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When a country doesn’t matter militarily or diplomatically, when no one is sharing intelligence with it anymore, all that it has left are…empty words, basically. Piety and preaching. That’s it.

So, now, when it comes to world affairs, Canada is a season’s ticket holder in the nosebleed seats. Holding up homemade signs, hollering, hoping to get on TV, while the real action is playing out elsewhere, far, far away.

Ever since 2004, when Paul Martin and his brain trust thought it would be a good idea to meet the homicidal Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in a tent in the desert, Canada has mattered less and less internationally. It all happened gradually. We became a bit of an afterthought, and then a punchline. Donald Trump, in particular, knows this. He’s noticed that the rest of the world hasn’t rallied to our side, as he’s openly coveted us as his 51st state.

It was not always thus. At one time – say, when Mike Pearson won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for resolving the Suez Crisis, or when Brian Mulroney fought to end apartheid in the Eighties, or when Jean Chretien refused to participate in George W. Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 – Canada truly mattered on the international stage. Not so much anymore.

In recent years, we’ve been reduced to thumbing out sanctimonious tweets from the sidelines, far removed from the action. In both official languages, bien sur.

So, Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a tweet on Thursday. Here’s part of what it said:

“Canada condemns the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza. Israel’s control of aid distribution must be replaced by comprehensive provision of humanitarian assistance led by international organizations. Many of these are holding significant Canadian-funded aid which has been blocked from delivery to starving civilians. This denial of humanitarian aid is a violation of international law.”

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Use your thumb for the clouds, my Mom said.

It was the pandemic. My life had blown up, I was living with two labs in an old farmhouse on an island, and nobody was allowed to go near anyone else.

Creatively, I didn’t have another book in me. My band couldn’t get together to play. I had given up writing for newspapers. So, I decided to paint again.

My ex hadn’t let me put my art up on the walls, you see, so I had just stopped. I went along with what she wanted. I did that.

So I dug out some paint and brushes and sat down at the long table in the dining room. The first one was a scene from around here, from a photo I took while riding my bike way out along a trail. A field of canola and a line of trees.  And a sky.

It looked okay; it was okay. But the clouds, which reached across the sky like a god’s fingers? I couldn’t get them right. I called my Mom.

She was an artist. Her paintings hung in galleries and homes across Canada. She was alone, too, because of the pandemic, but we talked on the phone every single day, twice a day. Morning and night.

“Use your thumb,” she said to me. “Not your brush. Use your thumb.”

So I did. And it worked. It was right. I was proud of it, so I put a photo of it up on the Internet. Right away, an old friend in Ottawa said she wanted to buy it. When I was sure she wasn’t joking, I sent it to my friend. And my Mom was happy.

“See?” she said. “You’re an artist. You’ll be better than me in no time.”

I wasn’t, of course. I’m not. I’ll never be as good as she was, in every conceivable way. But painting made me feel something I hadn’t felt in ten years – joy – and so I kept going.  There’s been dozens of paintings since then, and even an art show. She coached me and advised me through all of it.

My Mom, Lorna Emma Bridget Cleary Kinsella, coached me and my brothers through all of our lives, too, until we grew up and moved away. Despite the distance, she remained the bond that kept us all together – my Dad, my three brothers.  She was the centre.

She was raised by a single mother, the original feminist, Irene Cleary.  There were seven of them in their smallish apartment in Montreal, two sons and five daughters.  My Mom was the oldest girl.

Sons often think of their mothers as beautiful, but ours truly was. She was this radiant, dark-haired beauty from Montreal’s North End.  She looked like Elizabeth Taylor, people would often say, and she did.  She was beautiful in her heart, too.

She met my father, an aspiring doctor and future military officer, at a dance when she was 17.  She told us she knew he was the one.  She waited for him, declining (many) other suitors. They married in 1955 at the chapel at Loyola, where he had gone to high school and college.

My Dad was a doctor, but he was not a wealthy man.  He believed that health care was a right of citizenship, and that no one should ever profit from illness.  My mother believed that, too. So, while we were not poor, we were not ever rich.  We didn’t eat out much, we didn’t have fancy vacations.  My Mom cooked everything, and made her own clothes, and rehabilitated abandoned furniture.  And she painted.

She loved Canadian scenes, but she loved painting children and old people, too.  Many times – and still, now – people say to me she had a Group of Seven style, one that revealed her deep love of this country. Her works were always sought after, but she was modest.  We’d tell her she didn’t sell them for enough.

She taught art.  She studied art.  Growing up, there was always the smell of oil paints and linseed oil in our family homes in Montreal, Dallas, Kingston and Calgary.  Her art – and the art of others – filled our walls, and was often stacked up when there was no more room.

She always insisted we call, no matter how late, to say where we were and how we were getting home. She laughed (and defended me) when teachers told her I was a radical and a trouble-maker. She tolerated the punk rock racket coming up the back stairs, because she said she liked knowing where we all were.  My best friends, in their biker jackets and skinny jeans and homemade Clash T-shirts, would always gather at my house – to see my Mom and Dad, I suspected, and not so much me.  My friends still call them “our other parents.”

