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In October 1988, the Liberal Party started running an election ad in French about a free trade deal with the United States: “There’s just one line that’s getting in the way” of an agreement, the ad declared. Then, a hand appeared and erased the border between Canada and the United States.

Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives shrugged. Turner was spent force, they reckoned. The election was in the bag. Mulroney was going to win again.

On October 25, the English-language leaders’ debate took place at CJOH in Ottawa. There were no fireworks for most of it. And then, in the last few minutes of the debate, the discussion turned to the free trade deal.

Turner wheeled on Mulroney, jabbing a finger at him: “We gave away our energy. We gave away our investment. We sold out our supply management and agriculture. And we have left hundreds of thousands of workers vulnerable because of the social programs involved. I happen to believe you have sold us out.”

Mulroney grew red in the face. He sputtered and tried to interrupt. Turner was contemptuous: “[The] ability of this country to remain as an independent nation, that is lost forever and that is the issue of this election, Sir.” He said the word “sir” like it was a curse.

Turner went on: “We built a country East and West and North. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done that. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the North-South influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States.”

The impact was immediate. Within 48 hours, 72 per cent of Canadians said Turner won the debate. Internal polls, broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote in his excellent Turner biography, showed Mulroney was in big trouble – as many as 70 Tory seats were now in jeopardy, and potentially his Parliamentary majority, too. Frantic, the Conservatives started running ads calling Turner a liar and showing a hand re-drawing the border. The Tories’ ad guru said they were only saved by “bombing the bridge” on Turner’s credibility.

Which brings us to today, and Donald Trump. Who, according to his social media postings, is already regarding us as “a colony of the United States,” as John Turner memorably put it, so many years ago.

On Monday night, Trump posted this on his Truth Social platform: “It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada. I look forward to seeing the Governor again soon so that we may continue our in depth talks on Tariffs and Trade, the results of which will be truly spectacular for all! DJT”

The “DJT” means Trump wrote his statement, personally. A few days earlier, he was a bit more oblique, and posted an AI-generated picture of himself under the words: “Oh, Canada.” In it, he is facing a mountain – one he possibly thought was in the Canadian Rockies, but which is actually the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

Confronted with all this, Trump’s fans in Canada shrugged. He’s just joking, they said, which is what they always say when Trump says something stupid.

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On Google, the listing for the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, now says: “Temporarily closed.”

But that’s not quite true, is it? It’s closed for good. At 4:10 a.m. on Friday, the synagogue was set on fire while some Orthodox worshippers were still inside. They got out in time, thank God, but the Adass Israel Synagogue is now gone.  All that remains is some charred bits of wood, and some religious texts, reduced to nothingness.

The synagogue was at the sunny corner of Glen Eira Avenue and Oak Grove in Melbourne’s Ripponlea neighborhood. It’s a nice neighbourhood, by all accounts.

Pretty much everyone in political office swiftly offered lots of thoughts and prayers, and the police have said predictable things about the two men who destroyed the synagogue. (They were wearing masks, surprise surprise.)

What struck me, however, was something else: how much the Adams Israel Synagogue looks like other places of worship in so many other places – Synagogue Brunnenstraße in Berlin, Mordechai Navi Synagogue in Armenia, Oldenburg Synagogue in Vienna, the Rouen Synagogue, and on and on. 

Schara Tzedeck synagogue in Vancouver, too, along with Congregation Beth Tikvah synagogue in Montreal, and quite a few in Toronto. The synangogues are architecturally dissimilar, but they all have lots of tall fences and security cameras.  All of them.

Here’s how they are similar: all of them have been firebombed, or set on fire, since October 7, 2023. All of the ones named, above, and too many others to list here. And, guess what? You would have needed a magnifying glass to find a mention of the Melbourne synagogue fire in Canadian media the next day.

As such, we have reached that point where actual news is no longer news.  That is, something that is disturbing has become less disturbing – because it happens so often. That’s what we have observed with attacks on Jews, and Jewish places of worship, in the 428 days since Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Jews in Israel on October 7: evil has become banal, per Hannah Arendt.

Why? Why has it become so difficult to rouse people from their slumber, when places dedicated to love are being set ablaze – in the above cases, literally? Why?

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Roxy was her name. Before I even met her, that was her name.

She was a black lab and boxer mix, and a rescue. I drove out to Woodstock with two of my sons to get her, and the owner – an old-time Ontario PC, who recognized me as a damn Liberal and joked that I couldn’t have her – had already called her Roxy. It fit. So Roxy she was, right from the very start.

She looked like a lab, but she was tall and slender, and she ran like a racehorse. She had these beautiful brown eyes, and they told you she was a gentle dog. She never bit anyone or growled at anyone, because she loved people, basically. People loved her, too, as it turned out.

