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Good evening, lets start with todays top stories:

Federal legislation aimed at combatting foreign interference in Canada includes a new a registry of foreign agents and proposes giving Canadas spy agency more authority to combat threats.

Long-awaited legislation unveiled by the Liberal government today would create a Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner, who would be appointed after consultation with House of Commons and Senate leadership.

The individual would hold investigative powers and oversee a new mandatory registry of names for people conducting influence activity for foreign entities in provincial and federal politics and governments, as well as in Indigenous governments or councils.

The Countering Foreign Interference Act follows a federal inquiry into the issue that found foreign interference may have impeded the last two federal elections in Canada, though it didnt change the overall outcome. Commissioner Marie-Jose Hogue in a report last week called in foreign meddling a threat to Canadian democracy, and called for measures to tackle it.

Its unlikely the foreign registry announced Monday will be in place for the next federal election in 2025, the government said.

Israel appeared poised to launch a long-threatened invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, against the urging of humanitarian aid groups and allies, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus government rejected the terms of a ceasefire accepted by the Hamas leadership.

Videos and photos show long lines of Palestinians departing the city that had previous been declared a safe zone after the Israeli military used text messages and leaflets to warn residents in eastern Rafah to leave the area.

Hours after Israel sent the evacuation warning, Ismail Haniyeh, the Qatar-based political leader of Hamas, said he had accepted a ceasefire brokered by Egypt and Qatar. Any deal would involve the release of some of the 100 hostages Hamas has been holding in Gaza since Oct. 7. Netanyahus office said it would carry out the military operation in Rafah in parallel with negotiations.

Humanitarian groups have reacted with alarm to the evacuation order. Meanwhile, families some of the Israeli hostages are calling on their government to explain why the ceasefire negotiations fell apart.

Displaced Palestinians who fled Rafah after the Israeli military began evacuating civilians from the eastern parts of the southern Gazan city travel on a vehicle in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 6, 2024.Ramadan Abed/Reuters

The Winnipeg trial of a man accused of killing four First Nations women and dumping their bodies in a landfill will hinge on his mental state and the intention behind the killings.

Jeremy Skibickis lawyers told a Manitoba superior court today that their client killed the women in 2022, and they intend to argue he was not criminally responsible because of mental illness. The defences legal strategy means the trial will be heard in front of a judge alone, rather than a jury, when arguments get under way on Wednesday. The 12-person jury selected to hear the case will be dismissed.

Police have alleged that Skibicki is a serial killer who murdered 26-year-old Marcedes Myran, 39-year-old Morgan Harris, 24-year-old Rebecca Contois, and an unidentified woman whom Indigenous elders have named Mashkode Bizhikiikwe, or Buffalo Woman. Skibicki was arrested in 2022 for the killings.

The development in the high-profile case comes a day after Red Dress Day, marked annually to bring awareness to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

The federal government set a record high for fines related to non-compliance with Canadas temporary foreign worker rules in 2023 and this year is shaping up to be even worse, according to a Globe analysis of government figures.

Infractions include wage theft and workplace abuse. Ottawa handed out $2.7-million in penalties against non-compliant employers last year, with an average fine of $13,800 per decision.

So far in 2024, the average fine is nearly $29,000, according to data reviewed by The Globe as of late April. Thats significantly higher than the roughly $3,200 average fine from 2019.

Canadian companies have been hiring temporary foreign workers in greater numbers in recent years, aided by policy changes aimed at addressing labour shortages. But the trend has sparked concerns about the potential for worker exploitation.

Campus protests: Columbia University is cancelling its main graduation ceremony after weeks of protests over the war in Gaza. The Ivy League school, one of several postsecondary campuses across Canada and the United States where pro-Palestinian protests have popped up, says it will hold smaller, school-based graduation events. Meanwhile, Ontarios premier says universities should start clearing protest encampments.

Government procurement: Ottawa went years without launching after-the-fact audits of companies that received contracts from an Indigenous procurement program.

Mining: Panama elected a pro-business president over the weekend and the outcome is raising hopes for Canadian mining company First Quantum. The companys financial situation has deteriorated after its Cobre Panama copper mine which used to account for half its revenue was ordered closed by the countrys departing president last year.

