Canada

Carney Faces Up to the Reality of Trudeau's Climate Fantasies

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.

This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”

What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.

Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.

The shift gained more credibility when the magazine Nature recently retracted a 2024 study predicting economic collapse due to climate change. Reality has started to bite, even in my home state of California, a bastion of climate hysteria. Governor Gavin Newsom, an avid supporter of net zero, earlier this year basically  fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations. He also kept the state’s last nuclear plant going.

As they shy away from climate catastrophism, resurgent progressives in the U.S. focus rightly on issues like cost of living, medical care, and jobs. They realize very few working class voters — now up for grabs in the next election — actually prioritize climate policy; in a recent Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (non-college) voters identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their families. Recent U.S. polling reveals that belief in predominately manmade climate change is now at 45 per cent, according to Pew, and enthusiasm for spending money on climate initiatives has plummeted.

Perhaps even more surprising, politicians in deep-green Europe are beginning to recognize that green obsessions undermine their own industries.  Net-zero policies, notes a recent OECD study, have doubled the rate of job losses in high-carbon jobs, which traditionally paid higher salaries to mostly male, non-college educated workers than the retail, tourism and other low-end service jobs that replaced them. Virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are those with the strictest renewable policies  —  Germany, California, and the U.K. Overall, British, Italian and Germany industrial users pay roughly twice more for electricity than the U.S. or Canada.

So, here’s the reality: oil and gas remain the dominant source of energy, with even coal, a dirtier fuel than natural gas, making a comeback. Despite billions spent by governments — taxpayers — to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use, notes energy expert Robert Bryce, is not only thirty times larger than wind and solar combined, but is also growing faster. In the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar but 13,000 from fossil fuels.

Adding to the power grid is increasingly important with the rise of artificial intelligence. This appears to be leading to greater fondness among oligarchs and investors faced with a desperate need for reliable, affordable energy, which solar and wind are not. Now, some embrace nuclear power, long verboten among the green activists they so generously funded.

This shift away from tough climate policies will shape global politics for the next decade or more. Countries with ample fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Qatar will become richer and more influential. Other, more troubled oil producers, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela are able to survive, in the face of awful governance, only because they still have their share of “black gold.” The developing world, notably Africa and India, will either develop their own resources, or import huge quantities.

In this still fossil-fuel dominated world, Canada will have great cards to play and now may even be willing to play them. These are also Canada’s biggest exports; it is the world’s fourth largest crude exporter. Like the United States, the world’s leading energy producer, Canada’s influence will be tied to its natural resources.

Canada’s embrace of energy production also constitutes a way to work against fossil-fuel-funded malefactors like Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, and Russia. It is also a way to counter China, which emits more GHGs responsible for more than 30 per cent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share.

China, which lacks huge oil or gas resources, has seized on Western climate policies as a way to penetrate markets for solar panels and electric vehicles. This leads to praise from some greens, but the Middle Kingdom is not exactly abandoning fossil fuels; indeed, its EV and panel industries rest on power generated by its over 3,000 coal-power plants, which accounted for  64.4 per cent of global emissions in 2023.

In an ideal world, energy growth would be a common agenda in North America, faced with challenges from Russia, the Middle East and China. But Donald Trump’s misplaced idea of national interest makes such cooperation difficult for now. So, Canada will need to find other markets for crude and other commodities, precisely what proposed West Coast LNG and pipelines would address. Asia is a boom market for fossil fuels, and Canada could enrich itself hugely through this trade.

This is the moment for Canada to assert its economic power and tell us Yankees that you can play the “great game” of power politics, too. Carney’s shift also provides an opportunity — after a decade of disappointment — to get the country back on track and reassert itself as one of the world’s great liberal democracies.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Premier Smith and Prime Minister Carney sign a memorandum of understanding that opens the way to construct a new oil pipeline, via X.

Trump or Not, the US is a Vastly Better Partner for Canada Than China

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent cordial sojourn to Washington, and his claim of a close relationship with Dr. Demento, leaves some hope that for a reconciliation between our two countries. This is a necessity for the United States, which needs its closest neighbour as an ally, but even more important for a Canada largely dependent on U.S. markets, tourists, and military power.

