Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week thought-of-the-day ...

Prime Minister Carney's arranged election victories signal (at least in his mind) the time to get to work ... removing Canada from the American sphere of influence and jet-setting around the globe.

He'll take a moment out of that schedule to placate the morons who voted for him.

To wit:

A day after sweeping three byelections in Ontario and Quebec that gave him a majority in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he is temporarily removing the federal excise tax on gas and diesel.

The move means that the cost of gas will drop by 10 cents on a litre of gasoline and four cents per litre of diesel starting on Monday and lasting until Labour Day.

The fuel tax holiday, which Carney said would also see the four cent per litre excise tax removed on aviation fuel, is expected to cost an estimated $2.4 billion.

Now, about that:

Here is the real reason Mark Carney is temporarily suspending the fuel tax.

Rising fuel prices pushes inflation higher, forcing the Bank of Canada to hike rates. The govt can't afford to run $80B deficits as rates rise.

It has nothing to do with helping Canadians. It has…

— govt.exe is corrupt (@govt_corrupt) April 14, 2026

The Trudeau/Carney government as it stands (in case one had forgotten):

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The gap between Canada's richest and poorest grew last year as financial markets gained, interest payouts declined and the job market softened, said Statistics Canada on Monday.

The agency says the income gap — measuring the difference in the share of disposable income between households in the top 40 per cent and those in the bottom 40 per cent — reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025.

The result compared with a gap of 46.4 percentage points a year earlier.

The wider gap came as the lowest-income households saw wages rise slower than the overall average and saw their investment income fall because of lower interest payments on savings, the agency said.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada says the top 20 per cent of the wealth distribution accounted for 65.7 per cent of Canada's total net worth at the end of 2025, averaging $3.5 million per household.

In contrast, the bottom 40 per cent of the wealth distribution held three per cent of Canada's net worth, averaging $81,650 per household.

The gap in wealth between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 40 per cent was 62.7 percentage points at the end of 2025, up 0.6 percentage points from a year earlier.

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Ontario is overhauling its body that reviews complex medically assisted deaths, narrowing its membership, scaling back its scope and shifting its role away from independent oversight toward supporting the system it is meant to scrutinize, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.

Two former members say the proposed new version of the committee is designed to be less rigorous and to provide less oversight.

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Four provinces and the federal government are dialling back their freedom-of-information (FOI) laws, moves that ominously mirror one another.

British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Ottawa are tightening transparency legislation, or proposing to do so, to make internal government documents harder for citizens, journalists and others to obtain. 

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Canada’s dominant Liberal Party has introduced legislation that may soon make Christian speech illegal.

In March, the Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-9, also known as the “Combatting Hate Act.” The bill was introduced under the guise of mitigating antisemitic attacks in the wake of Hamas’ violent attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Liberals claimed it was developed to protect religious communities, but C-9 eagerly expanded to prohibit public displays of “hate,” including “Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” The Canadian Liberals have used so-called hate speech as a Trojan horse to enact censorship laws — the same thing American Democrats are trying to do here. 

C-9 intentionally uses vague language, allowing “hatred” to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Canada’s DOJ has admitted as much, stating, “The penalty for the new hate crime offence would reflect the harm caused by the illegal act.” Under C-9’s broad definitions, public prayers and Bible recitation could conceivably be prosecuted as criminal offenses if they’re determined to be “hateful.” Violators could face up to a decade behind bars.

The “Combatting Hate Act” reportedly removes a portion of the religious defense previously found in section 319(3)(b) of the Canadian Criminal Code, which states, “No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.” The “good faith” was protection for religious principles. 

C-9 creates a gaping loophole for anti-religious lawfare. The bill explicitly aims to “streamline” judicial “hate crime” proceedings by removing the requirement that all “hate propaganda charges” first be approved by Canada’s attorney general. This strips any semblance of law enforcement oversight, empowering individuals to inflict their anti-religious dogmas on anyone they deem “hateful.”

Canada has a history of legislating away its citizens’ freedoms. In 2017, Bill C-16 made “hate speech” against transgender-identifying Canadians a crime. Criminal complaints can be filed against someone who repeatedly uses biologically correct pronouns for a person who claims to be the opposite sex. 

Canada’s weak protections for speech and religious exercise have diverged from the United States’ historically much stronger safeguards, but today’s Democrats threaten to take America down the same dangerous path. In the 1970s, Canada introduced laws barring people from using telephones and later the internet to promote so-called hate speech. Though some of these laws have since been repealed, the country’s mission to counter “hate” is still in motion. In 2019, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Cabinet ministers to crack down on online “hate speech” in reaction to the political right.

