At least there were celebrations today. . .

But Canadians aren't happy. The Americans are in a tizzy. The French have gone mad. The Brits are changing guard. And Lebanon is on the brink.

I do hope you’ve had a happy Canada Day.

It has been my custom to resist the urge to become a miseryguts about the state of things. I’m trying to maintain that resistance, but the Canadian mood out there at the moment is very sour. At least Canada Day wasn’t made into a “day of mourning” again. So there’s that, I guess.

Here’s a rundown on some of the stories I’ve been working on, some of what’s upcoming, some things to know and some things to watch.

Busy dying, busy being born, barely surviving, but still. . .

Justin Trudeau is a dead man walking.

Already, Trudeau’s party was trailing the Conservatives in a steady descent that had put Pierre Poilieve’s Conservatives at 42 percent of the decided vote nationally to the Liberals’ 24 percent when the byelection polls closed in the 31-year Liberal fortress of Toronto-St. Paul’s last Monday night.

Conservative candidate Don Stewart emerged ahead of the Liberals’ Leslie Church, turning the 10,000-vote Liberal lead from 2021 into a 590-vote Conservative edge this time around. All week, it’s been like the death watch is officially underway. Trudeau has avoided all questions from reporters until today, when he had a friendly chat with the CBC. He insists he’s not leaving. “I am committed to doing the work of building a better Canada every single day,” he said.

We’ll come to what Canadians think about all that in just a minute.

Joe Biden is now on life support.

The Democrats have got a terrible problem on their hands. Unless President Biden can be made to concede and make way for a candidate who isn’t Kamala Harris, they’re probably inviting Donald Trump to return to the White House.

It might not be news to anyone closely watching the awful decline in the president’s mental acuity over the past four years or so, but during that wince-inducing debate with Trump, Biden displayed a diminished capacity that was too much, and just too awful to watch, for too many Democrats.

You know it’s bad when even the New York Times, the Democrats’ all-knowing arbiter of decorum and manners, settles on this official line, in an editorial-board editorial: To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.

So long, Rishi Sunak.

By April, net public satisfaction with the British prime minister had fallen to the worst showing of any of Sunak’s Conservative predecessors since John Major’s poll results in 1994. The Old Tories are tired and divided.

Keir Starmer is poised to win a Labour majority in this coming week’s British elections, marking a conclusive break with Labour’s disgraceful descent into Corbynism. Starmer will be picking up from where Gordon Brown left off in 2010.

Things could be worse.

My God. The French.

Emmanel Macron’s decision to call a snap election has revealed a likely result: He’s doomed. There’s always a chance that he’ll be able to cobble something together in a run-off vote to keep the creepy LePen at bay, but Zut, alors!

Here’s the irreplaceable Claire Berlinski: “The entire French political class has exploded in so furious an orgy of plotting, sniping, leaking, betraying, reputation-smearing, throat-slitting, purging, backstabbing, frontstabbing and sidestabbing that I truly wonder if any of them will be left alive at the end of this.”

We are Canadians, and we are not happy at all right now

This latest Canada Day Ipsos survey is quite distressing. Seven in 10 Canadians say “Canada is broken.” The sentiment is especially pronounced among younger Canadians, which should not be surprising. It has become practically impossible for almost all first-time prospective homebuyers to own a home. Rents are crushingly steep. G-d only knows how anybody can think about starting a family in Canada nowadays.

Fully 78 percent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 agree that “Canada is broken,” and only 66 percent of Liberals disagree with the idea. Thirty-five percent of Canadians say they’re less likely to feel proud to be Canadian than they were five years ago, while only 16 percent say they are more likely.

This, too, should not be surprising, given that the organizing principle of the Trudeau government has been firmly embedded in the standpoint that Canada is a genocidal and racist settler-state riven with systemic Islamophobia and structural patriarchy and mysogyny. How can you be proud of that?

Meanwhile, Canada’s Jews are feeling increasingly isolated, friendless and vulnerable. “It seems like every few weeks, a new synagogue is attacked or vandalized; Jewish and Israeli children are being routinely bullied; open supporters of Israel can find themselves doxxed online, their businesses boycotted or alienated from their industries. . .” Good podcast via the Canadian Jewish News here.

What I’ve been up to this past week

Mass graves? What mass graves? Missing children? Who’s missing?

I was on about all this again last Monday.

By way of immediate background, a month ago in the National Post I noticed that Ottawa and the Tk’emlúps First Nation leadership seemed to be quietly backing away from the incendiary and baseless claim that a “mass grave” had been discovered in an old apple orchard adjacent to the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential school.

That was the claim that allowed Prime Minister Trudeau to lower flags on all federal buildings for months on end and to plunge Canada into a national “George Floyd” psychotic episode of church burnings, riots, state-enforced historical revisionism and widespread lunacy. Much of the news media, shamefully, played along with it.

I quite exhaustively documented all that in The Year of the Graves. For conducting that effort in forensic journalism I was widely apprehended as having committed an unpardonable heresy, warranting my excommunication from the Canada Council and from polite society generally.

Anyway. . .

Last Easter, when the Tk’emlúps leadership entered into a Vatican-approved “sacred covenant” with the Vancouver Archdiocese and the Kamloops Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, nobody was allowed to see the text of the covenant itself. Then on Friday, June 21, to very little fanfare of any sort, the text of the covenant was released. It’s a fascinating and strange eight-page document.

