If the theme of 2025 in Canadian politics was to expect the unexpected, the ways in which the political world turned upside down will reverberate into 2026. Everyone will have their own surprise developments of this truly tumultuous year, but here are my top five picks for the big country-shaking shifts of 2025.
It has taken me a while to absorb the recent proposal by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jennie Carigan, clearly supported by Prime Minister Mark Carney, to raise a 300,000-strong “citizen militia” in peacetime.
The proposal suggests this would be built initially on a cadre of civil servants given a week’s military training to prepare for war.
The RCMP says it is actively investigating Ryan Wedding’s alleged criminal activities, in the hopes of laying criminal charges in Canada against members of the organization.
In the wake of charges in the U.S. against Canadians allegedly tied to the Wedding organization, two senior Mounties told The Globe and Mail that they are continuing to pursue their own probe.
“The outcome that is wanted, of course, is to lay charges here in Canada, if we can,” said Superintendent Marie-Eve Lavallée of Eastern Region RCMP, which is leading the Canadian investigation out of Montreal. “If we have enough to charge here, we will.”
So Canada is only now investigating???
More than half of Canadians say they will be staying home rather than travelling for the Christmas season, according to a recent survey.
The survey, conducted jointly by research company Narrative Research and data collection and market research business Logit Group, found that 58 percent of Canadians said they were staying home for the holidays, followed by 18 percent who said they would travel locally for the season, and 11 percent who said they had plans to go to another city or province.
Hope they’re not driving!
The 10 most dangerous winter roads in Canada, according to crash data
How’s this for a win-win deal? Alberta lets Premier David Eby, his B.C. NDP government and radical, anti-development First Nations group live in their little “green” bubble west of the Rockies while Alberta finds an investor or investors to build a pipeline to the West Coast through Montana, Idaho and Washington state.
‘We think religion is a private affair. But what happens when we accept immigrants from cultures where they think religion is not private but that actually it’s the only thing in politics that matters?’
Confronted at very short notice with the need to respond to an egregious hate crime – the slaughter in Sydney of 15 Jews by radical Islamists – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese completely exposed the moral vacuum at the heart of Western democracy.
Instead of damning the perpetrators for what they were, he blathered on about a general confrontation with extremism — right-wing extremism, no less — and the need for harsher gun laws.
Last week I carefully read the statement of strategic purpose of the Trump administration, a document published by every recent incoming administration within a year of its inauguration. The strategic statement has been received with misgivings by members of the Fortress America school that holds that the United States should be ready at all times to repulse any initiative from any potential rival country or group of countries, and by Western Europeans always on the lookout for any softening commitment of the United States to the defence of Western Europe.
I will explain why I don’t share those concerns, but my principal reservation about the strategic statement is that the country, and indeed the word, Canada, is mentioned only once in this document. A number of other countries are also overlooked but none of them has as intimate a geographic, commercial, and cultural association with the United States as Canada does.
Blacklock’s Reporter recently revealed that the federal government’s Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, is using her office to advocate for Muslim prayer rooms in federal buildings, citing “Islamophobia in the workplace” when accommodations for religious practices are not made.
This initiative also exposes her as using her office to advocate for federal employees “speaking out on Palestinian issues.”
Jack Frieberg’s parents were Holocaust survivors.
Louis and Gerda Frieberg came to Toronto in the 1950s to start a new life in the New World. He worked as a carpenter, she as a seamstress, making 70 cents a dress in a Spadina Avenue sweatshop. As Toronto boomed in the postwar years, they saw an opportunity and started a construction company.
I don’t see things improving for anyone in Canada who questions Islam in virtually any context.
Our mainstream politicians are cowards, our police compromised, the judiciary complicit and our education system a vile parody of its intended purpose.
Remigration is the only solution we have.
Is it really any wonder that three Toronto men who allegedly hunted women and targeted the Jewish community were using the very same tactics as Hamas?
On Oct. 7, 2023, it was Hamas who hunted Israeli women, raped them and killed them in a sickening display of violence that left 1,200 people dead. Within hours, there were people in Canada who took to the streets to celebrate the brutality.
WARMINGTON: Tim Horton would roll over in his grave hearing employees fired at Christmas
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand summoned Israel’s ambassador to explain why a delegation of Canadian members of Parliament was refused entry to the West Bank earlier this week.
Ambassador Iddo Moed was called in by Ms. Anand on Tuesday. Myah Tomasi, a spokesperson for Ms. Anand, said Mr. Moed met Global Affairs officials that day to discuss the treatment of the delegation.
Six MPs were part of a delegation of around 30 Canadians that also included representatives of charitable organizations. The group was denied entry to the West Bank by Israeli authorities on
Tuesday, prompting Ms. Anand to publicly voice her disapproval of their treatment.
I’m sure the Israeli envoy tried desperately not to smirk.
Four in five Canadians are concerned about the growing cost of groceries, at a time when food prices spiked as the annual inflation rate hit a two-year high in November.
Food price tags rose by an annualized rate of 4.7 percent in November, compared to the same time last year. In response, 81 percent of Canadians surveyed by Abacus Data are now concerned with ever-growing food prices, rising well above the average rate of inflation in the last couple of decades. The cost of meat, especially poultry and beef—main staples in the average Canadian’s protein diet— is leading the way.
With the Trump administration seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, demanding the “return” of oil and other assets and threatening war against the Maduro regime, the fate of the world’s largest proven reserves is once again in doubt.
As a result of U.S. sanctions, Venezuela has been all but frozen out of the international oil market, despite having more known oil than either Canada or Saudi Arabia.
If the oil were to start to flow again — as it did before the arrival of president Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro — it could have profound effects on Canada.
A US judge has blocked Michigan from enforcing a 2020 order that would have shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline, which runs beneath the Straits of Mackinac, the channel connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
Reuters reported that on Wednesday US District Judge Robert Jonker ruled that oversight of pipeline safety and the protection of the Straits is a federal responsibility, effectively preventing Michigan from shutting down the pipeline.