This is not an audacious or disrespectful statement. Throughout history smaller nations — in this case in terms of population and economy — have always tried to secure alliances with larger and more powerful ones. Sometimes it makes sense to gain leverage by feinting a possible shift in allegiances, but that does not sweep away strategic logic.

Simply put, Canada, whose economy has been a laggard in recent years, and already feels the impact of tariffs, has limited options about its long-term post-Trump future. Like other nations Canada will be forced to support one of two alliances, one anchored by the U.S. and the other by China, with strong ties to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

There are some who see a pro-China tilt as the path to Canada’s “independence.” Fortunately, Carney, however daft on some issues, recognizes China’s aspiration in the Arctic to constitute a leading “geopolitical threat” to the country’s prosperity and security. The Canadian military is already acting to monitor aggressive moves by China and its more trigger-happy sidekick, Russia.

In this tussle, Carney may hope that the EU or other countries could help, but in reality, only the U.S. has the wherewithal to resist Chinese encroachment. The binational alliance may be hard to endure under Trump, but ultimately the U.S. is a vastly superior choice. The once ultra green Carney suggesting the Keystone XL pipeline be resurrected demonstrates that we should be fated by geography to progress together.

Canada also may want to consider what to expect in a China-centric world. China’s historic strategy focuses not on establishing colonies but vassal states from which it can draw what it lacks, mainly raw materials, and customers for its increasingly sophisticated industrial machine. This is precisely why China has targeted Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, keeping them as suppliers of rare metals, copper, and foodstuffs.

In virtually no case does China try to lift up its client states to the status of competitors, as the U.S. did for Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. China knows what it wants. In terms of strategic materials — a major trade issue — China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American or Western competitors.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: World Economic Forum, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Yes, Fascism is a Threat, But It's Coming From the Left

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Fascism is in the air, on television and print. We read about American progressive celebrities and academics fleeing to other countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to exercise their notion of a free society. In her campaign, after all, Kamala Harris called Donald Trump a “president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

To be sure, Trump’s hysterical antics remind one of Benito Mussolini, but the long-term undermining of such things as free speech comes not primarily from MAGA land but in the favoured precincts of the progressives. The defenders of democracy, like Anne Applebaum, a brilliant analyst of Communist repression, and noted fascism scholar Timothy Snyder, now at the University of Toronto, focus their current angst almost exclusively on Trump, the nationalist and religious right.

What they ignore is the more fashionable fascism of the respectable establishments in both Europe and North America. This left-of-center authoritarianism is particularly evident in Europe, where established “moderate” and left parties in places like Germany, Romania and France have worked to keep populist candidates off the battlefield. In the U.S., progressives even tried to prevent Trump from running, although unsuccessfully.

In Keir Starmer’s Britain, you can go to jail for violating speech codes and also experience “two-tier” law enforcement, one for native Brits and another for newcomers, including the undocumented. And just wait till they pass their definition of “Islamophobia” which no doubt concerns them far more than antisemitism, which has been growing at a much faster pace.

Then there’s Ireland, where anti-Israel sentiments are strong, and where officials have pushed for censorship of online speech, most of it taking place on U.S. platforms. This drew opposition from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

But perhaps nowhere is the hypocrisy greater than in Canada. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada attempted to pass an online harms bill widely seen as draconian. Mercifully, it has not yet been passed. Trudeau, particularly during COVID, repressed basic rights, and during the truckers’ protests froze the fundraising efforts of dissidents. In a country that seems unwilling to arrest antisemites and rampaging Islamists, opposing government policy by middle-class Canadians risks jail time.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: William F. Hertha, under CC 4.0 License.

The Case for Defanging Ottawa

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

When globalism was hot, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau tried to be hotter by deciding that Canada has “no core identity, no mainstream,” and suggesting Canada had become a “post-national state.” Now that nationalism is back in vogue, Prime Minister Mark Carney, unwilling or unable to counter U.S. President Donald Trump’s taunts and tariff barrage, has become an odd recipient of Canada’s quest for a U.S.-like national identity. Even as he rails against America’s temperamental chief executive, he has shown little interest in curbing his country’s own protectionist policies.

