The Hamas attack on Israel was horrific and depraved, but at the same time foreseeable and explicable. The goal of Hamas and its allies in terror is not an independent state for Palestinians but the eradication of Israel and of Jews themselves. While many are now demanding that Israel hold back and negotiate for peace, some argue it is the “peace process” itself that facilitated the conflict. Lynne Cohen charts what she considers the only road to a durable peace – one that begins with uncompromising action by Israel and ends with an international effort borrowed from the post-Second World War era.

To be successful and enduring, a government must firmly establish its own legitimacy as the sole sovereign power within its boundaries. Anything else brings chaos. So why are Canadian governments so meekly accepting of the ongoing erosion of their authority by the courts? Taking a close look at a recent B.C. Supreme Court case that threatens to demolish the 164-year-old legal foundation of the province’s mining industry, Peter Best examines the practical and legal implications of this court-ordered diminution of Canada’s national sovereignty at the expense of the rapidly growing and vaguely defined notion of Indigenous sovereignty.

The term “rule of law” gets used a lot but, judging by how it is used, many people seem to misunderstand its meaning – including politicians at the highest levels. Appearances to the contrary, it does not refer to political governance by the courts, a country ruled entirely by lawyers, every disagreement triggering litigation or governments addressing every issue with more and more laws. Fundamentally, it means a system in which all – including the highest rulemakers – are bound equally by the law, no person or organization is above the law and governance never occurs outside the law. In this pre-publication excerpt from their new book launching at month-end, Joanna Baron and Christine Van Geyn chart Canada’s worrisome deterioration into a country no longer entirely under the rule of law, the resulting encouragement of lawlessness and the grave damage being done to the lives and liberties of Canadian citizens.

Pornography is as old as art itself. But unlike previous iterations distributed via painted vases, printing presses, movie theatres or video, the internet offers unlimited hardcore sexual content that is easily accessible, anonymous for viewers and nearly always free. As Elie Cantin-Nantel explains, this dramatic increase in availability creates serious problems for the physical and mental health of users, their families and society at large – with children and young women at greatest risk. And if that sounds like a public health crisis everyone can rally around…you’d be wrong. Cantin-Nantel asks why so many governments, public health organizations and academics are ignoring the porn problem. 

Its leaders are avowed leftists and even “trained Marxists.” Its central creed is an oppression narrative revolving around race, gender and other elements of identity. It loathes capitalism, middle-class society and traditional institutions, and wants to topple all of them. Whatever else it might be – even if you sympathize with some of its ideas and goals – it seems undeniable that wokism is a feature of the political left. Not so, says a small but vocal and apparently growing group of left-wing theorists. John Weissenberger explores the claim that wokism is actually a right-wing phenomenon stemming from the historically foreordained problems of “late-stage capitalism.”

Canadian smokers have seen warning labels on their cigarette packs for more than half a century, part of an ever-expanding government effort to convince them to quit. While these labels have metastasized in size and grotesqueness over the years, millions of Canadians still haven’t kicked the habit. Now Health Canada thinks one more warning – this time on every individual cigarette – will finally do the trick. Mustering ample scientific and international evidence, Ian Irvine argues there’s a better way to help smokers improve their health. But doing so will require a major reversal in how Ottawa regards smokers and the entire nicotine industry.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a good chart can explain billions. With just a few simple lines, a chart can bring complicated economic facts into sharp focus – revealing, for example, the growing gap in living standards between Canada and the U.S. since 2015. Or the $127 billion in excess spending by the federal Liberals even before the pandemic hit. Or the impact of the recent spike in inflation. Using seven custom-created charts, Matthew Lau illustrates and explains the financial devastation wrought by the Trudeau government’s fiscal policies throughout the Canadian economy. Troublingly, Lau’s final three charts suggest the worst is yet to come.

In its fanatical drive for “net zero,” the Justin Trudeau government is eviscerating Canada’s manufacturing sector and imposing massive costs on Canadians, while dancing along to China’s charade that it intends to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions, even as the Communist regime oversees record construction of new carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. The economic wellbeing of Canadians is, in other words, being progressively destroyed – and for nothing. It is time to wake up from this absurdist slumber, writes Gwyn Morgan, and also offers a formula for Canada to assign the costs of carbon emissions where they actually belong, rescue the nation’s manufacturing sector before it’s too late, lift the carbon tax burden from Canadians and, perhaps, even help the global environment.

