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New one.

This is in Israel, directly across the road from kibbutz Be’eri and just up from the Nova site. This is where I was with Amit, a young man – a boy, really – who was shot twice by Hamas on October 7 and got away. He told me his story. This is where they shot him: right here.

Bleeding from two bullets in his leg, he somehow got away at the bottom of that field, on the right. Later, when Hamas had left the area, he found his phone in the wreck of his car on the road to the left – it had been hit by an RPG – and he called his brothers to say he loved them and to say goodbye.

“Men are stupid,” he said to me. He was weeping. “We don’t tell each other we love each other.”

So I painted this today, in a rage. I get lots and lots of hate mail, you see, and today someone – she called herself Jennifer – went after me for supporting Israel. For being a “Zionist.” Whatever, but today it fucking enraged me. Not sure why, but it did.

So, I dedicate this painting to you, Jennifer. It’ll remind me of the strength of my friend in Israel, and how he will always be so much better than pieces of shit like you.

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Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.

Apologies to The Who, but the misapplication of their song lyric is apt: on all matters related to the Jewish state, former Global Affairs Minister Melanie Joly was bad. But her successor, Anita Anand, has already shown herself to be far, far worse. That is no easy thing, but the Toronto-area MP has pulled it off.

This week, reporters approached the newly-appointed Anand for a pro forma comment about the Hamas-Israel war. This is what she said.

“We cannot allow the continued use of food as a political tool … Over 50,000 people have died as a result of the aggression caused against the Palestinians and the Gazan people in Palestine. Using food as a political tool is simply unacceptable,” Anand said, before a cabinet meeting. “We need to continue to work towards a ceasefire. We need to ensure that we have a two-state solution, and Canada will continue to maintain that position.”

She then turned on her heel and stalked away. Jewish Canadians – and the many who support the Jewish state – registered genuine shock.

There are several factual problems with what Anita Anand said. Here are the big ones.

• “Over 50,000 people have died.” The source of that figure is Hamas, which runs the health authority in Gaza. Multiple agencies have stated that Hamas – which, all but the likes of Anita Anand recall, is a designated terrorist entity that broke the ceasefire and killed 1,200 people on October 7, 2023 – has promoted casualty counts that are deliberately, provably false. Even the Gaza authority now acknowledges as much. Zaher al-Wahidi, the head of statistics at the health ministry, told Sky News last month that thousands of individual deaths had been reclassified. “We realized a lot of people died a natural death,” Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [something] caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

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“There’s no such thing as a genius in politics,” said Jean Chretien – who then added that he had never actually met someone who is a genius at politics. He went on: “There are only human beings, some better than others, who rise or fall on the challenges they meet.”

True enough. But the ones who tend to do better at the political game? They are either lucky, or experienced.

Mark Carney had better hope that the 24 (24!) newcomers he selected for his cabinet on Tuesday are lucky – because they sure aren’t experienced. None of them have helped to manage an organization as big as the Government of Canada before. Not one.

That is why the Liberal Prime Minister’s cabinet seems more like an actual change in government than a cabinet shuffle. The sort of changes ushered in by Carney will mean lots of uncertainty, for him – and for Canadians. We simply don’t know enough about these newcomers to evaluate how they will do.

Thirteen of the new ministers are new to being a Member of Parliament, as well. So we don’t even have their record as an MP to examine, and predict how they’ll do.

The jobs that have been handed to the (relative) new kids on Centre Block aren’t inconsequential, either.  Consider:

 

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CALGARY – Mark Carney is doing a pretty good job so far. Sorry, folks, but he is. Three reasons.

One has to do with that meeting with Donald Trump. If you’ve worked for a Prime Minister (and I have), your job is to just avoid disaster, pretty much. Achievements are few and far between. So, the job is mainly to keep the boss from stepping on landmines.

There were a lot of landmines in Donald Trump’s office, this week. They weren’t easy to see, because that room has now been done up in so much gold and gilt it resembles the receiving room at Wild West brothel. But the landmines were there.

