And please join me Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. ET to Ask Me Anything about my coverage of medical assistance in dying (MAID). You can find more details below about how to join the conversation.

Five years ago, Canadians were told that they were living through a national reckoning with bigotry and hate. The federal government adopted a sweeping anti-racism strategy. Universities hired diversity officers. Companies created diversity, equity, and inclusion departments. Politicians spoke about systemic discrimination with an urgency often reserved for wars and natural disasters.

Yet antisemitism continues to surge, even though the infrastructure built to fight it is broader and deeper than any time in Canada’s history. Since October 7, 2023, Jewish schools have been shot at, synagogues attacked, and businesses vandalized. Jews have been harassed, assaulted, and spat upon. Protesters have marched through Jewish neighborhoods, and posters of kidnapped Israelis and a missing Jewish teenager were torn down.

Read more

Had you fallen into a coma during Canada’s election campaign in 2025 and awakened last Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, it would be easy to conclude that Canada and the United States had settled their differences: tariffs and other trade tensions, warnings about Canada’s dependence on the U.S., and even that bombast about tuning us into merely the 51st state.

There was Canadian prime minister Mark Carney delivering what amounted to a love letter to the U.S. economy to one of America’s most influential business audiences at a venue that has hosted presidents, central bankers, CEOs, and heads of state for over a century. “The United States approaches its 250th birthday as the most dynamic, resilient, and inventive country the world has ever seen,” Carney told the audience.

This was not the sort of thing Canadian politicians have been saying lately, especially Carney. (Remember Davos?) He even offered up the idea of a North American version of MAGA. “Canada strong will help make America great again.” Call it MNAGA for Make North America Great Again.

Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, liked that line, writing on X that “a lot of Americans can get behind that kind of positive message.”

Why would Carney talk like this? The former central banker was speaking directly to people who decide where capital flows—and making the case that Canada is a good place to invest. He met executives from BlackRock, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, Netflix, and others. He explained that Canada needs to diversify its economic relationships and reduce its vulnerabilities—and that American investors should invest more money in Canada.

Carney pointed out that Canada buys more American goods than China, Japan, and Germany combined. Seventy percent of Canadian exports are inputs for American products, and Canada supplies 99 percent of U.S. natural gas imports, 85 percent of its electricity imports, and 60 percent of its crude oil imports.

Read more

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where regulation requires American companies to help save our culture, homeless people have rights too (lots of them!), and numbers can look good and bad at the same time. Let’s jump in!

Netflix helped turn Vancouver into Hollywood North. Amazon, Disney, and Apple poured money into Canadian productions, employed armies of Canadian crews and creative types, and helped Canadian artists reach audiences far beyond Canada’s tiny domestic market.

The Canadian government seems to have looked at all this and thought: How do we tax and regulate it?

Online streaming services, ranging from the four American companies I just mentioned to Swedish audio streaming giant Spotify, will have to hand over 15 percent of their Canadian revenue under a decision announced last week by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The money will help subsidize parts of the media system considered culturally important by the government, especially French-language programming, indigenous content, and local news.

A 5 percent “base contribution,” to use the CRTC’s term, has been around since 2024. (Most normal people would call it a tax.) It was imposed as a result of 2023’s Online Streaming Act, which then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government sold as a patriotic effort to make streaming giants “pay their fair share.”

Of course, no one can really define what “Canadian culture” even means—least of all Trudeau himself, who infamously described Canada in 2015 as a “postnational state” with “no core identity.” And as I reported in 2023, the Online Streaming Act was never simply about bringing online broadcasters under similar rules as Canada’s traditional broadcasters. It was about dragging Canada’s old, protected broadcasting model into the internet age—and expanding the CRTC’s authority.

Read more

In March, the Liberal government introduced Bill C-22 in the House of Commons as a supposedly restrained sequel to the original “lawful access” legislation that I warned about in this newsletter last June. The backlash has only grown from civil liberties groups, technology companies, cybersecurity experts, and pretty much anyone else uncomfortable with the idea of the state building the infrastructure for digital surveillance. It comes across less like a narrow policing tool and more like something assembled by bureaucrats who binge-watch spy thrillers.

Government officials claim that the critics are hyperventilating about modern tools that could help law enforcement and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service fight everything from money laundering to child sexual exploitation to terrorist attacks. Last week, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree accused U.S.-based tech firms of “misinterpreting some of the safeguards” built into Bill C-22, including encryption protections.

But when Signal threatens to stop offering its messaging app in Canada, virtual private network (VPN) company Windscribe says it might move its headquarters to another country, and Apple and Meta warn that the personal data of users might be put at risk, perhaps the problem is worse than the companies’ reading comprehension of a bill that includes over 19,000 words.

Read more

This was supposed to be the year that Alberta’s separatist movement graduates from a political fever dream to something resembling a credible mainstream project. There have been meetings with Trump administration officials and rhetorical support from MAGA believers eager to cheer on Canadians who say their oil-rich province should join forces with the United States. A secession vote might even happen in October.