Fish farms: Canadas Public Sector Integrity Commissioner is launching an investigation into allegations that federal fisheries officials tried to silence scientists who were researching environmental threats related to open-net fish farms in the Pacific Ocean.

Keffiyeh ban: The Speaker of the Ontario legislature has partially eased a ban on the keffiyeh, allowing it to be worn inside Queens Park, but not in the legislative chamber. The Speaker banned the checkered scarf this year, arguing it is being worn to make a political statement about the Israel-Gaza war. Independent member Sarah Jama was asked to leave Question Period today after putting on the scarf inside the chamber.

MARKET WATCH

North American stock markets rise on renewed U.S. rate cut bets

Markets in Canada and the U.S. closed higher on Monday on fresh hopes of a potential U.S. rate cut.

Canadas main stock index closed its highest in over three weeks, boosted by energy stocks and renewed bets from investors on U.S. rate cuts some time this year.

U.S. stock indexes also ended higher on their third straight session of advances, though they underperformed the S&P/TSX composite index, which closed up 312.06 points, or 1.42 per cent, at 22,259.47.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 176.59 points or 0.46 per cent to 38,852.27, the S&P 500 gained 52.95 points or 1.03 per cent to 5,180.74 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 192.92 points or 1.19 per cent to 16,349.25.

The Canadian dollar was trading at 73.18 US cents.

Got a news tip that youd like us to look into? E-mail us at tips@globeandmail.com. Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop.

TALKING POINTS

In the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, no ones a winner

This beef is no longer about whos at the top of the rap game. Its about who can race to the bottom fastest. - Adrian Lee

Ontarios keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarfs meaning for everyone

Asking a Palestinian to remove the keffiyeh is like asking a Muslim woman to remove her hijab or an Indigenous person to remove their headdress. It is an article of clothing deeply embedded with ones culture and identity. - Sheema Khan

Putting migrants in federal prisons is unjustified and unjust

Rather than using more humane (and less expensive) alternatives to detention that allow for people to live in the community, the CBSA opted to detain thousands of migrants, even though every year, the agency monitors thousands of people in the community, and it is rare that any of them abscond. - Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock

In Canada, we bank where we buy

Participating in slick marketing programs that allow you to engage in lite banking activity seems contradictory and foolish. Its a little bit silly, just like Canadian Tire money was. - Vass Bednar

Ukraines push to conscript men abroad wont do much to win the war

Ukrainians living abroad who are opposed to fighting are unlikely to be lured back, in particular those who were already in other countries before the war started and children who are coming of age abroad. Instead, many may choose to cut ties with Ukraine entirely. - Lidiia Karpenko

LIVING BETTER

Need more fibre? Add these six high-fibre foods to your diet

There are two types of fibre: soluble and insoluble. Both are present in varying proportions in different foods, but some foods can be rich in one or the other.Ted Johns/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Fibre is an oft overlooked nutrient that comes with a whole host of health benefits. A diet high in fibre is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer, breast cancer and diverticulitis. Research suggests that eating fibre-rich food can help you live a longer life in good health. Read more here on how to up the fibre in your daily meals.

TODAYS LONG READ

At war with the censors

Late at night on Sept. 3, 1939, crowds of Torontonians waited outside the Globe and Mail building to read the latest news about Britains declaration of war on Nazi Germany. Canada followed suit a week later, with a war proclamation from Ottawa that appeared in the Sept. 11 Globe.The Globe and Mail

In the Second World War, the first global war of a truly mass-media era, The Globe and Mail took some of the first steps in defying the federal governments censorship machinery. The Globes publisher at the time, George McCullagh, even risked a prison sentence in the papers fight for the right to report on military blunders. Read more about the chapter of history here.

This is an excerpt from A Nations Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.

Evening Update is written by Holly McKenzie-Sutter and Maryam Shah. If youd like to receive this newsletter by e-mail every weekday evening, go here to sign up. If you have any feedback, send us a note.

