“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.”

The tariffs announced last night by President Trump on many Canadian goods are being imposed under s.338 of the so-called Smoot Hawley Act. They have not been used in 96 years in this way.

They have been imposed by Presidential proclamation, which is how Trump rolls and rules these days.

As the members of the Canadian delegation comes home this morning, they can hold their heads high. Canada couldn’t sign a deal the Americans tried to change at the last minute. Ask anyone who has done business with Donald Trump. That’s how he does it. It can’t work.

There will be lots of time to second guess what happened. But we need to come together as we have never done before.

We cannot succumb to tyranny, to the use of aged statutes that have not been used for a century. Trump is now our George III. Our American friends have to understand this. We are not Belarus. We are a real country that was ready to do a deal - and still is - for both parties but not prepared to put up with these “knavish tricks”.

More on this in a few days in the book I have edited - “Reclaiming Canadian Sovereignty in a Ruptured World”. You can order it now.

By Bob Rae 

July 30, 2026

Losing the United States as a critical leader and ally in the fight for democracy has presented Canadians with a new set of challenges.

The first one is emotional. Ever since the election of Franklin Roosevelt as President of the United States in 1932, the expansion of American culture through radio, film, and television, the postwar decline of the British Empire, and the arrival here in waves of people from around the world, Canadians have forged a connection to the U.S. that transcends politics, military alliances, and economic ties.

For the past century, America has been in our heads, and, yes, in our hearts.

Donald Trump’s election brought to power in the United States someone who, in addition to his other flaws and idiosyncrasies, has shown nothing but contempt for America’s independent neighbour to the North. It’s not that he’s just not that into us. He has demonstrated open hostility. We could take indifference. We can’t take hostility.

Beyond that sense of emotional loss is the reality that we’re not alone in being treated this way. President Trump has demonstrated an ability and willingness to alienate countries, values, and interests that have been foundational to American foreign policy since the Second World War.

The United Nations, NATO, development policy, trade policy, human rights policy: go down the list, the United States under Trump hasn’t just forfeited its global role, it has altered the alchemy of geopolitical power.

When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, the new American delegation at the United Nations made a point of saying “We’re back”. Given the severity of the first rupture, we had to make a point of saying, “Let us see how we can work together”. But even then, it was clear that America was not completely back, and that the rest of us had already developed a healthy scepticism.

Unfortunately, that scepticism did not produce a stronger commitment to fashion the kind of robust response to aggression, backsliding, and prevarication that could, for example, have delivered a knockout blow to the Russians in Ukraine, or mobilized the kind of financial and economic imagination that would have created the momentum for positive global change.

We waited for the Americans to lead, and yet it was clear that the Biden administration and NATO under their leadership was only going to provide some support for Ukraine, “for as long as it takes”, without recognizing that the reason it was taking so long was because there was a deep and shared belief that the purpose of the exercise was to help but not to push for victory.

The autocrats of the world are united as never before, and the United States under Donald Trump has left our team for theirs.

I have been saying this since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When I do, people ask me, “Are you saying NATO and the U.S. should enter the war directly against Russia?” The answer is no. We should allow Ukraine to defend itself. And self-defence means taking the war to the aggressor. That’s what Article 51 of the Charter sets out.

There was more fear and caution than vision in the Biden White House, and every ally was stuck in the same mode. This was apparent not just in the slowness in moving beyond the dreary consensus among the UK, the U.S., and Germany in response to Ukraine’s plight, but in the weak global response to COVID, the cuts to foreign assistance, and the deep global challenges we continue to face.

The shock of the second Trump term, with all of the corruption, nastiness, and incompetence it has brought with it should now be fully behind us. And while Canadians are feeling more united and galvanized in our response to what Donald Trump is doing to us, it is critically important that in our efforts to reclaim our sovereignty in this ruptured world, we realize that democracy’s struggle goes well beyond our national borders.

We do indeed need to reclaim our sovereignty, and the book I have just finished editing will, I hope, provide some impetus for further action. (Published by Lorimer, with the title Reclaiming Canadian Sovereignty in a Ruptured World, coming September 9th). But in addition to reclaiming our own sovereignty, we need to embrace a broader fight that is happening around the world. We have to answer the question, “Sovereignty for what?” It can’t just be for ourselves.

The autocrats of the world are united as never before, and the United States under Donald Trump has left our team for theirs. On every issue you can name — global inequality, better trading relationships, sexual and reproductive rights, cultural policy, immigration, climate change, nuclear proliferation — go down the list, what President Trump and his team want to do at home and in the world has nothing to do with what most Canadians, and our government, believe in and want to accomplish.

We are afraid to admit this, because we are afraid that if we say it too clearly, we will be punished by the American government—the sort of classic autocratic truth chill that, ironically, only underscores the seriousness of where we are with the former democratic superpower next door.

My call is not for an impulsive response. Rather it is for a response that is measured, as all such policies must be, by a strong sense of the consequences that can follow any decision, but also by a sense that our struggle is part of an all-important global struggle for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.

Real leadership in fighting for democracy is something we should embrace.

This means assessing what it will take to sustain democratic institutions, just as we did when we embraced the Atlantic Charter in 1942. We are not in the same kind of war now, but nonetheless our values and interests are being threatened as never before.

We never believed our American cousins would be the perpetrators of these threats, but here we are.

Policy Columnist Bob Rae teaches and writes on law and public policy. He is the Visitor of Massey College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, a Senior Fellow at the Forum of Federations, and a Matthews Fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. He served as Ontario’s 21st Premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

Bob Rae July 18 2026 / Gathering at Portland Community Centre

When the ceremonial sod to mark the beginning of the construction of the Rideau Canal was turned at the tiny village of Bytown in 1826, there were only a few houses in the area where three rivers met. A small number of people - Lieutenant Colonel John By, the Earl of Dalhousie, the surveyors who had been given an idea of the plan, and the masons whose work was to become a lasting hallmark - were aware of the ambition of the project, and the challenges that lay ahead.

Like all projects, it starts with a vision,  And all visions are framed by history.  The land we are standing on now was home for thousands of years to be the Algonquin and other indigenous peoples, and they were well aware of the trading routes that linked the valley of the St Lawrence to the valley of the Ottawa, and how the Rideau River and its lakes were a portage route to Lake Ontario and then to Lake Simcoe and points north.

When the British battles with the French were settled by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, a new map emerged that created a border along the St Lawrence, and then vast territories to the west of the mountain chain that kept the American colonial governments along the Atlantic Coast.  This was confirmed by the Royal Proclamation and the Quebec Act of 1774.  After the Revolutionary War, a new border was crafted in 1783 that gave the Americans the lands south of the Great Lakes, with the British retaining the area to the North.

The Americans had occupied Montreal and attempted to seize Quebec in the winter of 1775-1776. That was unsuccessful and they had to retreat back across Lake Champlain.  But the American ambition to invade and take over Canada  did not disappear, and the War of 1812 was fought at least in part because of their ambition to take the entire continent.

What had changed in the years between 1783 and 1812 was that Loyalist settlers from the United States had come in the tens of thousands to make their homes in Quebec, the Atlantic Provinces, and, of course what is now called Ontario.  Upper Canada was created in 1791, and a government was formed.  The population was small, but determined to defend itself from yet another attack from the south.

The war that broke out in 1812 was fought in good part on the Great Lakes, and, again, American attempts to defeat the coalition of Loyalists, French Canadians, indigenous people and the British army were unsuccessful.

These two experiences of American expansionism had created a strong desire on the part of this coalition to deter the United States from a third round. An independent Canada did not exist at that time, but the reality of communities with a growing sense of identity was beginning to flourish. The idea of building the Canal was an integral part of defending Canada, and its feasibility was based on the knowledge and experience of indigenous guides and elders who insisted that the Rideau waterway was a well beaten path that was the logical basis of a bigger project.  It must be said that the contribution of indigenous people to the mapping and surveying of the canal is something we should continue to acknowledge.

The design called for the building of 47 locks, its high point at Rideau Lake. The decision was made to build a lock at a channel in the northwest corner of the lake, allowing for the creation of two lakes, “Upper” and “Lower” or “Little” and “Big”, ( depending on your point of view), and using the deep channel on the PreCambrian shield to be the pivotal source of water to the southwest and the east.

The Canal took six years to complete.  Its construction was difficult, and required working in the most difficult of conditions.  Many people died, not from cold, but from heat, bugs, and disease.  Their cemeteries can be found along many points along the route of the canal. Their sacrifice must never be forgotten.

Like almost all infrastructure projects, it cost more than originally projected.  The Duke of Wellington believed in its military necessity, and was protective of it, but then, as now, partisan politics led to an insistence on a full parliamentary review, with many personal attacks being lodged against Colonel By, who died a few short years after the project was completed.  In his lifetime Colonel By was fully exonerated by the parliamentary committee, and while the cost of 850,000 pounds was a lot of money in those days, the Canal was a marvel of engineering in its time, and built to last.

The canal does not play a military or trading role today, but its value for tourism and linking up the Valley in a remarkable and beautiful way is well established.  It is designated as a World Heritage Site by the UN Agency UNESCO.

At the parish church in the village of Frant, Sussex, where John By is buried, there is a plaque that states “Zealous and distinguished in his profession, tender and affectionate as a husband and a father, and lamented by the poor…this stone is erected by his afflicted widow, in remembrance of every virtue that could endear a husband, a father, and a friend.”

At the time it was built, the Rideau Canal was the largest infrastructure project in the British Empire and in North America.   We can trace its origins both to our indigenous inheritance, and to the determination to stand on guard for our values and our national identity.  We should be proud as Canadians to celebrate this moment in our history.

Ahakista is a picturesque Irish hamlet located 100 km west of Cork on the Sheep’s Head peninsula. Its population is so close to a handful that Wikipedia doesn’t list a count. And if not for the events of June 23rd, 1985, its claim to fame would be the primarily local one of the annual Ahakista Regatta, held every August.

But the people of Ahakista and its neighbouring towns are a steadfast link in the circle of grief with the families of those who perished when Air India Flight 182 exploded 30,000 feet above the North Atlantic. While the crash site was 180 km off the coast, Ahakista was the village the families — mostly Canadian — gravitated to in the days and weeks that followed as a place where they could await news of recovery and toss wreaths into the sea in memory of their loved ones.

So, Ahakista has become an unlikely international dateline and ground-zero memorial for the worst act of terrorism ever committed against Canadians, and the cascading, generational tragedy it unleashed. And the people who live there take that responsibility very seriously.

Because this year marked the 40th anniversary of the tragedy, the memorial ceremonies were more elaborate, more heavily attended and drew people from farther afield than most years.

It was a powerful weekend of remembrance, with local dignitaries, representatives of the Irish, Indian and Canadian governments and family members of the victims all gathered by the sea.