But the push suddenly faces a credibility crisis because of a voter-data scandal. The trouble began when Jen Gerson, co-founder of independent Canadian media outlet The Line, reported that the Centurion Project, an ambitious pro-secession political machine, appeared to have access to sensitive voter data through a volunteer app connected to Alberta’s sovereignty movement. The database included the names and addresses of nearly three million Albertans, according to The Globe and Mail.

David Parker, who runs the Centurion Project, has said that the group did nothing wrong and that its volunteers used the database only to find people they already know—and did not have access to phone numbers or emails. He likened the data collection to the basic information found in phone books. That might be a comforting defense if your childhood memory of the White Pages includes voter identification numbers, private contact data, and sophisticated political profiling tools.

The Centurion App was pitched by its backers as a potentially revolutionary political organizing platform that was designed to modernize grassroots campaigning through sophisticated voter targeting, real-time volunteer coordination, and large-scale supporter identification. Emmott Kelsey, a prominent separatist, claimed that the app is “so groundbreaking that it was presented to the White House,” adding that it would “revolutionize how campaigns are run, and we’re the guinea pigs.”

After a source told Gerson that Alberta voter information was easily accessible through the app, she found her own personal data there, and then alerted Elections Alberta, the province’s election administrator. It declined to investigate, citing insufficient legal grounds under stricter rules introduced by Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s government last year that raised the evidentiary threshold for launching probes.

Read more

Things had been unusually quiet on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade front. But quiet sometimes means that someone is about to flip over the table. And that is exactly what U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did last week.

At a conference in Washington, D.C., he mocked Canada’s negotiating posture on the upcoming review of USMCA, the trade pact governing most of North American trade. A key July deadline looms over whether Canada can preserve the deal’s current exemptions—or face a more protectionist framework.

Read more

Glenn Cormier runs a pub on Bowen Island, a community of about 4,000 people less than an hour from downtown Vancouver. His problem isn’t having enough business. It’s finding someone to cook the food on the Bowen Island Pub’s menu. The island is reachable only by boat and ferry, and the local labor pool is thin. The workers who are nearby don’t seem interested.

“We have seen a decline in the interest of young people to go into the culinary arts,” Cormier told me. Casual dining, in particular, “is really not appealing to young Canadians.” He is able to find servers, but “if you don’t have the cook, you’re out of luck.”

Read more

Behind the headlines blaring about strained Canada–U.S. relations and President Trump musing about the “51st state,” something quieter is happening. Some Americans are reviewing their family trees, zeroing in on their Canadian roots, and applying for citizenship.

The surge in interest follows a change to Canada’s citizenship law, known as Bill C-3, which became law in December 2025. The change expands who can claim citizenship by descent. As a result, millions of Americans are now eligible.

Read more

In Texas recently, Islamic schools have become a political battleground—shut out of a $1 billion voucher program over security concerns, then allowed back into the program by a federal judge.

Canada, by contrast, isn’t debating Islamic schools. It’s building them.

Islam is the country’s fastest-growing religion and its second largest, with 1.8 million adherents—nearly 5 percent of the population and more than double the number from two decades ago. The Muslim community is also younger: The median age is about 30, compared to 41 nationally, and more than a quarter are under 15. Nearly 30 percent of the country’s Muslims are Canadian-born.

This demographic shift is starting to reshape education in Canada.

Islamic schools, once marginal, are expanding quickly. In Alberta, the Edmonton Islamic Academy, founded in 1987, now has about 1,400 students and a waiting list of more than 1,500. An $80 million expansion is set to open this September. It’s the largest Islamic private school in North America.

Read more

In recent weeks, Canada has seen a spate of gunfire directed at synagogues, and the government has issued a warning that a terror attack against the Jewish community was a “realistic possibility” within the next six months. Unsurprisingly, Canada’s Jews are questioning whether they could still be safe.

Canada’s teachers are on the case, and they have a message for their nation’s Jews: Sanction Israel. At its annual general meeting, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions, passed a motion on March 16 endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Some attendees wore buttons declaring “BDS Saves Lives” and “BDS Saves Kids.”

BDS resolutions are not new in Canada—they’ve long circulated in student unions and parts of the labor movement—but it’s the first province-wide endorsement by a K–12 teachers’ union. And it reflects a broader shift in schools across the country, which have become increasingly hostile to Jews.

Read more

The decision ordering Neufeld to pay was not made in a traditional courtroom. It happened in a human rights tribunal, an administrative body that sounds like a court but operates under different, much looser rules that allow accusers to remain anonymous. Its rulings can be reviewed by real courts but are rarely overturned, since the original ruling needs only to have been reasonable in a judge’s opinion.

Read more

Fast and efficient. That is an apt description for Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide program, as I reported in The Free Press last week. Some deaths even occurred on the same day that the person sought approval for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), according to a 2024 report.

Read more

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney created some confusion when he used the phrase new world order in January to describe the shifting global landscape marked by President Donald Trump’s disruption of traditional alliances and trade norms. But after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, Carney’s allegiance was crystal clear.

“Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” the prime minister said in a statement. Carney also reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself and to ensure the security of its people.”