But Canadians, indulging in a rare burst of nationalist authoritarianism, may be jumping on the wrong train. Even as people reject globalism, the “national state” is also losing its appeal — not only in the United States, but throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, as well. Some of this, on the left at least, reflects anti-western ideology, epitomized by DEI and the mandatory acknowledgement of First Nations land rights, which are now deeply entrenched in the education systems of the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Support for a highly centralized state also represents a rejection of Canadian and American attempts to balance national and regional concerns. As enormous countries, we each have populations that have predominately different origins and exist in often wildly different economies. A suburbanite at the edge of the Golden Horseshoe or in the endlessly expanding sprawl north of Dallas has very different ideas and priorities, whether in terms of schools or support for terrorism, than an arts or non-profit worker in central Toronto or Manhattan.

The differences get greater when you look across the continental expanse. Alberta and the Prairie provinces depend on raw material production, which is not exactly in line with Carney’s ultra-green vision, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has rightly pointed out. British Columbia inhales new urbanist dogma and seeks to reduce fossil fuels, and Ontario remains divided between its industrial base and its greener-than-thou urban elites. Like them, Carney seems more focused on things other than finding ways for Canada’s various communities to thrive.

But more power to the provinces or the states does not really go far enough. For most things, outside of national defence and foreign relations, the real goal should be to bring decision-making down to as local a level as possible. This notion is popular among Canadians, most of whom wish to see decisions made closer to home.

This notion is also embraced in the U.S., notes Gallup. Big companies, banks and media receive low marks from the public, but small business continues to enjoy widespread support across party lines. Millennials, largely liberal on issues such as immigration and gay marriage, are as one commentator suggests, more “socially conscious,” but they do not necessarily favour the top-down structures embraced by earlier generations; many prefer small units to larger ones.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo credit: Prime Minister Mark Carney addresses the crowd during Canada Day festivities in Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen.

Carney's Canada Will Devolve into Feudalism

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Canada may have severed its feudal ties less violently, but like America, it experienced far less sustained aristocratic domination than either of its two mother countries, France and Great Britain. But now, particularly with the rise of the ultimate establishmentarian, Mark Carney, as prime minister, Canada’s feudal future seems increasingly assured.

Carney’s election places power in the hands of the “ultimate Davos man,” a habitue and beneficiary of the elite financial and real estate. He is a reliable advocate for the kinds of strenuous climate, tax and regulatory policies undermining Canada’s middle class.

Canadians like to boast that their country is more egalitarian — in terms of distribution of wealth — than the United States. And to be sure, America’s more ruthless capitalism tends to create both a great many winners and a lot of losers, with the middle classes struggling in between. Yet, despite the aspirations of Trumpian fascism, it has been Canada, and notably the Liberals, who allow the clerisy — the modern-day Church — and the bureaucracy, to limit free speech, a classic fascist tactic.

But the essence of feudalism lies in the marginalization of the middle and working classes. Here, Canada is failing; its per capita income relative to the United States has been slipping for years, and is now at the lowest level on record. Nor is it living up to its oft-repeated egalitarian image. Rather, today, Canada is well on its way to feudalism, having its highest income inequality ever recorded, with the top 20 per cent of households holding more than two-thirds of all wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent holds only 2.8 per cent. At the bottom, notes the left-leaning Policy Options magazine, up to one-in-four Canadians suffer from “a poverty level standard of living.”

Canada not only lacks corporate headquarters, but it is also hardly an entrepreneurial hotbed like the United States. Canadian small businesses, notes one recent analysis, are less productive than those in the U.S., one reason why few, particularly in manufacturing, become large. A paper by the Business Council of Alberta identifies trade, financing, institutional, regulatory, or taxation constraints. Overall poor productivity, particularly among high end workers, also contributes to Canada’s mediocre performance.

