Canadian News

As United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urges Americans to get the measles vaccine, he's also casting doubt on it.

The internal memo says the proposed briefings would ensure security-cleared leaders are offered an 'intelligence-informed understanding' of the threats facing Canadians.

Mahmoud Khalil has rejected allegations of antisemitism, accusing the Trump administration last month of “targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent.”

It's the latest turn for the 77-year-old venue, which has hosted generations of rock royalty, including the Rolling Stones, U2 and the White Stripes.

'Nobody just vanishes. Somebody has to know something,' said Kathleen Toman, mother of missing 22-year-old Liam Toman.

Vancouver police said it happened as the pair were patrolling the area as a part of Task Force Barrage, an initiative to boost police presence in the area.

Peterborough, Ont. Mayor Jeff Leal was forced to issue an apology after he using a racial slur while giving a guest lecture to students at Trent University last month.

Melanie Hamrick, 37, said The Rolling Stones frontman, 81, proposed to her 'two or three years ago' and hinted that marriage may never be part of their future plans.

Ottawa police say the constable has been charged with three counts of sexual assault, two counts of sexual Interference and one count of sexual exploitation. 

City crews are set to begin working on Winnipeg's streets, sidewalks, bridges, public parks, and beyond as of Sunday

Racquel Hilbert, the Saskatchewan Party MLA who called federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh a terrorist in the provincial legislature last month, has been removed from additional MLA duties, the party says.

Saskatchewan's Serious Incident Response Team says a teenager on Kawacatoose First Nation was trying to get an RCMP vehicle to stop when a second RCMP vehicle hit him.

Gaston Pettigrew, who served during WWII's Battle of the Atlantic, was hoping to receive 100 birthday cards in time for his 100th birthday on April 11. He received more than 1,700, which are now plastered throughout his residence.

Saskatchewan is the province that wants to leave Canada the most if Liberals win the upcoming election in Canada, a new poll finds.

Around 33 per cent of residents from the central prairie province “say they would vote to leave federation, whether to form their own country or to join the United States,” if Liberals form the next government, according to the survey by nonprofit Angus Reid Institute .

As the federal election approaches and Canada-U.S. relations remain tense amid a trade war and talks of Canada becoming the 51st state, the topic of secession, particularly in the west, has also come up recently. The leader of the Reform Party of Canada Preston Manning said “a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession — a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it,” in an article he penned in the Globe and Mail .

Liberal leader Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre both spoke out against Manning’s remarks. Carney said Manning’s “dramatic comments” were “unhelpful,” while Poilievre said he disagreed with him . “We need to unite the country,” said Poilievre.

Despite the candidates not seeing eye to eye with Manning, Canadians did seem to base at least some of their answers in the survey on potential election results. The recently released data from Angus Reid shows that who the winning party will be matters greatly to residents of Saskatchewan in particular. Saskatchewan’s 14 federal ridings have remained entirely Conservative for the past two elections. That could be why the predominantly Conservative province is the most likely to plan an escape route if Liberals win.

The percentage of residents from Saskatchewan who said they would vote “yes” to leave Canada to become an independent country went from 20 per cent, initially, to 33 per cent, if Liberals won. Meanwhile, the percentage of residents who believed the province should join the United States went from 17 per cent, initially, to 23 per cent, if Liberals won. (To the south, Saskatchewan shares its borders with American states North Dakota and Montana.)

Residents from Alberta and Quebec were tied at a close second (30 per cent) when it came to wanting to become independent if Liberals won. The provinces that followed were British Columbia (17 per cent), Ontario (13 per cent), Manitoba (12 per cent), and Atlantic provinces, which were grouped together, at 10 per cent.

Alberta had the highest percentage when it came to wanting to join the U.S. if Liberals won, at 27 per cent, followed by Saskatchewan at 23 per cent. British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba were in the middle, at 19, 16 and 15 per cent, respectively. On the lower end of the spectrum were the Atlantic provinces (12 per cent) and Quebec (11 per cent.)

While the numbers coming out of Saskatchewan are “significant,” according to the Angus Reid report on the survey, the “vast majority still say they would vote no (to becoming independent or joining the U.S.) in each province.”

The survey also points to a possible underlying reason behind Saskatchewan wanting independence. Only one quarter of its residents said they felt that the province was respected by the rest of Canada. In both prairie provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, “legislation has been passed in recent years to increase autonomy and reject federal influence,” per Angus Reid.

However, the report from Angus Reid explains that “while threatening separatism is evidently seen as a good bargaining chip, few Canadians appear to actually want to leave federation, whether it’s to join the United States or to have their province become its own nation.”

