Carney’s moral failure is sacrificing human rights on the altar of trade and finance

Mark Carney sees the world through balance sheets and trade deals not moral obligations, and treats human rights as negotiable, secondary, or inconvenient. 

By Fareed Khan  
A version of this article can be found on Substack.  

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been described by many political observers as a “technocrat.” Canada has had technocratic prime ministers before—leaders who manage rather than inspire, who prefer balance sheets to moral clarity. But in living memory, there has been no PM that has been as weak on human rights as Mark Carney. His tenure has revealed a troubling truth—when confronted with the suffering of persecuted peoples, Carney consistently chooses financial gain over the defence of human dignity.

This is not a partisan critique, it is a moral one. And the pattern has become impossible to ignore.

Carney presents himself as a modern, rational, data‑driven leader. But beneath the polished language of markets and macroeconomics lies an apparent worldview in which human rights are treated as irritants—obstacles to be managed rather than principles to be defended. He speaks fluently about GDP growth, supply chains, and investment flows, yet stumbles when confronted with the basic question of whether human beings deserve protection from mass atrocity.

This moral hollowness is not theoretical. It is visible when he has been asked to respond to every major human‑rights crisis of his premiership.

The Gaza Genocide is Carney’s most damning failure

Carney’s refusal even to utter the word genocide in relation to Israel’s 34‑month genocidal campaign in Gaza is not political caution—it is a moral abdication. The term is not a fringe accusation, nor is it controversial among experts. It has been applied by dozens of respected global human‑rights authorities, including the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Israeli human rights group B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights Israel; the International Federation of Human Rights; and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Leading Israeli Holocaust scholars—Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal and Shmuel Lederman—have likewise affirmed that Israel’s actions meet the definition of genocide. When such a broad and authoritative chorus recognizes the reality of genocide, a prime minister’s refusal to acknowledge it is not prudence; it is a profound failure of moral responsibility.

This silence is not neutrality. It is a deliberate political choice to avoid moral responsibility. Carney knows that naming genocide carries obligations—legal, diplomatic, and ethical. He knows that acknowledging genocide would require sanctions, embargoes, and a fundamental shift in Canada’s relationship with Israel. And he knows that such actions would disrupt trade, investment, geopolitical alliances, and domestic political considerations for the Liberal Party he leads.

So rather than doing what is right he chooses silence.

Worse still, he has refused to impose sanctions on Israel—sanctions Canada deployed swiftly and forcefully against Russia when it committed the same crimes in Ukraine. The contrast is glaring. When Russia violated international law, Canada responded with boycotts, sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and moral outrage. When Israel committed the same crimes, the Canadian government offered platitudes, evasions, and the language of “concern.”

This hypocrisy reveals the core of Carney’s worldview, Human rights matter only when they align with economic or geopolitical interests. When they do not, they are quietly set aside.

Carney’s now‑infamous statement condemning Israeli Minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir for the “abominable” treatment of kidnapped Sumud flotilla activists, which was shared on social media, was revealing not for what it said, but for what it ignored. By singling out one extremist minister, Carney sidestepped the far more consequential truth. The atrocities in Gaza are not the work of one man, but of an entire political and military apparatus, led by people who consider Palestinians subhuman, that has inflicted decades of oppression, occupation, brutality and death on the Palestinian people. This infrastructure has inflicted More than 34 months of genocide in Gaza; a 20-year siege on Gaza that has deliberately restricted food, medicine, and humanitarian aid; six decades of a brutal occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza; nearly eight decades of ethnic cleansing across the territories controlled by Israel; and a conservatively estimated 80,000—possibly as many as 680,000—Palestinians murdered in Gaza. By condemning only Ben‑Gvir, Carney avoided confronting the full scale of state violence, and in doing so revealed the limits of his moral courage, the character flaws of his leadership, and the extent of his cowardice.

More trade with China—another genocidal state

Carney’s weakness on human rights is not confined to Israel. His pursuit of expanded trade with China—despite Beijing’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs—shows the same pattern of moral blindness.

