 |
| Ugandan martyrs, pray for us. |
Prime Minister Mark Carney has responded to the news that the Canadian economy entered a technical recession by saying lower population growth and reduced government spending have contributed to “weakness” in the economy.
Statistics Canada reported on May 29 that Canada’s economy showed no growth in the first quarter of 2026 after negative growth in the last quarter of 2025. The country’s GDP declined for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis, meeting the common definition of a technical recession.
Asked by reporters in Parliament on June 2 whether Canada was in a recession, Carney responded by saying his government had “been in the process of laying the foundations for a stronger, more resilient, more independent” Canadian economy. He said this involved the “difficult” work of making major investments, changing the way government operates, and securing trade agreements with other countries.
“As we do all that, the data is going to be uneven, and we will see some weakness,” Carney said.
Remember – he was a banker.
Or something.
Answering questions is for little people:
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday skipped Commons questions over the recession to take a 15-minute tour of a construction site in his Nepean, Ont. riding. The Prime Minister would only let media “take a picture of him wearing a hard hat and carrying a hammer around pretending he’s a carpenter” but would not discuss his management of the economy, said Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre.
**
As MPs gathered in the House of Commons at 2 p.m. Monday for daily question period, Prime Minister Mark Carney was 20 minutes away, posing for a photo op in front of a housing development in his riding.
The Leader of the Official Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, had hoped the prime minister would be present in the House of Commons to answer questions about the economy, given that, on Friday, Statistics Canada noted that gross domestic product output shrank during the quarter ending March 31, the second consecutive quarter in which the economy contracted.
One definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But with the second quarter shrinking by just 0.1 per cent, BMO Economics senior economist Robert Kavcic argued against applying that label.
“There is much more to a recession than two quarters of negative GDP growth,” Kavcic wrote. “Things aren’t great, but Canada isn’t there yet.”
Still, whether the country is in a recession is a debatable point, and that’s precisely what Poilievre wanted to do: challenge the prime minister for leading the country into what Conservatives argue is a “full-blown” recession.
But in skipping question period for a photo op — where he took no questions — Carney continued a pattern now clearly established during his time as prime minister of avoiding accountability to members of Parliament.
“Question period, where normally prime ministers go to answer, especially in a moment of crisis when the economy has fallen into the only recession in the G7, you’d expect him to be there to be accountable, to show his incredible economic brilliance, but he’s not showing up for question period,” Poilievre told reporters Monday morning in the House of Commons foyer.
Monday’s question period was the 123rd such session in the current Parliament and Carney has been present for just 33 of those sessions, or 26.8 per cent.
Also:
The Senate concealed hundreds of thousands of postcards mailed by Canadians opposed to a cabinet bill, the chair of the budget committee confirmed yesterday. Senator Tony Loffreda (Que.), a Liberal appointee, denied any trickery: “This decision was not made to silence anyone.”
All Hitler had to do was wait a few years:
In a statement issued Friday by Canada’s largest public sector union, recently-hired campaign officer Rawan Qaddoura will not be fired over the historic posts on Twitter — now called X — that praised the Third Reich leader and repeated racist tropes that the world is controlled by Jews.
“The staff member has taken full and public responsibility for this conduct,” read the statement from the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
In a statement issued alongside, Qaddoura called the posts “completely inexcusable” and she understands the harm they caused.
“These posts do not reflect my beliefs today, nor did they meaningfully reflect any beliefs that I sincerely held at the time,” the statement read.
Qaddoura claims she didn’t have the “same level of judgement political understanding, and emotional maturity” at the time the posts were made in 2012 and 2013.
“I regret the harm and distress this has created for staff, members, and the broader labour movement,” she said.
The posts were made when Qaddoura was allegedly 14 years old.
“I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work,” Qaddoura wrote in a January 2012 post on X, formerly Twitter.
In a second post six months later, Qaddoura wrote, “Everytime I read about Hitler, I fall in love all over again.”
