose province is the country’s sole producer of potash .

Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy research at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said that threatening U.S. access to Canadian minerals would be a dangerous escalation of trade conflict, given the importance of minerals in high-tech applications, including defence. China is currently dominant in global critical mineral supplies.

“Cutting off minerals is in a totally different universe of implications than taking booze off the shelves. One is a protest, the other is an act of war,” she said.

Exner-Pirot said that, given the prevailing geopolitical instability, Canada should be leaning into its hard-won reputation as a reliable and trustworthy trade partner. She added that Canada plays an especially vital role in critical mineral supply chains.

Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to Charlottetown on Wednesday for the conclusion of the first ministers’ meeting.

Carney said in his opening remarks that he’d do “whatever it takes” to defend the Canadian economy from U.S. aggression.

The prime minister is expected to speak with reporters in Charlottetown at 2:30 p.m. ET.

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A new paper is reviving the idea of “death by organ donation” — retrieving organs from MAID patients while they are sedated and unconscious but still alive.

Current law prohibits it, due to the long-standing dead donor rule, or DDR, which holds that people must be dead before organs can be removed (the “Death Requirement”) and that doctors must not kill a person by means of procuring his or her organs (the “Don’t Kill Rule”).

However, the authors of a new paper published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine say the growing acceptance of voluntary euthanasia complicates the dead donor rule, because people are knowingly consenting to death, and euthanasia laws sanction killing by physicians in “circumscribed situations.”

Death by organ donation might improve the quality of donor organs, they argue, “potentially saving many lives” and allowing donors to maximize their donation.

The idea not only sounds ghoulish, it also risks eroding public trust in MAID and organ donation both, said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman, who has spent most of his working life in critical care.

“I think a lot of the public would be fairly horrified by it.”

The authors of the paper — “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia” — said they are not arguing that the dead donor rule should be abandoned. Rather, the authors say it’s time to reassess the rule as it applies to MAID patients, given the growing acceptance of organ donation after euthanasia.

The rule protects people from being killed for their organs and treated merely as a means to benefit others, and has been preserved to protect public trust, they said.

However, voluntary euthanasia “creates a new ethical context” for the DDR, they wrote.

The “categorical constraint on physician killing, for its part, is legally and ethically circumvented by voluntary euthanasia,” two Canadian critical care doctors and a Harvard Medical School bioethicist wrote in the journal.

“The current legal reality of voluntary euthanasia provides a new context for interpreting the Don’t Kill Rule.”

MAID organ donors “are not dead yet, but their death is imminent” and will result directly from their voluntary request to have their lives ended by lethal injection, they said. In those cases, it may become “ethically arbitrary” to require a formal declaration of death before organs are retrieved, they wrote.

“In this landscape, the moral significance of strict temporal sequencing (post, not pre-mortem retrieval) is diminished,” they said.

The outcome isn’t altered “by whether death occurs moments before or during organ retrieval.”

Therefore, the ethical focus should “shift away from identifying a precise moment of biologic death and toward respecting patients’ autonomous decisions, ensuring that safeguards against coercion and exploitation are robust and advocating for a transparent and publicly accountable process,” they wrote.

Under guidance developed by the Canadian Blood Services, the decision to receive MAID must precede, and be separate from, the decision to donate, so that people don’t feel pressured to choose either.

However, the possibility of organ donation can be raised once the MAID request has been granted, and increasing numbers of Canadians requesting MAID are asking to donate their organs after death. One study found Canada performs more organ donations after euthanasia than any other country that has legalized the practice. Between 2019, the first year it was available, and 2021, Canada performed 136 organ donations after euthanasia. In 2021, Canada had 41 cases, compared to only 20 in Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain combined.

With organ donation after MAID, the person is taken to a hospital and administered life-ending drugs. Next follows a standard organ donation protocol: blood pressure is monitored via a line inserted into a small artery in the wrist to determine when the person’s heart has stopped beating.

Doctors then wait an additional five minutes — the “no touch” period — to confirm death before the person is transferred to the operating room for organ retrieval.

Death by donation “would look in some ways similar, and in some ways very different,” said first author of the new paper, Dr. Carter Winberg, a Canadian critical care doctor currently completing his masters in bioethics at Harvard Medical School.

The person would be brought to hospital and taken to an operating room, where they would receive the same sedating medications used with euthanasia. Except surgery would commence once the person was fully unconscious. Death would ultimately be caused by removal of vital organs.

Organs were once only ever removed from donors declared brain dead, meaning an irreversible loss of all brain function. They’re medically and legally dead, but their hearts are still beating, and a ventilator keeps oxygen flowing to the heart and other organs until organs can be retrieved, packed in special preservation fluids and sent to the recipient’s transplant hospital.

Twenty years ago, doctors began removing organs from “controlled circulatory death” donors — people who, like MAID patients, aren’t brain dead, but whose prospects for recovery are so grim a decision is made to withdraw life support.

However, organs can be damaged during the dying process and mandated waiting period due to a lack of blood flow and oxygen. The longer the ischemia time — that elapsed time without blood flow — the greater the risk the organs won’t function when transplanted inside another body.

Organ donation after euthanasia carries the same risks. However, if organs were removed while still receiving blood, the ischemia time would be shortened dramatically, making lungs, livers, kidneys and pancreases as viable as organs retrieved after brain death. It would also enable heart donation. Most donor hearts are retrieved from brain-dead donors.