The Chinese government has built a vast network of concentration camps, indoctrination boarding schools that separate Uyghur children from their families, forced-labour factories, and an all‑seeing surveillance state designed to crush an entire people. The United States, the United Kingdom, and several European governments have formally recognized these atrocities as genocide, while Canada has not. And Carney’s response has been one of astonishing moral indifference.

He treats China’s genocide as a regrettable footnote rather than the absolute barrier to trade it should be. He speaks in the antiseptic language of “market access,” “strategic partnerships,” and “economic diversification,” while millions of Uyghurs are subjected to forced labour, mass detention, sterilization campaigns, cultural erasure, and the destruction of their religious identity. There is no moral universe in which a genocide can be bracketed off as an inconvenient detail in a trade negotiation. Yet that is precisely what Carney is doing—reducing one of the gravest crimes known to humanity to a background concern that must not interfere with Canada’s economic ambitions.

Under Carney, Ottawa has sought deeper economic ties with Beijing. Human rights have not been a meaningful point of negotiation. Forced labour has not been a red line. The genocide of Uyghurs has not been a barrier.

The message is unmistakable: profit is more important than people.

Appeasing a Hindu supremacist regime

The Carney government’s efforts to negotiate a comprehensive trade deal with India is another example of his willingness to overlook atrocities for economic gain. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has embraced a racist, fascist, Hindu supremacist ideology that has made persecution of Muslims, Dalits and other Indian minority communities a matter of state policy. Citizenship laws target Muslims. Lynchings of Muslims by Hindu extremists occur with impunity. Journalists, academics, and activists face arrest for criticizing the government. The Modi regime has dismantled democratic norms and weaponized Hindu fundamentalism and nationalism as a tool of exclusion.

Yet Carney has pursued trade negotiations with India without including human rights a factor in negotiations. There has been no insistence on protections for Indo‑Muslims, Dalits, Christians or other minorities. No pressure on Modi’s government to end discriminatory policies. No moral leadership.

As South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” But it seems Carney hasn’t learned this lesson.

More trade with authoritarian states

Carney’s eagerness to forge trade deals with authoritarian regimes in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia further underscores his disregard for human rights. These states—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain—are among the least free societies in the world when it comes to civil liberties. Laws ban criticism of the ruling families, state policies, or Islam. Their governments use spyware and monitoring tools to target dissidents and activists. Political parties are illegal, and national legislatures have no real power. Millions of low-income workers face harsh conditions under the kafala sponsorship system. Activists and critics face arbitrary detention, lengthy prison terms, and unfair trials. Women’s rights are suppressed, being LGBTQ2 is criminalized, and independent journalism is silenced.

Yet Carney has treated these governments as normal trading partners, never making human rights a major point of negotiation. He speaks of Gulf autocracies as if they were simply emerging markets rather than repressive states where human rights are an afterthought. Canada, a nation that once prided itself on being a moral voice in global affairs, has now silenced itself under Carney.

Carney fails to defend Canadians’ Charter rights

Carney’s weakness on human rights is not limited to foreign policy. It is visible at home in his refusal to confront provincial governments that abuse the Canadian Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to violate the fundamental rights of Canadians. The clause was never intended as a routine political tool. It was meant to be an extraordinary measure used sparingly. But provinces have increasingly deployed it to override Charter rights for political convenience to: suppress labour rights; restrict freedom of expression; target vulnerable communities (Muslims in Quebec, the LGBTQ2 community in Alberta and Saskatchewan); and to pre‑empt judicial review of legislation.

This trend represents the slow normalization of constitutional vandalism. And Carney has done nothing to stop it (nor did his predecessors).

Refusal to use the power of “Disallowance”

The Constitution gives the federal government a powerful tool: disallowance. Under sections 55–57 of the Constitution Act, 1867, Ottawa can invalidate provincial laws that violate national principles or constitutional norms. This power has fallen into disuse, not because it is unconstitutional, but because federal governments have lacked the political courage to use it when needed.

Carney’s refusal to even consider disallowance to address Quebec’s Bill 21 “secularism” law or Alberta’s violation of LGBTQ2 rights is not restraint it is dereliction. When provinces openly use the notwithstanding clause to strip Canadians of Charter protections, the federal government has both the authority and the responsibility to intervene. But the federal government refuses

Political leaders who will not protect the rights of their own citizens cannot be trusted to defend the rights of persecuted peoples abroad.