Gone for now, at least, is all the talk about Canada’s recent pivot toward China, the rancor about Donald Trump’s painful tariffs on key sectors of the Canadian economy—such as steel, aluminum, and the auto industry—and the lingering bitterness from the U.S. president’s musings of making Canada merely the “51st state.”

Read more

Canada has always taken hockey seriously, and an Olympic hockey match with the U.S. is no laughing matter. Now the U.S. is treating hockey like it’s war, with Canada as the enemy. Within seconds of the U.S. victory over Canada on Sunday, American X looked like the U.S. had just won World War III. MAGA didn’t differentiate between Trump-supporting Canadians or Boomer liberals, Alberta versus the rest of Canada, or any of the usual internal fault lines. It was all just “Canada,” flattened into a single target.

The White House account resurfaced a 2025 X post from Justin Trudeau featuring a bald eagle pinning a Canadian goose to the ice. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh gave off full 51st-state energy, celebrating that the U.S. had “vanquished” Canada—“the most evil and depraved country on Earth”—which feels like an overreaction for an overtime hockey win, and makes one wonder what he would have said had it gone to a shootout. U.S. congressman Randy Fine chimed in to remind everyone that America is better than Canada in “Every. Single. Way.” Dave Portnoy, founder and owner of Barstool Sports, kept it subtle: “CANADA IS BROKEN. WE OWN THEM ON EVERY LEVEL POSSIBLE. WOMENS AND MENS GOLD IN HOCKEY.” And then there were the “medical assistance in dying” jokes—posts suggesting that the Canadian team might apply after the loss.

Read more

After last week’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, speculation swirled about whether the shooter being transgender was the main cause of the horrific attack. But there is no confirmed evidence that Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, had medically transitioned, had received gender-affirming medical treatment, or was in inpatient care, according to the regional healthcare authority in northern British Columbia.

Read more

Tumbler Ridge is a mining town of roughly 2,400 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, so remote that cellphone service cuts out about 30 seconds after leaving town. The secondary school where the shooter fired on students and staff has about 160 students. The mother of a 12-year-old girl who is battling for her life in the hospital was friends on Facebook with the killer’s mother, Jennifer Strang, and they both worked at the same mining company. “I will probably know every one of the victims,” the mayor said.

Shootings are not a recurring feature of national life in Canada, and the language used by law enforcement officials also sounded distinctly different. Early police alerts referred to the suspect as a “gunperson,” and a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer described the killer as “female” at a press conference, saying that authorities would respect the suspect’s preferred gender identity.

Read more

Canada is still talking about Mark Carney’s trip to Beijing last month, where the prime minister showed how Canada is preparing for a world where its economic future can’t rest on the United States alone. Closer ties with China are part of that strategy, even though that might be uncomfortable at times.

The initial moves include allowing the import of a limited number of Chinese-made electric vehicles and the elimination of tariffs on Canadian canola, which will boost one of our most important export industries. It was no surprise that President Donald Trump called the agreement “a disaster” that will “go down as one of the worst deals, of any kind, in history.” His words also showed that the Trump administration now views Canada’s friendlier trade posture toward China as part of America’s broader economic confrontation with Beijing.

Read more

It was not that long ago when Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau corrected a woman in Edmonton for saying the word mankind instead of peoplekind, and wore Bollywood-style clothes during an official visit to India. Compare those cringe-inducing moments with Mark Carney’s visit to the World Economic Forum last week. Very few speeches in Davos end with a standing ovation. Mark Carney’s did.

The prime minister opened his speech with a story from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel wrote about a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who put a sign in his shop window—Workers of the world, unite!—even though he didn’t believe it. Like everyone, he did it to avoid trouble. And that, Havel argued, was how the system survived: not just through force, but through millions of small, daily acts of going along with something everyone knew wasn’t true.

Read more

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney stepped onto a red carpet outside the Great Hall of the People last Thursday and reviewed a ceremonial honor guard of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Flanked by senior Chinese officials, he walked slowly past rows of soldiers standing at rigid attention as a military band played the Canadian and Chinese national anthems.

It was Carney’s first full day in Beijing, where no Canadian prime minister had paid an official visit since Justin Trudeau in 2017. Even the idea had seemed unimaginable since 2021, when Canada-China relations collapsed after the arrest of Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, known as the “two Michaels.” In 2018, they were detained in China on vague espionage charges, a move widely seen as retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S.

Read more

It was easy to treat all that “51st state” talk by Donald Trump as him just trolling Canada. Mark Carney would calmly respond that Canada “is not for sale,” and everyone would move on.

But Canadians are starting to think about something they haven’t seriously considered for a long time: Could the United States actually try to take us over? You can read my reporting on Canadians who would like Canada to become the 51st state and those who say they’re ready to take up arms if the Yanks ever came north.

When you add a growing separatist movement in resource-rich Alberta, it feels less and less like Canada will be an independent country with the same borders that it has today.

The United States president has repeatedly mused publicly about Canada becoming the newest U.S. state, even saying he would be willing to use “economic force” to push Canada into a political union. He usually moved on to musing about something else.

Read more