“Since death would be a chosen and inevitable outcome in these cases, enabling retrieval under ideal conditions represents a Pareto improvement: no one would be made worse off, and multiple lives might be saved,” they said.

No jurisdiction, as far as they’re aware, is considering or implementing death by organ donation. But in the setting of voluntary euthanasia and organ donation after euthanasia, the idea warrants “open, transparent dialogue,” they argue.

Most cases of organ donation involve people in intensive care who can’t provide first-person consent. Doctors have to rely on substitute decision makers and families “to help us understand their values and wishes,” Winberg said.

“That’s a very different looking context than someone who drives in from home with a family member and is able to have a full conversation with you about their values and wishes.”

With legalized euthanasia, organ donation has entered a “completely different landscape,” he said. “You have competent people asking and requesting their death. You have direct physician killing,” realities that didn’t exist when the dead donor rule was “stamped and defined in the literature.”

Everyone agrees people shouldn’t be used for their organs, he said.

“If the purpose of the death requirement is to maintain public trust and protect patients, can the spirit of that rule be done through other means? Our group would argue that it could be done through other means, if it was done thoughtfully in terms of upstream safeguarding with people who are competent and able to provide first-person consent.”

“So, yes, broadly, we are asking whether retrieval could form part of the process that causes death, rather than always occurring only after death has been declared in this specific new context,” Winberg said.

It’s a scenario his two co-authors raised in an earlier paper published in 2019 in the same journal.

Today, more than 200 million people live in jurisdictions around the world with some form of legalized assisted death.

Death by organ donation “is asking surgeons to take a living person into the operating room and to come out with a dead person, which I think is murder,” Lainie Friedman Ross, a University of Rochester bioethicist, told NPR.

Bowman, the University of Toronto bioethicist who has been involved in many MAID cases, is troubled by the very practice of organ donation after euthanasia.

“There’s a substantial cohort of patients that apply for medical assistance in dying who are approved, yet who choose not go go through with it. They take things day by day and they eventually die of their illnesses in other ways,” he said.

But if they have already talked to people about organ donation they might be afraid to say they’ve changed their minds. “I would argue that really erodes the voluntary element of it.”

People who seek MAID “tend to be really, really worn down by the reality and difficulties” of the illnesses they’ve been living with, he said.

“Some have said to me, ‘I take more than I give. Everyone takes care of me. I don’t give anything back.’ I worry about the psychology of that, in a lot of ways.”

Many clinicians also “really hold the desire to not want to waste organs,” Bowman said. “There can be subtle encouragement, definitely, to donate (and) societal praise.”

The authors “are kind of saying the definition of death has evolved, so we don’t have to worry about that as much,” Bowman added.

“You really do need some firewalls,” he said. “Clinicians, whatever they are, have got to put the patient in front of them first at all times. When a person is going to donate and it’s clinically advantageous for them to donate when they are still alive, one is pulling the other.”

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A 55-year-old pastor in Florida is suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, claiming the tech company’s chatbot discouraged him from seeking medical care while repeatedly misdiagnosing his health problems, even using the language of his own faith against him.

On Monday, Scott Winters and the law firm Tech Justice Law filed a lawsuit in California alleging ChatGPT engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine, exploited Winters’ religious identity and trust to keep him engaged, and violated his privacy rights.

The suit claims that in following ChatGPT’s advice, Winters suffered a life-threatening pulmonary embolism that left the husband and father hospitalized for weeks and forced him into early retirement.

“I had serious symptoms of a pulmonary embolism for six weeks that ChatGPT had wrongly attributed to something else,” Winters said in a statement. “ChatGPT manipulated my own language and beliefs because it knew I was a pastor. Not only did I nearly die, but I also lost my job, my career, my ministry, my home, everything.”

The suit is seeking seeking financial damages and asks the court to stop ChatGPT Health from operating until independent evaluators determine it is safe. It also wants stronger guardrails to prevent the chatbot from answering medical questions.

According to the suit, which has not yet been tested in court, the self-professed “lifelong learner” had been in excellent health for most of his life, but started experiencing health problems in 2022.

Frustrated with a medical system that largely dismissed his symptoms, the suits says, Winters turned to the internet for answers, researching his symptoms online and reading medical literature. “Finding answers became a personal mission.”

Winters had started using ChatGPT-4o in June 2024, shortly after its release. That year doctors diagnosed him with SIBO and chronic prostatitis, but he continued to consult the chatbot. SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) is an excessive amount of bacteria in the small intestine, while chronic prostatitis is long-term inflammation or infection of the prostate gland. The two are often linked.

“At the outset, his use of the tool was limited to everyday, practical matters,” the suit alleges. “He would ask the model questions about geography and politics and would sometimes use ChatGPT-4o to understand Biblical texts more deeply. Sometimes Scott asked for general information about his own medical conditions but typically kept his inquiries impersonal.”

Over time, that changed. “Fully stepping into the role of a medical practitioner, ChatGPT-4o began to offer specific care directives without including the disclaimer to consult a medical provider,” the suit says. “The lengthier Scott’s interactions with the tool, the fewer disclaimers it included in its messages … It prompted, ‘Would you like specific strategies to target your situation?’ Scott accepted ChatGPT-4o’s invitation.”

The suit alleges that on March 4, 2025, “ChatGPT-4o crossed deeper into the unauthorized practice of medicine by analyzing Scott’s use of allicin and berberine, supplements used to treat SIBO, and prescribed specific dosage recommendations.” The suit alleges additional prescriptions by the chatbot in the months that followed.