Continued here:
Evening Update: Liberals unveil foreign interference registry - The Globe and Mail

Americans of all stripes across the political spectrum have been understandably transfixed by the wave of student protests against the Gaza war that has spread from elite Ivy League campuses to numerous other schools, some more surprising than others. Police have been called in to break up student encampments not just at Columbia Universitys iconic Manhattan campus, which was both ground zero and a natural media target, but at USC in Los Angeles (once upon a time a famously white-bread conservative school), Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State, Indiana University and Cal Poly Humboldt in rural Northern California, among other places.

I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didnt save her job anyway.

First of all, its more accurate to say that the media-consuming public is riveted by the contentious political drama surrounding those scenes of campus discord than by the protests themselves, which are a striking sign of the times but hardly a brand new phenomenon. My own college graduation, in the mid-1980s, was disrupted by a student walkout over the universitys involvement in nuclear weapons research and its non-divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Strident moral positions and overheated rhetoric are features of student activism, which is sometimes effective and at other times purely symbolic; every generation, its fair to say, inherits or creates its own iteration.

Its also worth noting that Americas extraordinary narcissism another quality shared across the political spectrum creates a global distortion effect whereby the deaths of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world are transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. Nobody actually dies in this domestic crisis, but everyone feels injured: Public discourse is boiled down to idiotic clichs and identity politics is reduced to its dumbest possible self-caricature. When the apparent issues are about who has said the most hateful things, who feels more unsafe and in what context, and which political party can get away with twisting events to suit its preferred narrative, then were stuck in the TikTok reboot of Platos cave, staring at flickering shadows long since severed from reality.

None of that is the student protesters fault, exactly, although they have played an instrumental role in reprocessing the Gaza war launched, of course, in response to the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel last October as a theatrical spectacle or simulation, full of signs and symbols whose meanings are subject to endless debate. Most of them are expressing genuine (if histrionic) outrage that the U.S. government, self-appointed avatar of democracy and defender of the rules-based order, is funding and supporting Israels campaign of mass killing, wanton destruction and systematic deprivation against a virtually imprisoned civilian population.

Exactly how much this student movement has been contaminated by intemperate, hotheaded or outright antisemitic rhetoric is, shall we say, a question of interpretation but not one that can be credibly answered by Bibi Netanyahu, Elise Stefanik or Mike Johnson. As for those who seek to what-about the current wave of protests by observing that worse things have happened in recent history without driving the students of Emerson College to risk mass arrest in the Boston streets, they are correct while deliberately missing the point.

Whatever world-historical culpability the U.S. may have had for the genocidal conflicts in Darfur or Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, for Russias massively destructive war in Chechnya or Chinas brutal oppression of the Uyghurs or whatever atrocity youd like to name, those events were not the direct results of U.S. policy and did not carry the White House seal of approval. The Gaza war is, and does.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a longtime friend and admirer of Joe Biden, wrote last week, Gaza has become the albatross around Bidens neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahus. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign, in much the same way as the Vietnam War permanently stained the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was undermined by the massive antiwar demonstrations of 1968 including the student rebellion at Columbia, exactly 56 years ago this week, as it happens.

Americas extraordinary narcissism creates a global distortion effect whereby the massacre of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world is transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis.

Biden made a series of catastrophic miscalculations in the wake of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, Kristof argues, and the net effect has been to make the U.S. look weak, hypocritical and profoundly cynical. Longtime British politician and diplomat Chris Patten, a pillar of center-right establishment thinking, told Kristof that Biden had made a terrible, terrible error that fed into Chinese and Russian narratives that the West employs double standards and doesnt really care about principles.

I would describe Bidens predicament as a symptom of the moral and political failures of liberalism, as well as the peculiar status of the United States, a still-dominant global superpower now in irreversible decline. The president did not or could not grasp how rapidly and decisively world opinion would turn against Israel and the U.S., or how little the world trusts American foreign policy after the last six decades or so of misbegotten wars and disastrous blunders.

Furthermore, and this one is amazing too: Neither Biden nor anyone in his inner circle seemed aware that core Democratic constituencies Black voters, younger people, progressives already sympathized with the Palestinian cause and viewed the current Israeli government as a criminal rogue state (or worse). Or perhaps they didn't care: Mainstream Democrats tend to dismiss the significance of the youth vote, assume that Black voters will stick with them no matter what, and are eager to purge or bulldoze the activist left on any available pretext.

