Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your last mid-week post of the winter ...


If at first you don’t succeed, get your friends on the Supreme Court to rule in your favour:

The Liberal government is honking its final horn in its legal battle to validate its use of the Emergencies Act to deal with the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government filed its application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) on Tuesday in the hopes that the highest court in the land will overturn two earlier decisions that ruled the use of the draconian act was unjustified as a way to stop the protests .

In its filing, the federal government argued that the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal applied the “wrong principles” and a “flawed approach” when they ruled that the government’s unprecedented decision to invoke the Emergencies Act on Feb. 12, 2022 was unconstitutional.

The government is also arguing that the SCC needs to make a final decision after the courts came to a different conclusion than the government-convened Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), which found in 2023 that the invocation was reasonable.

“While the nature and purpose of the POEC differed from those of the court proceedings … their opposite conclusions create inconsistency and underscore the need for this Court’s intervention and guidance,” reads the application.

In January, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld a lower court decision that the Liberal government’s invocation of the Act to deal with lingering Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable, unjustified and violated the Charter.

The challenge to the use of the act was brought forward by civil liberties groups such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitutional Foundation (CCF) as well as the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The protest had lasted for weeks in Ottawa, with many large trucks parked on streets to protest the government’s pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At the time, the government argued it needed the exceptional powers granted by the act to freeze some convoy participants’ bank accounts, compel tow truck companies to co-operate with local police clearing out the trucks, and mark parts of downtown Ottawa as a no-go zone.

Within one week of the act’s invocation, police forces from across Canada had assembled in Ottawa to push out protesters..

But in 2024, the Federal Court ruled that the powers were unnecessary to deal with the Ottawa protest as well as sympathetic blockades at two border crossings in Coutts, Alta. and the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont.

In fact, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley determined that existing provincial and municipal powers were sufficient to address the disruptive protests.

In his decision, Mosley agreed with the government that the pan-Canadian protests in early 2022 were causing harm to Canada’s economy, trade and commerce. But he concluded that the damages did not rise to the level of a threat to national security as defined by the law to invoke the exceptional and heavy-handed powers of the Emergencies Act.

“The record does not support a conclusion that the Convoy had created a critical, urgent and temporary situation that was national in scope and could not effectively be dealt with under any other law of Canada,” he wrote.

“The harm being caused to Canada’s economy, trade and commerce, was very real and concerning but it did not constitute threats or the use of serious violence to persons or property,” he added.

RCMP had resolved the Coutts blockade prior to the invocation of the act.

In January, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Mosley’s decision , also finding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet did not have reasonable grounds to believe that the convoy created a national emergency.

“We are of the view that Cabinet did not have reasonable grounds to believe that a national emergency existed, taking into account the wording of the Act, its constitutional underpinning and the record that was before it at the time the decision was made,” wrote the court’s Chief Justice Yves de Montigny.

Now, the Supreme Court of Canada must decide if it will hear the case.


You watch.

The judicial activists will do what Carney wants.


 

Carney’s true goals are for himself:

On Friday, Statistics Canada released figures showing that the Canadian economy had shed 84,000 jobs in February, after a January that had already seen the evaporation of an addition 24,000 jobs.

(Sidebar: it's like a badge of honour for the Liberals, really.) 

All told, it’s the worst job loss since the COVID era, and confirms Canada’s position as second only to France in terms of overall unemployment rate. Canadian unemployment now stands at 6.7 per cent, as opposed to 5.2 per cent in the U.K., 5.8 per cent across the European Union and 4.4 per cent in the U.S.

In addressing the jobs figures on Friday, Carney claimed that 80,000 “net” jobs had been created under his tenure, and noted that the unemployment rate was lower than when he took office. It was at 6.8 per cent when he was sworn in last March, and is now at 6.7 per cent. Statistics Canada referred to the new rate as “virtually unchanged from 12 months earlier.”

Carney’s entire tenure has been marked by these kinds of unemployment figures. Without accounting for the job losses of the COVID era, every single month of the Carney government has seen unemployment rates higher than at any point since 2016.

And the figures get even worse when looking at private sector employment. Carney’s time as prime minister has seen the raw number of non-government jobs go down. There were 13.49 million private sector jobs when he took the helm. Now there are 13.48 million .

In all of this, youth workers have been hit hardest, with youth unemployment now standing at 14.1 per cent.