It also began to incorporate elements of Winters’ faith into its responses, the suit says, encouraging him to “let the storm pass” him over and telling him to repeat: “I’m safe. My system is recalibrating. This will pass.”

“ChatGPT-4o’s outputs mirrored Scott’s religious background and style of communication,” the suit reads. “It adopted the diction and cadence characteristic of Christian ministry and preaching. It sermonized scriptures in responses to medical queries indicating Scott’s severe physical symptoms. These responses, refracted through a biblical lens, harkened back to previous threads and memories from months earlier when Scott was using ChatGPT for his biblical studies.”

At one point it labelled a series of stretches and breathing exercises as “a win” and even “a form of worship.”

The suit alleges that this was due in part to a feature introduced in April 2025 called “dreaming.” The feature allows the chatbot to form memories based on interactions, which it can use in subsequent conversations.

In one exchange in June 2025, Winters told the chatbot: “The people in my church think I’m crazy for not going to the hospital.” It replied: “Right now, you’re doing something **incredibly brave**: choosing a calm, deliberate, and physiologically sound path to recovery – one that **most people (including well-meaning church members)** simply don’t understand.”

The suit alleges that, on July 13, 2025, Winters began experiencing shortness of breath, severe chest pain, heart palpitations and vomiting. He called 911. Emergency personnel declared his condition critical and rushed him for emergency testing, discovering blood clots in both lungs and diagnosing a massive pulmonary embolism.

Hours before this, Winters had been interacting with the chatbot, asking about sudden groin pain and whether he should go to the hospital. ChatGPT-4o assured him this was “very likely another minor piece of the long story” and “not something dangerous” that necessitated medical attention. It added: “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

“It turned out that the pain Scott was feeling in his groin was the onset of the pulmonary embolism that would nearly kill him,” the suit said.

“Scott Winters nearly died because ChatGPT acted like a medical authority while having none of the responsibility,” said Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of the lawyers behind the suit.

“If ChatGPT were a physician dispensing medical advice, it would be guilty of medical malpractice,” he said. “OpenAI actively promotes itself as a reliable source of medical guidance and must not be allowed to hide behind its algorithm to avoid accountability for providing false and misleading medical information to users. When a product manipulates a patient’s trust and replaces the doctors who could save him, it becomes a public crisis unfolding in real time.”

National Post has reached out to OpenAI for more information.

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The Toronto Police Service, in partnership with the RCMP, has charged a Toronto man with a terrorism offence following an investigation into alleged conduct at demonstrations in downtown Toronto, and allegedly acting “for the benefit of, and in association with, Hamas.”

Police allege that on May 25 and Sept. 7, 2024, Ahmad Hassan Hajahmad, 33, attended anti-Israel demonstrations in the area of Bay Street and Front Street West, “where he used amplification devices to make public statements that advocated for the detestation and harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities.”

In a press release Wednesday, Toronto Police said that on Monday the Attorney General of Ontario and the Government of Canada provided consent to proceed with the charge before the court.

The following morning, Hajahmad, of Toronto, was arrested and charged with participation in or contributing to the activities of a terrorist group.

He appeared before the Ontario Court of Justice on Tuesday morning. “Due to a court-imposed publication ban, the Toronto Police Service is unable to provide further details related to this investigation,” police said in the release, adding: “The Toronto Police Service thanks the RCMP’s INSET for their support with this investigation.”

INSET stands for Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams, which are led by the RCMP and made up of specially trained members of that group and other law enforcement and national security partners at the federal, provincial and municipal levels.

“Working together, INSET members track, deter, disrupt and prevent criminal activities of terrorist groups or individuals who pose a threat to Canada’s national security,” according to a government of Canada website .

On March 7, 2025, investigators executed a search warrant at a Toronto residence and seized multiple electronic devices. “A joint investigation by the Toronto Police Service Hate Crime Unit and INSET subsequently gathered evidence supporting the allegation that the accused acted for the benefit of, and in association with, Hamas, a designated terrorist group,” police said.

“Investigations into criminal offences committed at demonstrations do not end when the event is over,” said Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw in a statement.

“As this investigation progressed, we worked closely with our INSET partners to pursue the terrorism charge warranted by the investigation. These complex investigations underscore the importance of continuing to strengthen our Counter Terrorism Security Unit so we can identify and investigate evolving threats to public safety. We will continue to hold those who break the law accountable, no matter how long it takes.”

Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, called the incident “chilling” and said in a statement: “Governments and authorities across Canada must do more to confront those who are radicalizing people in our streets to support violence and promote terrorist organizations, and ensure police and national security agencies have the counter-terrorism resources they need to enforce the law and keep Canadians safe.”

A statement to National Post from Mohamed El Rashidy of Rashidy & Associates, counsel for Hajahmad, said in part: “Mr. Hajahmad is presumed innocent (and) has no connection to Hamas or any other foreign group. The single charge concerns his participation in public demonstrations in Toronto about the conflict in the Middle East.”

He added: “We’ll be looking closely at how and why this case came to be, and we’re confident it won’t hold up when measured against the law.”

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“We’ve got your uncle. What do you want us to do with him?”

The phone call from the Vancouver RCMP in the fall of 2024 was disconcerting, to say the least. And a little puzzling. Uncle Joe Atherton was no scofflaw. His nieces and nephews knew him as a devoted husband, an engaging raconteur, a gifted wood carver and a competitive archer. Oh, and a high-ranking Mountie.

We also knew he had been dead for 36 years.