But those failures, all damaging enough on their own terms, were amplified and undergirded by Bidens inexplicable faith that Bibi Netanyahu would somehow turn out to be a responsible leader and partner in a time of crisis, rather than a power-mad racist zealot with years of experience at manipulating American presidents. This miscalculation may seem mystifying when you consider Bidens long years of public service and his vaunted expertise in foreign policy; Kristof certainly finds it so.

It makes more sense if we understand liberalism, of the 21st-century Biden variety, as faith in the power of human reason, and specifically in its power to bridge differences between competing interests and establish common ground for civil discourse and political compromise. If we lived in a world of rational, self-interested beings willing to acknowledge the perspectives of others a world of liberals, in other words that might work out. But we dont, and in the real world Bidens miscalculation regarding Netanyahu was a potentially fatal mistake fatal for Bidens presidency, fatal for Israel, fatal for the future of the Middle East.

That brings us back at last to Dr. Renat Shafik, who prefers the nickname Minouche, and whose full title in the British House of Lords is the Right Honorable Baroness Shafik DBE. She arrived at Columbia last July, with no experience in American academic life, touted as a champion of diversity and inclusion. (By birth and parentage, she is both Arab and Muslim.) Less than a year later, she summoned the NYPD to the Morningside Heights campus for the first time since the legendary student takeover of 1968. If Joe Biden represents the tragedy of liberalism in its pathetic form no reasonable person can doubt his good intentions Shafik represents something darker, and almost farcical.

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If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of neoliberalism for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a rsum of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door.

If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of neoliberalism for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse than Minouche Shafik.

After the Gaza protests erupted at Columbia, Shafik evidently surrounded herself with high-priced lawyers and consultants drawn from the orbit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, who persuaded her that she could save her job by abasing herself before the Republican witch-hunters in Congress and giving them everything they wanted, up to and including confidential university documents they had no right to see.

This spectacular abdication of any pretense of academic integrity made her look like a liberal of the most craven and spineless kind, the kind who would rather surrender to a police state than stand up for the frequently uncomfortable principles of free speech. To the surprise of absolutely no one, or at least no one outside Shafiks neoliberal policy bubble, that did nothing to placate Stefanik and Johnson and the rest of the House Republicans, who did not want to be placated and had no interest in reasonable dialogue.

They wanted to watch Shafik squirm and grovel and then they wanted her head on a spike, while amplifying a largely invented crisis that delights their base and divides core liberal constituencies against each other. They have already achieved two of those three goals, and after alienating nearly everyone on the Columbia campus through her appalling cowardice, Shafik is surely numbering the days.

Given her record, no one could have expected her to behave differently than she did. The real question is what we might learn from Shafiks failure, and from the larger set of cultural and political failures it represents. After this disastrous week, one might be tempted to conclude that the slow, agonizing decline of American higher education has finally reached its nadir, and that American liberals will finally be forced to recognize that reason is useless against the enemies of reason. Im not holding my breath.

Read more

from Andrew O'Hehir

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Columbia crisis: Another massive failure of liberalism - Salon

Brussels and Western college campuses overreach enough to give Orban and his ilk the ammunition to paint liberal democracy as woke authoritarianism being thrust upon them, which they use to conceal their dismantling of independent institutions

By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion

Why are former US president Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans so fascinated by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of a small, landlocked central European nation that many of them likely could not find on a map? Because, as he said in 2022 when he addressed a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, Hungarys leader just keeps winning and winning and winning.

Orban has created a model MAGA country. In a speech to the conferences only European franchise in Budapest on Thursday, he offered himself up as living proof that conservatives can survive in an ocean of liberal pretense, to make Europe great again.

Others due to speak included US Republicans such as Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, and US representatives Andy Harris of Maryland and Keith Self of Texas, as well as former presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Rick Santorum.

Illustration: Mountain People

After a recent visit to Hungarys capital, still elegant and redolent of the days when it ran a small empire, I think liberals have even more to learn.