To recall, on that day 40 years ago, bombs were placed on planes heading west and east from Vancouver. The western flight killed two baggage handlers at Narita Airport in Japan. The eastern flight stopped in Mirabel, and the bags were transferred to the ongoing flight, Air India 182, bound for London, Delhi and Mumbai. That plane, called Kanishka”, blew up in midair, killing all 329 passengers and crew.

There was a powerful humanitarian and rescue operation conducted by hundreds of search and rescue professionals and volunteers, and the families were welcomed and cared for by the local communities. Canadian consular officials, diplomats and intelligence and police officers from Dublin, Ottawa and all over Europe also converged on the area.

The Akahista Flight 182 Memorial/Courtesy Bob Rae

Air India Flight 182 carries special significance for me. When I was asked to review Canada’s response to the tragedy in 2005, I began my own journey of truth and reconciliation.

My mandate from Minister of Public Safety Anne McClellan was to meet with the families after two individuals charged with responsibility for the bombing were acquitted by a British Columbia Judge after a long trial. In another trial, one individual was charged with involvement in building the bomb, but he had refused to co-operate in providing further information and also spent time in jail for perjury.

I was ably assisted by two young public servants, Taleeb Noormohamed and Michelle Semple. They have since married. Taleeb is now the Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville and Michelle is a successful lawyer. David Lederman of Goodman LLP also provided valuable legal advice.

The mandate took us across the country, visiting with families, police, government officials, prosecutors, lawyers, security experts, provincial leaders and security experts in London and Washington.

The families felt that their loss and struggle over twenty years had never been sufficiently recognized by their government and Canadian public opinion more broadly. Because the bomb brought the plane down thousands of miles from Canada, because it took so long for justice to clarify the cause of the catastrophe, and because the victims were brown and not white, of Indian and not European extraction, an “othering” of the tragedy took place. Canadians never really processed it as “our” trauma. Years later, in 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for all of the sins that compounded the devastating loss of so many on that day.

It took years for the government to conclude that the cause of the midair explosion was a bomb. Expert inquiries were launched to deal with issues of airport security. The police investigation both before and after the bombing was bedeviled by the recent split between the RCMP and CSIS, the new security agency established as a result of the McDonald Inquiry into RCMP activities. With the Cold War still a preoccupation, resources to deal with domestic extremism were inadequate, despite many warning signs that security threats were becoming more diverse and more complex.

The Irish Coast Guard pays its respects/Courtesy Bob Rae

My report, Lessons to be Learned, was published by the federal government in late November 2005. It documented the failures of agencies to see the warning signs of increased radicalism and extremism within the Canadian Sikh community as a result both of internal tensions and the political situation in India. Failure to share information between CSIS and the RCMP, and between government departments reflected on a fatal dependence on silos and outdated doctrines of “need to know”, as opposed to “need to share”.

Surveillance of key suspects was not consistently pursued. Resources were thin. Punjabi translation of a key intercept was late in coming. A bag was checked without a passenger boarding. Sniffer dogs were not used on bags at Mirabel and other equipment was broken. As I wrote in the report “everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong”.

But the questions I raised in my report, and Justice Jack Major reinforced in his much more complete public inquiry about why it took so long for Canadian governments to fully embrace the tragedy as a major Canadian disaster, where Canadian lives were lost because of a criminal conspiracy carried out by Canadians on our own soil, remain. Justice Major’s inquiry made findings and recommendations similar to mine, but only some were implemented. Our common conclusion was that a national calamity had not been sufficiently embraced as our own, with real consequences for ourselves and others.

In carrying out my work, I spent time in both Washington and London to discuss directly the experience of our allies. The Americans were preoccupied by the events of 9/11. They had barely heard of the Air India event. Yet many of the conclusions I was coming to — the failure to realize that the well-worn habits of the Cold War did not address the more diverse and dangerous world of insecurity we were living in, the absence of a truly diverse intelligence service that could deal with “homegrown terrorism” in a new way, the dangers of violent extremism in a wide range of communities, the need to break down the barriers between police forces and intelligence units that led to rivalries and crossed wires and a failure to read the signals — forced me to realize that Canada’s failure to embrace the full horror of what had happened, to share conclusions with other intelligence and police agencies, and other tough conclusions about what could only be described as a true system failure meant that what should have been a hard lesson for the world was allowed to be forgotten.

Meeting British officials made me realize that the challenges of dealing with the violence in Northern Ireland since the 1970s had forced intelligence, military, and policing to work together more closely, to understand the “need to share” as opposed to the “need to know”, and to deepen political commitment to engaging with security and intelligence issues at the most senior levels of government on a consistent and fully organized basis.

Paul Martin became the first Prime Minister to meet with the families of the Flight 182 victims, and he quickly realized that this had to be a long meeting. It started at 5 in the evening and went well into the wee hours of the morning. He then flew to Ireland with the families to attend the 20th anniversary of the bombing and asked me to make recommendations on how we should commemorate the bombing in Canada. My advisor Taleeb Noormohamed worked with families and provincial and municipal governments across the country to ensure that we were able to create monuments and places of remembrance across the country. June 23 is now a nationally recognized Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism.

Nowhere is that day recognized more fully and with greater feeling than on the southwest coast of Ireland, where the bodies were found and identified.

In Ahakista with families’ advocate Lata Pada

Lata Pada’s late husband and daughters

As the years since the atrocity have passed, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know many of the victims’ family members, including families’ spokesperson Lata Pada, the renowned Bharatanatyam dancer who channelled the grief of losing her husband and two daughters into founding and running the foremost Indian dance academy in Canada.

This year, it was extraordinary to feel the emotion and connection among families that have gathered every year at the memorial site in Ahakista, and to admire the monument that has been so lovingly maintained by the local community. Among the mourners this June 23rd was a 41-year-old woman who was just a baby when her mother was taken in one monstrous moment above the ocean. Her loss was still palpable.

A choir from the local school sang a heart-wrenching rendition of Let it Be and, on pennywhistles, Morning Has Broken. Scholarships were given to local students by the Air India families. Over the weekend before Monday’s ceremony, there were quiet dinners shared and reminiscences of all that happened in the days after bodies were discovered and brought ashore.

Of course, it is only right that the site of the accident, thousands of miles away from homes across Canada, should be an emotional centre for all the memories of what happened. But what is not right is the ongoing failure to understand the deep significance of this event in our lives as Canadians. The biggest lessons, that hate was allowed to turn to violence without effective intervention, that security is not someone else’s problem, but very much ours, that a loss of this dimension (per capita larger than 9/11) is one that all Canadians, and indeed a much wider community, need to join those families that still feel they have been asked to bear this largely alone and apart from their fellow Canadians.

It is never too late to improve and deepen our understanding and response. The 40th anniversary was a good beginning. Both Canada and India were represented by senior ministers. Ireland’s Prime Minister spoke at the ceremony and spent time with the families and the responders. It was the largest gathering in many years. Going forward, the leaders of our country need to continue to set an example, by understanding better what happened, with all its consequences, and then taking this event and turning it into a learning moment for our whole country.

Children need to be taught about this in school. The price of freedom and security is not just eternal vigilance. It is also eternal recognition, and eternal memory. This moment must be etched deeply and permanently into our history and our lives. “Closure” is a gimmicky word in these circumstances. Wounds heal with time and care, but deep scars and memories remain.

We now have five monuments for the tragedy. The words below remain with me, engraved in stone in Ahakista, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Let us embrace them and commit to the actions we know we must take, not with bitterness, but with determination to learn and do better.

“Time flies, suns rise and shadows fall. Let it pass. Love reigns forever over all.”

As the G7 leaders and invited guests gather this week in Evian, it is worth recalling an earlier conference held in the same town 88 years ago. It is not a direct comparison by any means.  But it is a way of recollecting our collective failures as well as our current challenges. One of the panellists on the Canadian podcast, “Red Passport”, discusses this point as well.

The Evian Conference was held in July of 1938 at the instigation of U. S. President Franklin Roosevelt.  He wanted it to be near Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, but not in Geneva because the U.S. had rejected joining the League two decades before. Thirty-two countries and 24 observer groups attended, and it had only one agenda item: Jewish migration.

Nazi Germany's racist discrimination against its Jewish population was intensifying.  The Nuremberg laws stripping Jews of their citizenship and criminalizing intermarriage were followed by employment bans in public institutions, seizure of property, and racist boycotts.

The Nazi takeover of Austria, called the Anschluss, was completed in the spring of 1938, immediately intensifying the pressure on the country's Jewish population. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the knot was tightening.

Jewish migration was at a trickle, because of the resistance of so many countries to accepting them.  As Prime Minister Carney reminded us in his speech at Holy Blossom Temple earlier this month, the CS St. Louis, the ship that travelled the globe in vain search for sanctuary, symbolized the number of ports, gates, and hearts that were closed to the grim reality of anti-Semitic repression.

Legal Jewish immigration to Palestine was limited by the British, who only agreed to come to Evian if Palestine was kept off the agenda.

After nine days, the Evian Conference of 1938 was a major failure. Only the Dominican Republic was willing to increase its quota of Jewish refugees. Everyone else, including Canada, made it clear that high unemployment and “lack of absorptive capacity” made it politically impossible to change restrictive policies.  These arguments have, tragically, their echos today.

The Nazis and their antisemitic allies in Europe and elsewhere rejoiced in the catastrophe that was the 1938 Evian Conference. Hitler's typically cruel and cynical response was, essentially, “Don’t blame us for wanting to force out the Jews — you don’t want them either.”

The Evian conference of 1938 was — as U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale said in a speech to the 1979 United nations Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva — "a test of civilization". Civilization failed. Hitler had his answer, and the world's Jews tragically had theirs.

The Munich Agreement followed two months later. Czechoslovakia was dismembered, its own Jews targeted, and in November, the violence of Kristallnacht in Germany still did not ignite the conscience of the world.  The planning for the so-called “Final Solution” began in 1940, and the Holocaust that took 6 million lives was the result.

This time in Evian, President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to revive the “original vocation” of the G7. This will be difficult, to put it politely, given the rupture that has been so well described by Prime Minister Carney.  There is no direct comparison between 1938 and 2026, except for this: collective security collapsed in the 1930’s, and the current crisis in multilateralism has yet to find a resolution. There is also a global refugee crisis that is being met with indifference and hostility in many countries.

The G7 has gone from roughly two thirds of the world economy in the mid 70’s to under half today, while China alone has gone from about a fortieth of global GDP at the same time to nearly one fifth today.  Humility and not bravado would seem to called for in the current circumstance.

In 1938, the chosen antidote to aggression was appeasement. Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — in his BBC Radio address of January 20, 1940, the act of feeding the crocodile in the hopes it will eat you last.