Trump was going to say something crazy about Canada – that was a given. He was going to say something that was wildly, provably false. He was going to make stuff up, just to see how Mark Carney would react.

Those were the landmines, and guess what? Mark Carney didn’t step on any of them. Closely resembling the central the banker that he is – a job which typically involves listening to idiot politicians say idiotic things, and keeping one’s cool – Mark Carney kept his cool.

He let Trump talk, and then delivered the one line he’d flown to Washington to deliver: namely, that Canada wasn’t for sale, ever. Huzzah! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, as George W. Bush might say.

Reason number two has to do with Pierre Poilievre, who Mark Carney wants you to think is his adversary. But he isn’t. After blowing a 30-point lead, losing an election that was in the bag, and then getting the pink slip in the riding he’d held for two decades, Pierre Poilievre is someone Mark Carney really, really wants to keep around.

So, when a reporter asked Carney about accommodating Poilievre’s desire to run in an Alberta seat where a fence post painted blue could win in a landslide, Carney was all magnanimous and whatnot, and said he’d do what he could to grease the wheels of democracy, blah blah blah.

I was impressed by his acting skills, on that occasion. If there’s anybody who really, really – REALLY – wants to keep Pierre Poilievre around, it’s Mark Carney. But he didn’t show that. He was sort-of lowkey about it, and the commentariat predictably ran around saying how refreshingly Prime Ministerial he was. But that’s nonsense: Mark Carney gave himself a big gift, and he tricked everyone into thinking he was being a charitable nice guy. Clever.

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RE’IM, ISRAEL – When you come to this quiet place – where the death cult called Hamas raped, mutilated, beheaded, burnt, slaughtered, and shot 364 young people on the morning of October 7, 2023 – some Canadian visitors inevitably ask themselves: where is my country?

Because, make no mistake, Canada’s leadership hasn’t been much in evidence around the site of the former Nova Music Festival. Or at any of the other sad places in Israel, really, where 1,200 men, women, children and babies were murdered by Hamas and Gazans on that terrible day. 

Did you know that every major world leader has been here to pay their respects, but not Canada’s? It’s true. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, ten days after the pogrom. The top leaders of France, Greece, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, the European Union. All have come to Israel to pay their respects and bear witness. Not Canada. 

Within Canada, meanwhile, something just as bad has happened: we have become one of the worst places in the world for antisemitism. 

It’s been noted, and reported on, in Israel, too: the schools for little Canadian Jewish kids sprayed with bullets. The Canadian synagogues firebombed. The Canadian businesses owned by Jews firebombed and shot up. Just because they are owned or run by Canadian citizens who happen to be Jewish. 

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A few years ago, I wrote this:

“[Pierre Poilievre]is one of the Conservative Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Like the Biblical Horsemen, everything he says and does is bad. Everything that is good that he touches withers and dies…He is one of the most despicable, loathsome politicians to ever grace the national stage. He is a pestilence made flesh.

Pipsqueak Pierre Poilievre is a disgrace to Parliament. He is a joke.”

Tell us what you really think, Warren!

In the fullness of time, I revised my opinion. I thought the Conservative leader-to-be had matured, somewhat. He jettisoned the WEF conspiracy theories, the pro-convoy idiocy, the dalliances with the Covid kooks. He started to act like a leader should. He grew up.

But the good people of the Carleton riding obviously didn’t agree. They weren’t so willing to forgive and forget. Somewhere between Monday night and Tuesday morning, voters in that riding – the riding Poilievre had held for a generation, just about – sent the Tory leader packing. They chose his Liberal opponent, Bruce Fanjoy, who is probably just as surprised as the rest of us.

Fanjoy didn’t just defeat the Conservative leader – he clobbered him, by 4,000 votes. It was a humiliation. It was a pounding. But even then – tellingly – Poilievre didn’t get the massage.

“We know that change is needed but change is hard to come by,” he said to his stunned followers, early Tuesday morning.