And therein lies a tale — a mystery, really — beginning with an idle comment over a couple of beers that would lead to a clandestine burial, a half-believed legend, and a grand quest coloured by controversy. And it would leave my siblings and me with new respect for an old chestnut: “The Mounties always get their man.”

Rumours of a Mountie under the flagpole

This spring, a year and a half after that phone call, I found myself in a Regina chapel in the company of my two sisters, my daughter, two of Joe’s nieces by marriage, and various senior members of the RCMP, resplendent in red serge. A lone piper, at the back of the nave, skirled The Flowers of the Forest as my uncle rested just below the altar.

Well, what remained of my uncle after cremation, burial, exhumation and forensic reconstitution.

Joe was about to be laid to rest — again and for good — this time with all due pomp and ceremony in the sylvan tranquility of the cemetery at Regina’s RCMP Depot Division , sometimes called “the Home of the RCMP.” This is where almost every member of Canada’s national police force has come to train since 1885, and where many rest eternally, among them now, my uncle, RCMP Supt. Joseph John Atherton.

For the genesis of this ceremonial weekend in the heart of the prairies, you’d have to go back decades, when a boozy rumour began to circulate in the Vancouver RCMP Officers Mess. The scuttlebutt was that a senior member of the RCMP had been secretly buried under the flagpole at Fairmont Barracks . Fairmont is a handsome, rambling Tudor-Revival pile in the Vancouver neighbourhood of South Cambie, and had once been the headquarters of the Mounties in British Columbia.

By the 2010s, that rumour had all the weight of a whispered message at the end of a protracted game of broken telephone. The only thing that everybody agreed on was that IF there was an officer buried under the flagpole, it was my uncle. How he got there, and who put him there, were matters of speculation.

It was largely idle speculation until 2013, when the RCMP moved from the 21-acre parcel of land around the Fairmont Barracks to new provincial headquarters in Surrey. The Canada Lands Company (CLC), the Crown corporation that oversees Crown land, entered into a partnership to develop the prime property with the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation, lower-mainland First Nations upon whose traditional territory the Fairmont Lands sit. It was one of several CLC projects in B.C. with the twin goals of privatization and reconciliation.

It soon became clear that the First Nations alliance, formalized as the MST Development Corporation, had no interest in preserving the century-old Fairmont Barracks, regardless of its Class-A heritage status. Indeed, there was considerable antipathy toward the building as a symbol of the RCMP’s checkered history with the Indigenous people of B.C. Suddenly, the legend of the Mountie under the flagpole became of more pressing interest. Would Joe Atherton, if he was there, be unceremoniously excavated to make way for a highrise, or paved over in the forecourt of a planned Indigenous cultural centre?

By 2017, when there was already a spirited campaign to save Fairmont from the wrecking ball, the saga of the surreptitious burial gained currency, thanks in part to a former Mountie digging into the narrative.

The possibility of a Mountie burial on the site was cast as an argument in favour of preserving the building, but soon enough, confirming the tale and preserving the remains became a crusade all on its own. It would eventually engage the most senior ranks of the RCMP in British Columbia, require sign-off from the First Nation group, and spark a Byzantine search that would involve the force’s tactical and forensic squads before its conclusion.

In the end, the search would answer the mystery’s lingering questions: the who and how and precisely where. But what of the existential question: why?

For why, we have to go back long before the future of Fairmont came into question, to the beginning of the path that would lead Uncle Joe to become, among other things, the scourge of heroin dealers in postwar Vancouver, aide-de-camp to Canada’s first native-born governor general, Vincent Massey, in the 1950s, and esteemed enough in law-enforcement circles to get an attaboy from J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s.

We have to go back to 1932, when Joe Atherton was 23, living in Vancouver with his parents and several brothers, including my dad, Frank Atherton, two years Joe’s junior.

Becoming a Mountie

In Depression-era B.C., thousands of men Joe’s and Frank’s age were being warehoused in remote federal work camps, clearing scrub and swatting black flies for 50 cents a day. Joe and my father weren’t among them because my grandfather, the impetuous, irresponsible and utterly charming J.J. Atherton, was, at the age of 60, finally able to support his family with steady work as a customs officer after stints as a professional foot-racer, itinerant actor, and owner of failing newspapers in the Kootenays (the last he lost in a poker game).

There was probably an element of J.J.’s swagger in Joe’s decision to become a Mountie. He wasn’t just taking a much-needed job, he was donning the red serge, joining the ranks of Canada’s most romantic icon. For Joe, the romance began with mucking out the stables at Regina’s Depot Division. Along with horsemanship, cadet Joe took instruction in judo, firearms, fingerprinting, criminal investigation and that most essential of police skills, typing.

As a new 3rd-class constable, Joe was immediately assigned to “E” Division (British Columbia) and found himself at Fairmont Barracks, where young Mounties lived in spartan conditions. After a couple of promotions and brief stints in Penticton and Kamloops, Joe was back in Vancouver by 1939 and assigned to plainclothes work, earning an extra 25 cents a day, a 15-per-cent bump in his first-class constable pay.

This is likely when he started to become intimate with Vancouver’s notorious Downtown East Side, then simply called “Skid Road.”

Joe would spend much of his career with the RCMP drug squad, in a city with one of the highest rates of drug abuse in North America. By 1949, when now-Staff Sgt. Joe Atherton was running the seven-member squad, it was estimated that 60 per cent of Canada’s street addicts lived in Vancouver. Joe worked the streets around Hastings and Columbia when heroin was the predominant menace. Reports from the time tell of elaborate RCMP undercover operations that could last months, often focusing on the trade around the notorious Broadway Hotel, ironically now run as a supportive housing centre. As a longtime member of the drug squad — eventually its senior officer — my uncle would have been in the thick of it.