Comparing Trudeau and Carney

While this analysis focuses on Carney and his government, similar criticisms can be levelled at his predecessor Justin Trudeau. On Gaza, on Israel’s decades-long occupation, on the misuse of the notwithstanding clause by provinces, Trudeau also failed to show the moral courage required of a national leader. He avoided naming Israeli atrocities for what they were. He refused to impose sanctions. He allowed provinces to weaponize the notwithstanding clause without federal intervention. On China, India, and the Gulf autocracies, Trudeau walked the same path Carney is now sprinting down—prioritizing trade, investment, and geopolitical convenience over human rights.

But there is one crucial difference. One of Trudeau’s first and most admirable decisions as prime minister was accepting thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing war and persecution just after he was elected prime minister. That act did not make Trudeau an angel on the other issues discussed here, but it demonstrated that he possessed at least some moral compass when it came to defending humanity. Carney has shown no such instinct. Where Trudeau jogged slowly down the path of moral compromise, Carney is racing down that road headlong, unencumbered by even the faintest hesitation about concerns for human rights.

Carney’s defenders often point to his credentials: a former governor of the Bank of Canada, former governor of the Bank of England, celebrated economist, respected financial thinker. But these accomplishments reveal the core problem. Carney approaches politics like a banker, not as a political leader representing all Canadians. He sees the world through balance sheets, not moral obligations, and treats human rights as negotiable, secondary, or inconvenient. He is a man who believes the market can solve everything except the things that matter most.

When humanity becomes a variable in an economic equation, it is always the first thing sacrificed.

Canada deserves a prime minister who understands that human rights are not optional. They are not bargaining chips to be traded away in back-room negotiations, nor are they secondary considerations to be weighed against export markets, investment flows, or geopolitical convenience.

Human rights are the moral foundation of any society that claims to value dignity, equality, and justice. In all the cases mentioned in this analysis Carney has responded not with the instinct to protect the vulnerable but with the instinct to protect economic interests

History teaches a simple lesson. A leader who refuses to protect humanity cannot be trusted on anything else. The measure of a prime minister is not the size of the economy he manages, but the size of the moral obligations he is willing to shoulder. By that measure, Carney has failed—and Canada must reckon with the consequences of a leader who has forgotten that the first duty of public office—to defend human life, not the bottom line.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau: The morally bankrupt leaders who ignored the Gaza genocide

Trudeau's and Carney's refusal to acknowledge that genocide is taking place in Gaza is factually indefensible and politically grotesque.  

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared in mid-May that the treatment of civilians aboard the Sumud Flotilla to Gaza—kidnapped in international waters by Israeli forces—was “abominable”, he revealed far more about his government than he intended. His statement was meant to project moral outrage, to signal that Canada still possesses a moral compass. Instead, it exposed a government that has lost its ethical bearings entirely. Because if Carney truly believed that the abuse of civilians was “abominable,” he would have said so long before a video of Itamar Ben‑Gvir taunting bound activists forced his hand.

But Carney did not, and the reason is simple. Carney has no moral compass, especially when it comes to how Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs are treated, whether by a foreign government or by his own administration in Canada.

Mark Carney only entered politics in early 2025, after Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Liberal leader. Before that, Carney spent decades in elite financial institutions—Goldman Sachs, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England—where he cultivated a reputation for technocratic competence and global statesmanship. Yet in all those years, through Israel’s decades-long brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its repeated assaults on the Gaza Strip, and finally its ongoing genocide, Carney never made a public comment. Not a word about the siege. Not a word about the occupation. Not a word about apartheid. Not a word about the mass killing of Palestinians. And this is for the most part understandable given the trajectory of his career.

However, his silence was not accidental, but it was revealing. It was the silence of a man who had never needed to confront the consequences of Western power, who had never needed to reckon with the violence that Western powers inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable, under the guise of maintaining an “international rules based order.” And so when he entered politics, his silence became a part of Canadian government policy.