In just a few decades, Canadians’ freedom of speech and religious liberties have declined dramatically. While both C-9 and C-16 might sound extreme and far from home, American politicians have pursued similar legislation under the guise of safety, social stability, and inclusion.

In 2025, the California Legislature introduced SB 771, which would have targeted social media companies for “acting as algorithmic accomplices” to content leading to a “hate crime.” Tech companies thought to be amplifying “hate speech” could have faced millions of dollars in civil penalties for each infraction. The governor vetoed the pro-censorship bill, but it passed through the state Senate and Assembly, meaning a majority of lawmakers endorsed the legislation. 

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law forcing social media companies to allow users to report online “hate speech.” Further, the tech companies were required to respond to each report or pay fines. The New York Legislature also introduced bills that would require the tech giants to enable users to report so-called misinformation about vaccines and elections — aka, information that threatens Democrat narratives.

U.S. leaders have also attempted to prevent Christian worship services. During the 2020 Covid shutdowns, many churches were forcibly closed. In March 2020, Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was arrested for violating a stay-at-home order and was shamed for holding regular church services. Several Christians in Idaho, including a church deacon, were arrested after singing psalms in public without wearing masks. It wasn’t until years later that the victims sued the city. The era of Covid lockdowns has passed for now, but the muscle the government flexed against Christians hasn’t atrophied.

Doesn't anyone read John Stuart Mill anymore?:

A former university professor who became a contentious figure for questioning claims about the existence of Indigenous unmarked graves says the outcome of her ongoing court battle will set a crucial precedent for academic freedom in Canada.  

Frances Widdowson, who launched a legal challenge against University of Lethbridge (UL) in July 2023, had her arguments heard by a Court of King’s Bench judge on Friday. Widdowson, a former Mount Royal University professor, is arguing that the University of Lethbridge restricted her right to free speech when it cancelled her talk in February 2023.

Blackfoot First Nation protesters and other demonstrators pressured the university to cancel the event, and then-president Michael Mahon consented to their calls amid what the school describes as security concerns. Widdowson — who has prompted similar protests at two other Canadian universities — said the cancellation mirrors a worrying trend of campuses restricting precisely the sorts of open debates they are meant to encourage. 

“People need to take this seriously, because universities are incredibly important institutions in a democratic society,” Widdowson said. “They let knowledge be disseminated, they’re important in the training of professionals, and are also a bulwark against authoritarianism. All of those functions now are under threat, because you have institutions like the University of Lethbridge, which is not academic at all anymore and has been completely captured by Indigenization activists.” 

Court hearings have focused on whether the university had an obligation to protect free speech in the face of the alleged “very real harms” of hosting the event, according to a legal brief filed to the court by Widdowson’s lawyer, Glenn Blackett. Following Friday’s hearings, a ruling is expected in the coming months.

Widdowson has attracted opposition primarily for work in which she has doubted the claims put forward about Indigenous unmarked graves in Canada, with a focus on Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc, previously known as the Kamloops Indian Band, which has claimed that 215 “missing children” are buried in unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school. 

Nearly five years after the initial claim, however, the First Nation has not exhumed the remains of any children. In a February update, the First Nation said its investigation using ground-penetrating radar is ongoing. Widdowson has made a point of emphasizing this current lack of evidence, including in a 2025 YouTube documentary called “What Remains: Aftermath of the Kamloops Mass Grave Deception.” (A 2021 Assembly of First Nations resolution referred to the Kamloops claims as an example of “burial sites or mass graves.”)

Widdowson said it was an “open question” whether any children were secretly buried on the Kamloops residential site, but said that those allegations need to be properly scrutinized and supported. The graves are regularly cited as evidence of Canada’s alleged genocide against First Nations. 

“Claims should be asserted on the basis of reason, evidence and logic, not the basis of a prescribed doctrine,” she said. 

The planned February 2023 event was about how “wokeism” was undermining academic freedom. Widdowson agreed to the talk on the invitation of Paul Viminitz, a professor who the university later fired in 2024. (Viminitz was previously a party to Widdowson’s Court of King’s challenge, and Jonah Pickle, a former student, is currently an applicant). 

Widdowson has since called on the Alberta government to intervene in her case against University of Lethbridge due to her claims about the threats to academic freedoms at stake, but the government has thus far declined. 

Elizabeth Harper, spokesperson for Advanced Education Minister Myles McDougall, said the province’s universities are obligated to report on their free speech policies, adding that “the University of Lethbridge has been asked to review their policies to ensure that they support free speech.”

Matthew Woodley, a lawyer at Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP who is representing the University of Lethbridge, was occupied with separate court proceedings on Monday and was unable to schedule an interview, according to his assistant.