Not surprisingly, job creation outside government employment has been meagre. Overall, as the bureaucracy has thrived under the Liberals, the people, in general have not. In 2002, Canada’s GDP per capita was about 80 per cent of the U.S.’s, but has dropped by 2022, to 72 per cent of that of its neighbour to the south.

But perhaps nothing so reflects Canada’s feudal dilemma than housing. Despite being a country with enormous reserves of land, even in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, Canadian climate and regulatory policies, coupled with high levels of immigration, have made building new homes extraordinarily expensive by putting more pressure on an already inadequate supply. Although immigration levels may now be reducing, a surge of migrants, including those fleeing the Trump immigration policies, is already overwhelming border cities like Niagara Falls.

In this shift towards oligarchy, homeownership and investment profits play a major role. This is particularly true in terms of housing, where the Liberal party has long championed “urban containment,” a policy that seeks to limit suburban and exurban development while promoting dense urban growth. The result, notes a new study by demographer Wendell Cox, has been housing prices that, in terms of the relationship between median home prices and household income, are increasingly out of reach for the average Canadian.

Immigration, key to Canada’s population surge, has contributed to this shortage. While the country’s working population swelled by a record 3.7 per cent at the start of this year, housing starts remained essentially flat. At one housing start for every 4.9 people entering the working-age population, “there is no precedent for a housing supply deficit of this magnitude,” notes National Bank of Canada economist Stéfane Marion. The biggest losers have been people under 40, for whom the homeownership rate has dropped to around 50 per cent, almost 10 per cent less than a decade before. It also helps to have wealthy parents who own a home; children of homeowners are twice as likely to acquire a home themselves.

If you wish to live in Canada’s two great international cities, and are not of aristocratic stock, it’s getting tough to get shelter. Four of the six major markets in Canada have a median multiple — a ratio of the median house price by the median gross (before tax) annual household income — of 5.4, considerably higher than the U.S.’s 4.8. Vancouver now ranks fourth among all anglophone markets at 11.8, behind Hong Kong, Sydney, and San Jose. Toronto, at 8.4, stands as the second-least affordable market in Canada and ranks 84th out of 95 markets in international affordability, with a severely unaffordable median multiple of 8.4. As late as about 1990, national price-to-income ratios were “affordable,” at 3.0 or less in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This pattern severely restricts homeownership, which has been declining since 2021. Not surprisingly, rates are lower in both Vancouver and Toronto than in much of the country. Clearly densification, the preferred growth option of the elites, does not help a housing shortage or reduce prices as Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia has shown. Indeed, now Vancouver is now producing less-than-half the housing units needed to meet demand, one reason for the high prices even in a weak economy. Condon, an eloquent advocate of densification, cites the “indisputable” evidence that “upzoning” increases the value of land (by increasing the development value).

Concentrations of property and wealth are likely to worsen under the renewed Liberal regime. Planners and climate activists, as in California, a place which almost rivals Toronto and Vancouver in their progressive domination, will likely get even stronger with “net zero” devotee Carney in charge. Similarly, industries that tend to create high-wage jobs, notably in oil and gas, will find themselves constrained, leaving the big money to financial institutions and those firms who rely on protectionism to shield themselves from both Chinese and American competition.

It may comfort the current ruling elites in Canada to bloviate over Trumpian idiocy, but none of this will slow the country’s growing shift to feudalism. Blaming Trump may deflect the suffering public from identifying the real culprits, the property and financial elites, and their political operatives like Carney, whose preferred policies threaten to stymie the progress of most Canadians.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: National Post.

We Must Not Take Our Eyes Off the True Threat — China

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

By his supreme idiocy, U.S. President Donald Trump has stirred up anti-American sentiment, but largely to the benefit of America’s archrival, China. Although Prime Minister Mark Carney is European in his manners and predilections, he is a charter member of the cadre of useful idiots who seem intent on imposing Chinese vassalage on Canada.

The Euro-centric economist has proposed that Canada strengthen ties with the European Union, but Europe is, for now, a spent force. Canada is more delectable for China. It has many of the raw materials that Beijing craves, with rising oil imports at the fore. Canada also has a large Chinese diaspora community, roughly 1.7-million people of Chinese descent, that Beijing seeks, with some success, to manipulate to its ends.