Back in Canada and midway through his M.A. in literature at an elite university, Brock Eldon has almost fallen apart, bottoming out during fruitless therapy. He finds solace in trusted family, reviving his determination to return to campus and confront his tormentor. Things don’t go as planned, as woke professors roil the department in a slow-rolling intellectual coup while M.A. and PhD students virtually beg to be shielded from the world’s greatest literature. In the concluding installment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon’s conviction solidifies that wokism is little more than remixed radical Marxism and that, to survive, he simply must not give in. (Part I is here and Part II is here.)

The purpose of great art and literature is to nourish the human spirit on an individual level. Or so Brock Eldon saw it. What he encountered in graduate school at an elite Canadian university was literature warped into a political tool of intimidation and compulsion, debauching even Shakespeare and destroying nearly everything in its path. Eldon watched the descent of PhD students into angry shouting nihilists and the incipient disintegration of a literature department. He descended a long way himself, fearing for his sanity and for civilization. In the second instalment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon melds his years spent in East Asia, where he found greater intellectual freedom than in Canada, into a penetrating and original take on the Vietnam War’s centrality to the postmodern/neo-Marxist capture of Western culture and institutions. Part I is here.

For many Canadians, figuring out the differences between a savings account and chequing account is all the banking knowledge they really want. Understanding how Bitcoin works or what a blockchain does seems overwhelming and irrelevant. Yet knowing your way around these digital banking innovations may soon prove vital to protecting your privacy and pushing back against government overreach. Using the experience of last year’s Freedom Convoy as his guide, Gleb Lisikh explains the nuances of cryptocurrencies, their strengths – and weaknesses – as bulwarks against financial censorship and why the Bank of Canada is suddenly so interested in creating its own cashless currency.

Brock Eldon entered Canada’s elite universities a true believer in everything they represented: the integrity of these institutions of higher education, the quality of their professors, the rigour of their scholarship, the purposefulness of their syllabi, and the meaningfulness of the degrees he would earn. He left confused, disillusioned and disgusted. Rebuilding his life in East Asia, Eldon clung to two things: an unshakeable conviction that the truth exists to be discovered – that two plus two really do make four – and a burning determination to tell his story. In the first instalment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon recounts his youthful faith followed by his first, worrisome encounters with a graduate department in the throes of wokist nihilism.

The South Nahanni River is widely recognized as the Holy Grail of Canada’s wild rivers. Paddlers, hikers and nature lovers all dream of experiencing first-hand the wonders of this fabled river in a national park in the Northwest Territories. But how did it earn such a reputation? In the concluding installment of a series that began with his account of a recent canoe trip through the Nahanni’s famous canyons, Peter Shawn Taylor charts the creation and evolution of the river’s aura as a remote place filled with mystery and adventure. From native myths to early 20th century hysteria about headless prospectors to its stature today as a premier bucket-list item, the Nahanni has carved out a permanent place in our national consciousness. It may be Canada’s greatest brand. Here’s how it happened. Part I can be read here.

They have inspired artists and poets since the invention of paints and writing. They’ve adorned funerals, graveyards and other mourning sites for millennia – since the literal dawn of humanity. They say “I love you” like few other things. Why, then, have so many funerals and other rituals for the deceased become flower-free zones, with mourners instead pressured to send money to specified charities? Lynne Cohen explores the vexing “In Lieu of Flowers” phenomenon, provides her unique take on what makes it pernicious, and offers a ringing paean to the appropriateness, usefulness and morality of always sending flowers.

Among Canada’s active bucket-list crowd, canoeing the South Nahanni River is often found at the very top of the page. This fabled river in a national park in the southwestern corner of the Northwest Territories is remote, expensive to access and, at times, quite challenging. It is also spectacularly rewarding. And while the number of people fortunate enough to see this area number only in the hundreds annually, it looms large in Canada’s national consciousness. Peter Shawn Taylor recently returned from a multi-week trip that revealed the Nahanni in all its splendour and fury. In Part I of a two-part series, Taylor recounts his time on the river and what it means to complete the journey.