That 25-cent a day pay bump in 1939 likely came in handy. That was the year he married my Auntie Eileen, an elegant and fun-loving woman who, on their honeymoon, according to family lore, started to exhibit the symptoms that would lead to her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

Theirs was a true romance, filled with love and laughter despite the slow, steady ravages of my aunt’s condition. There are family photos of the couple on horseback and hiking on North Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain. Joe was always active and, for as long as she could, Auntie Eileen kept up with him. When that became impossible, she became his most ardent spectator.

Joe was a competitive archer and a stalwart of the Greenwood Archers in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. He was also a “heel-and-toe” racer, the sport we now call race walking, no doubt influenced by his father, J.J. Atherton, who had competed in the sport professionally in Victorian England.

Joe was also a talented woodcarver. Visiting Joe’s home later in life, I marvelled at his collection of miniature Mounties, hand-carved in whimsical poses and painted to represent the historic progression of the force’s uniforms, from the pillbox-hatted members of the North West Mounted Police to the modern uniform. The collection includes a self-portrait, in the familiar red serge and navy jodhpurs, and is now on display in the mess hall of RCMP division headquarters in Surrey.

As a child in the late ’50s and early ’60s, my interaction with my uncle was almost entirely at the annual Atherton family Boxing Day party, and even that was limited. I would watch him carry my Auntie Eileen into my Uncle Reg’s Shaughnessy-area home, place her gently in a chair and fuss over her most of the evening. Joe and Eileen never had children.

Honours in Ottawa

Joining the Atherton clan at Joe’s Regina reinterment this spring were Janan Carr and Jacquie Stinson, the daughters of Auntie Eileen’s younger sister, Olive. As the only children on Eileen’s side of the family, they got the bulk of Joe’s attention.

“He was like a whirlwind when he visited, you couldn’t take your eyes off him,” says Carr. “He’d sing a song, he’d tell a joke, he’d lose his hat, and he’d be honestly interested in you.”

Joe was Carr’s godfather, and when she and her sister were very young, he’d take them for outings in Stanley Park. As a teenager, Carr took up archery under Joe’s tutelage. Joe and Eileen hosted Stinson’s 21st birthday celebration at the Fairmont Barracks, and Joe gave the toast to the bride at Carr’s wedding.

Twelve years into their marriage, Joe and Eileen moved to Ottawa where Joe had been assigned to administrative duty at HQ Division. He was promoted to full inspector in 1953, and soon after was appointed honorary aide-de-camp to Vincent Massey, then four years into his term as Canada’s 18th governor general. Joe continued in the role until the day Massey stepped down in 1959, one of several who briefed the governor general on the events he attended, managed protocol and handled administrative duties.

You have to wonder why Joe was chosen. A tattered Ottawa Journal newspaper clipping might offer a clue.

It shows a uniformed Joe standing tall and imposing in a House of Commons elevator with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, tucked in a corner behind him. It dates from November 1954, during the Queen Mum’s five-day visit to Ottawa. Obviously, Insp. Atherton served as escort during the royal tour, which included a lunch and reception on Parliament Hill where the diminutive Queen Mum charmed backbenchers and ministers alike. Did Joe make an impression on the vivacious royal?

Regardless, Joe eventually returned to his true home within the RCMP: Vancouver and the Fairmont Barracks. He was appointed superintendent in 1964, about the same time he assumed command of the Vancouver subdivision, overseeing an estimated 600 to 700 officers and civilian members. His promotion prompted a congratulatory letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. “This honour,” Hoover wrote, “is indeed an expression of the respect and esteem you enjoy.”

Whether the letter was just a courtesy note between co-operative police forces, or a reference to something more specific, perhaps from Joe’s time combating crime in one of North America’s major drug ports, is a matter of speculation. But my uncle deemed it important enough to hang on to.

Hoped to be buried ‘facing the rising sun’

Superintendent Joe’s new office, until his retirement in 1967, overlooked the flagpole in the forecourt of Fairmont Barracks, the place where, he would much later tell some mess-hall cronies, perhaps idly, he wanted to be buried “facing the rising sun.”

Joe was only 58 when he retired after 35 years with the RCMP; I have no doubt he would have stayed until they kicked him out were it not for the increasing care required by my Auntie Eileen. She died at 60 in 1971, and was very ill in her final years, according to her nieces. Eileen was buried near her parents in a family plot.

Two short-lived marriages later, and following a decline into dementia before his own death in 1988, it seemed like Joe had made no arrangements for his own final resting place. It fell to Bruce McLean, son of his third wife, Jean, to deal with his death.

McLean says his mother “had a real wonderful time with Joe for a couple of years,” but signs of Joe’s dementia were already becoming apparent. Eventually, my uncle was admitted to long-term care.

When Joe died in December 1988, he was a widower again; Jean had passed four months earlier. McLean, her son, found that some rudimentary arrangements had been made for Joe’s cremation and funeral service, though he’s not sure whether it was Joe or someone else who made them. Our branch of the family was 4,000 kilometres away in Ontario.

Joe, a devout Catholic, had apparently not left instructions for a funeral mass, but there was a modest service, attended by an elderly sister and sister-in-law, and his nieces by marriage, Janan and Jacquie.