The survey was conducted online from March 20 to March 24, using a randomized sample of 2,400 Canadian adults. “The sample was weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to region, gender, age, household income, and education, based on the Canadian census,” the institute said.

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Beginning Friday, Canadians over the age of 14 who will be in the United States for 30 days or longer will have to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Trump administration says it's just enforcing laws that essentially have been on the books for decades.

Health officials in Prince Edward Island have confirmed two cases of measles, the province's first reported cases since 2013.

The Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown, part of the University of Prince Edward Island, has apologized to its former artist-in-residence, after he stepped away from the position over a dispute with one of his paintings.

Christopher Griffin had resigned from the unpaid position this week after the AVC asked him to remove one of his paintings from the campus or leave his residency, which he had taken up in November after moving to Prince Edward Island from Ottawa.

The painting, The Crossing, bears a resemblance to Washington Crossing the Delaware, an 1851 oil painting by Emanuel Leutze that depicts General George Washington with the Continental Army on the night of Dec. 25, 1776, during the Revolutionary War. However, instead of soldiers, the boat in Griffin’s version contains 10 lemmings.

“A couple of American faculty members had expressed concern that the painting had a political meaning,” Griffin wrote in a Facebook post, before announcing his resignation. The CBC reported that the college said they received three complaints, of which two were from American members of the faculty.

Yesterday in an email to National Post the college said: “The University of Prince Edward Island recognizes the importance of balancing freedom of expression and a supportive learning environment, and that learning can sometimes be uncomfortable. UPEI reaffirms its commitment to free expression, critical thinking, and public dialogue.”

This morning it released a second statement: “The Atlantic Veterinary College acknowledges that asking the artist Christopher Griffin to choose between taking down his painting or leaving his residency was a mistake. The decision did not reflect our institutional values, and we regret the hurt and frustration it caused. Art plays an essential role in education and public life — it challenges us, encourages dialogue, and fosters understanding. We fell short of our responsibility to protect that role.”

The AVC said it had offered a direct apology to Griffin and offered to reinstall the painting, adding: “We are also reviewing our internal processes to ensure future decisions uphold our commitments to free expression and inclusive discourse. We remain committed to creating space for meaningful conversations — even, and especially, when they are uncomfortable.”

Griffin told National Post the apology came as a pleasant surprise when he awoke to it this morning.

“They extended an olive branch and an apology and that’s really all I could ask for,” he said. “That’s tough to do and I’m happy they took that step.”

He was astonished the news of the story had spread across the country, with coverage in Winnipeg, Lethbridge Alberta, CTV News, CBC and elsewhere. “I thought it might make the local Charlottetown news,” he said. “I had no idea it would spread beyond P.E.I., that’s for sure.”

He added: “The reactions and the support from Canadians across the country has … really reinforced my belief that we actually are a strong country and we will survive. So that’s a good thing.”

Dear fellow Canadians, I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from across the country, and the impassioned...

Posted by Christopher Griffin Art Studio on Friday, April 11, 2025

Griffin’s work has often featured animals, but his focus began to change after Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president in January.

“When my country was threatened by the government of the United States of America … I felt like I had to do something. I had to react,” he recently told CBC News . “My role as an artist is to communicate, so I came up with the concept of creating a body of work based on our national anthem.”

Those works included a polar bear, titled Strong and Free, and an elephant sporting a tiny Canadian flag. Griffin also recently posted to his Facebook page a “Made in Canada” logo he created for the Dominion Skate Company in Brampton, Ont., as a college student in 1987. It reads: “Canadian to the Core.”

He noted that other artworks have also taken inspiration from the same painting, including Shimomura Crossing the Delaware by Roger Shimomura , which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, and George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 1975, by Robert Colescott .

On the reason for the lemmings, he explained: “Lemmings are mythologized as participating in mass suicide by jumping over a cliff or into water. I felt this was an appropriate symbol to use in my painting to express my bewilderment at the self-destructive behaviour of the government to our south. However, I took great care to not create cartoonish or buffoonish creatures. I wished for them to have a dignity and a solemnity, because I care about them, and I do not wish them ill.”

He noted that the lemmings in his painting have the option to land on the other shore or turn around before it’s too late. He also pointed out that the myth of them as creatures bent solely on self-destruction is just that. “It’s not true.”

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Liberal Leader Mark Carney wore his prime minister hat today as he met with the cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations, while Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre re-upped his party’s economic platform in St. Catharines, Ont.