Trudeau’s legacy of weakness and denial

However, this wasn’t new policy. Carney inherited this moral vacuum from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose own record on Israel and Palestine was defined by weakness, evasion, and denial. Trudeau made occasional statements expressing “concern” about Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but these were always carefully calibrated to avoid offending Israel or the US.  Ultimately they were meaningless because he condemned very little of Israel’s criminal acts, recognized even less, and took no action to uphold international law or hold Israel accountable.

And at the end of his prime ministership, Trudeau finally said the quiet part out loud—he declared himself to be a Zionist. With that admission, everything became clear. His refusal to condemn Israel’s actions was not diplomatic caution, it was ideological alignment. His refusal to recognize genocide was not uncertainty, it was political loyalty to a foreign state. His government’s unwavering support for Israel, even as the death toll in Gaza climbed into the tens of thousands, was not a lack of courage, it was a deliberate choice and admission that Trudeau was an anti-Palestinian racist.

When Carney became prime minister he simply continued Trudeau’s policy of denial, complicity, and moral collapse.

Choosing not to see genocide in Gaza

Since it started both Trudeau and Carney refused to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Gaza.  This denial is not only factually indefensible, it is politically grotesque. Because the list of institutions, experts, and humanitarian organizations that have declared Israel’s assault on Gaza’s population as genocidal is unprecedented in modern history.

Among the organizations and individuals recognizing that Israel is committing the crime of genocide as defined under Genocide Convention are:

• the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry;
• the UN Special Committee;
• the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights;
• the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories;
• the former UN Humanitarian Chief;
• Amnesty International;
• Human Rights Watch;
• Israeli human rights group B’Tselem;
• Physicians for Human Rights Israel;
• Doctors Without Borders;
• Oxfam;
• Save the Children;
• Action Aid;
• Action on Armed Violence;
• the International Federation of Human Rights;
• the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS);
• Melanie O’Brien, president of the IAGS;
• Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research;
• Martin Shaw, author of What Is Genocide?;
• Leading Israeli Holocaust scholars: Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, Shmuel Lederman;
• the Norwegian Refugee Council;
• the Danish Refugee Council;
• Refugees International;
• the International Rescue Committee;
• Moshe Yaalon, former head of Israel’s military;
• Amiram Levin, former deputy head of Mossad;
• Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel; and
• the 30 nations supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

This list is not merely long—it is overwhelming. It represents the broadest consensus on genocide since Rwanda. Yet Canada, a nation that claims to champion human rights, has rejected all of it.

Canada is violating its international legal obligations

Under the Genocide Convention, Canada is obligated not only to prevent genocide but to punish those who participate in it. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Canada must act to stop grave breaches, including collective punishment, targeting civilians, and starvation as a method of warfare. Under the UN Charter, Canada must uphold international peace and security and oppose violations of international humanitarian law.

Instead, Canada continues to:

• Sell weapons and weapons components to Israel;
• Provide diplomatic cover for Israel;
• Refuse to sanction Israeli officials responsible for mass atrocities;
• Reject international legal findings of genocide; and
• Attack Canadian human rights advocates who speak out.

This is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Carney’s Hypocrisy Is Impossible to Ignore

Carney’s condemnation of Ben‑Gvir was not wrong. Ben‑Gvir is a racist extremist who celebrated his birthday with a cake emblazoned with a noose, who raised a champagne glass when the Knesset advanced a death‑penalty bill that applies only to Palestinians, and who has repeatedly called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. But Carney’s selective outrage is revealing. Ben‑Gvir is not an outlier; he is the distilled expression of a much wider system of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal violence in Israeli society — a society where a 2025 poll showed that 47% of Jewish Israelis supported the Gaza genocide. Singling him out for sanctions while continuing to arm the state he serves is not moral leadership. It is political posturing, a gesture designed to look principled while avoiding the far more consequential act of holding Israel itself accountable.

If Carney truly believed Ben‑Gvir’s actions were “unacceptable,” he would sanction the entire Israeli government and military leadership. He would halt all weapons exports immediately. He would prosecute Canadians who have joined the Israeli military and participated in war crimes. He would recognize the genocide that the rest of the world has already named.

