Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to meet Canada’s NATO obligation to invest two per cent of GDP in defence by the end of the year. But at a time of growing political instability, it’s important to remember that soldiers are not the only ones protecting Canada.
Working in the shadows, Canada has a civilian army of more than 6,400 intelligence practitioners in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Canadian Security Establishment (CSE) — both with headquarters in Ottawa, where most of their staff are — working around the clock to keep us safe. Unfortunately, according to a Public Safety Canada survey in 2021, 54 per cent of Canadians don’t know what they do. Also, despite the vital role they play in Canada’s defence, their budgets are not included in NATO’s calculation of Canada’s defence spending.
At base, a “fair” wage is one that will attract people to do what you need them to do.
It isn’t $20, $30, $40, or $1, $3, or $10 an hour. It is the wage at which people think they are better off taking than not. There is no non-artificial minimum wage, and no absolute limit to the size of the wage either. The way wages should be set is through market mechanisms.
At the very beginning of the now-violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles, a newscast sympathetic to the protestors showed members and former members of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stirring up trouble.
It is widely agreed that if Canadians don’t start focusing more on productivity and prosperity, we’re going to be in a heap of trouble strategically as well as economically. But headlines like “prepare for a decade of thrift and lower living standards” underline the familiar problem of trying to fight an enemy with outposts inside your own head. We’re so certain ever-bigger government makes us healthy, wealthy, and wise that when it makes us ill, poor, and baffled, we think yeah, we can’t afford to spend but we also can’t afford to cut. So the usual political incentives keep us spending, wildly.
You see this problem in the lax fiscal performance of governments of nearly every stripe nearly everywhere. But even more in the way their tongues praise fiscal prudence while their hands mock it.
In one of the most ironic editorials I’ve ever read, the editors at the Chicago Tribune are warning the residents of New York City not to elect Zohran Mamdani because as they say, they’ve “seen this movie before” and “the ending isn’t pretty.”
The “no s**t Sherlock” expression comes to mind.
Toronto will have learned this lesson by next year’s election, I hope.
You might be thinking, given the current geopolitical tensions, that the greatest threat to humanity is Israel, Iran and the US dropping bombs on one another. I regret to inform you that another humanity-destroying event occurred recently: the Bonnie Blue / Andrew Tate debate on the Disruptors podcast, which dropped on Friday. By Monday evening, it had racked up over two million views on YouTube. Okay, it won’t actually kill anyone to watch it, but it might just kill your faith in your fellow man.
What a difference six months make. In December, Canada’s Conservatives were in the catbird seat with 48 per cent support, while the Liberals dropped to 19. Practically everyone pegged Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as Canada’s next prime minister.
Then Justin Trudeau stepped down, Donald Trump took office and Mark Carney got elected Liberal leader. One federal election later, the Liberals have a minority and would likely have a majority if a vote were held today. It’s a reversal of fortunes worthy of a Shakespearean play (or, for the gen Z crowd, a Netflix drama).
A British national arrested over a pretend wedding with a nine-year-old in Disneyland Paris is a convicted sex offender who has staged fake funerals and film shoots with young girls in the UK, The Telegraph can reveal.
Jacky Jhaj was detained in the French capital on Saturday after attempting to conduct a fake ceremony in the popular theme park.
The 39 year-old has a history of conducting bizarre stunts, often involving young women in the UK, and has been convicted of sexual offences against children.
It is bad enough that Europe’s spineless leaders have done all they can to avoid taking sides with democratic Israel against Islamist Iran. But it will be even worse if they refuse to fight the intensifying political war on the home front, against the anti-Western alliance that has come out in support of Iran and its terrorist satellites.
Even when the likes of German chancellor Friedrich Merz confessed that little Israel is “doing the dirty work” for Western democracy by fighting the Islamic Republic, and some other EU leaders begrudgingly conceded it was in Europe’s interests to stop Iran acquiring an Islamist Bomb, they were still all squealing about “de-escalation” and pleading with the Ayatollahs to play nice. Europe’s equivocation was exemplified by the UK’s useless Labour foreign secretary, David Lammy, who told parliament that the issue of whether Britain supported the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities was not a “binary question.” Just as these people don’t know if a woman can have a penis, they don’t know which side to take in a war between civilisation and barbarism.
There’s a message for the Conservatives in recent polling that shows the Liberals surging ahead in public confidence.
If you don’t do conservative things, and instead do vote with the Liberals on things people expect you to vote against them on, they will shrug you off as irrelevant or worse, as idiots. And although Eastern Canada has a distinguished ten-year history of voting for idiots, you as Conservatives do not have idiot privilege: The idiot has to be a Liberal.
You know this.
A school in British Columbia–and God knows how many other schools in North America–distributed cards to 6th graders instructing them on how to use illegal drugs if they want to enjoy them safely.
The distribution took place at a school “Pride” event, because of course it did, and it instructed kids on the safest ways to use date rape drugs, narcotics, hallucinogens, and alcohol most enjoyably without getting dead.
1. What are we to make of Saturday night’s destruction of the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan?
Trump and the U.S. military took a great risk and succeeded in astounding fashion. Operationally, the destruction of the nuclear sites seems to have gone perfectly, in contrast to a long history of America’s Middle East debacles from the failed 1980 Carter rescue mission to the 2021 flight from Kabul.
Prime Minister Mark Carney recently announced that Canada will finally meet NATO’s defence-spending target of two per cent of GDP. But, as the man wouldn’t know austerity if it hit him over the head, it will come at a significant cost to Canadian taxpayers.
The defence spending target has been a long-standing bone of contention between Canada and NATO. “Allies currently meeting the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of two per cent of their (GDP) on defence will aim to continue to do so,” the members agreed in a declaration following a meeting of the North Atlantic Council in 2014. Any allies below this level would “aim to move towards the two per cent guideline within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO capability targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.”
The 5% of GDP spending target is just a sham, NATO countries have until 2035 to reach the “goal” giving loads of time for freeloaders like Canada to promise the sun, moon and the stars while contributing little.
Once adopted, all member nations except Spain will have until 2035 to reach the goal of 5%.
The agreement calls for at least 3.5% of national GDP to be spent on core military needs, while an additional 1.5% can be allocated for related expenditures.
Maybe it’s all an EU plot to rid themselves of NATO and US dominance. Carney would go big on that grift.
I advise against ever taking Carney at his word. He wants us out of NATO and with the EU yoke round our neck.
NATO’s 5% benchmark would cost Canada $150B a year, Carney says
Signing on to NATO’s new defence spending target could cost the federal treasury up to $150 billion a year, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday in advance of the Western military alliance’s annual summit.
The prime minister made the comments in an interview with CNN International.
“It is a lot of money,” Carney said.
Liberal has breakdown over Trump’s America pic.twitter.com/iaTIfkI7Ef
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 24, 2025
