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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

It seems we are far too Canadian; Yet not Canadian enough

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

Oh, Canada. You have been too nice.  Too kind.  Too silent. For too long.

And now a noisy minority is undermining our country’s values, laws and institutions.

Protestors have taken over many university campuses and they are fomenting hatred toward Jews and Israel. Few Canadians are speaking out. We seem incapable of responding to bigotry and hatred – even when it is occurring right in front of us.

Our silence has allowed (what at one point were) 15 pro-Palestinian encampments (tent cities) to be established in universities across Canada. It’s as if students no longer have to study or find a summer job to pay for tuition.

Instead of doing something productive, they are protesting against Israel’s war against Hamas (the Palestinian government that is also a designated terrorist group). But, in doing so, they have pushed aside the academic tenets that call for a free exchange of ideas and respectful debate on issues.

They are outright demanding that the universities divest any funding that has ties to/or support for Israel.  Some groups are even demanding that they sever ties with Israeli academics and their institutions.

Negotiating divestments? Asking for a change to financial policies hardly seems like it could lead to hate-filled invective.

It is always a challenge to know where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech. But nasty words can lead to even worse actions and, in this case, it wasn’t long before the protests took a long jump across that line.

Tensions quickly escalated at McGill University when senior administrators were followed and harassed by masked protestors at their homes and offices. Others hung an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a striped outfit resembling the uniforms that Jews were forced to wear in concentration camps – you know, where Nazis deliberately killed six million Jews. Yet the police would only act when protesters stormed the admin building. Fifteen were arrested.

Other blatant displays of anti-Semitism popped up on campuses – chants of “Go back to Europe” and “Zionists are terrorists.” Some Jewish students received threats of “We will find you” on their social media accounts.

Can you imagine the response of Canadians if such slogans targeted aboriginals or homosexuals? What if they were chanting “All Muslims are terrorists”?

The outcry would be immediate and in no time at all the protest camp would be shut down. That can be said with certainty because our twisted and biased sense of morality has already reared its ugly head.

At the University of Toronto, a small group of pro-Israel students tried to establish a camp to counter the anti-Jewish vigil. But they were immediately whisked away by police — because of the huge security risk they posed.

Back at McGill, the tent city is now hosting a “revolutionary youth summer program” and even advertised it with an image of terrorists wearing keffiyehs (black and white scarves), covering their faces and clutching machine guns. It was a picture from decades ago but that doesn’t negate its power to incite fear and violence.

Jewish students told a House of Commons committee that they no longer feel safe and are forced to hide their identities. The University of Waterloo had to tell students making complaints of anti-Semitism that they could no longer do anything about it because there were too many complaints to investigate!

McGill University’s president says, “none of this is peaceful protesting. It is designed to threaten, coerce and scare people.” The president at U of T told MPs that “anti -Semitism has been a growing presence recently in our university.”

As tensions have escalated, very little action has been taken. The police don’t seem to want to act, and administrators are too busy wringing their hands. The primary criticism against taking action is that it would be seen as too ‘authoritarian’ to shut down free speech. After all, this is Canada.

Of course, having to hide your ethnicity and Semitic identity in public doesn’t exactly smack of Canadian values either.

Canadians have been silent as we witness the fragmentation of our civil society. It brings to mind a famous poem entitled “First They Came.” It was written by a German who was initially a Nazi supporter but changed his views when he was imprisoned for speaking out against Nazi control of the churches.

“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist;

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist;’

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

 This week, as we celebrate Canada and Canadian values, take some time to think about the things we are willing to stand for and the things which we must stand against.

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the book, Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.

Business

It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

The Cost of Underselling Canadian Oil and Gas to the USA

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Canadians can now track in real time how much revenue the country is forfeiting to the United States by selling its oil at discounted prices, thanks to a new online tracker from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The tracker shows the billions in revenue lost due to limited access to distribution for Canadian oil.

At a time of economic troubles and commercial tensions with the United States, selling our oil at a discount to U.S. middlemen who then sell it in the open markets at full price will rob Canada of nearly $19 billion this year, said Marco Navarro-Genie, the VP of Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Navarro-Genie led the team that designed the counter.

The gap between world market prices and what Canada receives is due to the lack of Canadian infrastructure.

According to a recent analysis by Ian Madsen, senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre, the lack of international export options forces Canadian producers to accept prices far below the world average. Each day this continues, the country loses hundreds of millions in potential revenue. This is a problem with a straightforward remedy, said David Leis, the Centre’s President. More pipelines need to be approved and built.

While the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline has helped, more is needed. It commenced commercial operations on May 1, 2024, nearly tripling Canada’s oil export capacity westward from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels daily. This expansion gives Canadian oil producers access to broader global markets, including Asia and the U.S. West Coast, potentially reducing the price discount on Canadian crude.

This is more than an oil story. While our oil price differential has long been recognized, there’s growing urgency around our natural gas exports. The global demand for cleaner energy, including Canadian natural gas, is climbing. Canada exports an average of 12.3 million GJ of gas daily. Yet, we can still not get the full value due to infrastructure bottlenecks, with losses of over $7.3 billion (2024). A dedicated counter reflecting these mounting gas losses underscores how critical this issue is.

“The losses are not theoretical numbers,” said Madsen. “This is real money, and Canadians can now see it slipping away, second by second.”

The Frontier Centre urges policymakers and industry leaders to recognize the economic urgency and ensure that infrastructure projects like TMX are fully supported and efficiently utilized to maximize Canada’s oil export potential. The webpage hosting the counter offers several examples of what the lost revenue could buy for Canadians. A similar counter for gas revenue lost through similarly discounted gas exports will be added in the coming days.

What Could Canada Do With $25.6 Billion a Year?

Without greater pipeline capacity, Canada loses an estimated (2025) $25.6 billion by selling our oil and gas to the U.S. at a steep discount. That money could be used in our communities — funding national defence, hiring nurses, supporting seniors, building schools, and improving infrastructure. Here’s what we’re giving up by underselling these natural resources. 

342,000 Nurses

The average annual salary for a registered nurse in Canada is about $74,958. These funds could address staffing shortages and improve patient care nationwide.
Source

39,000 New Housing Units

At an estimated $472,000 per unit (excluding land costs, based on Toronto averages), $25.6 billion could fund nearly 94,000 affordable housing units.
Source

About the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is an independent Canadian think-tank that researches and analyzes public policy issues, including energy, economics and governance.

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