After the service, Joe’s ashes were sent to Bruce McLean. He remembers being approached by two men who identified themselves as Joe’s former RCMP colleagues and who said they knew where Joe wanted his remains to rest.

McLean doesn’t remember their names, nor was there any official approach by the RCMP, he says, but the plan to bury Joe at the RCMP barracks seemed to make sense. He handed over the ashes.

Buried under the flagpole?

Flash forward to 2015. After decades of mess-hall musings about a secret burial at Fairmont Barracks, retired RCMP Supt. Joe Healy strung the rumours together in a post he published on his website, The RCMP Graves Discovery Database (rcmpgraves.com), honouring deceased colleagues. He reached out to 80-year-old Don Wilson, the deputy commissioner who had been commanding officer at Fairmont Barracks in the late ’80s.

Wilson remembered being approached in 1988 by two retired members — his recollections seemed to refer to Staff Sgt. Jack Duggan and Chief Supt. Al Cart — about depositing my uncle under the flag. After that, his memory of the incident was vague.

Almost two years later, Healy’s story was brought to the attention of retired RCMP Cpl. Donna Morse, a feisty trailblazer who was among the first troop of 32 female officers sworn in to the RCMP in 1974. Morse, then president of the Vancouver Division of the RCMP Veterans’ Association, had made it her mission to save Fairmont Barracks.

By then, the former RCMP campus known as Fairmont had been renamed the Heather Lands and the First Nations-owned MST Corporation had made it clear it had no interest in preserving the building. In fact, its long-term plans called for the creation of an Indigenous cultural centre situated — not by chance — at the barracks site.

“(Fairmont) was the home, the working place, the social place for the RCMP up till when it was turned over to the Indigenous nations,” says Morse. “I took it upon myself to contact the city of Vancouver and start making inquiries.”

Built as a private school in 1914, the Fairmont building became a military hospital at the end of the First World War and was transferred to the RCMP in 1920. It is listed on Vancouver’s heritage register as “an outstanding example of the Tudor Revival style,” and in the past would have been seen as untouchable.

But for thousands of years before Fairmont was built, the property was traditional hunting and gathering grounds for the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. And, among First Nations, the RCMP’s role in enforcing residential school policy was still an open wound. A decision on Fairmont would be the first test of a reconciliation framework passed by Vancouver city council in 2014, under which normal city policies could be set aside to advance the goals of reconciliation.

Morse says her mission to save Fairmont shifted into another gear when she read Joe Healy’s web post. “I thought, OK, if, in fact, this is true that there is … one of our own buried under the flagpole, then I really have to push with the city, because to me, that’s sacred.”

She says she confronted the ranking officers of the B.C. Division at the time with the story of my uncle’s furtive interment and was told they “didn’t have the resources, nor (were they) wanting, to get involved.” The barracks was becoming a bit of a hot potato.

By 2022 , Vancouver city council had reached a compromise: the Fairmont building would be moved — if a willing partner could be found to provide a new site and underwrite the estimated $47-million cost before the MST Corporation got around to developing that corner of the Heather Lands, still some years away. To date, there have been no offers.

In a council meeting before that decision, First Nation representatives were unmoved by arguments that the possibility of my uncle’s remains on the site warranted the preservation of the Fairmont building.

As reported by CTV News, Squamish Nation Coun. Syexwáliya/Ann Whonnock told the meeting that multiple members of her family had been buried at what became, in the 1930s, the footings of the Burrard Street Bridge. “No consideration was given for the feelings of our families, and we were forced to dig them up and move them up to where our family lived, 25 miles up the Squamish River. Then the land was expropriated, given as a tree farm licence, and a logging road had to be constructed, and they were asked again to move the remains.”

When it became clear that the Fairmont building could not remain on the Heather Lands, Morse again approached the RCMP about my uncle, and got a sympathetic hearing from a new commanding officer. Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald assigned his executive officer, Insp. Veronica Fox, to investigate.

“I had two problems,” says Fox. “No. 1 was the witnesses had passed away.” No. 2, she says, was that the site had apparently been renovated at some point.

Old photos showed two flagpole sites: one closer to the building and now paved over, and the second farther away and surrounded by shrubbery. Fox could see that the change took place sometime between 1965 and 1992, four years after my uncle’s death. If my uncle was buried at the old site, the search would likely be abandoned.

That’s when a representative from the site’s new owners mentioned that stacks of early blueprints for the Fairmont had been left in the building’s attic. On a “ridiculously hot day” in August of 2023, Fox sifted through the papers in the sweltering attic and, after several hours, found a blueprint that showed the old flag and its new position. The date of the relocation was May 1985, three years before the supposed surreptitious burial.

About the same time, Fox interviewed retired Sgt. Major Hugh Stewart, who remembered chatting with some retired members 11 years after Joe’s death. They were swapping “war stories” in the mess, according to Fox, when one said, “Did you know that we’ve buried somebody near the flagpole in the Rose Garden?” The members, believed to be former deputy commissioner Don Wilson, and former members Jack Duggan and Al Cart, then walked him over to the flagpole and pointed to the burial spot.

That was enough for Fox. With the permission of the site’s Indigenous owners, she arranged a retrieval operation for June 25, 2024, calling upon members of the RCMP tactical troop to handle logistics — heavy equipment, tools, food and water, even a latrine — and members of the forensic recovery team to oversee the dig. Witnesses included representatives of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations and representatives of the RCMP Veterans’ Association. The divisional chaplain offered a prayer before the exhumation began. “If we didn’t find him, we wanted to acknowledge that, you know, his spirit is here,” says Fox.