That was followed by a third post from August 2013, where she quoted a now-deleted X account saying, “The whole world is controlled by Zionist Jews and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”
All three tweets were cataloged and archived by online antisemitism watchdog Canary Mission, which has documented Qaddoura’s history of anti-Israel activism.
Qaddoura will remain an OPSEU employee
In their statement, the union said they conducted a throughout review of the matter, including her job performance and Qaddoura’s mea culpa.
“Having concluded that process — and recognizing both the authentic accountability she has demonstrated for comments made as a child and her exemplary record of respectful conduct in the workplace — OPSEU/SEFPO has determined that the staff member will remain on staff,” the statement read.
“We will not be commenting publicly any further on internal staffing matters or next steps.”
The statement also acknowledged concerns raised by Jewish OPSEU members.
“We have heard your concerns and understand this situation does not exist in isolation, and we are committed to doing more — not just responding to incidents as they arise, but building a union where every member, including Jewish members, feels genuinely respected and included,” the statement read.
Except “chair medicine” and “waiting room care” have become routine and common, default responses to Canada’s severely gridlocked emergency rooms, Mackay and other emergency physicians are reporting.
“ER chair medicine in Ontario (the awful cousin of hallway medicine) is unacceptable. Full stop,” Toronto emergency physician Dr. Raghu Venugopal posted on X.
“We need to get rid of it. We must fund hospitals and fix the problem of critically ill patients put in a chair. There is zero exaggeration here. I am sounding the alarm. Hear it.”
Venugopal posted that he witnessed people in “extremis from pain” being “put and kept in a chair.”
Extremis can mean uncontrolled, doubled-over-in-agony pain. “Generally speaking, those patients shouldn’t be in a chair,” Mackay said.
But as backed-up emergency departments desperately try to manage more demand than they have the capacity to meet, more people are being assessed in “unconventional spaces,” the official euphemism for spaces never designed, or equipped, to provide emergency care: No access to oxygen or suction, no nurse call bell, no easy access to a washroom or sink, no shred of privacy.
“Unconventional spaces” can include any carved-out space. Hospitals are converting ambulance bays into patient wards. “No heating, no plumbing, but, ‘Hey, it’s great — we’re taking care of our patients by sticking them in a cold garage,'” said Mackay, chair of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physician’s rural, remote and small urban section.
Patients have been examined in closets and washrooms. Doctors are wading into waiting rooms and pulling sick patients into corners and cubby holes. Blankets are being hung off IV poles to create makeshift curtains for people stranded in chaotic hallways. While it may give the illusion of an acceptable version of medicine, care is “guaranteed being comprised by the concept, ‘We can just see a patient in a chair,'” Mackay said.
**
In Canada, if your doctor refers you to a specialist, you’ll likely have to wait 15 weeks to get an appointment. Then another 13 weeks to get treated. Just getting an MRI will take 4 1/2 months, on average. But if you want to kill yourself? You can get a same-day appointment.
Welcome to the healthcare system that Bernie Sanders and his socialist pals want to import into the U.S.
A decade ago, Canada legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying,” or MAID. At first it was limited to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable,” such as end-stage terminal cancer patients. Five years later, it was expanded to those whose “death is not reasonably foreseeable.” People with a disability or non-terminal illnesses could get a doctor to snuff them out. Lawmakers expanded it again to include those suffering solely from a mental illness, which the government expects to implement next year.
MAID is already big business in Canada. Nearly 100,000 Canadians have availed themselves of this form of “healthcare,” and it now accounts for more than 5% of all deaths in the country.
And the government seems to be doing everything it can to make it a runaway hit. Lawmakers waived the 10-day waiting period for those whose deaths “are reasonably foreseeable,” and the rest have to wait only 90 days.
The result is that same-day or next-day killings are common, which one member of the MAID Death Review Committee said “reveals remarkable fast‐tracking of euthanasia.”