I would bring her to work to our Bloor Street offices, every single day. Often, I’d go looking for her, and I’d find her with her head on the lap of one of the political consultants who worked for me. They were having a lousy day, they’d tell me, and then they’d feel Roxy’s head in their lap. She knew.

Roxy was an empath. The dictionaries say an empath is “someone who is highly attuned to the emotions of others.” Except she wasn’t a someone, per se. She was Roxy, my dog, and she had this truly extraordinary ability to know when you were sad or lonely or lost, and she would just sidle up to you and put her head on your lap. And you’d feel better, because she would console you.

I had no closer companion for nearly 15 years of my life. And, in all that time, she asked for nothing at all, other than to be loved back. And love her I did.

Roxy was with me every minute of every single day. I took her everywhere, and everyone who knew me knew Roxy, too.  She was with me through marriage breakup, pandemic isolation, child disownment, betrayals and losses, and lots of crises. You know how it is: people always say they’ll check in, and they’ll help you out, and that they care and all that. But then they often just disappear on you.

Not Roxy. Roxy the empath would always always always be there, head on your lap, looking up with those brown eyes. Knowing.

When my Mom was dying, Roxy knew that was happening, too. She’d linger by me, watching. And when I would go to sit at her bedside, my Mom would ask about her, because she loved Roxy. “She is such a sweet and gentle dog,” my Mom would say. “She has a soul.”

Is that true? Can a dog have a soul? In my religion, Thomas Aquinas said that animals do not have souls. I guess that may have been true for Thomas Aquinas’ dog, but I don’t think it was for mine. Roxy had a soul. That was why she was an empath, I think. That was how she knew what people were feeling, what they were holding inside. She felt what they felt.

If she was here, right now, she would of course know what I am feeling and she would console me. But she is not here.

It is later. We are back from the vet – Picton Animal Hospital, who were wonderful – and I am writing this. I am weeping, and this time – for the first time in such a long time – Roxy will not be consoling me.

She is not gone, however. She is in the next room. She is with my Mom, head in her lap, and Roxy the empath is making my Mom smile. And I can hear my Mom laughing.

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Trump Tax™️.

President-elect Donald Trump may call it a “tariff,” but essentially that is what he is promising to impose on his first day in office: a tax. “Tariff” comes from a Turkish word meaning “prices.”

So, the price of just about everything is where the Trump tax will be most keenly felt. In his late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that he intended to slap tariffs “on ALL products coming into the United States.” His targets: China, Mexico and – notably – us.

For most of our history, we have been the closest allies and trading partners of the Americans. No more. If he carries through with even part of his tariff, Trump will effectively cripple the Canadian economy. He will be treating us like we are the enemy.

For Canada, the Trump Tax will mean that further interest rate cuts are over. Rates will likely need to go up, in fact, to shore up the Canadian dollar, which started to plunge the moment Trump made his announcement.

More broadly, the Trump Tax will strangle consumer spending just as the critical Christmas season kicks off.  Many firms will scuttle Christmas bonuses, and not a few would now be contemplating layoffs – they’d be fools not to. Inflation will return with a vengeance, and some analysts are even quietly wondering if the Trump tax will usher in something akin to a depression.

Trump has fans in Canada, mainly on the political Right. Those partisans will dispute all of this, of course, just like the millions of Americans who ignored warnings from Kamala Harris that Trump’s tariffs would cost them, too.

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In ‘Lee,’ Kate Winslet’s new movie about the celebrated World War II photojournalist Lee Miller, the descent into the heart of darkness is slow, but it is always the destination.

The film starts with Miller and her young friends watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis marching triumphantly through the streets of Berlin. Miller and her friends shake their heads, disapproving, still unaware that the Nazis are marching towards them, too.

War begins. With her Rolleiflex camera, Miller goes on to document London’s Blitz, the fierce battle over Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris. And then, with her photojournalist colleague David E. Sherman, Miller arrives at Buchenwald and Dachau, the concentration camps where tens of thousands of Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Freemasons, Communists, Catholic priests and Roma people were slaughtered. But mainly Jews.

You have perhaps seen the photos Miller took at Buchenwald in April 1945, just after it was liberated by Allied troops. They are famous photographs, now displayed in museums. In them, you see a block for medical experimentation, and other buildings set aside for executions and torture, and a crematorium. Miller described what she saw:

“The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.”

The movie about Lee Miller arrived around here in the same week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference to announce a tax holiday on pudding and fake Christmas trees. His smirking Minister of Finance hovering beside him, Trudeau was asked about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants against two Jews. His government would “abide” by the ICC warrants, he said.

“This is just who we are as Canadians,” he said.

Is it? Is that who we are now? Or is it the sort of moral abasement Lee Miller and her friends glimpsed in flickering newsreel footage about Nazis? Because it certainly feels like that.