But even that figure doesn’t account for the tens of thousands of young Canadians who have simply given up looking for work, thus officially removing them from the “labour force.” A recent tally by analyst Richard Dias noted if all these “inactive” youth are counted, Canada’s youth unemployment rate surges to nearly 18 per cent; a high not seen since the 1990s. …

Productivity refers to how much GDP is being generated per worker. And in Canada, the story of the last decade is that with each passing year, the average worker is producing just a bit less wealth than they were the year before. The only reason this hasn’t resulted in 10 years of constant recession is because Canada has been juicing its GDP with immigration -driven population growth.

Carney has brought this up several times. He gave a May speech identifying “weak productivity” as one of the singular drains on Canadian quality of life. And his November budget included a tax credit dubbed the Productivity Super-Deduction.

But according to figures tabulated last month by Desjardins, the best that can be said of productivity under Carney is that it remains flat . The Bank of Canada’s January Monetary Policy Report would conclude much the same. Even if Canadian GDP had been able to post growth of 1.7 per cent last year, the average Canadians’ experience of it was “ essentially flat.”

Where this trend is made all the more noticeable is that it is continuing to not happen in the U.S. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, Canadian per capita GDP was not only the same as in the U.S., but it grew at the same rate .

Starting in 2013, the Americans continued on their upward productivity trajectory, while Canadians dropped into the doldrums we know today. And the 12 months of the Carney government have been no exception to this trend. In just the last nine months of 2025, the average American saw their share of the GDP rise by about $750 , against the $0 seen by the average Canadian.

One of the main drivers of Canadian productivity stagnancy is that industrial investment has dropped off a cliff. A worker with a backhoe is obviously much more productive than a worker with a shovel, and the last decade has been subject to a rapid deindustrialization of the Canadian economy.

One particularly dramatic chart published last year by the National Bank of Canada shows “investment in industrial machinery” plummeting to generational lows in the first quarter of 2025, despite the exact opposite happening in the U.S.

“Canadian businesses today operate with less machinery and equipment than they did 10 years ago,” reads a January analysis published in The Hub . “We are not just failing to modernize. In some sectors, we are de-capitalizing.” …

Carney’s signature promise upon taking the helm was that he would be able to restore relations with the United States, and bring a resolution to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war against Canada. “I know the president, I’ve dealt with the president in the past in my previous roles when he was in his first term, and I know how to negotiate,” Carney said during a February debate for the Liberal leadership.

And according to polls, that’s primarily what drove his victory. Among voters who supported Carney, they primarily did so under the belief that he would manage the Americans better than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Twelve months later, that trade war continues, and Carney has mostly overseen the slow deterioration of Canada’s U.S. export trade.

Meanwhile, Mexico — a country that often shared billing with Canada in Trump’s various trade threats — is counterintuitively strengthening its U.S. trade ties. So much so, that Canada can no longer claim the title as the United States’ largest trade partner.

Mexico is now the largest exporter to the U.S., and the largest importer of U.S. goods. The latter title breaking a Canadian record that stretches back as far as the Second World War.

And according to a writeup by the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Vieira, this might be very specifically a consequence of Carney government trade policy.

“Trump administration officials credit Mexico for taking a pragmatic approach on trade talks, while describing negotiations with Canada as challenging,” he wrote.


Also:

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On April 1, Canada’s industrial carbon tax will rise to $110 per tonne. As oil prices surge globally, all countries will likely experience upward pressure on food prices. But countries layering additional cost burdens onto their industrial sectors will feel the effects more acutely — and Canada is firmly in that group.

This creates a classic double whammy for Canada’s food supply chain: Rising global energy prices combined with a rising domestic carbon tax. The impact will not necessarily be visible to consumers as a specific surcharge. Instead, it will quietly filter through the system until it shows up where it always does — at the grocery checkout.

It is one of Canada’s silent killers of competitiveness.

A recent analysis published by The Hub, written by Charles Lammam, highlights the deeper issue. Canada’s regulatory environment has become increasingly burdensome over the past quarter century. While the United States remains among the OECD’s most open and competitive economies, Canada’s regulatory competitiveness has steadily eroded.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to spend more and run deficits more than twice as large over the next five years compared to those planned by the previous Liberal government, according to a new study by the Fraser Institute.

As a result, Carney’s combined deficits are projected to total $321.7 billion from 2025-26 to 2029-30 — $167.3 billion higher than the $154.4 billion former prime minister Justin Trudeau was projected to spend during the same period, according to the report by the fiscally conservative think-tank.

 


Pretty lame:



But talking would only lead to discussion and maybe even outright rejection from something so fascist and nutty that we must question how we got to this point in the first place:

Proposed legislation would give police and Canada's spy service new powers to investigate online activities — powers they say they need to keep pace with criminals in the digital age.

The bill tabled in the House of Commons on Thursday would require internet and phone companies to tell authorities whether they provide service to a particular person or account number.