He has done none of these things.

Historically, Canada avoided pursuing war criminals

There is a myth in Canada that the country has a proud and robust history of prosecuting war criminals. It is a comforting story, one that allows Canadians to imagine themselves as steadfast defenders of human rights and international justice. But the moment this narrative is examined with even minimal scrutiny, it collapses. In truth, Canada has not made much effort to hunt down war criminals since World War Two, and its record is defined far more by avoidance, delay, and half‑measures than by genuine accountability.

For decades, Canada preferred to look away rather than confront perpetrators of atrocity, just as it is doing with Israel. Instead of launching serious investigations, pursuing criminal trials, or building the legal capacity to prosecute genocidal criminals, Canada has relied on bureaucratic tools—denaturalization and deportation—that allow the government to quietly remove individuals without ever proving guilt in court. These measures create the appearance of action while avoiding actual prosecution. Far from being a global leader in accountability, Canada’s war‑crimes record is a story of institutional reluctance, political timidity, and systemic inertia. It is a record that reveals a country far more committed to protecting its own political convenience than to upholding the principles of international law it claims to champion.

Following the Second World War Canada prosecuted a small number of Nazi war criminals immediately afterwards—almost all of them POWs already in Canadian custody. After 1948, however, Canada entered a 30‑year period of complete inactivity. During the 1950s through the 1980s, hundreds of suspected Nazi collaborators entered Canada, yet the government made no serious attempt to locate, investigate, or criminally prosecute them.

The 1985 Deschênes Commission confirmed what survivors and human‑rights advocates had long known: Canada had never meaningfully prosecuted Nazi war criminals domestically, despite ample evidence and decades of opportunity. The few criminal trials attempted in the 1990s—including the high‑profile case of Imre Finta—ended in acquittals, after which Canada effectively abandoned domestic prosecution altogether.

The rare exception of Rwandan génocidaires

Canada’s record of domestic war‑crimes prosecution is remarkably thin, and its only true success stands out precisely because it is so rare. The single case in which Canada managed to secure a conviction under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act was the prosecution of Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan génocidaire found guilty in 2009. His conviction was historic: the first time Canada used the principle of universal jurisdiction to try an individual for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed abroad. Munyaneza’s trial demonstrated that Canada could hold perpetrators of mass atrocity accountable when it chose to invest the political will, legal expertise, and prosecutorial resources required.

But Munyaneza’s case was the exception, not the beginning of a sustained effort. The only other attempt at a domestic war‑crimes trial under the same legislation—Jacques Mungwarere—ended in acquittal in 2013. After that, Canada effectively retreated from the field. No further domestic prosecutions followed, and no institutional momentum emerged to build on the precedent set. Instead of developing a robust system capable of confronting atrocity, Canada returned to its longstanding reliance on administrative measures.  The result is a war‑crimes record defined not by a legacy of accountability, but by one conviction surrounded by decades of institutional reluctance.

Canada’s support for Israel is built on lies

For decades, Canadian governments have insisted that Canada is a defender of human rights, a champion of international law, and a guardian of the rules‑based order. But these claims collapse under the weight of scrutiny, and certainly as we witness Canada’s lack of action around the Gaza genocide.

Canada cannot claim to defend human rights while arming a genocidal state. Canada cannot claim to uphold international law while ignoring the world’s legal findings. Canada cannot claim to support peace while enabling mass slaughter.

The Carney government’s position is not simply hypocritical—it is morally bankrupt, as was that of Justin Trudeau’s government

What is truly “unacceptable”

When he saw the video of Israeli minister Ben-Gvir taunting the imprisoned activists from the Sumud Flotilla he used the word “unacceptable” in reaction to what he saw. But what is truly unacceptable is Canada’s complicity. What is unacceptable is the refusal to name genocide. What is unacceptable is the sale of Canadian weapons to a state committing mass atrocities. What is unacceptable is the betrayal of international law. What is unacceptable is the dehumanization of Palestinians through complicity.

Carney’s government has failed the most basic test of moral leadership—the ability to recognize human suffering and act to stop it. Instead, Canada has become a bystander to genocide, and worse, an enabler of the crime of crimes.