“One elderly woman declined MAID and preferred palliative care,” he wrote. “When a hospice placement request was rejected, her husband, who had been assessed as struggling with ‘caregiver burnout’ asked for an urgent MAID assessment. She was euthanized that day.”
Nor does the state appear to care much about enforcing its own rules.
The Toronto Globe and Mail this week reported on a case involving a 45-year-old who suffered from Crohn’s disease, whose doctor approved him for death at a meeting in a coffee shop, and then followed up with dozens of text messages encouraging him to go through with the euthanasia, including one bashing family members who opposed him committing suicide. The doctor even drove him to the facility to administer the fatal drug cocktail.
The same doctor had also declared a patient dead only to have her start breathing again, requiring him to return to finish the job.
Why keep tabs on
thing like that?:
Labour inspectors must ensure no illegal immigrants are working on federal public works, says Conservative MP Kyle Seeback (Dufferin-Caledon, Ont.). Cabinet has admitted it does not know how many, if any, of an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants in Canada are drawing wages in subsidized construction: “Can the Minister cite one investigation?”
**
The Department of Immigration says there is “high interest” in foreigners applying to become Canadians under 2025 changes to the Citizenship Act. Conservative MP Brad Redekopp (Saskatoon West) in Commons debate on budget Main Estimates pressed for a number: “Does the Minister stand by her estimate?”
The Grift in process:
The Senate human rights committee last night voted 7 to 1 to criminalize Indian Residential School “denialism.” Public statements intended to promote hatred by downplaying the impacts of Residential Schools would be outlawed under threat of two years in jail: “It can involve denying, minimizing or justifying the documented abuses, deaths, forced assimilation and intergenerational harms.”
**
No, this isn't the latest headline out of Minnesota — look a little further north.
In 2021, at a time when media throughout the Western world were still in a state of agitation after the killing of George Floyd, Canadian outlets picked up a story too sensational not to be true:
Hundreds of indigenous First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves at residential schools run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia.
The Kamloops Indian Band sent around a press release that "confirmed" it.
The statement claimed the remains of 215 children had been found with the help of an expert using ground-penetrating radar.
"We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify," said the band's chief, Rosanne Casimir.
"Some were as young as three years old," she continued, asserting "the final resting place of these children" was in the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Only it wasn't. No human remains have been found at Kamloops, as media that fanned the flames of the story now admit.
Even now, Canada's biggest daily paper, The Globe and Mail, phrases its retraction in cagey terms.
"There has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains," the paper conceded on May 30.
That funny phrasing leaves one wondering, is there private confirmation of human remains — another "knowing," perhaps?
The Globe and Mail editorial, titled "There is no reconciliation without truth," is a masterpiece of embarrassed equivocation, lamenting conditions for First Nations children at Canada's residential schools and even insisting the absence of bodies "does not mean children did not die there" before finally, eight paragraphs into the story, taking a smidgen of responsibility:
"The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge" the story, the editorial board concedes.
"The initial headlines and stories in the media simply stated as fact that the remains of 215 children had been found. Many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made references to 'mass graves'," a phrase that went beyond even Chief Casimir's claims.
Yet right after admitting its failures, the paper speculates, "Perhaps it will be proven, some day, that there are hundreds of unmarked graves at Kamloops" — as if the error here was being a little too hasty to declare what will sooner or later turn out to be true.
After all, that would be the "truth" that fits the narrative The Globe and Mail lays out in the first seven paragraphs of its story, a tale of wicked residential schools and countless First Nations children doomed to a miserable death.
The narrative comes first — the facts must follow.
This time they didn't, but next time?
The narrative isn't going away just because its showcase story has been debunked.
The consequences of the media hype aren't going away, either:
Canadian taxpayers footed the bill to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — real money in U.S. dollars, too — for First Nations groups to investigate "soil anomalies."
The government simply doesn't know where the money went.