“It takes time. It takes work and that’s why we have to learn the lessons of tonight so that we can have an even better result the next time.”

But is Pierre Poilievre the sort of guy who “learns lessons?” Is he the one who can achieve “an even better result the next time?”

The available evidence isn’t persuasive. Just a few weeks ago, Poilievre had a 30-point lead over the Liberals. He had a massive war chest. He had a party that was united behind him.

And, even after all that, he failed. His party lost. He lost. He blew it.

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When the story of the 2025 election campaign is written, when it takes up its place in the history section in the library, what will be said? What will be the moral of the tale?

Every election is like a book. It has a beginning, a middle and the end.  It has its protagonists and its antagonists, its lesser characters, its moments of pathos and bathos.  It has (usually, hopefully) a plot.

The plot in this one, this election story, was simple. Everything was going one way, towards a conclusion that seemed inevitable: the ascension of Pierre Poilievre to the office of Prime Minister, and a historically-huge Conservative Parliamentary majority – and the reduction of the despised Justin Trudeau Liberals to irrelevance.

And then, at the end of the first chapter in January, a villain entered the plot. The villain was so awful, so rotten, so cruel, he was almost a caricature. But he was real. Simultaneously, Justin Trudeau – defeated, dejected, no longer the right one for the coming battle – left the stage. 

Without warning, without just cause, the next chapter commenced with the villain named Donald Trump destroying things: the established world order, free trade, the rule of law. That was chapter two. Peace, order, and good government were shredded, and by chapter three – in and around the month of February, 2025 – the skies had gone dark and the inevitable conclusion, a Pierre Poilievre majority government, was no longer inevitable.

As plot twists go, it was almost fantastical. For that month, for that chapter, Canadians quietly went about their business, shaking their heads, quiet as church mice. Initially, we dismissed Trump’s threats as a deeply unfunny joke, told by a drunken guy at the end of the bar who refuses to leave at closing time. Then, eventually, none of it was funny anymore, and Canadians cancelled Spring Break trips to Florida or Arizona or Hawaii, and they stopped buying Campbell’s Soup. Chapter three: a crisis deepens. 

The putative hero of the piece, like all of the best heroes (King Arthur, Spiderman, David of Goliath fame), didn’t initially resemble one. He didn’t look or sound remotely like a saviour. Mark Carney, in style and content, had a banker’s approach, mainly because that was all he had ever been. It was hard to picture him in a suit of shining armour, leading a brave charge up the hill against the villain Trump. 

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, did look like a warrior, because that was all that he had ever been. He had a soldier’s swagger and mien. It was easy to picture him defending the Alamo, or Gettysburg, or emerging victorious at Iwo Jima. 

And therein lays the big plot twist: those were American battles, and American victories, weren’t they? There was something about Pierre Poilievre’s way – his choice of language, his policies, his style – that suggested, subtly and then not so subtly, that he may not have his musket pointed in the right direction when the final battle happened.

In other books, in other tales, there have been characters a bit like that. Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes, Trapper John to Hawkeye, even Chewbacca to Han Solo. Great characters, great heroes. But always playing second fiddle to the main guy. Here, in this book, that’s the quiet, analytical banker who sometimes spins fantastical tales of his own. Mark Carney.

It’s an odd story, this 2025 Canadian general federal election. An epic battle – literally, truly – for a nation’s existence, for all the marbles. And, in a plot twist that will be remembered long after the book is put away, the people abruptly decided to put their fates in the hands of the guy who has never been in a war like this before. And not the other guy, the fighter named Poilievre.

That, at the conclusion of this book, is the moral of the tale: sometimes, the people will surprise you. Sometimes, they will not rally behind the warrior, the one who knows how to fight. Sometimes, they will choose the other guy – not because they believe he is a soldier. They will choose him to lead because they think his heart is in the right place. Because they think he isn’t going side with the villain, at the end.

Quite a book, isn’t it? Doesn’t sound believable. But it’s on its way to becoming a bestseller, just the same.

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