Supt. Nav Hothi, head of the B.C. division’s forensic evidence recovery team, says that searching for cremated remains was new to her team, “because, from a criminal perspective, there’s not a lot of forensic evidentiary value there.”

“We started looking at the photos from (the late ’80s), and we were able to identify a radius of probably six feet by six feet in which we would focus our search efforts. And if we were unsuccessful in that area, we would then move to the left or right of it. But after that, we would really have to reassess.”

They used a small excavator to pull up some overgrown rhododendron bushes, making sure not to go too deep. “We knew this was dug by … friends and close colleagues of your uncle, and they were probably a little intoxicated when they did it, having come out of the mess,” says Hothi. “So we knew that they hadn’t dug deep.”

The team carefully scraped away the exposed soil by hand, looking for changes in composition. About two feet down, they found a quantity of grey powder that looked like industrial fertilizer, says Hothi. It wasn’t until they found pieces of decomposing cardboard mixed in with the ash that they realized they had found my uncle.

The ash and the soil around it were harvested and brought back to the forensic laboratory in Surrey, where as much of the dirt as possible was meticulously extracted. Then they called our family.

Insp. Fox gave us three options. Joe could be buried at a private cemetery, perhaps with one of his former wives, or flown out to Ottawa with an honour guard, and buried ceremonially in the RCMP section of Beechwood Cemetery. Or, he could be sent to the cemetery at Depot Division in Regina. Regina was the one place none of Joe’s remaining nieces and nephews lived near or had reason to visit, but the symbolism was persuasive.

In Regina, the final sendoff

So that is how, this year at the end of May, we found ourselves in the oldest building in Regina, a wood-panelled chapel that started life in 1883 — two years before Louis Riel was hanged nearby — as a mess hall for the outpost that would become the headquarters of the North West Mounted Police.

Insp. Fox and Deputy Commissioner McDonald had flown out from Vancouver for the ceremony, as had retired Cpl. Donna Morse. Also present, dazzling in red serge and burnished leather, were Assistant Commissioner Robin McNeil, the commanding officer of the force in Saskatchewan, and senior members from Depot Division. Thirty-eight years after his death, almost 60 years after his distinguished career with the RCMP had ended, my uncle was getting the sendoff he deserved.

He would not rest in front of his beloved Fairmont Barracks in Vancouver, but through the contrivance and generosity of the Vancouver branch of the RCMP Veterans’ Association, he would spend eternity close to it in a different form. His remains had been transferred to a handsome walnut urn, adorned, on its face, with a finely detailed etching of the building, whose past was so much a part of Joe’s career.

After funeral mass, after the hymns and the blessing, the entire party retired to the Depot cemetery, an oasis of green in this dry Prairie city, overarched by elms. For nearly a century and a half, RCMP members have been buried here at no cost.

A piper, at a discreet distance, rendered the first familiar notes of Amazing Grace as we stood before the columbarium. The sense of occasion was palpable. When the urn had been placed inside the niche, the assembled Mounties gave a final salute. By chance, Joe’s neighbour, just a few niches over, is Don Wilson, the district commissioner who colluded in his first burial. It seemed fitting.

For a variety of reasons — mostly physical distance — I did not pay enough attention to my Uncle Joe while he was alive. I don’t mean that I was inadequate in my familial duty, though I suppose that’s true, too. What I regret, after months of being immersed in the story of his life and the mystery that followed it, is that I missed out knowing better a remarkable man. I am mourning my loss, not his.

Main image: A portrait of RCMP Supt. Joseph John Atherton shows his braid and aiguillettes over his right shoulder, indicating his role as an aide to someone of high rank — in this case, Vincent Massey in the mid-1950s. Photo courtesy Atherton family

OTTAWA – The new revenue-sharing deal between Canada and the United States for the Gordie Howe International Bridge was released Tuesday evening after criticism over lack of transparency and conflicting messaging from the prime minister.

The full text, released by the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority (WDBA), contradicts statements made last week by the prime minister about the terms of the arrangement.

According to the agreement, Canada will give the U.S. 50 per cent of net revenues for the first 15 years, after recovering operating costs. The U.S. share will go into a United States-Canada Economic Development Fund, which will be controlled by the U.S. government.

The details come 10 days after the federal government announced the agreement . Missing from the document released on Tuesday is any reference to Canada recouping debt-servicing costs, which had been an issue of conflicting comments from Canadian and American officials.

Prime Minister Mark Carney had originally told CTV News two days after the deal’s announcement that the split in net revenue with the U.S. would come after accounting for debt-servicing costs on Canada’s financing for the bridge .

Canada fully financed the construction of the bridge that connects Windsor, Ont., to Detroit, at a cost of $6.4 billion.

But soon after, Bloomberg News reported that a U.S. official contradicted those terms, saying that interest costs will not be included in the calculation.

The prime minister then made no reference to debt-servicing costs in his comments last Thursday, when he was asked about the details of the deal. Carney also said he expects net revenues for the first couple of years to be “modest” and even “negative.”

On Saturday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick boasted on social media that the deal would give the U.S. half of net revenues until 2041, and “ Our share is before interest and principal.”

The agreement also confirmed Lutnick’s comments that the U.S. gets a “ say in setting the tolls,” specifying that Canada must direct the WDBA to inform and get consent from the U.S. government if toll rate increases exceed 10 per cent in a single fiscal year or if toll rates decrease “below the average of comparable regional crossings.”