History will not forget this moment. And it will not forgive those who chose silence, denial, and complicity over justice.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Trump’s wildfire blame game is an ignorant reaction to a friend dealing with tragedy

Canada is throwing everything it has—every plane, every firefighter, every resource—at a fire season that is historically unprecedented.  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

When United States President Donald Trump declared that Canada was “mismanaging” its forests and therefore responsible for the smoke drifting into the United States, he did more than display a misunderstanding of basic science. He revealed a profound ignorance about the natural world, the scale of Canada’s geography, and the limits of human power in the face of climate‑driven catastrophe. His threat to impose tariffs unless Canada “gets its wildfires under control” is not merely foolish—it is a reckless distortion of reality that undermines one of America’s closest allies.

Let’s be clear. No government on Earth can prevent or control wildfires across a landmass as vast, remote, and ecologically complex as Canada’s northern forests. To suggest otherwise is to advertise a dangerous level of stupidity about how nature works.

A forest the size of a continent

Canada’s boreal forest region is not a national park with paved access roads and ranger stations. It is the largest intact forest ecosystem on the planet, stretching more than 4,800 kilometres (3,000 miles) from Canada’s border with Alaska to the shores of Newfoundland on the North Atlantic. It covers 5.6 million square kilometres (2.3 million square miles)—roughly 80% of the size of the entire lower 48 American states, or 140% of the landmass of the European Union.

This is a wilderness so vast that large portions have never been walked by human beings. There are no highways, no towns, no infrastructure, and no practical way to “manage” the forest in the simplistic way Trump implies. To accuse Canada of “poor management” of an ecosystem this large is absurd. It is like blaming the US government for failing to “manage” the Pacific Ocean.

Wildfires in this region are not caused by bureaucratic negligence. They are caused by the same forces that have shaped the boreal forest for millennia—lightning, drought, heat, wind, and climate change.

Lightning doesn’t ask permission

In just the past several days, the Government of Canada’s Lightning Detection Network has recorded more than 14,000 lightning strikes across northern Ontario and southern Manitoba—each one a potential ignition source when the forest floor is parched. Lightning is responsible for most of the large wildfires in Canada’s boreal region, a reality no government can prevent any more than it can command rainfall or reverse drought conditions driven by climate change.

Canada is experiencing one of the driest, hottest summers in recorded history. The Canadian Wildland Fire Information System reports that fire danger levels across multiple provinces are at “extreme”, driven by record‑low precipitation and high winds. These are climate‑driven conditions, not political ones.

To blame Canada’s government for the smoke drifting into the United States is like blaming firefighters for the direction of the wind.

Canada is throwing everything it has at the fires

Trump’s comments ignore the scale of the response Canada has already mobilized. According to federal and provincial emergency agencies:

• More than 6,000 firefighters are currently deployed nationwide, including crews from every province and territory.
• Over 200 aircraft, including Canada’s world‑renowned water bombers, are engaged in suppression operations across the country
• International assistance has been requested and received from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, and Mexico.
• The Canadian Armed Forces have been deployed to support evacuations, logistics, and ground operations.
• Thousands of volunteers and emergency workers are risking their lives daily in some of the most dangerous terrain on Earth.

In other words, Canada is not sitting idle nor “mismanaging” anything. Canada is throwing everything it has—every plane, every firefighter, every resource—at a fire season that is historically unprecedented. And yet the fires still rage because nature is bigger than governments.

A forest fire is not a house fire

Perhaps the most useful way to illustrate the absurdity of Trump’s claim is through analogy.

When a house catches fire, firefighters arrive within minutes. They have hydrants, hoses, ladders, and roads. They can surround the structure, attack the flames from multiple angles, and extinguish the fire within hours. The area is small. The access is easy. The resources are concentrated.

Now imagine a fire the size of Delaware, or Connecticut, or Vermont. Imagine that fire burning in terrain with no roads, no hydrants, no communications infrastructure, and no safe access points. Imagine flames over 30 metres high (over 100 feet) moving at 20 kilometres per hour (12 mph) through dense forest, driven by winds that shift unpredictably. Imagine smoke so thick that aircraft cannot fly and temperatures so high that water dropped from planes evaporates before it hits the ground.