Orban wants to change the world in his image. That is not a metaphor or hyperbole. You do not have to like him or his goals, but do not discount the 60-year-olds voracious ambition, political talent and sheer chutzpah.

Hungarys experience under Orban offers at least two takeaways for liberals: First, build a united opposition and do not wait to fight back. Second, focus that fight tightly around the rule of law and democratic institutions. Mix it up with the culture wars and you will play into populists hands.

Orbans a lot smarter than his clownish British counterparts. He does not want to leave the EU, which would only make his country poorer and him less influential, but to occupy it. He wants to stoke a revolution of like-minded populists across the bloc that would capture EU institutions, including the European Parliament, which opinion polls suggest would have an expanded far-right contingent after elections this summer.

He is also openly rooting for a Trump victory in November and makes no secret of his preference for the political systems of countries such as Singapore, Turkey, India or Russia, over so-called liberal democracies.

At the beginning of the year we were alone. By the end of the year, we will be the majority in the Western world, Orban told supporters in a March address to mark Hungarys heroic, but ultimately failed, 1848 revolt against the Habsburg Empire.

Everyone would be welcome in his new world of nationalisms, Orban said except for traitors who worked with the EU institutions in Brussels (in his eyes, a new incarnation of the Habsburgs), and those who want to open the floodgates to migrants, or hand our children over to unhinged gender activists.

You know you are in Orbans new order from the moment you get off a plane. Ads promoting Hungary as family friendly line the walls of the jet bridges. The borders are proudly resistant to (non-European) refugees and migrants.

The government has forced out academically free universities, or simply starved them of funding. Meanwhile, the prime ministers chief ideologue, Balazs Orban (no relation), took charge of a private academy called the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and supersized it, endowing it with US$1 billion and an overtly Orbanist agenda.

He can do that, because Viktor Orbans friends and loyalists control much of the economy, including advertising and media, where they bought up 500 outlets and bundled them into a single government-friendly entity. In the deepest of ironies, the whole project has been funded with the help of EU aid that at times accounted for close to 5 percent of GDP.

Driving into the city, billboards show Viktor Orbans main political opponents daubed with dollar signs as if it were graffiti, to portray them as the unpatriotic, paid lackeys of the US. Previously, the same billboards had attacked European Commission President Ursula Van der Leyen. Before her it was George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist whom Viktor Orban has sold to his voters as a Bond villain. Keeping voters mobilized against enemies, real and imagined, has been critical to Viktor Orbans success.

US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, who is gay, is also on the hit list. In a remarkable speech last month, Pressman warned against Viktor Orbans backsliding on democracy under cover of rhetorical shell games that tell you to look anywhere other than where the actual ball is hidden. That was typical of Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War, and in Russia still, he said. But this is not something we expect from allies.

Other populists cannot copy Viktor Orbans playbook wholesale, because it has depended on a unique weakness in Hungarys electoral system that easily grants a supermajority of parliamentary seats. That gave Viktor Orban a free hand to legislate and change the constitution from the day he took office. He used the power to create a de facto one-party state he has called it illiberal democracy without having to jail opponents, as in Turkey, or kill them, as in Russia.

What matters is whether Hungary is still a democracy, 10 years into this illiberal project, said Agoston Samuel Mraz, chief executive of the government-friendly Nezopont Intezet think tank and polling agency. Clearly it is, because the most important question is whether the opposition has a possibility to win the election.

It does, Mraz said. It is just that Viktor Orbans opposition is divided and not very good.

Maybe. Technically, Mraz is right. Most Hungarians can watch TV commentators criticizing the government if they try. They could also vote for opposition parties if they wanted to. It is just that the field is so sharply tilted in favor of Viktor Orban in terms of money, media coverage and gerrymandered electoral districting that it would take a minor miracle to unseat him. (The next elections are scheduled for 2026).

There are signs of fatigue with Viktor Orbans Fidesz party, which for the first time since 2010 is overseeing a declining economy that is not easily explained away, with growth negative and inflation at 17 percent last year. The open question is whether it is too late to unravel Orbanism, because a lot of damage has been done.