The challenge to the G7 is to understand fully the nature of the current crisis: the ongoing wrecking of multilateralism by Donald Trump, a growing inequality which is undermining trust in both national and international institutions (such as the G7), and the AI revolution which thus far is gathering steam without either governance or accountability.

We shall see if any of these are mentioned in the communique on Wednesday June 17.

Canada’s position is incomparably stronger than it was in 1938.  Prime Minister Carney is at least articulating the central reality that surround us:  a rupture in the global order that has created unprecedented uncertainty, and the possibility of an alternative path both nationally and internationally that can create security where none really exists.  He wants liberal democracies to lead in fighting for this new agenda.

But there is a risk that the G7 agenda, as it is currently framed, will fail to meet the moment of the global economic challenge.  The G7 preparatory track produced, on April 30, the G7 Financing for Development: Framework for Promoting Health Sovereignty Financing and Self-Reliance, a New G7 Approach to Economic Corridors, and a Declaration of Ministers of Development and Ministers of Finance on Domestic Resource Mobilization. Read those titles as Orwell would. “Health sovereignty financing and self-reliance” and “domestic resource mobilization” sound too much like the donor walking away while telling the recipient that funding their own survival is a form of dignity. The word doing the concealing is “self-reliance.”

The Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign assistance and the G7 is at great risk  of joining the messages to the world  that “you’re on your own two feet” and “you’re not welcome here”.  It is certainly true that much has changed in the global economy since Lester Pearson’s groundbreaking “Partners in Development”.  The rise of China and India and other rapidly growing economies did, in fact, require a dramatic political commitment to increased domestic savings and investment.  There is a need for reform and change.

Partnership is still required, both for humanitarian assistance and the need for capital investment in the poorest countries. So far the response from the G7, despite evidence of growing need, has been to retreat.

The global refugee and migration crisis today is not confined to one race, religion, or continent - it is now truly global and requires engagement, and not abandonment.  We are paying a price in human life and well being that is undeniably linked to the decision to take a chain saw to the ties that have knit the world together over the past 80 years.

We abandon solidarity at our peril. That is where the comparison with 1938 holds up. Lessons to be learned.

Historic perspective: Bob Rae at the Citadel in Quebec City

By Bob Rae

May 25, 2026

We are living through a moment when our democracy, unity, and international engagement are once again being tested.

In the last week alone, I’ve spoken at the Together/Ensemble conference in Calgary on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, followed by the Democratic Engagement Exchange dialogue on the state of Canada’s democratic health.

The bad news is that our politics seems precarious. The good news is that the appetite for dialogue and public discourse has never seemed higher.

This past weekend, my wife Arlene and I were in Quebec City, honoured to join the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference.

It was an intensive three days of animated discussion on all the topics Canadians in general and Policy writers and readers in particular have been debating — from sustainable prosperity, to resilience amid volatility, to Canada’s place in the world, to leadership and security (my panel).

While this was unfolding in the province that has taught itself and us so much about the darkness and light of nationalism, the subject that preoccupied us beyond the official agenda was Alberta.

Premier Danielle Smith’s announcement last Thursday that she would include a question that could unleash an independence referendum on Alberta’s pre-scheduled October 19th referendum has now become the most urgent threat to Canada’s future.

It follows a complex process in which competing citizen campaigns for petition signatures for and against independence unfolded over many months.

The decision by the province’s Chief Electoral Officer to validate a referendum on Alberta independence was overturned on May 13th by Justice Shaina Leonard, who upheld the arguments of Indigenous groups that the Crown’s duty to consult could not be avoided by the Alberta government ahead of any independence referendum.

This is the second such decision by an Alberta court, and the second time the Premier has responded by insisting that to allow “Trudeau-appointed judges” to subvert the “will of the people” was anti-democratic.

These arguments are not new, either in Alberta or elsewhere, and this is not the first time that provincial governments with authoritarian tendencies have been curbed by the courts.

Among the most notorious laws of the Alberta Social Credit government, first elected in 1935, was its requirement that newspapers issue a “correction” and reveal their sources if the government concluded that stories were untrue. In Quebec, Maurice Duplessis’ government shut down, with its “padlock law” publications deemed to be “subversive” or “bolshevist”.

The Orwellian nature of this abuse of majority power was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Court’s decisions in these (and other) cases were important precursors to the unanimous Supreme Court opinion on the Quebec Secession Reference in 1998.

That opinion stands firmly for the principle that in a constitutional, federal democracy, minority rights matter, and even a majority vote in a provincial referendum cannot override these protections. The rule of law means that the law is above us all.

This applies to Canada particularly, because we are a federal country, and because Section 35 of the Constitution Act was designed to make it clear that “existing aboriginal and treaty rights” were specifically protected.

This reality led to a body of Supreme Court decisions (including the 1973 Calder case recognizing Aboriginal title, which predates patriation) that have recognized that neither federal nor provincial governments can ignore the existence of indigenous people whose presence predates the arrival of European explorers and settlers.

The myth of terra nullius — that somehow Canada was the land of no one before first contact — was exploded.

Compared with the richness and complexity of a country created with what Saskatchewan Deputy Attorney General John Whyte described in his oral submission to the Supreme Court in the Quebec Secession Reference as “the threads of a thousand acts of accommodation”, it should be clear that a populism that fails to recognize the dignity of difference is more a variant of authoritarianism than a form of democracy.

This is the fight we are now in, at home and around the world.

Governor General Mary Simon, coming to the end of her term of office, reminded participants in Quebec City of the challenges facing both Canada and the world, including climate change and the pressures on Arctic nations and communities. I have had the pleasure of working with her since the constitutional discussions of the early 1980’s. Her wisdom and thoughtfulness prevailed above the passionate debate.

‘The 1943 Quebec Conference’ by Reginald Hubert Rogers, on display at the Citadel

Visiting the Citadel, I was also reminded that in August of 1943, a young diplomat named Saul Rae — in whose footsteps I followed half a century later as ambassador to the United Nations — looked on as Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mackenzie King reaffirmed their commitment to the Atlantic Charter and agreed on preparations for the D-Day Normandy landings. My father would leave Canada shortly thereafter for Algiers, where he served with General Vanier at Canada’s mission to the Free French.

In what I’ve been writing, reading and saying recently, I keep running into Roosevelt as the immortal exemplar of American leadership whose contrast against the current incumbent remains a powerful source of moral clarity.

In January 1944, a few months after that first of two wartime Quebec conferences, President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address laid out for his fellow Americans and the world the inextricable connections among the timeless themes of sustainable prosperity, national resilience, free trade, leadership and security — “economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of nations.”

“The best interests of each nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving Nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace,” President Roosevelt said. “In the present world situation… unquestioned military control over disturbers of the peace is as necessary among nations as it is among citizens in a community. And an equally basic essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all Nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.

“There are people who burrow through our nation like unseeing moles and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.

The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power — and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighbouring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense.”

The same pathologies of isolationism, protectionism and authoritarian bullying surround us today, as they have in the most difficult days of our past.

Canadians are not only facing a wave of tactical populism from a rogue American president, we are facing it at home as well. Appeasing it at home makes as little sense as does appeasing the predatory hegemons once again bedeviling humanity.

We are at an especially challenging moment. We have to recognize that the rights and freedoms we take for granted in Canada are actually shared by different governments — federal, provincial, Indigenous — as well as by each of us as individuals.

As King, Roosevelt and Churchill knew, the real task of leadership is not just counting heads. It is turning heads. Faced with the lying machines in our hands, our task today is to counter with truth. Polls change. Heads turn. Truth matters.

As there was in a previous era of malignant autocratic madness harrowing nations across continents, there is a rational, morally and intellectually honest discourse unfolding — in Calgary, in Quebec City, in rooms and on platforms across Canada and beyond.

I could not be more grateful to be a part of it.

Policy Columnist Bob Raeteaches and writes on law and public policy. He is the Visitor of Massey College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, a Senior Fellow at the Forum of Federations, and a Matthews Fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. He served as Ontario’s 21st Premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

My stay in Kingston included an enjoyable visit with an old friend, Art Milnes — historian, journalist, speech writer, and a source of continuing inspiration. Art asked me to join him one afternoon on a walking tour of the university. Our first stop was right outside the School of Policy Studies, where I was teaching.

Next door were the grounds of the old Richardson Stadium where Franklin Delano Roosevelt received an honorary degree on the afternoon of August 18th, 1938. The speech marked such a key moment in history that Art used it as the anchor of his book, In Roosevelt’s Bright Shadow: Presidential Addresses About Canada from Taft to Obama in Honour of FDR’s 1938 Speech at Queen’s University.

That day, FDR was joined by Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the Governor General of the day, Lord Tweedsmuir, better known as the writer and scholar John Buchan (author of The 39 Steps, which became an Alfred Hitchcock film).

Roosevelt had not had to travel far, just a short trip up the Hudson Valley from Hyde Park. Roosevelt knew Canada and Canadians well, especially from his summers in New Brunswick, on Campobello Island.

Think of the moment. Roosevelt was a firm opponent of appeasement, and it was clear to him that the ambitions of fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini would only come to one conclusion: war in Europe.

As a younger man, Roosevelt had been a strong follower of President Woodrow Wilson and a supporter of the League of Nations. He was the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 1920, an election he lost to an isolationist Republican Party led by Warren Harding, who would go on to lead one of the most corrupt presidencies in American history (I said “one of the most” — we’ll get to the “most” in a moment.)

That day at Queen’s, Roosevelt strode to the podium, flashed his famous grin and said: “The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.”

Roosevelt said many wise things in his speech at Queen’s that stand in marked contrast to the Trumpian rhetoric of today.

Yes, the contrast with our current bilateral dynamic is inescapable.

At the time, Roosevelt’s comment made many headlines because it signalled that he was trying to penetrate the prevailing isolationist mindset and speak directly about the common interest between our two countries. He knew Canada was seen positively in the United States and could use that bridge to prepare Americans for what was to come.

Roosevelt said many wise things in his speech at Queen’s that stand in marked contrast to the Trumpian rhetoric of today.

“Civilization, after all, is not national — it is international,” Roosevelt said as the most uncivilized chapter in human history loomed, “even though that observation, trite as it is to most of us, seems to be challenged in some parts of the world today.”

Addressing what now seems like the downright rudimentary role of lies and propaganda in the rise of fascism, Roosevelt articulated a paradigm that, factoring in technological innovation, could just as easily apply today:

“Ideas are not limited by territorial borders, they are the common inheritance of all free people…of all the devastations of war none is more tragic than the destruction it brings to the processes of men’s minds. Truth is denied because emotion pushes its aside. Forbearance is succeeded by bitterness. In that atmosphere, human thought cannot advance.”

