Full Comment

Over the holidays, we’re looking back at some of the best episodes of 2023, a year that saw massive controversy over the state of Canada’s schools. At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical edu...

An extended video version of this interview will be available starting Tuesday, December 19, 2023, online at National Post (nationalpost.com). Special guest host Rex Murphy sits down in person with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre for a year-end interview. They discuss what’s behind the Tories’ remarkable rise in the polls this year. Poilievre explains why he thinks Trudeau’s increasin...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started the year in fine form. Twelve months later his party is melting down in the polls and Pierre Poilievre is heading what looks like an election-winning juggernaut. But the Conservative leader shouldn’t get too comfortable, as the Full Comment year-end politics panel discusses. Host Brian Lilley is joined this week by Conservative guru Kory Teneycke and former Li...

It’s no secret the RCMP is broken. But as Garry Clement discusses with Brian this week, the force’s inability to investigate serious national crimes — money laundering, narcotics, organized crime, Chinese interference, terrorism and more — is turning Canada into a haven for lawlessness. And innocent people are paying for it with their lives. Clement served in the force for 30 years, from undercove...

The financial trouble the Trudeau Liberals have put Canada in looks disturbingly unlike previous debt and deficit hangovers, as William Robson tells Brian Lilley this week. The losses Ottawa has pushed onto the Bank of Canada are choking off desperately needed income, explains Robson, president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute. Wages are losing ground. Business investment indicators are the wors...

A lot of the criticisms against Canada’s public broadcaster are fair, acknowledges Richard Stursberg, who was the CBC's executive vice president from 2004 to 2010: The programming doesn’t always reflect the country outside of downtown Toronto; the CBC competes with private broadcasters for advertising, even though it’s government-funded. The problem, which Stursberg says was the case then and rema...

Journalists for major news organizations joining the terror attack against Israel. Newscasters that refuse to call Hamas terrorists. Campus lefties insisting the torturers, rapists and murderers are the real victims. All of this and more are how the story westerners hear about the Israel-Hamas war is being distorted to vilify the Jewish state and benefit Hamas, as Israeli-based journalist Caroline...

Almost exactly eight years after rebuilding the Liberals and winning government, Justin Trudeau looks like he could be done as party leader. His once powerful personal brand seems irreparably ruined, especially after his recent surrender on his signature carbon-tax policy. As National Post columnist Chris Selley and host Brian Lilley discuss this week, a Liberal party that became Trudeau’s cult of...

Host Brian Lilley is joined this week by American podcaster, journalist and author Ben Shapiro to discuss the antisemitic pro-Hamas marches in Canada and the U.S. after the terrorist attacks in Israel — and the sense of danger that has American Jews buying guns in case they need to defend their families. How did our society become so degraded? Shapiro tells Brian it’s because we’ve permitted hate...

Historical ignorance is the generous explanation for the House of Commons applauding a veteran of the Nazis’ Waffen SS Galicia division during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But the embarrassment and outrage that followed shed little light on exactly how Ukrainians like Yaroslav Hunka found themselves first wearing the infamous Nazi SS uniform, then immigrating to live peacefu...

Gaza not long ago had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world — until Hamas took over, turned it into a terror base and began using Gazans as cannon fodder for anti-Israel public relations, just as its doing now. As Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, discusses with Brian this week, Hamas’s Islamist theocracy has few fans among the Palestinians of Gaza, or indeed elsewhere...

The shocking political realities behind Canada’s badly broken housing market are sinking in — and the damage spreads much deeper and wider than the generations being unfairly priced out of starter homes. Ben Rabidoux, founder of Edge Realty Analytics, is the guy both federal Conservatives and Liberals turn to for deep housing insights. He joins Brian this week to discuss how waving in millions of...

At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. Students wear uniforms, sit in rows and listen to instruction. It’s teacher-led learning, not child-centred. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian...

After the prime minister dropped his bombshell assassination accusation against India, the world has waited for him to back it up. But Ujjal Dosanjh says that when it comes to credibility on this file, Justin Trudeau — and Canada — don’t have much. And the unserious way Trudeau has handled allegations around the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar hasn’t helped. Dosanjh, a former Liberal cabinet minist...

Don’t call it cancel culture: that masks the grimness of the authoritarian era we’re living in, says author Brendan O’Neill. It’s an anti-enlightenment, he says, that is rapidly and fervently obliterating centuries of western civilizational progress. O’Neill, author of the new book A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, joins Brian this week to expose the shibboleths we’re all being force...

It’s not just that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are leading in national polls: it’s that the party is bringing in new groups, including “the people who get stuff done,” as guest Lord Daniel Hannan calls the working class. The prominent British journalist and Tory politician joins Brian from the Conservative policy convention in Quebec City, where he delivered the keynote address, coming from t...

As federal Conservative party members prepare to gather for their policy convention in Quebec City, they’ll be pushing for a platform that takes on the culture wars, head on. Meanwhile, polls currently show party leader Pierre Poilievre on his way to a majority government as voters rally to his message about the rising costs of housing and living. Long-time Conservative power player Kory Teneycke,...

Bill Vigars was starting a new gig at the Canadian Cancer Society when he flew to the East Coast to check out an unknown kid with one leg planning to run a personal marathon a day across Canada for cancer research. Before he knew it, Vigars was helping Terry Fox make the Marathon of Hope a national phenomenon that’s kept Terry’s legacy alive for decades, with nearly a billion dollars since raised...

Things were different in the “before times.” Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t all experts in viral variants or polymerase chain reaction tests. We’d never heard of “vaccine apartheid” or “social distancing.” No one drank “quarantinis” after enduring a “covidivorce.” And “self-isolating” and “lockdowns” were things to be avoided. In his new book Pandexicon, author Wayne Grady has chronicl...

Mike Ramsay was friends with former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto, whose suicide after allegedly enduring false bigotry accusations in an anti-racism session has shocked Canadians. And Ramsay says he’s experienced similar vilification. He’s been called a “white supremacist.” He’s been suspended as a school trustee in Waterloo, Ont. He says it’s because he fights to keep schools focused on lea...

Formerly one of Canada’s top crime reporters, Tamara Cherry witnessed gruesome violence and terrible trauma. What she says she didn’t realize was how the way she and others covered the crime beat was worsening pain for survivors, responders and reporters themselves. Cherry, author of the new book The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, joins host Brian Lilley, himself no...

The economics of the music business have been turned upside down in recent years. For artists and fans alike, concerts now are king. Legendary publicist, writer and music maven Eric Alper joins Brian this week to discuss why this summer’s concert season in particular is making history, why some concert tickets now cost more than plane tickets, and the most obvious reasons why Taylor Swift left Can...

It’s where we should be building up capabilities against Russia’s hypersonic missiles and Chinese spy aircraft coming over the North Pole. But news the Liberal government is closing the Canadian International Arctic Centre is the latest indication Ottawa doesn’t get the importance of the North. After the Harper government made the Arctic a bigger priority, the last eight years have revealed Ottawa...

Food inflation is showing no signs of letting up soon, as guest Sylvain Charlebois tells Brian Lilley this week. But grandstanding politicians yelling about “greedflation” by allegedly avaricious grocers are looking in the wrong place, says Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. The recent guilty plea by Canada Bread, admitting to years of bakery price-fixin...

Climate crusaders are convinced this year’s fire season is global warming. Conspiracy theorists think it’s eco-terrorism from arsonists to scare us about climate change. The reality, as Kenneth Green tells Brian this week, is much more complicated, with everything from poor forest management practices, natural burn cycles, and yes, also some climate and some human causes, playing roles — in additi...