Our home always radiated warmth and love, and my Mom was at the centre of it. When our Dad died in Kingston in 2004, all of us expected she wouldn’t stay there – that she would move to Toronto, where we were.  But she didn’t.  She remained in Kingston for ten more years with her little dog Maggie, and kept painting, and she kept declining expressions of interest from men. “They’re not your father,” she’d say.  “There will never be a man as beautiful as he was, for me.”

She came to Toronto, eventually, but never got the hang of the place. (Few do.) When the pandemic arrived, she and I would meet at the fence on her main-floor balcony in the Beach, and I would give her canvases and brushes and paint. Titanium white was hard to find during Covid, but I got some for her. For the clouds, maybe.

She painted. She made it through, never getting sick.  And, when it was finally over, that all changed. She was 90 years old, and she fought it.  But cancer finally claimed her on this day one year ago, just as it had taken my Dad, 19 years and one month before.

I have one painting of hers, now, raised up higher at my house than all the others, so that I can always see it.  It is of a river, moving past some trees, a reddish sky is seen through their branches.  On the left, there is a white patch of canvas, with no paint on it.  It is where she stopped, perhaps because the end was near. Would it have been a bit of cloud? Would she have used her thumb?

Now, I look at her art on my walls and marvel at her talent, and marvel at the boundless beauty of her.  And I marvel, too, at how blessed I was to be the son of Lorna Emma Bridget Cleary Kinsella, who was an artist and my mother, and who I love and miss with all my heart.

 

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The worst places for the explosion in antisemitic hate? 

The United States, and then Europe – unsurprising, given their relative populations. But the country that has had nearly as many antisemitic crimes as all of the rest of the world? 

Canada.

Antisemitism – Jew hatred – has metastasized like a virus within this country. The statistics do not lie. Wherever one looks in Canada, these days, antisemitism can be seen.  In our streets, on our computer screens, in the media: the cancer of Jew hatred is ubiquitous, in 2025. 

And, too often, those we entrust with authority – teachers, union leaders, politicians, police, prosecutors, media – seem to be completely indifferent to it.  But there are grim consequences that flow that indifference.

Children, as any parents knows, are always watching. They observe grown-ups, they listen, and they remember. And, now, Canadians children are now clearly acting on what they have seen and heard elsewhere.

The Justin Trudeau Liberal government generally did an atrocious job combatting antisemitism. About that, there can be little debate. But a few days, ago, Mark Carney’s Ottawa actually did something useful: it released a report titled ‘Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools,’ and – even in these dark days – it is a shocker.

Authored by respected University of Toronto Professor Robert Brym, commissioned by the Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, the detailed report studied “the prevalence, nature, and impact of antisemitic incidents in elementary and secondary schools” across Canada’s largest province. There was a lot of it.

Brym interviewed 600 parents and examined nearly 800 antisemitic incidents at Ontario schools between October 2023 – when Hamas and Gazans killed, wounded, raped or kidnapped thousands of people in Israel – and January 2025. Among his findings:

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The letter reads like it was dictated by a drunk at the end of the bar who won’t leave when it’s closing time.

Donald Trump’s letter to Mark Carney, that is. Run-on sentences, ungrammatical, improper punctuation, irregular capitalization, lousy syntax, you name it: the Mango Mussolini’s letter to our Prime Minister is guaranteed to give your favourite English teacher a stroke. It’s that bad.

But it’s consistent. It’s predictable, too.

“Starting August 1, 2025,” writes Trump, “we will charge Canada a Tariff of 35 per cent on Canadian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs…If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise
them by, will be added onto the 35% that we charge.”

Here we go again.

In mob parlance, Trump’s letter is what is called a shakedown: pay the protection money, pay the pizzo, or else. You’ve got a nice little country, Mark-o. It’d be a shame if something bad happened to it, etc.

As objectionable as that is, it’s still a case of Trump being Trump. In fairness to the man, he doesn’t believe in free trade; he campaigned against free trade. But he’s certainly willing to use our desire for free trade to ruin us.  

As some may recall, Trump pledged to gut free trade in his inauguration speech. Ten days later, he declared a fentanyl “national emergency” and his intention to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canada for everything we sell to the U.S.

Trump proclaimed his fraudulent “national emergency” for one reason and one reason only: to get himself out of the terms of the USMCA trade deal. You know, the deal that he himself signed, with his ubiquitous Sharpie.

And that’s how it’s been, for months. Whenever we think we have achieved a relative degree of sanity, whenever we think the worst is over, Trump threatens more tariffs. In the past seven months, it has happened many times. Supply management, our banking system, defence spending, and on and on: Trump will concoct just about any pretext to break the deal. And us.

But – still – it’s Trump being Trump. It’s what, and who, he is. What of Mark Carney?

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CUPE Ontario is undemocratic, unrepresentative and unhinged, say some of its own members.