Roosevelt also took the time to stress the importance of openness and candour in the conduct of diplomacy between our two countries. He emphasized that “We maintain our own rights with frankness because we refuse to accept the twists of secret diplomacy, because we settle our disputes by consultation and because we discuss our common problems in the spirit of the public good.”

There would be differences, and expressions of opinion on all sides.

“We cannot prevent our people on either side of the border from having an opinion in regard to wanton brutality, in regard to undemocratic regimentation, in regard to misery inflicted on helpless peoples, or in regard to violations of accepted individual rights…that is what we mean when we say that public opinion ultimately governs policy. It is right and just that this should be the case.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Queen’s University on August 18th, 1938/Queen’s University

Roosevelt’s great challenge was moving American public opinion to a deeper understanding of the fascist threat in Europe. He was confronting the America First movement led by Charles Lindbergh, and that prevented him from doing more to stop the outbreak of war in September of 1939.

But bilateral diplomacy between Canada and the United States deepened at this time and led to a bold move between Roosevelt and King, and their governments.

On September 10th, 1939, Canada declared war on Germany following Hitler’s unilateral invasion of Poland.

Every effort was being made to overcome the low defence expenditures that marked the years between 1918 and 1939, but mobilization was facing its challenges. King and Roosevelt decided to build on what Roosevelt had discussed publicly in his Kingston speech, and what both sides had been discussing privately since then.

On August 17th, 1940, nearly two years later to the day from Roosevelt’s address at Queen’s, Prime Minister King was driven down to Ogdensburg, New York, 100 km south of Ottawa.

There, he was met by Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who had come up by train. They talked through dinner in Roosevelt’s private railway car, and kept going through the evening.

The conversation was cordial and practical. Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted to make good on the commitment he had made in Kingston two years before, and that he had specific ideas on joint efforts to protect the St. Lawrence River, the security of Newfoundland and the Eastern Seaboard of both Canada and the United States.

A Gallup Poll taken in November 1940 revealed that 83.8% of Americans supported the establishment of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence.

They then proceeded to draft five short paragraphs on what should happen next. This would be known as the “Ogdensburg Declaration”. It was released on Sunday, August 18, 1940, the second anniversary of Roosevelt’s Queen’s convocation address.

Here is the wording:

“The Prime Minister and the President have discussed the mutual problems of defence in relation to the safety of Canada and the United States.

It has been agreed that a Permanent Joint Board on Defence shall be set up at once by the two countries.

This Permanent Joint Board on Defence shall commence immediate studies relating to sea, land, and air problems including personnel and material.

It will consider in the broad sense the defence of the north half of the Western Hemisphere.

The Permanent Joint Board on Defence will consist of four or five members from each country, most of them from the services. It will meet shortly.”

The American Institute of Public Opinion in Princeton New Jersey had been following closely the evolution of public opinion on the war. Coincidentally, my father Saul had, after completing his doctorate at the London School of Economics on “Public Opinion and Its Measurement” and doing a post-doc term at Oxford, joined George Gallup in Princeton to work on precisely this subject from 1939 to 1940, when he joined the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa.

A Gallup Poll taken in November 1940 revealed that 83.8% of Americans supported the establishment of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which followed a June 1940 poll where 81% of Americans supported sending troops to Canada in the event of a foreign attack.  It is important to recognize, by way of contrast, that in April of 1941 two thirds of Americans polled opposed sending troops to Great Britain.

After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt said “a state of war exists” between the United States and the Japanese Empire. Germany soon declared war on the United States, not the other way around.

We are now a long way from the spirit of Ogdensburg.

The announcement this week from the Trump administration that it is unilaterally “suspending” its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (or Defense, to Americans) after 88 years opens a new source of contention between our two countries.

Above all, it serves as a potent reality check from a country whose geopolitical loyalties have been shifting for years from the rules-based order that reflected Roosevelt’s values to the autocratic one that offends them all.

Policy Columnist Bob Raeteaches and writes on law and public policy. He is the Visitor of Massey College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, a Senior Fellow at the Forum of Federations, and a Matthews Fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. He served as Ontario’s 21st Premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. This piece originally appeared in Policy Magazine

We walked for two wonderful days, one windy, one calm, joked, laughed, and cried a bit. I am posting some pics from the trip. Scores will remain a secret but Adam’s hole in one on the 17th with a 40 mile an hour gust behind him will remain forever etched in memory.

Here’s my tribute to Charles from early September, 2022.

“At the banquet of life Charles never chose the vegetarian option.

I am very grateful to Cathy and the family for giving me a chance to pay tribute to a man who brought much happiness to so many, including

me, Arlene and my family.

He lived life with gusto, love, and great joy.  His death has been so sudden that finding the words, let alone saying them out loud, is exceptionally hard.

Charles was acutely aware of who he was, where he was from, what he thought, who and what he cared about.  He was a Protestant Scott from the Ottawa Valley, whose family had roots in the lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland.  He was connected to the Nyes and Fremonts in the United States.  He was Charles Fremont Scott III.  He was infinitely funny, loyal, astute, wise, and caring, although the last is a quality he would often deny.

Bob Armstrong has talked about his roots in Ottawa and his remarkable career as a lawyer.  I shall be talking about his life outside the law, and his gift of friendship. One thing that really outraged Charles was the fact that I was given a QC by Bill Davis in 1985, just before he retired. I could always get him going by joking about this.

He loved the law but he was unsentimental about leaving it and doing other things that he wanted to do.  He had so many interests.  First came family.  Remembering his own travels with his parents as a boy, he and Cathy took an amazing safari trip to Kenya with most of the children just before Covid.  It was a huge success.

He was a terrific photographer.  He was a reader, and surrounded himself with books. Anyone who visited him and Cathy on Lewes Crescent will know what I mean by “surrounded”.

He adored Cathy, his wife of over 50 years.  Many of us here are witness to the love affair that never stopped.  He loved, and was hugely proud of, his children, Charles, Heather and Jen their spouses, and all the  grandchildren, as well as his brothers Andrew and Paul and his nieces and nephews.  This same  love extended to many friends and to their children.

There was no limit to his generosity, except in my case on the putting green, where concessions were few and far between.  He implored me to stop begging.  He was a computer whiz, he loved old cars, old friends, and old wine.  He loved new cars, new friends and new wine.   He loved Pigna and Italy, the Cambridge Lectures, international golf matches, and was a mainstay of the Ontario Lawyers Golfing Society, an illustrious group to which he recruited me after I became what Charles called “UnPremier”.  I introduced him to a breakfast group, he quickly became the heart and soul of the group.

He loved food, and he loved to cook. He would emerge from the kitchen with his hat and chef’s outfit with “Carlo da Pigna”carefully inscribed.  He loved welcoming friends to his table.  He loved engaging people.  He had no side to him.

He introduced Arlene and me to the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, of which his father had been a founder.  Arlene became a member of the board, and we spent a wonderful time together this past summer and many summers before that.

He loved Big Rideau Lake, which is where our friendship began many years ago, and where he died.  Our families bought cottages on the lake in the same year, 1956. We knew each other as boys and  teenagers, and Charles could remember every song from those early days, which we would play and sing in our many back and forth trips from Toronto to the cottage.   In the 90’s he took pity on my playing alone at Rideau Lakes Golf Course and asked me to join him and son Charles.    “Somebody had to take you in.  I guess it had to be me”.  And so friendly acquaintances became best friends.

He used to say I was his most expensive friend, with political campaigns, golf bets, and a wide range of charity events that he loyally supported.  Our political views were different, and could lead to argument.  That never interfered with our love.  The golfing bets actually evened out as his handicap grew and he insisted on the “science” of the golf index.  We played all over the country, and indeed all over the world.  The intensity of our matches was marked by two important features - first, neither of us was very good, and second, we loved to play.  After one game Charles said “that’s the most fun I’ve had with my clothes on”.

He had quips and sayings that he would repeat often.  When the golf cart started he would say “we’re off like a bride’s nightgown”.  A shot from one bunker to another bunker was called “a Saddam Hussein”.  And the payment of the bet was “we’re not here for a long time but a good time”.  He and I shared an affection for a Kingston radio announcer in the 1960’s Max Jackson, whose sign offs were “that’s caps and gowns sports fans”  and “if you want to have a friend, be one”.  This last one was certainly true in Charles’s case  Many of the things he said, the jokes and aphorisms, were not suitable or appropriate, or even repeatable.  But they were always funny.  And they were Charles.

Like all of us Charles could be grumpy.  He had strong views about a world that he felt was going to hell in a hand basket.  But his charm was his humour, his enormous sense of fun, his ability to connect, to remember, to remind, and to stay in touch.  His love for Cathy and his family knew no bounds.  He lived and died surrounded by their devotion.

I can hear his voice on a morning call “Bobby, it’s Charles”…and we would then proceed to deal with the news of the day, what we would call the organ recital, and then whatever plans we could make for dinner, golf, a trip, cottage life, and on it would go. Our sign off was “love you, see you soon”.  I still love him but I shall not see him in person again.  Which is not to say that his voice, his laugh, his needling, his quips and sayings, his presence, will ever disappear.  They will be with us all until our own lives are over.

Charles would have wanted us to grieve and miss him, but he would also want us to keep going, to find ways to remember and cherish friendships and the sense of fun and play that he brought to every aspect of his life.  Like Matthew in “Anne of Green Gables” I have reached the point that I can’t find the words, but I can feel Charles’s hand on my shoulder, saying “finish it up.  Carry on without me.”

Charles often talked about his scorn for both religious and political orthodoxy.  But if he was wrong, I am convinced that St Peter would say upon greeting Charles “No more calls we have a winner”.  And we are all winners for having known him.

He was our Bonnie Prince Charlie, so I shall close with these words from a Scottish song about the Bonnie Prince who became a King and a short chorus from a Burns song “Charlie is my darling”

Then here's a health to Charlie's cause,

And be't complete an' early;

His very name out heart's blood warms;

To arms for Royal Charlie!

Come thro' the heather, around him gather,

Ye're a' the welcomer early;

Around him cling wi' a' your kin;

For what'll be king but Charlie?

Come thro' the heather, around him gather,

Come Ronald, come Donald, come a' thegither,

And crown your richtfu' lawfu' king!

For wha'll be king but Charlie?

The chorus to Burns’s song is quite simple.  The rest of the lyrics are rude and inappropriate, but here’s the chorus -

“Charlie is my darlin’, my darlin’ my darlin’

Charlie is my darlin’ , a youthful chevalier”

A Talk on Justice, Power, and Democratic Resilience

Osgoode Law School, March 30, 2026

Bob Rae

There is a moment in Blaise Pascal's Pensées that cuts to the heart of everything I want to say today. Writing in seventeenth-century France, Pascal observed:

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

That is the whole problem, stated in eight words. Law that cannot be enforced is a pious hope. Force without legal constraint is tyranny. The rule of law exists precisely in the tension between those two truths — as the effort, never finished, never perfectly achieved, to make what is just strong, and what is strong just.