Take the rule of law, a sine qua non for any genuine democracy. Viktor Orban brought the prosecutors office, constitutional court and ombudsman under his control early, before moving on to the Supreme Court and making a new position, filled by the wife of a Fidesz lawmaker, to take charge of all judicial appointments and training budgets for the lower courts.

Tamas Matusik was among those elected in 2018 to the judiciarys existing governing body, the Hungarian National Council of Judges, who first took a stand for its independence.

We were hunted down, he said.

Some members resigned under pressure. Others were subjected to public smear campaigns. Matusik personally was the object of more than 400 negative TV and press items in a single month, as he went to seek European support.

I told colleagues there, this can happen to you, he said. Some laughed at the idea, said Matusik, who eventually became president of the council and whose term has since ended. They arent laughing anymore.

In the end, it worked and Viktor Orban backed down. His appointee resigned and, under intense pressure from the EU, which withheld more than 10 billion euros (US$10.71 billion) of funding to press for the reversal, powers were restored to the council to run the lower court system. That secured release of the EU funds, but Hungarys highest courts remain captured.

The original sin of our judiciary was that no one stood up and protested when it all began, Matusik said.

That is one key Viktor Orban lesson for liberals: To push back early where it really counts. Another is to define much more tightly where that is, focusing exclusively on what is required for membership in the club of Western democracies, including the EU and NATO, and is therefore open to legitimate international pressure.

It is vital to resist the overreach that has helped Viktor Orban sell his shell game to voters by eliding issues of democracy with identity politics. After all, if illiberalism just means having a democracy stripped of woke diktat, what is not to like for a conservative?

The EU, for example, is still withholding 20 billion euros of funding for Hungary, with the bulk of criteria for the moneys release focused on measures to prevent fraud and corruption. When he attacks these conditions, the prime minister invariably talks about demands to repeal a law banning the exposure of minors to material that refers to homosexuality, and a requirement for asylum seekers only to apply from outside the country.

His complaint resonates. I disagree with these laws, as does the European Commission, but many Hungarians do not.

The EUs attempt to police the area has proved a political gift to Viktor Orban, diverting attention from his erosion of the rule of law, and from the losses to Hungary including tens of billions of euros in EU aid that are being caused by corruption among his business allies. It also raises reasonable questions about whether policies on LGBTQ+ rights and immigration should be decided in Brussels or national parliaments.

Viktor Orban and his like succeed in part because there is enough overreach in Brussels, Western college campuses and elsewhere that he can use it to paint liberal democracy as a woke authoritarianism that is being thrust down Hungarian throats, concealing his destruction of independent institutions. So let us stop talking about liberal and illiberal democracy altogether. It is just democracy, it is under severe threat in Hungary and that is nothing to admire or emulate.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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MAGA is obsessed with Viktor Orban; liberals should be, too -

Political careers often end in failure a clich that exists because it too often happens to be true. Justin Trudeau, one of the worlds great progressive leaders, may be heading toward that moment. In a recent interview he acknowledged that every day he considers leaving his crazy job as Canadas prime minister. Increasingly, the question is not if he will leave but how soon and how deep his failure will be when he goes.

At stake is something that matters more than one politicians career: Canadas contemporary liberal and multicultural society, which just happens to be the legacy of the prime ministers father and predecessor, Pierre Trudeau. When you fly into Montreal, you land in Trudeau airport, and thats because of Pierre, not Justin.

The threat to that liberal tradition is not all Justin Trudeaus fault, of course. The right-wing tide overwhelming global politics has come late but with pent-up vigor to Canada. For several years now, polls have shown Mr. Trudeaus Liberals at lows from which no Canadian political party has ever recovered in elections. In a recent by-election, in a key suburban district of the Greater Toronto Area, the Conservative Party beat the Liberals by a lopsided 57 percent to 22 percent, a swing of nine percentage points to the Conservatives.

But polls and by-elections can be poor predictors of election viability. A better indicator is the flummoxed figure of Mr. Trudeau himself, who seems increasingly out of touch in the new world of division and extremism.