That is what Canadian firefighters are facing.

To demand that Canada “put out the fires” is to demand the impossible. It is to demand that human beings overpower the combined forces of drought, heat, lightning, wind, and climate change.  Only a fool would make such a demand.

Canada has always stood with the US

Trump’s comments also betray a disturbing lack of gratitude.

Just last week, a Canadian water bomber pilot died fighting fires in Colorado. Canadians have fought fires in California, provided aid after hurricanes in Louisiana, helped with floods in New York, and following tornadoes in the Midwest. We have never blamed American leaders for the impacts of natural disasters. We have never threatened tariffs or politicized tragedies beyond our control because smoke crossed the border.

We asked how we could help, we donated and we prayed for our friends because that is what neighbours do.

Let’s be honest. Trump’s threats have nothing to do with forest management. They are part of a pattern, where he uses crises—real or manufactured—to bully Canada into concessions on trade, energy, and continental security. Rather than being angry about smoke from forest fires crossing borders, he is exploiting smoke.

He is using a natural disaster as a political weapon, as leverage to extract economic concessions from a country that has stood by the United States for generations. It is gangster politics—extortion dressed up as environmental concern, and it is beneath the office he holds.

Only weather can change the situation

Every fire expert in Canada and the United States agrees that the only force capable of shifting the tide is weather. Significant rainfall, cooler temperatures, and reduced winds are the only variables that can slow or extinguish fires of this scale.

Government’s cannot manufacture rain, legislate humidity, or order lightning to stop. The fires will end when nature decides they will end.

Blaming Canada for the uncontrollable forces of nature is not leadership. It is ignorance and it is dangerous. It undermines the very alliance that has kept North America stable and prosperous.

The facts are clear. The science is clear. The scale is clear.

The only question is whether the President of the United States is willing to see it.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

On international day to eliminate racism Canadian politicians’ PR performances demonstrate their hypocrisy

Commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Racism is political theatre for Canadian politicians. It costs nothing, changes nothing, and allows politicians to virtue-signal.
 

By Fareed Khan 

A version of this can be found on Substack.

Every year on March 21, Canadian governments at all levels solemnly mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Flags fly, statements are issued, and anti-racism programs are highlighted as evidence of governments’ actions to fight racism. Yet this annual ritual rings hollow when right-wing politicians and media outlets actively enable hate by refusing to condemn white supremacists or platform them for political gain.

As Islamophobia explodes according to Statistics Canada data, as academic research documents a surging white supremacist movement, and as Donald Trump normalizes bigotry from the White House, the gap between rhetoric and reality exposes a profound hypocrisy. Despite public commitments and taxpayer dollars poured into anti-racism efforts, Ottawa and the provinces have failed to adequately confront the hate poisoning Canadian society. Their deafening silence on the Gaza genocide—now formally acknowledged by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and leading Holocaust scholars including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg—has only fuelled anti-Palestinian racism at home.

A report from the National Council of Canadian Muslims reports a shocking 1,300% spike in hate crimes targeting Muslims since October 7, 2023, with independent monitors documenting surges as high as 1,800% in some regions. These are not abstract statistics, they reflect real terror—vandalism of mosques, death threats, workplace discrimination, and violent assaults. Academic studies from institutions tracking far-right networks reveal a parallel surge in white supremacist organizing. Groups like the Active Clubs and networks tied to figures such as Jeremy MacKenzie have shifted from online echo chambers to street rallies, propaganda campaigns, and recruitment drives across Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Their messaging—explicitly supremacist, xenophobic, and often intertwined with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes—has moved from fringe forums into mainstream conservative discourse. Right-wing media outlets amplify this poison daily, framing immigrants, Muslims, and racialized communities as existential threats while platforming politicians who wink at the rhetoric.