As enormous as the fraud here appears to be, worse is the destruction unleashed by arsonists and vandals against Catholic Churches in the story's wake.
Canada's state broadcaster, the CBC, cataloged 33 churches "burned to the ground" between 2021 and 2024, with 24 of those incidents "confirmed arsons."
"A researcher and some community leaders suggest Canada's colonial history and recent discoveries of potential burial sites at former residential schools may have lit the fuse" for these incendiary attacks, the CBC reported.
Yet the media lit the fuse — not only by hyping an outrageous story that was never backed up by evidence but also by laying down a grand narrative that stoked anger at churches.
(And, in typical fashion, although the residential schools were Catholic-run, other churches also suffered from indiscriminate attacks apparently inspired by the story.)
**
Between 1991 and 2004, land surrounding the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had been excavated by a Simon Fraser University team. The work involved digging “shovel test pits” and then screening the soil for bone tools, fire pits and other evidence of pre-contact Indigenous use.
And apparently, some of those test pits had been incorrectly pinged as suspected graves.
“I had to rule out where those excavations had taken place in the late 90s, early 2000s,” said Beaulieu. “After this review it was determined that there remain 200 targets of interest.”
Unmentioned at the two-hour press conference was the arguably far more relevant information that the area of the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds they had surveyed also lay atop a historic septic system.
In fact, the survey site may have been overtop the system’s “disposal beds,” a structure consisting of a latticework of clay pipes, installed in 1926 and laid out in an east-west orientation. The details of the system were easy to find. The plans, purchase order and correspondence related to the septic field are all held in the archives of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
**
Federal managers yesterday testified they never authorized a $10 million charge by Indigenous Languages Commissioner Ronald Ignace to host a four-day conference in Ottawa. An internal audit is underway: “How many Indigenous people could have learned their language with $10 million?”
**
35 (1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.
(2) In this Act, “aboriginal peoples of Canada” includes the Indian, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada.
(3) For greater certainty, in subsection (1), “treaty rights” includes rights that now exist by way of land claims agreements or may be so acquired.
(4) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, the aboriginal and treaty rights referred to in subsection (1) are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.
Note, it does not say consult anywhere within that text. It certainly doesn’t say consent.
The duty to consult we keep hearing of is a judge-made constitutional obligation developed by the Supreme Court of Canada. In a ruling regarding the Haida band in 2004, the Supreme Court stated, “When the Crown (federal or provincial government) contemplates conduct that might adversely affect established or potential Aboriginal or treaty rights, it has a duty to consult the affected Indigenous group(s).”
The nature of Canada’s system follows the living tree doctrine. It’s a principle of constitutional interpretation that views Canada’s Constitution as a dynamic, evolving document rather than one frozen in time. It’s a nice ideal, but it has empowered activist judges to veritably rewrite the document and not in a good way.
**
DRIPA, which was passed by the government of former B.C. premier John Horgan in 2019, cannot provide a viable framework for reconciliation in British Columbia, because the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is not a viable framework for reconciliation in an advanced western democracy such as Canada, which already recognizes and affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights in its Constitution.
The suggestion that UNDRIP ought to be Canada’s reconciliation framework came from the Truth and
Sec. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, states, “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” The Supreme Court has interpreted this as the proper vehicle for reconciliation in Canada. While Sec. 35 has been criticized, it at least provides a balanced approach to reconciling the pre-existence of Indigenous societies with the imposition of sovereignty by the Crown.
UNDRIP is inconsistent with Sec. 35 and is contrary to what the Supreme Court has determined to be the constitutional obligations of governments and the rights they are supposed to protect. Governments simply cannot accept UNDRIP as an alternative pathway to reconciliation in the Canadian context.
Apparently the B.C. government’s view was that it never intended DRIPA to be legally enforceable by the courts, or to cause UNDRIP itself to be the law of the land. Yet in December 2025, the B.C. Court of Appeal disagreed with that interpretation of both DRIPA and Sec. 8.1 of the Interpretation Act, which states that, “Every Act and regulation must be construed as being consistent with the Declaration.”
