National
Election interference: eye on the ball, please
David Johnston, who should be beside the point
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People living in Canada are having their democratic rights undermined. Fixing that should be everyone’s goal.
Back from vacation, I’m delighted to see nothing has changed. It’s David Johnston this and David Johnston that and David Johnston the other. That last link is about how Johnston has hired Navigator, which is reliably identified as a “crisis-communications firm” in stories like this, to help him figure out what to say. To which one possible answer, given the current storm of excrement, is: My God, wouldn’t you?
I prefer not to pile onto stories that absolutely everyone else is writing about. Today constitutes a bit of an exception to that policy. I’m working on a bunch of stories on topics that will stray very far abroad from this one. But while those other stories percolate, here are a few thoughts on Canada’s response to election interference.
First, we’re in the phase of the story where everyone digs in. Johnston has a mandate from the Prime Minister of Canada which extends to October. He plans to keep working until then. I never thought he was right for this job. But nobody should be surprised that, having taken it, he intends to keep doing it.
But, we are told, Parliament has voted to demand that he stand down! Indeed, that’s how I’d have voted too. Yet Johnston persists. This too is hardly surprising. Ignoring Parliament is easy enough, and it often feels great, as when Parliament voted to express profound sadness over a cover illustration in a magazine where I used to work. Johnston could have taken Parliament’s counsel, but since we are, as I’ve noted, in the phase of the story where everyone digs in, he’s digging in instead.
There is a school of thought that believes this sort of situation must lead straight to a confidence vote and an election. Brother Coyne is that school’s headmaster. I’m always in favour of the largest possible number of elections too, especially since I now make a living selling political analysis. I fondly hope the next campaign will be excellent for business. But I seem to recall that the last time Parliament followed its convictions all the way to a forced election, Canadians responded by sending the Parliament-flouters back with reinforcements. I don’t know whether that would happen now. But the opposition parties are allowed to make such calculations. No surprise, then, that they too are digging in — but not all the way.
Where does this leave us? First, with a process terribly compromised by lousy design. Justin Trudeau sought to outsource his credibility by subcontracting his judgment. The credibility transfusion was supposed to flow from Johnston to Trudeau. Instead it has gone the other way. The PMO hoped they’d found somebody whose credibility nobody would challenge, because he comes from the sort of precincts that impress them. Now they’re stuck insisting that challenging Johnston’s fitness or his conclusions is uncouth. The number of Canadians who decline to take etiquette tips from the PMO continues to surprise the PMO.
So far I have discussed all of this in terms of the usual Ottawa obsessions: Parliament, status, tactics, winners and losers. This sort of scorekeeping comforts Ottawa lifers, soothes us because we have been doing it most of our lives.
But there is another audience here.
It is Canadians and permanent residents who live here and experience intimidation all the time. Most are members of diaspora communities, Chinese and other. They have been saying for years that their freedoms of speech and assembly and their right to security of the person — their Charter rights — are being targeted, infringed and impinged by agents of Beijing’s thug regime. What Cherie Wong, executive director of the Alliance Canada-Hong Kong, says every time she is asked, is that it’s time for action. ACHK’s latest report reads a lot like its earlier reports, like the reports from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians that Trudeau admits he ignored. There’s not much new here, just as there would not be much new after Johnston’s process, or after a theoretically better process launched by some future government.
So Ottawa’s current process obsession, while understandable, is not at all helpful.
The ACHK report includes recommendations that could be implemented before the next election, if parties were less obsessed with using foreign interference to win the next election. The Trudeau government is indeed moving ahead on some elements of ACHK’s recommendations, including a foreign-influence registry. That’s a fraught process that presents real pitfalls — overreach and stigmatization at one extreme, and at the other, a once-over-lightly framework that would not capture the sort of clandestine activity that’s the problem. As indeed the political scientist Stephanie Carvin discusses in the ACHK report. So it’s not something to be rushed. But all due dispatch would be welcome.