As Canadians flex their patriotic muscles and hold “elbows up” in response to punishing U.S. tariffs, many might be surprised that another economic crisis has been percolating here for years — from inside the country.

It effectively dropped Canada into recession months ago, has left us as poor as the residents of Alabama and is so dire, the usually circumspect Bank of Canada warned it’s time to “break the glass” and sound the emergency.

For this at least, U.S President Donald Trump can’t be blamed.

“We have been fundamentally weak in this country for 10 years,” Stephen Poloz, former governor of the Bank of Canada, said in an interview. Some experts say for much longer.

The issue is the country’s steadily declining rates of per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and “labour productivity” — decidedly unsexy terminology for issues that have a tangible impact on everyone’s wallets.

Per-capita GDP is the per-person average share of the country’s economic output — essentially a measure of our standard of living. Productivity is not about how many hours or how hard people work. It’s about how much wealth is created by each worker, affected by factors like business investment, employee training and taxation.

Overall GDP has been growing a bit the last couple of years amid a population surge driven by record immigration levels, the new Canadians having to at least buy the necessities of life. But the per-person share of GDP fell for six consecutive quarters recently in Canada, before recovering ever so slightly the last quarter. Two quarters of negative growth overall is considered a recession. We might not technically be in one but on a personal level we are, say many economists .

The reason for that plummeting per-capita GDP lies chiefly with “dismal” rates of productivity. Canada has to address that problem, economists say, or fall toward the bottom of the list of industrialized nations and particularly struggle to cope with American protectionism.

“If we had higher productivity in the core of our economy, higher per-capita GDP … we would have a more resilient economy — and today is when we need more resilience,” said Poloz, now a special advisor to the Osler law firm.

And yet, as politicians campaigning for the April 28 federal election evoke nationalistic sentiments and feisty hockey catch phrases in response to Trump’s tariffs, they’ve been less vocal about maladies that started sickening the Canadian economy long before the latest trade war.

“Right now in the political debate, it’s still not that much at the forefront,” said Paul Beaudry, a University of British Columbia economics professor and former Bank of Canada deputy governor. “What we’re hearing about the most is very much deficit-financed tax cuts. It’s unlikely that by itself is going to make us more innovative.”

No one suggests solving the problems will be easy for whichever party forms the government. But economists and business leaders say there are policies that could supercharge Canada’s sluggish economy.

Governments, they say, ought to provide incentives to encourage investing in Canadian business, while trimming regulation and streamlining bureaucracies that “crowd out” private economic activity. The kind of innovation that produces industrial heavyweights has to be championed more. Worker training needs to better fit the economy’s needs, while the skills immigrants bring with them should be better exploited. Inter-provincial trade barriers must be knocked down.

“We have to make it easier for businesses to do business,” said Pascal Chan, a vice president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

The emphasis is on goosing the private sector, a potentially controversial strategy. But economists stress that more productive companies hire more people, pay them fatter wages on average and generate additional tax revenue to fund social programs and the like.

The issue may not be front and centre in an election focused on Trump’s foreign and trade policy, but the parties have given at least some attention to the productivity question.

The Conservatives announced a major tax break for those who invest in Canadian business, and constantly highlight a “lost Liberal decade” of poor economic performance. Liberal Leader Mark Carney has said productivity must be improved and promised to provide various tax and other incentives. The New Democratic Party actually criticizes the pursuit of “so-called productivity” and promises to focus government procurement on unionized, Canadian workers.

Whatever the solutions, the indicators of economic peril are stark.

Canada’s per person GDP was 82 per cent of the U.S. number in 2002. It slumped to 72 per cent in 2022. By then, per-capita GDP in the U.S. was almost US $64,000 — $18,000 more than in Canada.

But this country has been slipping in comparison to most other developed nations, too, falling from $3,000 above the average of Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members in 2002 to slightly below the OECD average by 2022.

Canada used to be on par with Australia, yet fell to $4,000 behind it by 2022.

The future looks even less pretty, a Fraser Institute report noted last year. OECD analysts have projected that if current trends continue, Canadians’ income — as measured by GDP — would reach $63,000 per person by 2060, compared to $94,000 in the U.S.

The grim numbers parallel slumping investment in tools like artificial-intelligence, machinery, training and intellectual property — things that make workers more productive. Investment per worker was only about $14,000 by the second quarter of 2024, down from a peak of $18,000 in 2014, noted the C.D. Howe Institute in a report last September.

Meanwhile, Canadian investors often send their money abroad instead of here. Canadians own a trillion dollars of assets in the United States — more than Americans have ploughed into our economy, said Poloz.