One would expect some Canadians to resist these trends but Carney epitomizes an establishment, including American corporations and Wall Street, that remain remarkably untroubled with Beijing’s stated aim of becoming a global economic superpower by 2049. So, while assaulting Trump for his trade policy, Canadian political leaders seem to be missing that the West’s greatest long-term challenge is the relentless Sinic mercantilism.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to appease China in order to “Trump-proof” and revive the country’s moribund economy seems more like the road to ever great irrelevancy, as is the case for much of Europe. China is trying to build a mega-embassy in London that will help it surveil and harass those who fled Communist rule for the assumed safety of Great Britain.

Trump may be a posturing maniac, but the China challenge is of a more considerable magnitude. China already dominates the industrial world; it now boasts roughly as many factory exports as the U.S., Japan and Germany combined. It is the world’s the world’s largest automobile market and the biggest steel producer. It is also investing heavily to take over the aerospace industry from leading companies like Bombardier, Boeing and Airbus.

Carney and other members of the elite cannot address these threats as long as they adhere to notions like “net zero,” an obsession of Carney and his fellow poobahs. For all his talk about building energy infrastructure, Carney’s green obsessions could instead lead Canada into a dependent relationship with solar and electric vehicle manufacturers based in China, a country that emits more greenhouse gasses than the U.S. and the EU combined.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

If Carney Brings Canada Closer to Europe, Financial Ruin Would Follow

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

U.S. President Donald Trump’s mindless, and frankly pointless, comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have stirred up latent Canadian patriotism. But it also may result in Canada, which is already economically moribund, further aligning itself with the permanent European Union bureaucracy.

A tilt towards Europe would be natural for Liberal Leader Mark Carney, the former pre-Brexit head of the Bank of England. He’s an advocate of the very environmental, social and economic policies that have led the EU — and, to some extent, Canada — into economic and social decline.

Carney is the ultimate product of the Euro-Atlantic elite, with affiliations with the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group and the Group of Thirty. Recently, he travelled to Europe in a search of “reliable allies” — that is, people who think alike. He has identified as a “European” in the past, and holds British and Irish citizenship.

In office, we can expect him to epitomize the bureaucratic spirit of the profoundly dysfunctional EU. The central organizing principle of the EU is disregard for nation-states. Recent antidemocratic moves to remove troublesome populists in Romania and take out a leading presidential aspirant in France suggests Europe’s most outspoken defenders of democracy frequently toss out results when disappointed.

The rest of the European agenda is no bargain, either. It prioritizes an ever-expanding welfare state, as well as climate, social and immigration policies now rejected in the United States. Its politics, and economics, centre on stasis.

This is a swan song Canadians need to resist. Under the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, Canada was already succumbing to the essentials of Euro-politics: high trade barriers, net-zero climate policies, essentially open borders and the systematic undermining of the country’s past.

Climate is a particular challenge. Carney has a long history, including as United Nations special envoy for climate action, of being at the forefront of steering investment to preferred “green sectors.” American investors have already moved away from such commitments.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Michael Wuertenberg, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Why Jews Are Fleeing the West

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: D. Berkowitz via Wikimedia under under CC 2.0 License.

America First Can't Be America Alone

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Like others, Canadians now know there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s neither polite nor gentle. The question is how to co-exist with a raging bully whose economy absorbs nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports and one trillion in two-way trade.

What his fans call Donald Trump’s drive for “muscular pax Americana” is not exactly warming hearts around the world. In December, Britain sent an ambassador with a well-expressed disdain for the new president to Washington. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans and Brits to fight to preserve the continent’s disastrous welfare and climate regime. Trump’s alienated not just Canada’s New Democrats, but also Conservatives who share something of a common agenda with Trumpism.

Ironically, this is occurring when many citizens in Europe are already voting for anti-migrant, nationalism and culturally conservative candidates, producing leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who already has an amicable relationship with Trump. Canadians and other foreigners need to understand that, for Trump, everything is about making a deal, starting with outrageous demands and threats.