Trump’s return to power has supercharged the trend. His casual bigotry—racist rants against migrants, praise for white nationalist ideas, and relentless dehumanization of Palestinians, and racist social media rants—provides a global template. Canadian right-wing politicians and commentators echo the same language, importing MAGA-style division into our politics. The result is a toxic feedback loop—hate crimes rise, white supremacist groups grow bolder, and governments respond with performative gestures rather than decisive action.

The federal government and provinces trumpet their anti-racism funding—grants for community programs, task forces, and funding for security around mosques and synagogues. Yet these efforts remain superficial. They fund workshops and awareness days while ignoring root causes. Police-reported hate crimes continue to climb because enforcement is lax and data collection severely under counts the crisis. In the most recent federal election which returned the Liberals to government the issue of fighting racism wasn’t even discussed.

Online hate proliferates unchecked on platforms that profit from division and fuels violence. Most alarmingly, successive governments have refused to address how their own foreign policy stokes domestic racism. The Gaza genocide—documented in exhaustive reports by international human rights organizations and noted genocide scholars has been met with equivocation at best, complicity at worst.

Additionally, Canada’s leaders have offered tepid calls for Israeli “restraint” while maintaining arms exports, diplomatic cover, and economic ties, unlike Ireland, Norway, Spain and other nations, which have taken much stronger and principled stands against the Gaza genocide. This failure to unequivocally condemn the systematic destruction and horror in Gaza—potentially more than 680,000 dead, entire family lines erased, infrastructure reduced to rubble, conditions deliberately calculated to make life unlivable—has direct domestic consequences, and legitimizes anti-Palestinian racism. When Palestinian voices are silenced on campuses, in workplaces, and in public debate, when pro-Palestine protesters face disproportionate policing while hate marches receive kid-gloves treatment, the message is clear--some lives matter less. Anti-Palestinian bigotry, often disguised as “criticism of Hamas,” has surged alongside Islamophobia. Jewish Canadians who oppose the genocide are smeared as self-hating, Arab and Muslim Canadians are collectively demonized, and the Charter rights of Palestinian Canadians are systematically violated. The government’s inaction turns what should be a human rights consensus into a wedge issue that divides communities and emboldens racists and bigots.

The hypocrisy deepens when we examine specific leaders. Mark Carney, Doug Ford, François Legault, and their counterparts continue to deny Palestinians the full protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They refuse to recognize the inherent racism embedded in Zionist ideology—an ethno-supremacist framework that privileges one group’s national rights over another's in the same land, justifying dispossession, settler-colonialism, occupation, and now genocide.

These politicians speak of “shared values” and “two-state solutions” in platitudes, yet they block calls for accountability, label Palestinian solidarity as extremism, and equate anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a claim vehemently rejected by progressive Jewish organizations in Canada and the US. They meet with the leaders of legacy Jewish community organizations to condemn antisemitism while ignoring or marginalizing Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voices pleading for consistency. They fund anti-racism programs with one hand and undermine them with the other by refusing to apply Charter principles universally.

When sincere anti-hate advocates—civil society groups, scholars, and affected communities—offer concrete recommendations (stronger hate speech enforcement, independent oversight of policing, ending arms sales linked to genocide, public recognition of anti-Palestinian racism as a distinct category, and genuine consultation with impacted groups), the response is lip service. Photo-ops and press releases substitute for structural change. Leaders nod solemnly on March 21, then return to policies that protect the status quo.

Commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Racism under these conditions is political theatre. It costs nothing and changes nothing. It allows governments to virtue-signal while right-wing enablers stoke division, white supremacy groups organize openly, Islamophobia explodes, and the Gaza genocide’s spillover hatred festers unchecked. True commitment demands more--unequivocal condemnation of all racism, including the ethno-supremacist ideology driving the Gaza genocide—full Charter protections for all, accountability for foreign policy failures, and implementation of community recommendations rather than performative gestures.

Canadians deserve better than annual hypocrisy. Until governments match their anti-racism rhetoric with courage—confronting right-wing hate, addressing surging white supremacy and Islamophobia, and ending complicity in genocide abroad—the International Day will remain an empty ritual. Hate will not be eliminated by press releases and political platitudes. It requires moral consistency, political will, and the recognition that Palestinian rights are human rights. Anything less is mere theatre, not justice.

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