A French schoolteacher was beheaded for showing his class cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed. This barbaric act has finally compelled Justin Trudeau to defend free speech, reversing his previous equivocation. Fergus Hodgson warns that government and the media are already complicit in restricting speech under such guises as “hate speech,” “discrimination” and “misgendering.”

For decades professional catastrophist David Suzuki has called humans “maggots” and a “cancer” on the Earth. His misanthropy is celebrated and taught in schools. His favourite mangled metaphor casts humans as bacteria. But the doctor of doom ought to know that we are more complex and creative organisms than microbes. The arc of human progress – for all its fits and starts – proves his “science” is hogwash, write Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak, as it was with all the Malthusians before him.

A Canadian Press poll of the national media ranked the legalization of cannabis as Canada’s top business story of 2018. Pipeline paralysis and the crisis in the energy sector ranked a distant third. Hello? The birth of a $6 billion-per-year industry is more important than the death of one generating $117 billion annually? This is the worst misread of an economy since Marie Antoinette and, as Gwyn Morgan writes, it portends more bad news for Canada in 2019.

The National Women’s Hockey League earlier this week announced it is expanding into Toronto. Stephen Harper’s book, A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey, recounts the troubled relationship between Hogtown and pro hockey. For James. R. Coggins, the book’s undeclared subtext is that hockey (and Canada) wins when Toronto loses.

Max Bernier was reproached and ridiculed on CBC’s Power and Politics program because a candidate running in the Burnaby byelection for his “fringe” People’s Party of Canada opposes teaching the novel concept of “gender fluidity” to schoolchildren. The host and her kangaroo court of mainstream party partisans found the candidate guilty of “homophobia and discrimination”, and fingered Bernier as an accessory to the thought crime because he refused to condemn it. But honestly, writes Grant Brown, nothing could be more fringe than believing that human gender and sexual orientation are as changeable as the weather.

Only a small number of Canadian authors and thinkers publicly question the racial segregation underpinning Aboriginal law and policy. The latest to do so is northern Ontario lawyer Peter Best, in a passionate and wide-ranging book entitled There Is No Difference. In an age when the human equality lessons of Mandela, King, Lincoln and Gandhi have been turned upside-down by identity politics, Best warns that Canadian apartheid is plunging the country ever-deeper into racial division and economic paralysis. Despite its flaws, writes Brian Giesbrecht, Best has produced an important and hopeful work.

Ronald Reagan never wavered in his conviction that America was a great country that would prevail over enemies of democracy and freedom. His fundamental optimism and determination carried his nation to victory over the Soviet “evil empire” and his personal rags-to-riches experience breathed new life into the venerable American dream of limited government, personal liberty, and individual self-reliance. Sadly, Reagan’s current successor governs on the premise that America is no longer great, and he has no discernible, consistent convictions about anything. Mark Milke laments the loss of U.S. self-confidence, and leadership, in a review of a new book about the “Great Communicator”.

Ottawa’s promise to rescue many dozens of dying Indigenous languages and effectively give them equivalent status with English and French has billion-dollar boondoggle written all over it. Peter Shawn Taylor makes a powerful case for letting lost tongues die a natural death.

Steve Larke and Adam Le Dain hold up the mirror to our digital culture and reveal the breathtaking hypocrisy of everyone who condemns carbon energy while using all the technologies that increase hydrocarbon demand. If they really want to save the planet, they would give up their smart phones, forsake air travel, and stop buying cool stuff on Amazon that has to be delivered from all over the world – or acknowledge they won’t do any of that and instead support responsible energy resource development in Canada.

Canadian stoners are already longing for the good old days of criminalized cannabis where it was easy to get excellent weed at a fair price with decent customer service and low risk of getting busted. Now that it’s ‘legal’ they’re confused and fearful about where they can smoke, what they can grow, how much they can carry, and how long they must wait after toking before they can drive or go to work. And that’s only if they can find any. Legalization is working for some, though: the former cops and politicians who used to prosecute potheads and are now dealing the stuff. Karen Selick reports.