The court determined that, “Properly interpreted, the Declaration Act incorporates UNDRIP into the positive law of British Columbia with immediate legal effect.” This has created enormous levels of legal uncertainty in the province and opened the door for First Nations to litigate, and potentially upend, any provincial laws if they so choose.
Even American First Nations have cited DRIPA and UNDRIP in legal challenges to provincial government decisions, including the government’s approval of the Eskey Creek mine in northern B.C.
Recently, the Business Council of British Columbia surveyed its members and found that 98 per cent of them are “very concerned” about DRIPA “applying to all laws in the province. The same share of respondents also said that they do not believe DRIPA is living up to its original promise of creating greater investment certainty in B.C.”
**
On the sunny afternoon of October 16, 1966, just a few weeks into the school year, 12-year-old Charlie (aka “Chanie”) Wenjack was enjoying himself on the swings in the playground at the back of Cecilia Jeffrey (CJ) Indian Residential School in northwestern Ontario. Seven days later, his lifeless body was found lying beside the railway tracks about 70 kilometres east of the Ontario–Manitoba border.
Today, Charlie Wenjack is the most famous Residential school student in Canadian history—a symbol of the suffering endured by Indigenous children who were forced to attend white-run boarding schools away from their families.
Books have been written about Charlie. Buildings have been named in his memory. He is featured in more than 50 “Legacy Spaces” across Canada sponsored by banks, major retailers, universities, performing-arts centres, and governments. Thousands of Canadians from coast to coast “Walk for Wenjack” every October. Children in more than 65,000 classrooms across Canada and in the United States are being taught about his altogether too-short life and tragic death through a book called Secret Path.
Unfortunately, much of what has been written and said about Charlie Wenjack—including some contents of Secret Path—has no basis in fact.
While it is absolutely true that he longed to be back with his family, and that he died of exposure while trying to make the ill-advised trek back home, lurid depictions of Charlie being preyed upon by priests and nuns within a schoolhouse full of gothic horrors are completely ahistorical. (Indeed, there were no priests or nuns working at CJ at the time Charlie attended.) …
According to a Daily Miner and News report on the inquest into Charlie’s death, it was a restless Ralph McDonald who took the initiative to leave that Sunday afternoon “because he wanted to visit his uncle, whom he liked.” The newspaper quoted Ralph saying he much preferred trapping animals with his uncle to being in school.
The newspaper also reported that Charlie’s best friend, 10-year-old Eddie Cameron, testified that Charlie was lonely and, when the McDonald brothers headed for their uncle’s cabin, he decided to tag along with them.
According to a February 1967 article by Ian Adams, published in Maclean’s, the decision to run away had been made on the spur of the moment. “Right there on the playground, the three boys decided to run away… It was a sunny afternoon, and they were wearing only light clothing. If they had planned it a little better, they could have taken along their parkas and overshoes. That might have saved Charlie’s life.”
Three of Charlie’s sisters, who were also at Cecilia Jeffrey, might well have been on the playground that Sunday afternoon. Wherever they were, he didn’t say goodbye to them, which suggests that he intended to return after the visit to the uncle’s cabin.
During one of the many interviews I conducted in Kenora for my newly published book, Lonely Death of an Ojibway Boy, a former senior staffer at CJ, Abe Loewen, told me the doors were never locked. There was no gate at the open-pillared road entrance, and no fence on the opposite side of the property. Nothing would have prevented Charlie or any other child from leaving the school whenever they felt like it. …
In the official form that he prepared in support of an inquest into Charlie’s death, Coroner Dr R. Glenn Davidson wrote, “they [the boys] stayed at the Kellys for a few days, and then Wenjack was told to leave. Wenjack was given some matches in a glass container and a map by Kelly’s wife. It is believed he left about 3:00 pm October 19 [Wednesday] to head east.”
