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National Post
a day ago
- Business
- National Post
Conrad Black: I put in a good word for Canada with Trump. If only Carney could do the same …
Article content The prime minister has admirably agreed to devote five per cent of GDP to national defence, an area that has been scandalously ignored since the retirement of former prime minister Brian Mulroney more than 30 years ago, even if much of that funding can be spent on projects that are only marginally connected to defence. As I've written here and elsewhere ad nauseam for decades, defence is the most economically productive form of public investment as it assists high technology manufacturing and research and the per capita personnel costs are relatively modest, and it is the most efficient adult education opportunity for the members of the Armed Forces. But five per cent of Canadian GDP is over $100 billion in a country overloaded with debt and taxes and running a chronic annual federal deficit. Article content The prime minister is conducting a rather prudish flirtation with pipelines, trying to reconcile the absolute necessity of increasing Canada's national income by satisfying some of the world's raging appetite for our oil and gas with years of his mad green jeremiads and fantasies, producing such inspired nostrums as Carney's concept of the carbon-neutral pipeline, as if it was proposed to deliver rosewater by pipeline to export markets or eastern Canada. There has been no hint of where the prime minister is leaning in budgetary terms but some hard choices are going to have to be made soon. Article content Article content The closest he has come to an executive decision so far is his shameful nonsense of threatening to recognize a Palestinian state run by the corrupt, enfeebled, completely inept, mistrusted and totally unrepresentative Palestinian Authority. It's quavering leader, 89-year-old longtime terrorist supporter Mahmoud Abbas, has made a lot of completely implausible claims of democratizing the bloodstained regime he inherited from Yasser Arafat, which has still not delivered anything of what it promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993, for which Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Hamas invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of Oct. 7, 2023, was intended to be, and was received as, an act of war, and Israel has largely won that war. There can be no peace until the Arab leaders in Gaza and the West Bank are prepared to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields and steals their food, and Israel has achieved a relatively low ratio for urban counter-guerrilla warfare of civilian-to-terrorist casualties. It was an error to have reduced food imports to Gaza between March and May that has now been corrected, but the Hamas terrorist operation must be exterminated to provide any possibility of peace for the Arabs or the Jews. Carney has done us no favours by tagging along behind the impotent posturing of the French and British, who, ever since the British promised the same territory to the Jews and Arabs at the same time in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, have never had any policy in the region except to await American initiatives and then posture as being better disposed to the Arabs. Article content Article content Mark Carney was elected on a false though imaginatively histrionic premise of imminent national danger from the United States. He took over the government that ran this great and rich country into a ditch of capital outflows, declining relative prosperity, slow growth, an unsustainably large public sector, an almost collapsed health-care system and a state of national defence so anemic we would have trouble fending off an attack from angry Greenlanders. Canada is a treasure house with a talented and motivated population and political institutions that have been generally successful though they're in need of renovation. Carney has been given a great opportunity and a great challenge, and it's almost show time. On his thin record, we are entitled to hope, but also to fear the worst. Article content Article content Article content
Bloomberg
20-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Why Energy Giant Aramco is Making a Big Bet on Tech
Aramco — a cornerstone of the oil-rich Saudi economy — is making a major move into high technology. Joumanna Bercetche went on an exclusive visit to Aramco's to learn more about the energy company's big bet on tech. (Source: Bloomberg)