In the end, Trump will make the best deal he can strike, and, under the Conservatives at least, there’s hope that some common ground can be struck. Ignore the imbecilic statements about taking over Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal, and look to strike a deal that makes sense.

But let’s be honest here: you can’t blame Trump for the current chaotic state of the world. The world “rules-based” system was falling apart — as seen in the Red Sea, Palestine, Ukraine, and throughout Africa — when the supposed “adults in the room” were in charge.

What Trump lacks, at least so far, is a strategic sense of how to build an alliance against the China-Russia-Iran-Venezuela-North Korea axis. Recently, Doug Ford proposed such an “Am-Can” alliance that would leverage the power of our huge continent’s huge resource base.

The cultural fit is not perfect, but our binational ties make us, as the Chinese would say, as close as teeth and lips. We share a huge border, similar resource bases — much of our cross-border trade consists of oil, lumber as well as some cars — and for the most part, a common language as Canada does with Britain and our fellow commonwealth countries, Australia, and New Zealand.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: C.P. Swire, under CC 2.0 License.

Jews Are Discovering That Canada's Multicultural Utopia Isn't Safe

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:28:58 -0500

In the many summers my family spent in Quebec, at the farm owned by my wife’s uncle Morris and his wife Louise, I could see Canada in its best light. Morris, who grew up in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal, always expressed gratitude to Canada, a country that birthed his own success and provided security his Polish forebears never enjoyed. “Canada,” he would say, almost tearfully, “is a very good country.”

Morris died not too long ago, but I am glad he is not experiencing what is happening now. Of course, Montreal Jews experienced prejudice before: beatings on the streets by local toughs, boycotts of Jewish businesses and quotas at McGill. For much of the first half of the last century, the country’s politics were in large part dominated by the antisemitic three-time prime minister MacKenzie King, one of the most hostile western leaders to Jewish immigration before the Holocaust.

Today sadly all too much now reprises the 1930s, with governments standing by as rioters deface Jewish institutions across the country. Some of this comes from political extremists, but a key driver has been poorly vetted immigrants from countries with very different traditions. In what is the fourth-largest Jewish country (after Israel, the United States and France), 82 per cent of Canadian Jews feel less safe today than before the October 7 pogrom.

The Jews of Canada have been abandoned by the very forces — the Liberal party, the big cities and the universities — which once nurtured them. The Liberals’ tilt away from Israel parallels rising antisemitism within Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s partners in the NDP. The new drift was epitomized by Trudeau’s pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dared show up on the country’s tarmac. Such an action, he claimed, would show “just who we are as Canadians.”

There’s another word better suited for this: betrayal. We see some of this in the U.S. Democratic party but, for the most part, President Joe Biden and congressional leaders have restrained the anti-Zionist left. Oddly many American Jews expect president-elect Donald Trump to be far tougher on Islamic terrorists, expel foreign students breaking the law and protect besieged Jewish communities. Most Jews may dislike Trump for his crudity and nativistic leanings, but they supported him more than any GOP candidate since 2012, with huge margins among the Orthodox.

Canada’s Jews have also been shifting towards the Conservatives. Former prime minister Stephen Harper has long been well-regarded, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, likely the next prime minister, has been outspoken in his support of both Israel and the security of Canadian Jews. As in the U.S., it’s the left that torments the Jews, not the right.

Canada’s Jews need new allies because they are losing the demographic battle, and inevitably some electoral influence. The Muslim share of the population has more than doubled since 2000 to roughly five per cent in 2021. Meanwhile the Jewish population of roughly 326,000 accounted for under one per cent in 2016. As Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly admitted, citing her own district’s demographics, numbers matter.

Quebec has long sought to lure French-speaking North Africans to make up for a diminishing workforce. Nationally, Canada’s broken immigration system does little to screen migrants, which has led observers to conclude the country is a haven for terrorists, war criminals and other undesirables. Jews in Canada, notes analyst David Mendelson, a Montreal native, are finding out how things can unfold in the multicultural utopia of an increasingly post-Christian Canada.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: Can Pac Swire via Flickr under CC 2.0 License