One reason why Dr. Davidson had the wrong date—in fact, Mr. Kelly didn’t show Charlie the way to the nearby railway tracks until Friday, October 21—was that the magazine article describing Charlie’s trip to the trap line wasn’t published until more than three months after his death. That important information wasn’t available to Dr Davidson at the time he issued the warrant for the inquest.
Dr Davidson wrote in his report that one of the reasons he’d decided to hold the inquest was “to ascertain if [Charles] Kelly turned the boy loose with no food to travel over 300 miles east, on the [railway] track.”
That hike (which would take even a well-provisioned adult two weeks to complete) would have taken Charlie to the town of Nakina in north central Ontario, from where he’d have to take a plane to get to Ogoki Post. He had no food, water, or money. And it isn’t clear how he would have convinced anyone to fly him back to his reserve, even if he’d managed to complete the hike.
Charles Kelly testified at the inquest that Charlie had left without his knowledge, contradicting his statement to Adams that he’d showed Charlie how to get down to the railway tracks on Friday morning. In the end, the inquest jury issued a handwritten report that concluded that both “Mr Benson” (at whose cabin the boys stayed Sunday night) and Kelly “should have notified the authorities of the [boys’] presence.”
We can only speculate about what serious consequences there would have been for Charles Kelly if the coroner and the jury had known that Charlie had been at his trapline cabin on Thursday night and that he’d turned him loose Friday morning with neither food nor water, nor much idea of where he was going.
**
In a column published in newspapers across Canada, WE Charity co-founders Craig and Marc Kielburger said Chanie Wenjack “died fleeing his residential school” and encouraged Canadians to donate money in support of “Legacy Rooms” in restaurants, schools, libraries and corporate boardrooms.
“For a $5,000 donation,” they wrote, “the Downie-Wenjack Fund will provide an official plaque and signage explaining Chanie’s story to set the tone for the Legacy Room. The money raised supports initiatives to teach about residential schools in Canadian classrooms.”
Gord Downie gets top billing on the $5,000 plaques in Legacy Rooms that are now sprouting up across Canada. His trademark hat sits atop the words “The Gord Downie” in boldface. The line below in smaller, lighter, type says: “& CHANIE WENJACK FUND.” There’s a photo of Gord Downie performing at one of his concerts on the left side of the plaque and one of a shy, smiling little Chanie on the right.
One might well ask whose “legacy” is being commemorated. Chanie Wenjack’s name is completely overshadowed.
The plaque looks like part of a donor-supported promotion for the late Gord Downie’s solo albums.
On October 28, 2017, the Globe and Mail published an article about a Canada 150 reconciliation journey through the Northwest Passage on the Polar Prince.
At one point, Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. broke down in tears during a group discussion on reconciliation in the ship’s Legacy Room.
“I just don’t know why in this Legacy Room there is no box of Kleenex,” she said prompting laughter from her colleagues. “Or why Gord Downie’s name is bigger than Chanie Wenjack’s” on the plaque on the wall.
Good question.
We don’t have to trade with China:
"When you look at all the 'agreements,' they are only memoranda of understanding. In other words, they are merely invitations to talk more." — Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and co-author of World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century, to Gatestone Institute, May 22, 2026.
The pipeline is especially important to Russia because it will replace sales to Europe, lost because of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
"Russia is running out of capital. Putin does not have the cash to build Power of Siberia 2, and he has not been able to convince the Chinese to pay for it." — Dmitri Alperovitch, to Gatestone Institute, May 22, 2026.
Let them argue forever if they want. While they do, America continues to have a chokehold over China's imported energy supply.
**
Federal figures confirm cabinet granted Beijing the equivalent of half the battery electric car market in Canada through 2031. The Minister of Industry had downplayed the China concession as “a small quota.”