And, increasingly, the union leadership’s animus towards Jews is getting worse, they say.

CUPE Ontario’s 2025 draft “Action Plan” provides ample proof, they say. The lengthy document contains scores of statements by the union adopted at their recent convention. But the Action Plan doesn’t reflect members’ priorities, they say – and it reveals that the union, led by Fred Hahn, is no longer representing its members.

“They’re not accountable to us,” said a member of the union, who was granted anonymity in exchange for their views. “They claim that they are, but they’re not. The vast majority of CUPE Ontario members have no idea that this is going on…And [the Action Plan] really does nothing to advance worker rights here in Ontario.”

Evidence of that are not hard to find in the latest CUPE Ontario Action Plan. A sampling:

• “CUPE Ontario will continue to advocate for the rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, including demanding a withdrawal of legislation which has adopted this definition.” The problem with that? The IHRA definition of antisemitism is the common-sense definition, and the one that dozens of countries have formally adopted – including every major democracy on the planet, critics of Israel included.

• “[CUPE Ontario will] continue to work with our allies to fight against ‘bubble zones’ that limit our constitutional right to protest.” The problem there? Fanatics have shown their willingness to attack people worshipping when they are at their most vulnerable, at mosques, synagogues or churches. Such “bubble zones” already are used to protect abortion clinics, so why doesn’t Fred Hahn’s CUPE Ontario object to that, too? We all know the answer.

• “Work with CUPE Nationals International Solidarity staff to advance education efforts on anti-Palestinian racism [APR].” The problem with that pledge is the benign-sounding “anti-Palestinian racism.” APR has been interpreted to mean that Israel is completely illegitimate – and that the Jewish state’s existence is considered “racist” towards Palestinians, and should therefore be wiped off the map. APR does not accept that Israelis and Palestinians can and should co-exist.

• “We commit unequivocally against genocide and for the rights of the Palestinian people.” The problem with that commitment, of course, is that the numbers – and the reality – simply don’t support the “genocide” blood libel: in April, no less than Zaher al-Wahidi, the head of statistics at the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, told Sky News that thousands of individual deaths in the Israel-Hamas war had been reclassified. “We realized a lot of people died a natural death,” he said.

And so on and so on. The CUPE Ontario Action Plan, to some of its own members, is an extremist manifesto, and one that doesn’t truly reflect what a union is supposed to be doing. And it’s wildly undemocratic, they say.

“[CUPE Ontario’s conventions] are the furthest things from a democratic process,” one says. “CUPE Ontario has roughly 290,000 members – but only about 1,100 have voting rights at conventions and attend conventions. And union locals have limits on who they can send – and [they are] very selective about who can go.”

And when anyone goes and tries to oppose the anti-Israel extremism? Says a member: “Other viewpoints, other opinions, they get shut down.” There’s no democratic process in CUPE Ontario, they say.

The most extreme example of that came last month, when CUPE Ontario actually endorsed and promoted a “HANDS OFF IRAN” protest at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto. Despite the fact that Iran is considered by many to have the worst human rights record in the world – despite the fact that Iran’s Islamist rulers murder, torture, imprison, dismember, rape and brutalize their own people, all the time – CUPE Ontario officially embraced the world’s number one supporter of terrorism.

Says one member: “We don’t truly believe that CUPE Ontario’s leaders are invested in workers rights anymore. Look at the ‘hands off Iran’ protest that CUPE Ontario put their stamp on…They’re so twisted in their ideology and where their allegiances lie, now.”

So, what can be done? Some members are looking at signing with other unions. Some are talking decertification. Neither is an easy process, however. But something has to be done to get CUPE Ontario back to representing its members, they say.

“Union members need to be made aware of what’s actually happening and where our money is going,” one says. “We need people to step up.”

So, CUPE Ontario members: step up!

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Lloyd Axworthy stirred.

The Manitoba Liberal MP looked around the paneled boardroom in 409-S, the office of the Leader of the Opposition, in Centre Block. “I think I am going to express outrage about this one,” he said to the room. Someone laughed.

It was long ago, 1992 or so. We were gathered for the daily meeting to determine what we – the Liberal Party Official Opposition – were going to ask about during Question Period. I can’t remember what Lloyd had decided to be outraged about. But I remember that he said that.

I was reminded of it again when Lloyd unloaded both rhetorical barrels on Mark Carney this week. The Prime Minister was “a boot-licker,” Lloyd had said, quote unquote. For capitulating to Donald Trump’s demand that Canada scrap the Digital Sales Tax, Lloyd suggested last week, Carney had revealed himself to be a craven coward.

Axworthy continued in his blog post: “A pattern is now set: Trump harrumphs, we comply. What else will we quietly surrender? Cultural industries? Environmental standards, agriculture security, Arctic sovereignty?”

Wow. Shots fired, as they say. So, the obvious question: was what Lloyd said genuine, or was it a bit of political performative theatre? Either way, it was something Mark Carney would be ill-advised to dismiss as the rantings of a Grit ghost.

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