The two Jews Trudeau agreed to arrest, in the unlikely event they ever alight on Canadian soil, are Israel’s Prime Minister and its former Minister of Defence. They had committed “war crimes,” the ICC declared in a release, which went then went on to say the details of the war crimes are “secret.”

It’s relevant that the details are being kept secret. Disclosing the facts, you see, would swiftly reveal the allegations to be as phony as one of Trudeau’s tax-exempt plastic Christmas trees.

The facts are these: Palestinians – some in uniform, some not – swept into Israel early on the morning of October 7, 2023, and commenced murdering, maming, raping and stealing thousands of Jews. On that day, you might say, it was “just who they are as Palestinians.”

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What I write sometimes makes people angry. Right and Left.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. It’s interesting.

I write about different stuff. Politics, music, culture, whatever. People react.

Sometimes I take a position that is notionally “progressive.” I’ll indicate support for trans kids, or taxing polluters, or vaccines.

Self-described “progressives” will react by saying nothing. “Conservatives,” meanwhile, will go apeshit and say I’m a communist, a pedophile, whatever.

But they will say those things to me directly. Right to me.

And sometimes I take a position that is notionally “conservative.” I’ll say I support capital punishment, or less taxation, or (these days) Israel.

Self-described conservatives will react by sending me messages about how delighted they are that I have joined their side, even though I haven’t joined any side. They always want to increase the size of their team. I think they always want validation.

The progressives are a different matter. When they read that “conservative” stuff, they again don’t contact me directly, almost ever.

Instead, they complain to my editors. They complain to my publishers. They complain to my clients.

They complain to whoever they think is my boss.

They do that to get me fired or disciplined or whatever. Mainly, they do it to get me canceled.

That’s the difference between conservatives and progressives, in my experience. The conservatives will get angry and abusive, but at least they do it to your face. The progressives get pious and indignant and vengeful, and they will try to get you shut down.

Both sides have assholes, in their own way. The critical difference is that, however: one side gets mad at you directly, and then forgets about it. The other side wants to end you, forever.

That’s how I look at the “woke” stuff. In definitional terms, being woke means opposing bigotry and injustice. I agree with opposing bigotry and injustice.

In practical terms, however, woke has come to mean: punish those who disagree with you. Make them bleed.

That’s what the Right and the Left have come to mean to me, at least insofar as my writing goes.

I don’t really give a shit about either extreme, but it’s certainly been interesting.

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Observing the braying, spit-flecked mob outside the doors to Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel on Monday night – replete with signs (falsely) accusing Israel of genocide, and hinting (clearly) at a desired genocide of their own – it almost seemed redundant to ask: what did the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas swarm hope to accomplish?

It’s a relevant question, too: like, what the Hell? Are you actually against books, pro-Hamas cabal? Have you, at long last, reached that low, that nadir?

Because that’s all that the tony affair at the Park Hyatt was about, folks: books. Canadian books, in particular.

The occasion was the awarding of the Giller, which is one of the biggest such prizes for writing in the world, with $100,000 going to the winner. It’s been going for years, now, and was started by the much-admired Jack Rabinovitch, a business guy who loved books. He named the prize after his wife and true love, Doris Giller, who had been editor at the books section of the Toronto Star. After Jack passed away in 2017, his daughter Elana Rabinovitch took up the mantle.

The finalists this year were from across Canada. There was Eric Chacour from Quebec, who wrote ‘I Know About You.’ There was Anne Fleming from Victoria, with ‘Curiosities.’ There was Guelph’s Deepa Rajagopalan, who was there for ‘Peacocks of Instagram.’ There was Conor Kerr, who is an Alberta guy and even wore his cowboy hat all night, picked for his book ‘Prairie Edge.’ And there was the winner, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Anne Michaels from Toronto, who wrote ‘Held.’

It was a nice event. Everyone there – former Toronto mayor John Tory, Canadian U.N. Ambassador Bob Rae, and a metric ton of folks sporting Order of Canada pins on their lapels – wanted to celebrate books generally, and Canadian books in particular. Who could be against that?

Well, the Hamas fetishists could be, and are. Last year, just a few days after Israel commenced its just and rational war against Hamas for slaughtering 1,200 Jews and non-Jews, some creeps disrupted the Giller ceremony. They jumped up on stage with signs that falsely accused the main sponsor, Scotiabank, of “funding genocide.” Screamed one: “We will not be silent anymore.”

Well, at this year’s gala, they were. There was more security present than at a typical Prime Ministerial speech, and everything went off without a hitch. No Hamasniks made it inside to cause trouble. Credit Elana Rabinovitch for that.

People at this year’s event – where Scotiabank’s name was absent – were clearly relieved. Some great books got promoted, and Canadian writing got celebrated. It was, as noted, nice.

But the question still nags: How can the ones who profess to be for Palestine be against books?

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