(For a discussion of the complexities of foreign-influence registries, readers could do worse than to look at the proceedings of a February meeting of a joint committee of both chambers of the Australian Parliament, considering amendments to Australia’s own foreign-influence registry six years after it was implemented. The comparison with our own debate does not flatter Canada’s Parliament. Australian politics can be raw and tough, and Beijing’s influence is, if anything, a more pressing issue there than here. But members from all parties in Australia discuss the issue calmly. They treat witnesses as sources of useful information, not as sticks to beat their political opponents with. I’m not sure how Canada can get there from here, but it’s refreshing to be reminded it’s possible.)
I suppose what I’m proposing here is a dose of pragmatism informed by a sense that Parliament can be something more than an endless pissing match. I was an early member of the skeptics’ club on David Johnston’s suitability for this particular task. I don’t feel chastened by subsequent events. But that ship has rather spectacularly sailed. Trying to turn the next five months of his work into a bigger fiasco won’t help the people living in Canada in fear and worry. Neither will adding another commission with grander pretensions for a report sometime after the next election. The question facing parliamentarians now is to work on solutions instead of trying to win arguments. There’ll be plenty of arguments later.
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From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By J.D. Foster
Trump should insist on these measures and order that unless they are carried out the United States will not participate in NATO. If Canada is allowed entry to the Brussels headquarters, then United States representatives would stay out.
Steps Trump Could Take To Get NATO Free Riders Off America’s Back
In thinking about NATO, one has to ask: “How stupid do they think we are?”
The “they,” of course, are many of the other NATO members, and the answer is they think we are as stupid as we have been for the last quarter century. As President-elect Donald Trump observed in his NBC interview, NATO “takes advantage of the U.S.”
Canada is among the “they.” In November, The Economist reported that Canada spends about 1.3% of GDP on defense. The ridiculously low NATO minimum is 2%. Not to worry, though, Premier Justin Trudeau promises Canada will hit 2% — by 2032.
A quarter of NATO’s 32 members fall short of the 2% minimum. The con goes like this: We are short now, but we will get there eventually. Trust us, wink, wink.
The United States has put up with this nonsense from some members since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is how stupid we have been.
Trump once threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, then he suggested the United States might not come to the defense of a NATO member like Canada. Naturally, free-riding NATO members grumbled.
In another context, former Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore famously outlined the first step in how the United States should approach NATO: Don’t get stuck on stupid.
NATO is a coalition of mutual defense. Members who contribute little to the mutual defense are useless. Any country not spending its 2% of GDP on defense by mid-year 2025 should see its membership suspended immediately.
What does suspended mean? Consequences. Its military should not be permitted to participate in any NATO planning or exercises. And its offices at NATO headquarters and all other NATO facilities should be shuttered and its citizens banned until such time as their membership returns to good standing. And, of course, the famous Article V assuring mutual defense would be suspended.
Further, Trump should insist on these measures and order that unless they are carried out the United States will not participate in NATO. If Canada is allowed entry to the Brussels headquarters, then United States representatives would stay out.
Nor should he stop there. The 2% threshold would be fine in a world at peace with no enemies lurking. That does not describe the world today. Trump should declare the threshold for avoiding membership suspension will be 2.5% in 2026 and 3% by 2028 – not 2030 as some suggest.
The purpose is not to destroy NATO, but to force NATO to be relevant. America needs strong defense partners who pull their weight, not defense welfare queens. If NATO’s members cannot abide by these terms, then it is time to move on and let NATO go the way of the League of Nations.
Trump may need to take the lead in creating a new coalition of those willing to defend Western values. As he did in rewriting the former U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, it may be time to replace a defective arrangement with a much better one.
This still leaves the problem of free riders. Take Belgium, for example, another security free rider. Suppose a new defense coalition arises including the United States and Poland and others bordering Russia. Hiding behind the coalition’s protection, Belgium could just quit all defense spending to focus on making chocolates.
This won’t do. The members of the new defense coalition must also agree to impose a tariff regime on the security free riders to help pay for the defense provided.
The best solution is for NATO to rise to our mutual security challenges. If NATO can’t do this, then other arrangements will be needed. But it is time to move on from stupid.
J.D. Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
From LifeSiteNews
A Pre-Budget Consultations in Advance of the 2025 Budget report recommends no longer providing charitable status to anti-abortion organizations and amending the Income Tax Act to remove the privileged status of ‘advancement of religion’ as a charitable purpose.