Part of Mr. Trudeaus problem is simple exhaustion, both his own and Canadian voters. He has been in government for almost eight and a half years. During that time, he has been one of the most effective progressive leaders in the world. His government cut Canadas child poverty in half. He legalized marijuana, ending roughly 100 years of nonsense. He made large strides in reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians. He renegotiated NAFTA with a lunatic American president. He handled Covid better than most. You dont have to squint too hard to recognize that he is one of the most competent and transformative prime ministers this country has ever produced.

But an era has passed since the start of that halcyon time, when Mr. Trudeau stood in front of his first cabinet and, when asked why it was half female, answered, Because its 2015. Now a new generation has emerged, for which the liberal technocratic order his government represents has failed to offer a path to a stable, prosperous future and the identity politics he once embodied have withered into vacuous schism. The growing anti-Liberal Party sentiment of young people is the biggest threat to his electability.

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Opinion | Justin Trudeau May Be No Match for the New World of Polarization - The New York Times

The federal governments payment program for the vaccine-injured is getting a $36 million top up from the feds, but accessing that money is proving difficult.

Of the 2,233 claims made to the Vaccine Injury Support Program, just 138 a little over 6% have been approved by the medical review board for the program, which has paid out $11.2 million so far.

The Liberals have allocated an additional $36 million in the recent budget to the Vaccine Injury Support Program, over the next two years.

Oxaro administers the Vaccine Injury Support Program for the feds for all provinces and territories, except Quebec, which has itsownprogram.

Ross Wightman, who was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre system after receiving a COVID vaccine, was one of the recipients, getting a one-time payout of around $250,000, the maximum offered by the program. He also receives $90,000 annually in income replacement.

I dont know if theres even an amount that would ease the pain, said Wightman.

Despite being poked, prodded, and tested for months, doctors were fearful of the consequences they might face from superiors if they officially declared that the vaccines caused Wightmans injuries.

He has permanent nerve damage in his hands from the Guillain-Barre. He can no longer work or do simple tasks around the house, resulting in his wife no longer being able to work, as she needs to take care of the household tasks and children.

Given the extent of the permanent life-changing injuries, a couple hundred thousand dollars isnt much, thats for sure. No. Its just a wake of destruction thats left behind for family and all that stuff, he added.

It took months of struggle and jumping through hoops for Wightman to get paid. Even still, hes struggled with being reimbursed for expenses. He said that he finally received $15,000 for his expenses after hounding them for four months, but it was only a quarter of what hed had to spend.

Waiting years for payment from the vaccine injury program is the best some could hope for.

Julie Gamble has been dealing with the program for years, only to face being hung up on by the phone and not getting replies to her emails.

Shes connected with many others through various vaccine-injured support groups, only to find that theyve faced the same struggles having submitted all of their medical records and hearing nothing but excuses as to why theyre not getting back to us.

Our families have been destroyed. We stepped up to the plate and did what was asked of us. Nothing about this is fair to any of us, said Gamble.

Gamble says she was permanently injured by the vaccine with polyneuropathy, estimating she has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses and lost income.

She said that her short-term memory is very poor, and she has almost no muscle remaining in her hands. She does not think she will ever work again.

Its the biggest regret of my life that I got this vaccine, she said.

She almost didnt get her second shot. After having a horrific reactionto the first dose, she said her pharmacist did not want to give her the second. She went to see an immunologist at the pharmacists recommendation. Instead, she was admitted to the hospital waiting room and consulted by a doctor, who encouraged her to get the second shot, which she did.

On my way home, I knew Id made a mistake, she said. That night, I ended up blind in my right eye. My bladder let go. My eyeswere swollenlike eggs. I had a rash all over my body, and I couldnt stay awake. I tasted metal in my mouth.

Since her injury, Gamble has been trying to connect with people in similar situations online. Any time she posts about vaccine injuries, she said she gets suspendedfrom Facebook and other social media platforms for false and misleading information.

Despite her husband working as much as he can and receiving CPP disability payments, Gamble has had to use food banks to get by.

True Northreached out toHealth Canada, the Vaccine Injury Support Program, and Oxaro but received no response.

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Only 6% of vaccine injury claimants have been paid as Liberals earmark $36 million for program - True North