The bridge began construction in 2018 to address the congestion on the privately owned Ambassador Bridge, which handles just over a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade.

An agreement that was struck with Michigan in 2012 originally stipulated that Canada was to receive all the toll revenue until it could recover its financing costs, including interest, after which revenues would be shared. Michigan and Canada are joint owners of the bridge.

In June, U.S. President Donald Trump blocked the opening of the bridge, on the basis that the original deal was unfair to the U.S. The Windsor mayor, among many others, had said the obstruction came as a result of lobbying efforts by the Maroun family , owners of the Ambassador Bridge, which stands to lose toll revenue to a competing trade route.

In a post on X, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blasted Carney’s original explanations of the deal’s terms .

“This is a straightforward sharing of profits on a bridge that was built 100 per cent with our tax dollars,” he said, on Wednesday. “This is the exact opposite of what you said.”

“After such a contradiction, how can Canadians trust you on anything related to your dealings with the United States?”

Despite the U.S. and Canada reaching a deal on the Gordie Howe crossing, relations between the two countries remain tense, after Trump announced on Monday a 50 per cent tariff on several Canadian goods, set to take effect Aug. 19.

A day later, the Canadian government announced a decision to cancel a joint cross-border celebration of the bridge opening on Friday.

“In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” said Jenna Ghassabeh, director of communications for the minister of housing and infrastructure, in a statement on Tuesday.

The bridge is scheduled to open to traffic on Monday, July 27.

National Post, with files from Catherine Lévesque

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Ottawa has released details of the revenue-sharing agreement between Canada and the United States for the soon-to-be-opened Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit, Mich., and Windsor, Ont.

A document posted to the Windsor–Detroit Bridge Authority website lists several factors under what is referred to as a “proposed agreement in principle.”

They include a payment by Canada of 50 per cent of net bridge and crossing related revenues for the first 15 years of the bridge’s operation. “Such payments shall be made to a United Sates-Canada Economic Development Fund, established and solely controlled by the Government of the United States,” the document states.

It also requires Canada to tell the U.S. of any changes to bridge tolls that are greater than 10 per cent, or that result in rates being less than “comparable regional crossings,” meaning the nearby Ambassador Bridge or the tunnel crossing. The U.S. may choose to veto such changes.

Another clause cements the opening date of July 27, and allows for “a ceremonial opening event” no later than Aug. 3. Canada backed out of a planned July 24 ceremony after U.S. President Donald Trump proposed a series of new tariffs on this country.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre took Prime Minister Mark Carney to task in a social media post Tuesday for the deal being “the opposite of what you said.”

He said Carney had claimed that “any sharing of the toll revenue won’t happen until all the debt … is repaid.” But, he added: “We learned last night that you had signed a deal that gives the U.S. ‘50% of net bridge and crossing related revenues for the first 15 fiscal years of bridge operations.'”

Prime Minister,

You said: “Any sharing of the toll revenue won't happen until all the debt, all of the debt, is repaid."

Yet we learned last night that you had signed a deal that gives the U.S. “50% of net bridge and crossing related revenues for the first 15 fiscal years of…

— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) July 22, 2026

Read the full text of the Gordie Howe International Bridge agreement:

Canada and the United States have reached agreement in principle on the following:

1. Economic Participation: Canada will provide annual economic participation payments, outside the 2012 Canada–Michigan Crossing Agreement equal to fifty percent (50 per cent) of net bridge and crossing related revenues for the first fifteen (15) fiscal years of bridge operations. Net bridge and crossing related revenues is all revenues collected with respect to the bridge, less all incurred operating costs of the bridge. Such payments shall be made to a United Sates-Canada Economic Development Fund, established and solely controlled by the Government of the United States.

2. Eligible Fund Commitments: Canada and the United States will reasonably agree on the objects of the United States-Canada Economic Development Fund, which will be for the benefit of the United States and trade between Canada and the United States.

3. Toll Governance: Canada will direct the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority (WDBA) to inform the Government of the United States regarding proposed toll-rate adjustments during the first fifteen (15) fiscal years of bridge operations and to seek the United States’ consent where:

a. a proposed toll-rate increase (i) exceeds ten percent (10 per cent) within any fiscal year and (ii) would result in toll rates that are above the average of comparable regional crossings; or

b. a proposed toll-rate reduction would result in toll rates falling below the average of comparable regional crossings.

The Government of the United States must provide its consent or notice of withholding of such consent within thirty (30) days of notification from WDBA, failing which consent shall be deemed to have been provided.

4. Crossing Agreement: Nothing in this Agreement in Principle shall be interpreted as amending, modifying or superseding the 2012 Canada–Michigan Crossing Agreement or the ownership, governance and financial framework established thereunder.

5. Implementation: Officials will develop and finalize the legal, financial and administrative arrangements necessary to implement this Agreement in Principle as expeditiously as possible.

6. Bridge Opening: Upon confirmation of this Agreement in Principle, the Parties will direct their respective officials, agencies and authorities to undertake all actions necessary to open the Gordie Howe International Bridge to commercial and passenger traffic on or before 27 July 2026. The Parties, along with the State of Michigan, shall also work together to hold a ceremonial opening event no later than 3 August 2026.

• Canada nixes cross-border celebrations for Gordie Howe Bridge opening after new tariffs
• Lutnick boasts U.S. will get 50% of net revenue on Gordie Howe Bridge, calls it ‘Art of the Deal’

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