We are living through a moment when that tension has become acute — not only within our own societies, but in the international order that generations of statesmen, diplomats, and citizens built, imperfectly, from the ruins of the Second World War. I want to trace that tension through several different but connected threads: a famous confrontation in American constitutional history, the evolution of our own understanding of Indigenous rights, the assault on judicial independence we are witnessing in real time, and finally, the fragility of the international legal order in the face of a doctrine of might that its architects celebrate without shame.

I want to end with Learned Hand — not as a consolation, but as a challenge.

* * *

When the Court Speaks and the President Looks Away

In 1832, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down one of the most important decisions in its history. In Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct political community, with territorial boundaries within which the laws of Georgia could have no force. The Cherokee were not subjects of the State. They had rights. They had sovereignty. The Court had spoken.

President Andrew Jackson did nothing. The exact words attributed to him — and they may be apocryphal, but they are historically grounded — were these:

John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.

And so the Trail of Tears followed. In 1838 and 1839, the United States Army forcibly removed the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands. Roughly four thousand men, women, and children died on the march west. The Court had found justice. The President had the force. And the President used it not to uphold the law, but to defy it.

This is Pascal's equation in its most brutal form. Justice without force, powerless. What the Jackson episode reveals is that the rule of law depends, ultimately, on the willingness of those who hold power to be bound by it. Courts have no armies. They depend on the executive branch to respect and enforce their rulings. When that respect is withdrawn, something more than a legal ruling is at stake — the entire architecture of constitutional government begins to tremble.

I will come back to Jackson. He has found admirers, in our own time, in unexpected places.

* * *

What We Have Learned, and What It Has Cost Us

The Cherokee were not alone in their dispossession. The legal systems of Canada and the United States were, for much of their history, instruments of that dispossession. The Indian Act was law. Residential schools were law. The systematic denial of language, culture, land, and self-government was carried out not by lawless mobs, but by the orderly machinery of the state.

This is something that Canadians have had to reckon with, and are still reckoning with. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's ninety-four Calls to Action, released in 2015, were not simply a moral inventory. They were a constitutional challenge: to acknowledge that reconciliation is not charity, it is obligation. It flows directly from Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, from the duty to consult recognized in Haida Nation, from the affirmation of Aboriginal title in Tsilhqot'in. The law has been evolving, slowly, sometimes painfully, toward a more honest account of itself.

What has this reckoning done for Canadian constitutionalism? I think it has deepened it. It has forced us to acknowledge that the rule of law is only as good as the values it embeds — that legality and justice are not the same thing, and that a legal order that denies the humanity and rights of entire peoples is not a rule of law worth defending, it is a system of organized oppression dressed in the language of order. Engaging seriously with that history has, I believe, given Canadians a richer and more honest appreciation of what pluralism, diversity, and constitutional rights actually require. Not comfortable abstractions, but real commitments, with real costs.

* * *

The Assault on the Courts

Against this background of hard-won constitutional learning, consider what we are now witnessing.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford responded to a court ruling striking down his mid-election reduction of Toronto city council by invoking the notwithstanding clause — within hours of the decision, before any appeal could be heard. He declared publicly that the ruling was 'certainly wrong,' and made clear that elected will would simply override judicial review. His government subsequently used the notwithstanding clause pre-emptively, before any court challenge had been filed, as a signal that inconvenient rights would be set aside before they could be enforced. This is not a disagreement with a court's reasoning. It is a statement that courts, on certain questions, need not be consulted at all.

In the United States, the assault has been more direct. President Trump famously described a federal judge who ruled against his travel ban as a 'so-called judge,' and suggested that the judiciary bore responsibility for any terrorist attack that might follow. He has called judges who rule against him 'Obama judges' and 'Biden judges' — prompting the rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who responded that the United States does not have Obama judges or Trump judges, but 'an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.' Trump described those same judges as 'USA-HATING' and 'MONSTERS.'

Stephen Miller, the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, has told the American public that the President's powers 'will not be questioned.' He has declared the President the 'sole head of the executive branch,' and dismissed judges blocking executive actions as 'fifteen communist crazy judges.' He has publicly mused about suspending habeas corpus — one of the foundational rights of free societies since Magna Carta — saying it 'depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.' And he has articulated a vision of the world that makes no pretence of legal constraint:

We live in a world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

Pascal turned on its head.  Not justice made strong, but strength declared just by definition.

Vice President JD Vance has been equally candid. In February 2025, he posted publicly: 'Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.' He called Chief Justice Roberts' statement that the judiciary exists to check the excesses of the executive 'a profoundly wrong sentiment.' And in a podcast interview, he invoked — approvingly — the very ghost I raised a moment ago:

When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, 'The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'

We should take him at his word. This is not rhetorical excess. It is a stated governing philosophy. The question these men are raising — though they would not put it this way — is whether the rule of law itself is a constraint on sovereign power, or merely an instrument of it.

* * *

The Sovereign Exception: Schmitt contra Pascal

There is a philosopher who would have recognized this argument instantly. Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who became the most sophisticated intellectual apologist for the Nazi state, built his entire theory of sovereignty on a single proposition:

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

By 'the exception,' Schmitt meant precisely what it sounds like: the moment of emergency, of crisis, of existential threat, in which normal legal rules are suspended. For Schmitt, it is in the exception — not in ordinary law — that sovereignty reveals itself. Whoever gets to decide when the emergency exists, and what rules no longer apply, is the true sovereign. Courts, constitutions, international agreements — these are all fine for ordinary times. But in the exception, the sovereign stands above them.

Listen again to Miller on habeas corpus: 'The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so that is an option we're actively looking at. The decision depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.' Listen to Vance: 'Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.' The word 'legitimate' is doing all the work. Who decides what is legitimate? The executive. Who decides when the exception applies? The executive. The circle closes. This is Schmitt with an American accent, invoking the language of democracy to dismantle its foundations.

Pascal understood something Schmitt did not want to understand: that justice must be embedded in law precisely because power, left to itself, will always call its own exercise legitimate. The rule of law is the institutional form of the insight that no human sovereign — no president, no premier, no parliament — is self-authorizing. Authority flows from law and constitution, not the other way around. When the executive decides which court orders to obey and which to ignore, we have not arrived at strong government. We have arrived at arbitrary government — which is, as Pascal knew, another name for tyranny.

* * *

Might Makes Right: The International Dimension

What is happening domestically in the United States is inseparable from what is happening internationally. The doctrine is the same. The audience is different.

Pete Hegseth, the United States Secretary of Defense, wrote in his 2024 book that 'our adversaries should receive bullets, not lawyers,' and questioned openly whether the Geneva Conventions should be followed. At his confirmation hearing, when Senator Angus King pressed him to simply confirm that the United States would abide by the laws of warfare — laws that the United States helped write after the Second World War — Hegseth replied that an America First policy would not 'hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.' He told the assembled generals and admirals at Quantico:

We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.

And just last week, in the context of the ongoing conflict with Iran, he declared: 'No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.' Legal experts have been unambiguous: denying quarter — refusing to accept the surrender of enemy combatants — is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a war crime under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, prohibited in American military doctrine since Lincoln's Lieber Code in 1863, and the basis on which the United States prosecuted German military officers at Nuremberg.

The Secretary of Defense of the United States has publicly proclaimed a war crime as policy. And behind him stands Stephen Miller's philosophy, now applied to the world: strength, force, power — the iron laws of the universe. International law, humanitarian law, the rules-based international order — these are, in this view, 'stupid rules' written by 'dignified men in mahogany rooms' that prevent real warriors from winning.

This is not a disagreement about tactics. It is a repudiation of the entire project — begun at Nuremberg, elaborated at Geneva, codified in the Rome Statute — of subjecting the conduct of states and their military forces to law. It is a declaration that power is its own justification. And it comes from the most powerful state on earth.

We need to understand how very different this world is from the one we have been creating.  We cannot let that history disappear.

It is true that international law is often hard to enforce, and that its meaning gets lost in Latin phrases and and political rhetoric.  But the rule of law starts from the simple principle that wherever communities exist there must be rules, and those rules must apply to everyone - in the famous phrase “no matter how high ye may be the law is always above you”.  For hundreds of years national sovereignty has been limited by treaties signed between states, nation states formally agreed in the nineteenth century to accept that the conduct of wars and the treatment of prisoners and combatants needed to be subject to broader humanitarian principles, and in the last century the growth of rules governing all aspects of international life has grown exponentially.

The creation of the World Court, now the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and in recent years the signing of the Rome Treaty and the establishment of the International Criminal Court, are both critical pillars in the architecture of international law.

Global treaties have been signed on the Law of the Sea, on genocide, torture, climate change, protecting the ozone layer, the rights of children - all reflect a profound common sense that we have build stronger common institutions to face the challenges of our time.    

International law is a real thing. Both the United States and Canada have been at the forefront of its development in the modern era.

On January 6, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Address.  Remember that war in Europe and Asia had been going on for some time. Canada declared war on Germany in September, 1939, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland.  Remember too that that invasion was preceded by accusations that Germany was being threatened by Polish aggression, and that Hitler claimed that Germany’s invasion was “defensive” in nature.  Remember too that this invasion was preceded by two agreements that live today in infamy (to borrow an FDR word) - the Munich Agreement of March, 1938, between Britain, France, and Germany, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August, 1939, between Germany and the USSR.  The first allowed the carve up of a sovereign state, Czechoslovakia.  The second was a treaty of friendship and non-aggression, which contained a secret agreement carving up Poland between the Soviets and the Nazis.

Roosevelt knew that the world around him was collapsing in the face of brutal, authoritarian attacks, and Britain by January 1941 stood alone in Europe.  Churchill had come to office in May of 1940, and immediately implored the United States to help.  Roosevelt’s problem was that both public opinion and the American Congress were dominated by a prevailing isolationism which despised “foreign entanglements”, and he himself had campaigned in 1940 committed to keeping the US out of conflict (just as Woodrow Wilson had done in 1916).

Roosevelt knew that leaders needed followers, and that his task was to persuade the American public that the United States could not abandon those that were fighting for freedom.

The January 6, 1941 speech is often referred to as the “Four Freedoms” speech.  In it Roosevelt talked of the central importance of

• Freedom of Speech

• Freedom of worship

• Freedom from fear

• Freedom from want

These were not just freedoms for Americans, they were freedoms of all people.  It was a bold vision.  It put him at odds with the isolationists of his day, just as the idea of universal principles puts it at odds with the narrow nationalisms of our time.