In 2022, I wrote an essay titled “What is coming next for Canadian churches?” In that essay, as well as in my recent book How We Got Here, I noted that as Canada shifted from being a post-Christian society to an increasingly anti-Christian one, Christian churches and organizations will inevitably lose tax-exempt or charitable status:
Churches and other religious institutions that refuse to bend the knee will likely lose their tax-exempt status at some point. Canadian LGBT activists have been making this case for years, and it is only a matter of time before the idea catches on or — more likely — a progressive politician decides that the time is right. I suspect that a key reason this has not yet been discussed is the awkward fact that many non-Christian institutions hold similar positions on marriage, sexuality, and abortion. That said, I have no doubt that a way to target churches specifically will be worked out. LGBT activists are already asking why the government is “rewarding bigotry” by awarding tax-exempt status to churches with a traditional view of sexuality, and LGBT activists have publicized sermons they disagree with as evidence of hatred. The churches and the state are on a collision course, and it isn’t hard to guess how this will end.
We may be seeing the first move in that direction. With the Christmas season upon us and Ottawa in chaos, few Canadians noticed the government’s publication of “Pre-Budget Consultations In Advance of the 2025 Budget,” the report of the Standing Committee on Finance. The report of annual pre-budget consultations included 462 recommendations that have been tabled and, according to the Standing Committee, will be taken into account by “the Minister of Finance in the development of the 2025 federal budget” (which, if Trudeau is still in power, will be Dominic LeBlanc).
Two recommendations included in that report are deeply concerning, and the Christian Legal Fellowship has written to both the Minister of Finance and the Finance Committee Chair Peter Fonseca to express that concern:
Recommendation 429: No longer provide charitable status to anti-abortion organizations.
Recommendation 430: Amend the Income Tax Act to provide a definition of a charity which would remove the privileged status of ‘advancement of religion’ as a charitable purpose.
Those two recommendations, of course, were buried at the very end of the report. The first is unsurprising — Trudeau’s government is currently targeting crisis pregnancy centers that assist moms and babies in need, so it was inevitable that the government was eventually going to target local Right to Life organizations and other pro-life groups that still have charitable status. More brazen is the recommendation that the Income Tax Act be amended to eliminate “advancement of religion” as a charitable purpose — this could, according to the Christian Legal Fellowship, “have a devastating impact, not only on the 32,000+ religious charities in this country, but the millions of Canadians they serve.” CLF urged the government “to reject any such approach and clarify exactly what is being contemplated.” As CLF noted in their letter:
Religious charities account for nearly 40% of all charities in Canada, including churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and other faith communities, operating programs such as soup kitchens, shelters, refugee homes, and food banks. They provide indispensable social, economic, and spiritual support, filling a significant gap in our communities and meeting the needs of millions of Canadians.
Suggesting that such organizations must do something other than “advance religion” to be considered charitable ignores the reality that these services are themselves the very manifestation of religious beliefs, inherent to and inextricable from the charity’s religion itself. It also betrays a long-standing recognition of the intrinsic goods provided by religious communities, who offer people hope, encouragement, and belonging in ways that simply cannot be quantified or replaced. Ultimately, any efforts to substitute their much-needed services would place an extraordinary strain on all levels of government.
I have no doubt that the Trudeau government is willing to purse these recommendations regardless; these plans, however, may be thwarted by the next election. Trudeau no doubt remembers the Canada Summer Jobs Program fight, when his government insisted that recipients sign an attestation of support for abortion and LGBT ideology and suddenly found themselves facing angry imams, rabbis, and other religious leaders instead of just the priests and pastors they’d assumed would be impacted. It seems unlikely that going after religious charities is a fight Trudeau wants now.
Trudeau will, however, be campaigning on abortion — it’s the wedge issue he returns to again and again as the PMO increasingly resembles Custer’s Last Stand. Thus, Recommendation 429 may be taken up sooner rather than later. Either way, these two recommendations are essentially a statement of purpose. The Liberals may not get to them just now, but be assured that this is what progressives intend to do just as soon as they get the chance.
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