In a statement, University of Lethbridge spokesperson Trevor Kenney said that the same week of the cancelled talk in February 2023, Widdowson led two other lectures at the university that passed without incident. 

“The University cancelled a room booking for an event involving Frances Widdowson as the result of concerns relating to possible harms raised by members of the University community, including safety risks,” Kenney said. 

On May 27, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band, or Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc, claimed that it had located the remains of 215 children — “some as young as three years old” — in an apple orchard at a former residential school site. The claims were based on the results of ground-penetrating radar, which is capable of detecting ground disturbances but does not confirm the presence of bodily remains. 

The next month, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan said it had found potentially 751 potential unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Merieval Indian Residential School. (The Cowessess chief emphasized at the time that they were not mass graves, but unmarked ones.) 

Some cities including Victoria cancelled their Canada Day celebrations that year, and The Canadian Press named the Kamloops “unmarked graves discovery” as its newsmaker of the year. 

Widdowson said that until the evidence of graves are verified, it is intellectually unhealthy to assert that they do. That is also true for Canada’s First Nations, she said, who deserve to have their many struggles addressed on a foundation of truth. 

“If we don’t have the truth, we will not be able to figure out the best way to organize society,” she said. “That’s what’s happened to Aboriginal people now, is that they’re being fed a whole bunch of falsehoods which are making it impossible for Aboriginal people to thrive and live full lives in modern society. 

In December 2021, Mount Royal University, Widdowson’s former employer, terminated her over allegations that a series of tweets she had posted were a form of harassment. In 2024, an arbitrator found that Widdowson’s dismissal was unwarranted and that, despite her controversial views, there had “never been a complaint about the quality or ethics of her scholarship.”

 

As much as you may wish it, socialism simply doesn't work:

Something feels off about Canadian public policy. Governments at every level seem perpetually busy announcing new agencies, launching new programs and carving out new tax measures. They are drawn to the new and visible, while the core of their responsibilities — the services people currently depend on — quietly deteriorates. There’s a name for this: “policy adventurism.” It’s a distraction we can no longer afford.

Toronto City Council recently voted 21-3 to launch a pilot project establishing four city-operated grocery stores. The goal is to make food more affordable for residents struggling to make ends meet. Food insecurity in Toronto is real and Canada is the food inflation capital of the G7.

But consider the proposal. This is a municipal government that cannot reliably fill potholes, has presided over a transit system in chronic dysfunction, and has seen housing affordability collapse on its watch. Now it intends to enter the grocery business. As food economist Sylvain Charlebois notes, modern food distribution is “incredibly complicated.”

Because grocery retail operates on notoriously thin margins, the Daily Bread Food Bank finds that even if the city eliminated those margins entirely, the maximum theoretical saving to households would be around $40 to $73 a month. The underlying drivers of food pricing would remain completely untouched, while taxpayers would be left subsidizing a permanent municipal loss leader.

The grocery pilot reflects a broader governing reflex: when confronted with complex, systemic failures, governments are often tempted to launch new initiatives rather than fix the machinery they already have. At the federal level, this dynamic has driven a steady expansion of new agencies.

Ottawa created the Canada Infrastructure Bank in 2017 to catalyze private investment in public infrastructure. It spent years failing to move money out the door. Rather than reckon with that reality, the Carney government doubled down. It added the Major Projects Office, Build Canada Homes and a Defence Investment Agency.

As Shannon Proudfoot recently wrote, this is a workaround rather than a public service overhaul. And it mistakes the rhetoric of urgency for the reality of delivery. Starting up a new agency generates a press release. It does not generate the structural regulatory reform or procurement capacity that determines whether things get built.

The recent Ontario budget shows similar adventurism. It includes a new $4 billion Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund — on top of the recently established Building Ontario Fund, with funding now at $8 billion — to leverage private capital to grow certain sectors. Missing from this conversation is why pension funds and private capital are choosing to invest abroad rather than at home in the first place.

As governments expand into dubious new areas, existing responsibilities get shortchanged. A March 2026 Auditor General report found that Ottawa identified over 153,000 potentially non-compliant international students but had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases a year. The ArriveCan application — a simple digital tool for border management — ballooned to an estimated $59.5 million with costs the Auditor General described as impossible to determine due to poor record-keeping.

Millions of Canadians do not have a family doctor, and they now wait a median of 28.6 weeks for medically necessary treatment — triple the wait in 1993. Student math scores have been falling for over two decades. Violent crime has surged. And serious concerns remain about the quality of Canada’s infrastructure.

These outcomes are striking because they occurred precisely at a time that governments dramatically expanded payrolls. Real institutional capacity is built through focus and clear mandates. Policy adventurism destroys the discipline of doing defined things well over time.