The legislation would allow police to then seek a production order from a court to obtain subscriber information from a company, such as the name, address, phone number and services provided.

The bill also updates warrant powers for computer searches and proposes a new authority to allow Canadian police to make requests of foreign electronic service providers, including social media and AI chatbot companies.

The government says police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service need new tools to investigate national security threats and organized crime because existing laws have not kept pace with changes in technology and court rulings.

A previous version of the bill alarmed civil liberties advocates who said it would allow authorities to demand to know whether a person has an online account with any organization or service in Canada — which could risk exposing a person's medical information or other private details.



Yet another domino:

 

 

We don't have to trade with China:

Xi has been supremely confident that China will dominate the rest of the century... "Change is coming that hasn't happened in 100 years," the Chinese leader told Vladimir Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow in March 2023. "And we are driving this change together."

Many in Washington and New York policy circles essentially agreed with Xi as they accepted the narrative of America's managed decline.

Not President Donald Trump. In a spectacular move, he extracted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from Caracas on January 3 and is now in the process of taking down Iran's theocracy.

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The Department of Canadian Heritage is purchasing only Canadian-made paper flags for July 1 under cabinet’s Buy Canadian policy. Federal departments in the past used Chinese suppliers for items including maple leaf pins given to new citizens at swearing-in ceremonies: “The requirement is limited to Canadian services.”

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A senior official from the Chinese Communist Party’s International Department met with former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Trudeau-appointed Senator Yuen Pau Woo during a four-day visit to Canada in March — a significant development given that Germany’s domestic intelligence service warned in 2023 that the body effectively operates like an intelligence service of the People’s Republic of China. The meetings were documented in a readout and photographs published on the department’s official website.

Images show Lu Kang, Vice Minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in a working meeting with Chrétien and a formal photograph with Senator Woo, flanked by Canadian and Chinese flags, accompanied by the Chinese Ambassador to Canada and the Consul General from Toronto.

The readout states that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s officials, business leaders, and think tank scholars also took part in the meetings. A separate photograph shows the delegation at a meeting held at Gowling WLG, where the Canada China Business Council’s Executive Director Bijan Ahmadi — a former president of the Iranian Canadian Congress, an organization that has publicly called for lifting Canadian sanctions on Iran and opposed the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity — was also present.

The department’s own account of the visit frames it as follow-through on the “new type of strategic partnership” agreed when Carney met President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January, with the “Canadian side” characterized as expressing broad enthusiasm for party-to-party exchanges and the economic opportunities presented by China’s 15th Five-Year Plan.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution issued a formal July 2023 safety notice warning that the department — also known historically as the International Liaison Department — warrants “particular care.”

“In recent years, the Chinese state and party leadership has significantly intensified its efforts to obtain high-quality political information and influence decision-making processes abroad,” the notice states. The agency warned: “The IDCPC now de facto acts as an intelligence service of the People's Republic of China and is therefore part of the Chinese intelligence apparatus.”

 


That's a position of weakness:

Defence Minister David McGuinty said Tuesday that Canada’s decision not to join the U.S. and Israel’s military attacks on Iran was clear “from the beginning” of the war more than two weeks ago, while underscoring that position is not going to change.

During a press event in Brampton, Ont., highlighting Canada’s military aid to Ukraine, McGuinty was asked about the resignation Tuesday of U.S. National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, who said he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war because “Iran posed no imminent threat” to the U.S.

McGuinty told reporters he had not been aware of Kent’s resignation but suggested he “made a principled decision, I suppose.”

“Look, the United States is going to find its way forward on this with Israel,” he said. “In terms of Canada’s position, we’ve looked at this very carefully. We’re following it hour by hour. It’s a very volatile situation, and so we’re very, very careful in terms of taking steps in any direction.

“But for us, from the beginning, it was clear that joining this in terms of the prosecution of the war offensively was not going to occur.”



Canada the cruel:

Rushed, incomplete assessments, families kept in the dark, loved ones driven to choose MAID because of unbearable suffering.

A new study adds to growing evidence that Canadian families’ experiences with doctor-assisted death are deeply mixed, with some describing the experience as raw, traumatic and surreal — including sometimes oddly “cheerful” providers — and others describing caring and compassionate deaths for loved ones who’d “had enough.”

Canada’s assisted-death law focuses on the rights and autonomy of people to choose when to end their lives.

But many families told the University of Alberta research team that families should be included in such profound, life-or-death decisions.

Some only learned of the MAID request after death, “raising the complex issue of patient autonomy versus family involvement,” the researchers wrote.