I wrote a piece about it in last Monday’s National Post. I could have used several pages of the Post to really get into it. Long story short:

It may be the closest thing to an apology that Canada’s Roman Catholics are likely to hear for having been subjected to the paroxysms of hysterical bigotry that first erupted in May, 2021. One of Canada’s most gruesome urban legends was allowed to leap from the realm of ghastly conspiracy theory to the stuff of front-page headlines around the world. And all of it was nurtured and financed by the Trudeau Liberals, who further threatened to criminalize any backchat or impudent skepticism about any of it.

The idea of the covenant began among leading Tk’emlúps families who had become fed up, early on, with having to go along with stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates. The Easter covenant was the result of an intervention by the Catholic clergy, former Tk’emlúps chief Manny Jules and former national chief Phil Fontaine on behalf of Indigenous Catholics who’d had to sit there and shut up while their Catholic faith and their traditions were assaulted and their beloved churches were burned to the ground.

But there is a great deal more in the covenant than that. Apart from certain telltale contraditions that were impossible to expunge from the record, there is something quite remarkable, straight off the top. After four “Whereas” clauses the covenant gets right into it:

HISTORICAL PRECEDENT FOR A SACRED ACCORD 1. On June 2nd, 1537, Pope Paul the Third promulgated a bull relating to the rationality, souls, and rights to freedom and property of any Indigenous people encountered by Catholics in their universal mission. . .

What follows in the text thoroughly undermines what quite a few journalists in this country constructed with a fiction straight out of the Da Vinci Code. It involves the Vatican's mythical role in a non-existent "doctrine of discovery" that is alleged to have dispossessed Indigenous people in Canada.

A sampling of what is known in non-theological circles as bullshit:

CBC: An Indigenous scholar on why the Pope needs to address the Doctrine of Discovery. CBC’s ‘As It Happens’: Pope faces calls to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. Saskatchewan Leader-Post: Anthem at Pope’s Apology Serves As An Awakening. CBC: Gift of headdress to Pope draws condemnation from some First Nations people in Manitoba.

The 1493 papal bull that it has been fashionable to insist as having given rise to the genocidal "doctrine of discovery" and its attendant doctrine of terra nullius has been "repudiated" by the Vatican so many times, just over the past few decades, I can't count them. It was first repudiated in 1537, as the Easter covenant immediately admits.

On top of that, here’s the Supreme Court of Canada, from the Tsilhqot'in decision, a full decade ago: “The doctrine of terra nullius (that no one owned the land prior to European assertion of sovereignty) never applied in Canada, as confirmed by the Royal Proclamation (1763).”       

Real Story subscribers were treated to a jolly rollick through all this a while back: The Pope Has Magical Powers Now? Here we are in the 21st century and a defunct papal bull from 1493, repudiated centuries ago, is front-page news again.

Speaking of journalism that isn’t journalism. . .

Also in the National Post, on Friday, I made some effort to deaden the sound of the cheers and hurrahs that greeted the release of a certain insufferable celebrity cyber-vandal from London’s Belmarsh Prison.

All here in The Moral Indecency of Julian Assange. Summary version:

The Americans were pursuing an overbroad, unprecedented and chilling prosecution under the Espionage Act, and there’s nothing wrong with having hoped that the U.S. Justice Department would lose a battle pitting an antiquated notion of American national-security interests against free speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But that is not what happened here. What happened was a grubby plea deal that secured Assange’s admission of guilt in exchange for time served. But there is a silver lining. It’s in the way the Assange story helpfully exposes what you could call a global directory of creepy and intellectually slovenly politicians, activists and media personalities who can now be confidently dismissed as never deserving of any serious attention, ever again.

Meanwhile, Lebanon is on the brink

After all these months of rocket assaults from Hezbollahland, with 100,000 Israelis displaced from the Israeli-Lebanese border all this time and things up there getting uglier, it looks very much like the focus of the war is going to shift northward, of necessity, and it’s going to be really awful.

The Canadian military is working on contingency plans for an airlift of some kind for as many as 45,000 Canadian citizens in Lebanon. Israel’s Channel 12 reports that in a rather tense conversation with Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, our own Mélanie Joly said Canadian Forces planners were already in the region, making contingency plans for “the largest evacuation we have ever undertaken.”

The Saudis have advised their citizens in Lebanon “to depart the Lebanese territory immediately.” Australia is telling Aussies in Lebanon: Better get out while there are still flights available. The Netherlands has issued the same warning. Germany’s Foreign Ministry issued a similar travel warning, suggesting that German citizens get out as quickly as they can because “the situation at the border between Israel and Lebanon is very tense.” What an understatement that was. Kuwait has issued the same warning to its citizens: Get out of Lebanon, now.

Today, the U.S. embassy in Beirut was telling Americans to get out of the country as soon as practicable “in view of the security situation taking place in the region," noting that escape routes appear to be shutting down fairly rapidly. Swiss International Airlines AG (Lufthansa, Swiss, and Eurowings) are “adjusting flight schedules” already, “resulting in some cases in short-notice flight cancellations.”

All for now.