Some of it is well-intended. But the political reality is hard to ignore. New agencies and pilots generate headlines today with ribbon-cutting opportunities. Fixing a complex regulatory apparatus or reducing surgical wait times takes years, with diffuse credit and no guarantee of political reward.

And once government signals it is open for business in a new domain, stakeholders mobilize, lobbyists identify opportunities and pressure mounts to add more — each addition drawing staff, budget and ministerial attention away from the functions that were already failing. Every hour a deputy minister spends starting up the latest adventure is an hour not spent on restoring the integrity of the immigration system or managing the hospital capacity crisis.

A similar dynamic plays out in the tax system. Every budget seems to produce questionable new carve-outs, each justified in isolation, collectively producing what might be called the Swiss-cheese effect: a base riddled with holes, increasingly difficult to administer, eroding the fiscal foundation that existing public services depend on.

Governments do face genuinely new demands, from regulating artificial intelligence to navigating shifting trade relationships and managing demographic pressures. These challenges require immediate attention and institutional bandwidth.

But a state spread thin on redundant agencies and municipal grocery stores cannot manage these modern imperatives. Fiscal room, bureaucratic capacity and public trust are scarce. We cannot afford to spend them promiscuously on elective adventures while the foundations of public policy continue to crack.

The moment demands a rigorous return to prioritization. Governments must perform well in the core duties they have already promised before borrowing resources from the future to invent something new.

But make-work projects give the impression of solid action, so ...

Now, placing people in remote areas with few to no academic and professional opportunities and ingraining in them ideas of perpetual victim is helpful in what way?:

Given how prevalent diversity, equity and inclusion ( DEI ) has become in recent years — notably in the federal government — it’s important to state some facts.

For example, according to the federal government’s anti-racism strategy , “Systemic anti-Indigenous racism accounts for the fact that compared to non-Indigenous People, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis experience poorer social, economic, and political outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.” But according to the data, factors such as education and geography largely explain the differences in average incomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

In fact, as noted in a new study by the Aristotle Foundation, when Indigenous Canadians have a trade or university degree, live near a major urban centre and work full time, they have similar — or sometimes higher — incomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

Consider the latest census data, which measured incomes in 2020. Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year and have a bachelor’s degree or higher, the median employment income was $5,000 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Calgary, $4,000 higher in Toronto, $4,000 higher in Vancouver, $500 lower in Montreal and $2,000 lower in Ottawa-Gatineau. (All geographies refer to Census Metropolitan Areas).

Among Canadian workers who worked full time for the full year but have no certificate, diploma or degree, the median employment income was $5,600 higher for Indigenous workers than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto, $800 higher in Vancouver, $400 lower in Montreal and Ottawa-Gatineau, and $1,600 lower in Calgary.

As the data show, at higher levels of educational attainment (university certificate or diploma, a bachelor’s degree or higher), Indigenous workers actually slightly outperform their non-Indigenous counterparts on average. At lower levels of educational attainment, their median incomes are slightly less. It is difficult to conclude from these statistics that Indigenous workers’ incomes are negatively impacted by systemic racism.

Overall, the median employment income in 2020 was actually 15.7 per cent lower for Indigenous workers compared to non-Indigenous workers, but much of that is because a lower proportion of Indigenous workers obtain university degrees than the general population. Another major reason is that only 50 per cent of Indigenous workers worked full time for the full year compared to 54 per cent of non-Indigenous Canadians.

Incomes also tend to be higher in large cities where there’s more economic opportunity, and living and working in a federal or provincial capital provides more access to government jobs where pensions and job security tend to be much stronger. The data show that Indigenous workers are less likely to live in or near major urban centres — another reason for the income disparity.

So, what’s the main takeaway?

The data suggest that despite historic wrongs, Indigenous Canadians today are not hostages to a systemically racist economic system — they can and do prosper. When Indigenous Canadians obtain the same level of education and work the same number of hours in the same city as non-Indigenous Canadians, their incomes are broadly similar.

 Notably, any remaining income differences cannot simply be attributed to “systemic racism.” It would be silly to conclude that systemic racism causes full-time Indigenous workers with bachelor’s degrees to earn less than non-Indigenous workers in Ottawa-Gatineau while also causing full-time Indigenous workers without any certificate, diploma or degree to earn more than non-Indigenous workers in Toronto.

The bottom line is that hours worked, geography, and education largely explain the employment income disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Canada. The evidence does not support the claim that “systemic anti-Indigenous racism,” as the federal government might suggest, is to blame. Therefore, any policies meant to address systemic racism should be reviewed with a skeptical eye.