Research and development has also shrunk to half the rate in the United States, noted TD Bank economist Marc Ercolao in a 2023 report .

“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass?’” said Bank of Canada deputy governor Carolyn Rogers in an oft-quoted speech a year ago. “Well, it’s time to break the glass.”

Of course, wealth and related figures don’t tell the whole story.

While per-capita GDP may be as high in Alabama as in Canada, wealth is distributed more evenly here than in the U.S., noted Nobel-winning American economist Paul Krugman in a recent essay . Canadians report being more satisfied with life than Americans and, armed with programs like universal health care, live three years longer than their U.S. cousins on average — and a whopping decade longer than Alabamians.

But even Krugman acknowledges that Canada’s economy has been “underperforming,” while countries with a similar income spread and social-safety net are pulling ahead.

There’s no one answer to how the country landed in this predicament, experts say.

Lack of investment is clearly a big part of the equation. GDP growth often stems from smaller companies that have innovative ideas and “suddenly have hockey-stick growth,” says Poloz. Yet 95 per cent of firms in the small to mid-cap phase are turned down for financing in a country with limited venture capitalism, he said. Which means promising young Canadian enterprises tend to get snapped up by Americans, depriving this country of their future wealth.

“We don’t go around praising innovation especially,” says the UBC’s Beaudry. “You have to want to be, and to celebrate, the innovators.”

Then there’s the swelling size of the public sector. Since the Liberals were elected in 2015, the federal workforce has increased by over 100,000 — more than double the overall population growth. The public sector made up 13 per cent of the economy in 2015. Now it’s 16 per cent, says Poloz.

When the government sector expands at a time of slow industrial growth, the public side tends to “crowd out” in economic terms the businesses that generate wealth, he said.

In all, Canadians shouldn’t get too obsessed with the shrinking per-capita GDP over the last couple of years as immigration expanded the population — the problem has been with us for much longer, says Beaudry.

“Productivity hasn’t been growing very fast for 30 years,” said the UBC economist. “That, we should be worried about.”

Policy proposals that could potentially spur on private-sector productivity and halt Canada’s sliding per-capita GDP

 Liberals 

• Cut municipal development charges and reduce “housing bureaucracy, zoning restrictions and other red tape” to encourage more home building;
• Cap size of federal workforce and review government spending to “spend less and invest more”;
• Build a “trade diversification corridor” to build transportation infrastructure to facilitate international trade;
• Eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers on homes of $1 million or less;
• Cut the lowest tax rate by one per cent, saving a two-income family up to $825;
• Cancel the consumer carbon tax;
• Fund increased food-processing capacity, help farmers reach new markets and buy more efficient machinery and other measures to boost the agriculture sector;

“If we’re going to keep our people safe, if we’re going to meet our social obligations we’re going to have to be more productive.” — Liberal Leader Mark Carney, November 2024

Conservatives

• Exempt individuals and companies from capital-gains tax when they re-invest those gains in Canadian businesses;
  Increase funding for harbours to encourage growth in the fishing industry;
• Open the door to more oil and gas production in Newfoundand and Labrador and Western Canada;
• Create a “national energy corridor” to fast-track approvals of transmission lines, railway, pipelines and other infrastructure for moving energy resources;
• Exempt all buyers from GST on homes up to $1.3 million;
• Tie infrastructure funding to provinces on growth in housing;
• Cut the lowest income tax bracket to save those taxpayers $900 each per year.
• Cancel the consumer and industrial carbon tax;
• Slash the number of federal bureaucrats and otherwise cut federal spending.

“During the lost Liberal decade of higher taxes and … paycheque-killing anti-resource project radicalism, Canada’s GDP has slumped to the worst growth in the G7 and half a trillion dollars worth of investment has fled Canada for the U.S.”  — Conservative campaign statement

NDP 

• Increase the minimum income on which tax is applied, saving families over $500 a year;
• Ban American companies from federal procurement contracts while tariffs in force;
• Permanently favour unionized and Canadian companies in government procurement;
• Incentivize value-added processing and manufacturing in Canada, reducing the country’s reliance on exporting raw materials to the U.S.

“Decades of Liberal and Conservative governments have hollowed out our economy, chasing GDP growth and so-called productivity while handing billions to corporations and letting good jobs disappear.” — NDP candidate Matt Green (Hamilton Centre)

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Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

The Atlantic Veterinary College has apologized to its former artist-in-residence, who quit after being asked to take down a painting he says was censored by the Charlottetown institution due to its political message.