**
On May 6, Guangming Daily — not just an official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, but allegedly the favored mouthpiece of the world’s largest intelligence agency — published an admiring essay under a headline that reads “From dependence to autonomy: how the Carney government is reimagining Canada–U.S. relations.” The piece, which approvingly amplified Carney’s odd choice to flourish a figurine of the British general Isaac Brock, famed for repelling an American invasion in 1812, does not report on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rupture with Washington so much as celebrate it.
It casts his turn away from the United States not as a crisis to be managed but as an awakening to be admired, a passage from servitude to sovereignty.
The striking part is that the essay’s central idea — dependence giving way to autonomy — was, almost to the word, the case Carney himself made to a room of American financiers three weeks later.
At the Economic Club of New York on May 28, the prime minister described Canada’s drive to become “more autonomous” as a “core” objective of his government, then sanded the edge off with a line built for the room: “Let’s be absolutely clear. Canada Strong will help make America great again.”
Strip away the flattery — a borrowing of Donald Trump’s own core slogan — as Guangming Daily does, and the same program remains beneath it: a deliberate loosening of the ties that bind Canada to the United States, even as Carney trumpets forging deeper strategic ties with Beijing in trade, law enforcement, media and culture.
According to the Australian analyst Alex Joske, the China-influence expert who wrote the definitive study of Beijing’s feared Ministry of State Security, Guangming Daily is, in his words, “still the MSS newspaper of choice today.” In Spies and Lies, his account of the ministry’s influence operations, Joske documents its long use of publishing houses, think tanks and newspapers as fronts to shape Western opinion and to reach its agents; among them is the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, an organization the ministry knows internally as its Eleventh Bureau. This is the apparatus that has now chosen to lavish praise on a sitting prime minister of a Five Eyes democracy.
The essay’s other enthusiasms are specific.
It praises Carney for resisting what it calls American expansion, and casts Canada, under his hand, as a representative of a world standing against “America first” and economic coercion. It applauds the defense decoupling now underway in Ottawa — the pledge to route the bulk of federal defense contracts to domestic firms, the march toward five percent of output on the military by 2035, the billions promised for the Arctic — and reads each as a healthy loosening of the American grip. And it closes by noting that Canada supplies roughly sixty percent of American crude imports and is Washington’s most reliable source of nickel, while a tariff-burdened Trump administration heads into a midterm election under strain. The subtext is not subtle.
Canada has leverage, Donald Trump is vulnerable, Ottawa can afford to stall.
The Bureau makes no claim that Carney sought, welcomed, or coordinated with this Ministry of State Security endorsement. What the record shows is explicit: the propaganda arm of a hostile intelligence service has decided to celebrate, in flattering and well-informed detail, the foreign policy of an allied head of government.
That trope — Carney as the bulwark against a tariff-obsessed Donald Trump — is not new from Beijing.
It is almost exactly the message a Chinese Communist Party information operation pushed during the 2025 federal election, when Canada’s election-threat monitor, the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, disclosed a covert campaign run through Youli-Youmian, WeChat’s most popular news account, casting Carney as the tough Canadian leader best suited to stand up to Washington — one post titled, in translation, “The United States is Facing a Tough Prime Minister from Canada.” Intelligence tied that account to the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. A year later, the Ministry of State Security’s newspaper of choice tells the same story.
There is a logic to that enthusiasm, and it is known in Ottawa.
Among the durable aims of Chinese statecraft is to divide the Five Eyes — to pry the United States apart from the allies with whom it shares its deepest secrets. A 2018 report published by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service through its academic outreach program mapped the method with unsettling foresight. Trading partners, it warned, “have quickly found that China uses its commercial status and influence networks to advance regime goals.” And it issued a caution that reads today like a note left for the present government: “Unless trade agreements are carefully vetted for national security implications, Beijing will use its commercial position to gain access to businesses, technologies and infrastructure that can be exploited for intelligence objectives, or to potentially compromise a partner’s security.”