It was also an idea that was rejected by many authoritarians in the world who believed then, as they do now, that human rights are not universal, but are rather culturally determined.  This ignores the fact that in all religions there are concepts of mutual obligation, dignity of the individual, and the importance of respecting the idea of laws that bind and apply to all.  Nowhere do we find the notion that tyranny or cruelty are to be celebrated as universally good.

Six months later Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland.  They had twin purposes - Churchill needed the US to enter the war, Roosevelt needed Churchill to become more of a democrat and embrace his global vision of a democratic order after the conflict.  The result was the Atlantic Charter, which is in reality the basis of both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was proclaimed in 1948, 75 years ago.

Those principles were:

• no territorial changes made against the wishes of the people

• Self government as a defining principle of the new order, replacing the colonialism of the past

• Freer trade and freedom of the seas

• More co-operation to improve the global economy

• Disarmament of aggressor nations and rejection of force as the basis to settle disputes

To put it simply - we fought the Second World War to stop these wars of aggression.

Our modern international legal architecture would not have existed without both Roosevelt’s vision and American leadership.  The challenges we face today require a renewal of that commitment and leadership.  The world cannot afford an America turned in on itself.

The global challenges we face - conflict, aggression, lies, disinformation, climate change, deep poverty and growing inequality, the ongoing presence and threat of pandemics and other health challenges - cannot be met by the nation state alone. While action at the local and national level is of course essential in achieving success in the effort to combat these global realities, they are insufficient, and will only work if accompanied by joined up action.

The main flaw in the laws and treaties that exist is that their enforcement is weak and uneven.  The principal enemy of enforcement is the insistence by many countries that somehow they are different or exceptional, that the rules do not apply to them, that their sovereignty trumps the greater good of humanity.    This is at the heart of our current challenge.

In his opening address to the Nuremberg Statute Justice Robert Jackson spoke these compelling words in 1945

“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.”

What we now call crimes against humanity are set out in the Rome Treaty, which has been ratified by 123 countries, but this number does not  include Russia, Ukraine, China, India, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and…the United States of America, as well as over 60 other countries.

Nuremberg focused rightly on the crimes of aggression and what became known as genocide.  Special tribunals have been created to deal with deliberate infringements of human rights since then, and the International Court of Justice is now dealing with several applications under the Genocide Convention, focusing on terrible events in Myanmar, Ukraine, and Gaza.

I

There is strong evidence that many countries and their leaders are responsible for great crimes.  The Charter of the UN sets out clearly that an aggressive attack by one nation state against another is a fundamental breach of the Charter.  There should be no surprise in that:  the UN was created, in the words of the preamble, “to save future generations from the scourge of war” in the immediate aftermath of the bloody conflicts of World War II. The first war crime is starting a war without clear and undeniable justification.

Canada’s commitment to the rule of law is based on both values and self interest.  Together with a great many other countries, we have learned the hard way that collective security is essential for our individual freedoms, and that we have to rely on mutually agreed and effectively enforced rules to advance our interests.  There is no other path for us.  For example, in trade disputes between Canada and the United States we require and need effective tools of mediation and arbitration to ensure that your might does not always make right.  And in agreeing to an effective regime under NAFTA and its successors the United States preserves its interests as well.

Canadians have a special sense of pride that in celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we remembered a Canadian legal scholar, John Humphrey who as an international civil servant of the United Nations in the 1940’s ‘held the pen’ in the drafting of this document.  The ethical foundation of that document is the same as that expressed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, that human rights are not a product of one legal or cultural tradition or another, but can be found in what it means to share both our common humanity and the reality that that morality itself is based on the principle that freedom and dignity require mutual respect and the recognition that the pursuit of selfish ego on its own leads not to civilization but to its destruction.

I was proud when the first speech Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave at the United Nations as Prime Minister was about indigenous rights.  Indigenous people in Canada had been important leaders in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, but it took us a decade to ratify it.  He spoke about our shared experience of colonialism, that we had much to understand and overcome in our history, and that the road to equality passed through Canada as much as it does through all countries.  The acceptance of international law and standards has the effect of lifting us all up, and holds governments accountable.  No matter how mighty or sovereign we might be, the law applies to all of us.

Here I would emphasize the importance of returning to President Roosevelt’s ideas about freedom from fear and freedom from want.  Just as America could not survive as a nation “half slave and half free”, we cannot expect a world that is half vaccinated and half unvaccinated, half with access to education, opportunity, and health care, and half with none, half living in security and half in fear of speaking their minds or living their lives as free human beings.

The means we use to communicate and share information are being flooded with lies and hate at a pace and level that is completely unprecedented.  Conspiracy theories, anti-semitism, misogyny, phobias and hatreds of all kinds are spreading at the speed of sound, and being amplified and magnified in ways that Goebbels could only dream of.  The ugliness of political debate has never been greater, and the cowards of hate hide behind pseudonyms as they enter the brawl of social media.

Armed with guns as well as megaphones, the perpetrators of unrest and chaos take many different forms in many different societies.

But despair in the face of all this is not an option.  The only path that will work is to commit ourselves to reason, law, civility, and, yes, enforcement.  The remedy for disorder is order.  Not an order based on repression or dictatorship, but on the rule of law itself,  recognizing that the common good of humanity demands no less.

This is not a pipe dream, because it is based on the simple premise that our self interest and our values align at this “sweet spot”, this place where our freedoms and our survival require us to dedicate ourselves to the rule of law not just in our own cities and towns and countries, but in a world that cannot be alien or foreign to us because it touches us all so closely, and above all because it reflects our common humanity.

Canada's Responsibility: Joining and Leading

This is the moment that requires Canada to be something more than a bystander.

We have, in recent years, been reminded of our own continental vulnerability — of how dependent we have been on American power, American markets, and American goodwill. The temptation, in the face of that vulnerability, is to accommodate, to be quiet, to avoid offending the neighbour whose goodwill we need. I understand that temptation. I have sat in rooms where it is the dominant instinct.

But there is something Canada can do that is not accommodation. We can both join and lead a coalition of states committed to the defence of the architecture of international law — not as a bureaucratic preference, but as a moral imperative, rooted in our own experience of what happens when law yields to force. The United Nations system is imperfect, frequently paralysed, sometimes captured by the powerful. International humanitarian law is unevenly enforced. The International Criminal Court remains contested. We know all of this.

But the alternative — a world in which states freely declare that they operate by the iron law of strength, in which the Geneva Conventions are 'stupid rules,' in which no quarter is given, in which the sovereignty of smaller nations is simply a function of their military capacity — is not realism. It is barbarism organized at a national scale. The post-war order was built by people who had seen that barbarism close up, and decided that something different was both possible and necessary.

Canada has assets here that we do not always use: a credible multilateral tradition, relationships across the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, a respected voice in international legal institutions, and a history — imperfect, contested, but real — of trying to make international law mean something. We should be a country that convenes, that builds coalitions, that insists on accountability, that does not quietly acquiesce in the normalization of war crimes because the country committing them is our largest trading partner.

The rule of law does not stop at the border. It never did.

* * *

I want to close with Learned Hand — one of the greatest judges in the history of the common law, who served for over fifty years on the American federal courts and never sat on the Supreme Court. On May 21, 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, he stood before over a million people in Central Park — newly naturalized citizens of the United States — and asked a question:

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.

The spirit of liberty, for Hand, begins with epistemic humility — the recognition that certainty about one's own righteousness is precisely where tyranny begins. Miller is certain. Hegseth is certain. Those who declare iron laws of the universe are certain. Hand says: that certainty is the enemy.

But Hand goes further, and this is the passage I want to leave with you. Because he was a federal judge — a man whose entire career depended on the authority of courts — he told those million people something unexpected:

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of responsibility. The rule of law is not self-sustaining. It is not a machine that runs on its own, immune to the will of those who live under it. It depends — ultimately, irreducibly — on the civic commitment of citizens, and of nations, to insist on it, to defend it, to refuse the seduction of the exception.

That is true domestically. Courts that are undermined will eventually cease to be independent. Constitutions whose provisions are routinely overridden by the notwithstanding clause will become instruments of power, not constraints on it. The citizens of democratic societies — including Canada — cannot outsource the defence of the rule of law to judges and lawyers while powerful voices work to hollow it out from within.

And it is true internationally. The Geneva Conventions will not enforce themselves. The Rome Statute will not bring war criminals to justice without the political will of states behind it. The rules-based international order is not a natural condition. It is a choice, renewed or abandoned by each generation of leaders.

We are being asked, in our generation, whether we will renew it. The answer cannot come only from courts, or from constitutions, or from international institutions. It must come from the hearts of citizens and the commitment of nations. Learned Hand was speaking to newly minted Americans in 1944. But he was, I think, speaking to all of us.

The spirit of liberty is not just a domestic aspiration. In this moment, it must become the animating principle of a joined-up solidarity of nations — nations that understand, as Canadians have come slowly to understand, that law is not the enemy of freedom, but its only reliable guardian. And that force without justice is not strength.

It is tyranny. Pascal knew it. Learned Hand knew it. And somewhere, in the best of ourselves, we know it too.

Balsillie School of International Affairs — March 31, 2026

Bob Rae

It is a  pleasure to be here at the Balsillie School, an institution built on the premise that ideas and debates about global issues matter — that the way  we understand the world shapes how we act in it. That conviction is itself under pressure today. Populism, isolationism, and something that mistakenly calls itself realism are all driving this conversation in the wrong direction.

And this is why I want to talk about George Orwell and the shadows and light he has created for our own times.

Orwell died in January 1950, six months after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. He was forty-six years old, exhausted, his lungs ravaged by tuberculosis he had fought for so many years.  He did not live to see his book become the most important political novel of the twentieth century. He did not live to see how thoroughly his vocabulary — doublethink, newspeak, the memory hole, Big Brother — would enter common usage.

We are living in Orwell's shadow, but we are also living in the light of what his great admirer George Woodcock called his “crystal spirit” and  as well the penetrating  legacy of his conscience.

Orwell was born Eric Blair in Motihari, Bihar, in 1903 — the son of a British civil servant who was a manager of the opium trade. Put another way, George Orwell was the son of a drug dealer.  Profits fron opium fuelled the Empire.  Young Eric returned to England with his mother for his education, first at a prep school famously described in his essay “Such, such were the joys”, went to Eton on a scholarship, and then joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He served there for five years.

Those years were the beginning of his political education. Orwell’s every note, poem and written comment can now be found in the remarkable 20 volume set of his complete works.  Before Burma what is interesting is the orthodoxy in his earliest views from his earliest days.  He was orthodox son of the Empire, loving Kipling and writing patriotic poems about the First World War.  But one could also argue that his decision to join the police in Burma was a kind of rebellion.  His friends at Eton went on to Oxford.  He did something very different.

The young Blair seemed “a boy apart”.  This first conscious choice defied the easier path.