“I got a phone call on June 1st from her family doctor that I had never met. She said, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that your mother has passed away,'” one woman recounted. “And I literally told the doctor, I said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got the wrong person, like, you’ve called the wrong person.'”

“Obviously, my mom doesn’t need my consent to be able to proceed with this. I don’t know what the answer is, but there needs to be a conversation about people who just go ahead and do this, and it’s allowed to be done without their next of kin or family member, anybody.”

The research team said their study “supports including families in assessments, when appropriate, to increase transparency and reassure families that safeguards were met.”

In December, 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian, who struggled with vision loss from diabetes and depression, died by MAID in a Vancouver funeral home, despite being denied an assisted death multiple times in Ontario, his home province. When his mother was told her son was dead, she thought it was a prank.

In 2021, 61-year-old Alan Nichols, who had a history of depression, was euthanized over the objections of his family and nurse practitioner soon after being hospitalized for a psychiatric episode. The sole condition listed in his MAID application was hearing loss, The Associate Press reported.

“Canada is now noted as the fastest growing assisted dying program in the world,” the U of Alberta research team wrote.

As of the end of 2024, 76,475 MAID deaths had been reported in Canada since the practice was legalized in 2016. The country is expected to mark its 100,000th MAID death by summer.

A special joint parliamentary committee is now meeting to deliberate expanding MAID to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness, which is set to come into effect in March 2027.

 The new, Health Canada-funded study asked families from five provinces — British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec — to share their stories supporting 35 Canadians who received MAID. One-on-one virtual interviews were completed between October 2024 and January 2025.

Among the findings, in some cases the decision for MAID was driven by “unmanageable or unbearable symptoms” such as severe shortness of breath or pain so severe, “if you touched the bed, she was in agony,” as one family member described it.

Others feared loss of autonomy, and having to rely on others for daily tasks like bathing or toileting, or the possibility of moving into a nursing home.

“It was just like a series of losses, right,” one relative said. “You lose the ability to work. You lose the ability to play. You lose the ability to eat, to sleep, to do everything. So, the loss was already there…. The final, the MAID, was just like the grand finale of the loss journey.”

Some MAID deaths were driven by insufficient home care — “they come when they come but not when you need it,” one family member said — or drawn-out waits to see specialists.

“My mom needed psychiatric help,” reads one transcribed interview. “My mom was a victim of a broken healthcare system. My mom had been trying to see specialists for months and months and months (for a brain injury)…. It got to the point she lost all hope.

“And so my mom ended her life because of desperation, not anything to do with dignity.”

“Although many participants experienced respectful, caring and compassionate interactions with healthcare professionals involved in the MAID process, others did not, adding to already stressful and intense emotions,” the researchers wrote in BMC Palliative Care.

Some families described hasty assessments done over Zoom, without deep discussions about alternatives and supports families could offer to help, and “what felt like a rapid assessment-to-provision timeline, which contributed to concerns that MAID may have occurred prematurely.”

Canada’s law requires two assessors to agree a person is eligible for MAID. But some families said the second assessor seemed to simply “rubber stamp” the first assessor’s decision.

Concerned were raised about the accuracy of assessments, including whether mental health issues were fully addressed. A two-page list compiled by one family of their father’s history of depression, suicidality, personality traits and other suspected mental illnesses was largely ignored.

Several families described being ill-prepared for the day of the MAID provision. “I was somewhat traumatized. Not somewhat. I was,” one said.

“I was disturbed at how long the process took. Yeah, how long the process took. And it’s very raw. Your first injection, second injection, third, fourth. It goes on.”

Some participants described dispassionate care and a “cold, uncaring, unempathetic” MAID provider. “Booking our MAID date was like booking a dinner reservation. So, it’s just all very, very, very impersonal.”

What one family found most off-putting was that the MAID provider seemed strangely “cheerful about it.”



Euthanasia covers a multitude of bureaucratic sins:

In Winnipeg, some patients are waiting 20 hours or more to receive care. On Thursday afternoon, the children's hospital CHEO in Ottawa had an estimated wait time of 15 hours and 47 minutes for non-urgent patients; in Summerside, P.E.I., the estimated wait time for non-urgent patients on Wednesday was more than 10 hours.

Meanwhile, the latest statistics published by Ontario Health show that patients who came to an ER in January and were admitted to hospital spent on average 20.3 hours in the emergency department before getting a bed in a ward. The average time spent on a stretcher in ERs across Quebec on Tuesday was 18 hours.

Doctors in Alberta have called for the province to declare a state of emergency over the overcrowding affecting emergency rooms, calling the situation a "crisis state."

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