What this young man discovered in Burma was not the benevolent civilization that empire promised.  It was, rather, a system of racism, domination and corruption  that required the constant exercise of power and authority.  His essay "Shooting an Elephant" is one of the most honest accounts of imperial psychology ever written. An officer forced by the crowd's expectations to shoot an elephant he does not want to kill, simply to avoid looking weak — it is a parable about how systems of power trap everyone inside them. The oppressor, Orwell understood, is never simply free.

But the deeper lesson of Burma that the colonizer's most dangerous quality was not just its violence.  It was its certainty, its conviction that those in charge saw more clearly, knew better, and were  entitled to decide. That certainty made it impossible for the imperial administrator to hear what the people he governed were actually saying. It meant that  listening — genuine, deep listening — didn’t happen.

This is not ancient history. It is the template for how wealthy democratic nations have consistently approached the developing world: with solutions prepared in advance, institutions taken off the shelf in Whitehall.

Imperial habits die hard, if at all.  In her brilliant book “Finding George Orwell in Burma”, Emma Larkin retraces Orwell’s steps from the 1920’s and also encounters both how Orwell’s work was still read as a guidebook to the manipulation and corruption of the current regime, and how many stories there were about his own behaviour as a policeman.  He broke up demonstrations and wielded a mean truncheon.  He had mistresses.

But in the novel he also captured the casual racism of the colonial club, and the narrowness of the small elite who thought they were running things.  In all his subsequent writings about Empire, the daily experience of being part of the system never left him.  It gave him a particular anger about what he saw happening to himself and to others, and realized that it was a truly oppressive and corrupt system.

One suspects that if he was alive today he would have something to say about how persistent this system is, how the white vans of the UN might seem as alien and imperial to the local population as the imperial Raj, and how the sudden collapse and withdrawal of assistance could be just another sign of betrayal.

Orwell left Burma after 5 years - at first on leave and then permanently.  He then committed another act of rebellion.  He resigned from the Indian Civil Service and told his bewildered father and surprised mother that he intended to be a writer, and that his mission and purpose were to live on his own terms without financial support. He went off to join the   destitute in the East End of London and in the slums of Paris. He wanted to know — not from a comfortable distance, but from inside — what poverty actually felt like and what it did to human beings. He was,  learning to listen to people his society had rendered invisible.

We live today with the largest human displacement crisis 1945.  There are approximately one billion people living in extreme poverty and 135 million people displaced by conflict and climate change. These numbers are not abstractions. They are human beings, each of them as particular, as irreducible, as full of inner life as any of us.

The question Orwell would ask — the question we need to ask — is not only how this happened, but why it is so easy for those of us who are comfortable to not see it. The architecture of the global economy, like the architecture of empire, is very good at rendering the suffering of others invisible. We benefit from trade relationships we do not examine too closely. We consume goods produced under conditions we prefer not to think about.

The climate crisis is, among other things, a displacement machine. It is already driving hundreds of millions of people from lands their families have inhabited for generations. The Pacific Islands are going underwater. The Sahel is drying up. The warming of the Indian Ocean is disrupting the monsoons on which a billion people depend for their food. And the bitter irony — the Orwellian irony — is that the people least responsible for the emissions driving these changes are overwhelmingly the people suffering their worst consequences first.

These communities have been telling us this for thirty years. They have brought their data to climate conferences, their testimony to international tribunals, their proposals to development banks. They have not been short of words. What they have been short of is listeners.

To live in Orwell's shadows and light is to refuse to pretend that this invisible suffering is not happening — and to refuse the comfortable illusion that we already know how to fix it.

The process by which Eric Blair became George Orwell meant leaving certain illusions behind - the benevolence of empire, the alleged logic of capitalism and inequality, and realizing that to break with these mythologies also meant changing his name.  Many other writers have done the same, but it was part of his effort to break with his past, and to look afresh at the world as it really was, and not the world that pretended to be.

After publishing “Down and Out in Paris and London” and “Burmese Days”, Orwell decided to take his next journey to the world of working class England in the midst of a global depression.  “The Road to Wigan Pier” was another journey into the heart of the beast, and out of that journey more convinced than ever that the evil and extent of deep inequality meant that democratic socialism was a necessary response.

But his socialism was, again, not of the orthodox variety.  Unlike any of his contemporaries, he did not like Karl Marx.  He was not an economist, or in any sense a politician.  He referred caustically to “smelly little orthodoxies” and had no interest in entering the political arena. His real interest was in exposing, and understanding, how people lived and thought.  He went down a coal mine and described brilliantly how dangerous and difficult that work was.  He attended socialist summer schools and made fun of the people who went to them. In his own life at this time Orwell got married to Eileen O”Shaughnessy and lived in a little village in Hertfordshire.  He struggled with his own poverty.

It was not an idyllic life, but in any event was shattered by the Spanish Civil War.  His experience in that war changed his life, and ours, in important ways.  His own fight against was, again, different from those who joined the Communist Party and became part of the mainstream recruits into the foreign brigades controlled by the Party.  But since he didn’t want to just be a writer, like Hemingway and many others, he joined a rag tag group in a brigade that was identified with the Spanish anarchist group known as the POUM.

This decision in turn meant that, as he describes in “Homage to Catalonia”, Orwell became embroiled in an internecine war in which the POUM and its supporters were seen as “Trotskyites” and therefore “enemies of the people” by the Communist Party.  Orwell was wounded on the battlefield, but was also nearly killed by Stalinist agents in Barcelona. This experience with Stalinism meant that he was not only anti-fascist. He experienced first hand what he saw as the dishonesty and deep corruption of the Communist elite.

He watched the Moscow show trials and understood what they were when many Western intellectuals were still making excuses. He saw that the common thread between Hitler and Stalin was not their their relationship to truth: both required the elimination of independent thought, the subordination of fact to the needs of power.

Orwell had a hard time getting “Animal Farm”, his allegory about Stalinism and its betrayal of the Russian Revolution, published.  The Soviet Union was an ally in the war against Hitler.  Orwell was upsetting the apple cart too much.  Finally, one publisher, Fred Warburg, came forward and published the book that finally made Orwell a financially successful writer.

The rise of autocracy in our own time follows patterns Orwell would have recognized instantly. The playbook is remarkably consistent. First, discredit the institutions that constrain power — the courts, the press, the electoral system, the civil service. Second, replace the language of shared reality with the language of tribal loyalty — facts become "fake news," expertise becomes "elitism," complexity becomes conspiracy. Third, concentrate authority in the executive and dismantle the accountability that liberal constitutions were designed to create.

Carl Schmitt — the German legal theorist who became the crown jurist of the Third Reich — gave this a theoretical gloss: the sovereign is he who decides the exception. In a genuine emergency, Schmitt argued, normal rules are suspended, and the leader who grasps the emergency moment is the one who truly holds power. It is a theory tailor-made for manufactured emergencies. Every autocrat reaches for Schmitt, whether they have read him or not.

Today, Freedom House reports that democratic freedoms have declined globally for eighteen consecutive years. Over half of the world's population now lives under authoritarian rule. Again, these are not statistics. They are the conditions of life for billions of human beings who did not choose them — and who, it is worth noting, are disproportionately concentrated in the parts of the world that wealthy democracies have historically treated as peripheral.

Orwell understood something even more unsettling than the rise of autocracy. He understood how autocracy becomes totalitarianism — and why that transition is so much harder to reverse.

Autocracy consolidates power. It suspends norms. It concentrates authority. But it is still, in a sense, a political arrangement — it can be negotiated with, survived, sometimes reversed.

Totalitarianism is something different. It does not merely dominate — it transforms. It reaches inside the mind. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that totalitarianism was not simply tyranny at scale but a historically new form of rule that attempted to remake human nature itself — to abolish the inner life, to eliminate the capacity for independent thought and spontaneous action.

Orwell showed us the endpoint. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not, at its core, a novel about surveillance or thought police or even about torture, important and horrifying as all of that is. It is a novel about the final page, when Winston Smith, his resistance broken in Room 101, genuinely and finally loves Big Brother.

What makes this so relevant now is that the early stages of this process do not look like jackboots and torture chambers. They look like something much more familiar: the exhaustion of citizens so overwhelmed by contradictory information that they stop trying to know what is true; the slow normalization of lies so audacious that the only available response seems to be credulity or paralysis; the calculated weaponization of contempt for institutions — a contempt that, once seeded widely enough, becomes nihilism. They're all corrupt. Nothing matters. Why bother.

Orwell's answer to this nihilism was stubbornness. He insisted, against all the sophisticated arguments  that two plus two equals four, not five. That facts exist. That language matters. That calling things by their right names is a political act.

But there was a second and equally deep preoccupation running through everything Orwell wrote, inseparable from his passion for truth: his preoccupation with freedom. Not freedom as an abstraction, not freedom as a rhetorical flourish, but freedom as a daily, practical, embodied condition — the freedom to think for yourself, to speak what you believe, to live without the permanent surveillance of power, to have recourse against the state when the state does you wrong.

These two commitments, to the pursuit of the truth, and his deep commitment to freedom, that put him at odds with those in power, whether from the right or the left.  Orwell insisted for the last fifteen years of his life that he was a committed socialist.  But it has to be said that it was a different kind of socialism.  He would not pull his punches for the sake of the cause.  It is his punches that defined him.

This is where Orwell connects directly to the oldest and most important idea in the constitutional tradition: the rule of law.

Blaise Pascal, writing in seventeenth-century France, put the problem in eight words that remain unsurpassed: Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyrannical. The whole challenge of civilized governance is contained in that sentence. Law must have the power to be enforced — a pious hope is not a legal constraint. But force that is not bounded by justice is simply domination. Law exists precisely in the tension between those two truths

Orwell's Winston Smith loses everything — loses truth, loses memory, loses love, loses finally the very capacity for resistance — because there are no institutions left to protect him. The Party has abolished the independent judiciary, the free press, the separation of powers, the rule of law. Big Brother is not constrained by anything beyond Big Brother's own will. That is precisely the point. That is the dystopia. And the path to it does not begin with Room 101. It begins with the slow, incremental delegitimization of the institutions that stand between the individual and unchecked power.

When I look at the world's response to these forces, I see grounds for both encouragement and concern.

Our Prime Minister has been speaking with unusual clarity. At Davos in January, Mark Carney did something rare for a serving leader: he acknowledged openly that the rules-based international order was, in his words, "partially false" — that the rules applied asymmetrically, that the strongest exempted themselves when convenient. He invoked Václav Havel's image of the greengrocer who hangs the Party slogan in his window without believing it — and argued that it was time to stop performing a fiction. At the Lowy Institute in Sydney earlier this month, he continued in the same register, arguing that middle powers — Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, South Korea — collectively command more economic weight than any single great power, and can therefore shape a new order if they choose to act together. The ambition, as Carney put it, is to "build something better — more prosperous, more just — than what came before."

The argument for democratic middle-power solidarity is both true and strategically significant. The "principled and pragmatic" framework is a genuine contribution.

But here is what I want to add  what I think is missing, and what Orwell's shadow makes impossible to ignore.

When Carney acknowledged at Davos that the rules-based order was "partially false" — that the rules applied unevenly, that power shaped the terms — he was saying something that the countries of the Global South have been saying for decades. They did not need the rupture of 2025 to discover this. They have known it since Bretton Woods at the end of the Second World War.  They have known it through every round of trade negotiations that protected subsidies in wealthy countries while demanding open markets from poor ones. They have known it through the sovereign debt crisis, through the conditionalities attached to development lending, through Security Council vetoes that blocked accountability for atrocities when great-power interests were at stake. They have known it through the slow violence of a climate crisis they did not cause and cannot escape.

So when middle powers now invite the Global South to join a new coalition to defend and rebuild the international order, there is a legitimate and pointed question from the other side of the table: Why should we trust that this time will be different? Will our voices actually shape this new order — or are we being asked, once again, to participate in a project designed by others, on terms set by others, for purposes that serve others first?

That question cannot be answered with a speech, however good. It can only be answered by doing something that the architects of the old order consistently failed to do: listening.

Listening, in this context, is not a polite gesture. It has specific content.

It means taking seriously the demand for reform of the institutions — the UN Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank — that were designed in 1945 and still reflect that world's distribution of power. It means genuine debt relief for countries whose development options are foreclosed by obligations they incurred under terms of profound asymmetry. It means climate finance that matches the scale of the crisis, delivered without the conditionalities that have historically made development assistance more about donor priorities than recipient needs. It means, above all, accepting that the people most directly affected by poverty, displacement, and climate catastrophe are not merely the objects of our policy but the subjects of their own — that solutions designed without their full participation are solutions that will fail.

Orwell went to Burma and learned to see what imperial certainty had blinded him to. He went to Wigan and to Paris and learned to hear what comfortable distance had deafened him to. That journey — from certainty to listening, from distance to proximity — was not just a personal transformation. It was an intellectual and moral method. It is the method we need now.

A new international order that does not incorporate the voices of the billion people in deep poverty and the 135 million displaced by conflict and climate will not be a better order. It will be the old order with a better press office.

And here I want to be direct about something that tends to get lost in the strategic language of middle-power coalitions and trade diversification: the new order must be explicitly and unambiguously grounded in international law and universal human rights. Not as aspirational decoration. Not as useful rhetoric for building coalitions. As foundational commitments that constrain what even well-intentioned states are permitted to do in pursuit of their interests.

International law is the rule of law applied beyond borders. It is the principle that states, like individuals, are not permitted to do whatever they are powerful enough to do. It is expressed in the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force, in the Geneva Conventions, in the Refugee Convention, in the International Criminal Court. These instruments are imperfect — they are inconsistently enforced, they are subject to great-power veto, they have been ignored when inconvenient. But their imperfection is not an argument for their abandonment. It is an argument for their reform, their strengthening, and above all their honest application.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1948 — the same year Orwell was finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four, writing in a cold cottage on the island of Jura with his lungs failing. It was not a coincidence that both emerged at the same historical moment. Both were responses to the same catastrophe: the demonstration, in the most brutal possible terms, of what happens when human beings are stripped of their rights, their dignity, and the protection of any law beyond the will of the powerful. Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, and  Canada’s John  Humphrey understood that the Declaration was not a description of how states behaved but a claim about what every human being was owed — regardless of nationality, regardless of geography, regardless of which great power happened to be ascendant.

If the new order is to be genuinely better — not just more resilient for the countries building it — it must apply these commitments universally. It must apply them to allies as well as adversaries. It must apply them in Gaza and in Sudan, in Myanmar and in Ukraine. It must apply them when their application is costly and inconvenient, not only when it is easy and politically useful. Nothing corrodes the credibility of democratic middle powers faster than the selective invocation of principles — defending sovereignty here, ignoring it there; condemning atrocities committed by enemies, excusing them when committed by friends.

Orwell would have recognized this double standard immediately. He had watched it operate in his own time, from the Left's refusal to acknowledge Stalin's crimes to the imperial democracies' selective outrage. He called it, simply, dishonesty. And he understood that political dishonesty, tolerated long enough, makes truth itself seem naive.

The antidote is not cynicism about international law and human rights because they have been applied inconsistently. The antidote is their honest, consistent, universal application — including by us, including when it costs us something.

There are many new frontiers where international law is essential.  They owe much to Orwell’s imagination.  Rebecca Solnit’s book “Orwell’s Roses” reminds us that his fascination and knowledge of the natural world and the dangers of its disappearance is a window to his wider value.  He loved the particularity of things, and fought for their preservation.  This speaks to the gap between the protection of biodiversity and our collective inability to do anything about it.  The planet is at risk, and so are all of us who depend on its health.  International treaties and laws on these issues are essential because by their very nature they cannot be solved by nation states alone.  Global warming is global.  The oceans are part of the global commons.

Pandemics are not stopped by customs officials or fences.  The internet and social media transcend boundaries, no matter how hard dictators try to stop them.  And disinformation travels at the speed of light, even though they bring darkness.  All this means that the effort to deal with the problems they create for democracies, for freedom, for truth, cannot stop at a border.

George Orwell did not believe in easy optimism. He thought, rightly, that this is just one more way in which intellectuals made their peace with intolerable arrangements.

But he was not a pessimist either. His stubbornness was itself a form of hope. Not hope as sentiment. Hope as discipline.

We are at one of those moments when the temptation to resignation is very strong. The forces of autocracy and of magical thinking are powerful. The old order has been ruptured. The new order has not yet been built. And the people with the greatest stake in getting that new order right are the people who have been least heard in every previous attempt to build one.

If we are serious — not just principled, but actually serious — about building something better, we need to say what "better" means. It means billions of people no longer invisible to the systems that govern them. It means the displaced and the dispossessed having recourse to institutions that actually function. It means the rule of law applying not just to the weak but to the strong. It means truth being worth defending, even when it is inconvenient. It means courts that hold, judges who cannot be purged, and elections whose outcomes are respected.

And it means sitting down with the people who have been on the receiving end of our certainties for the past two centuries, and asking — and genuinely waiting for the answer to — what they need, what they know, and what kind of world they are trying to build.

A distinguished Singaporean diplomat put it this way recently in the well known publication “Foreign Affairs”: “The 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in the West hasn’t yet learned the art of listening to the remaining 88 percent with whom they share the planet,” The editor of that magazine reminded us that “the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has produced an energy crisis that is barely felt by the United States but is wreaking havoc on Asian economies… without a real “dialogue among equals,” the West risks “losing the rest.”

Orwell lived and wrote in the darkest years of the twentieth century. He watched the worst happen. And still he fought, and wrote, and still he insisted on calling things by their right names, and still he insisted on seeing the people that systems of power preferred to keep invisible.

That is what it means to live in his shadow — not to be paralyzed by it, but to do the same stubborn work, in our own time, with our own tools, and with ears as well as eyes open.

And, as for the light, and how it gets in, Leonard Cohen put it best in “Anthem”

“There are no perfect offerings

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in”

We do not search for perfection, and we accept the cracks.  And we seize whatever chances we can for the light to get in.

By Bob Rae

April 3, 2026

The outpouring of emotion and praise for Stephen Lewis on news of his death came from every quarter, and deservedly so.

At each stage of his life, Stephen made an impact and touched people with his clear moral direction and unequalled rhetorical power.

As Ed Murrow once said of Winston Churchill, Stephen Lewis mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. He inspired, cajoled, pushed, charmed, inveigled. He could be unrelenting in his scorn for inaction in the face of wrong and in his passion for battles ahead.

Shakespeare describes Henry V’s leadership gifts in visiting his anxious troops at Agincourt on the eve of battle as “a little touch of Harry in the night” — the ability to rejuvenate the exhausted, persuade the doubtful and fortify the fearful. Stephen’s talents went far beyond wordsmithing. He could move mountains of resistance with his unique combination of charm and persistence.

In the 1950s my father came back from judging a debate sponsored by the UN Association of Toronto saying he had been impressed by the personality and eloquence of a teenager named Stephen Lewis, “David’s son”. I can remember heading over to Queen’s Park from University College to watch raucous debates where the newly elected member from Scarborough West gave far better than he got in the 1960s.

His interest and passion for Africa took him to Biafra to see for himself the consequences of civil war in Nigeria.

When he became leader of the Ontario NDP, he led the party to Official Opposition status as the Big Blue Machine was reduced to a minority government.

He impressed and befriended his opponents as well his followers and became legendary not only for his oratory but for his passion for issues such as workers’ health and safety and Indigenous rights.

To the dismay of many, the wear and tear of politics led him to resign his seat and the leadership in 1978 and took him out of elected politics when he was only 40. He rejected all entreaties to return, focusing on his work on labour relations, public advocacy and media commentary.

It was Prime Minister Mulroney’s call in 1984 asking Stephen to become Ambassador to the UN in New York that provided the scope and platform for his international vision and put his political and rhetorical talents to work in a unique way.

NDP and CCF leaders Michael Cassidy, Donald MacDonald, Ted Jolliffe, Bob Rae and Stephen Lewis in 1983/Courtesy Bob Rae

It also allowed Stephen to become an advocate for Africa once again, to push for stronger action on AIDS, conflicts and desperate famine conditions. He put Canada in the forefront on dealing with apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Namibia. His efforts could put him at odds with diplomatic and bureaucratic colleagues, but his personal bonds with both Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney allowed him to persist.

He also built strong ties with key officials in the UN, including  Secretary General Kofi Annan, that lasted for the next decades, and that led to his appointment as Deputy Director if UNICEF and soon after UN Special Envoy for Africa in 2001.

It also led to Stephen’s decision in 2003 to establish the Stephen Lewis Foundation, specifically targeting AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation has raised over $200 million and supported the work of dozens of agencies and civil society organizations in 14 countries.

Stephen battled ill health in his final years, but he fought on until the end. He was determined to see his son Avi’s victory as leader of the federal NDP, a wish fulfilled just before he died.

Stephen Lewis, like all of us, was a complex man. My own relationship with him dates back to the 1970s, when I joined the NDP as a law student. He was a strong supporter of my leadership of the provincial party in the 1980s and led my transition team after the election of 1990, when the Ontario NDP formed a majority government.

He served as head of a review of racism in policing in 1992, but he became increasingly critical of the government, particularly the Social Contract. That inevitably strained our personal relationship, as did my decision a decade later to seek the leadership of the federal Liberal Party in 2006.

My exit from federal politics and work on indigenous and refugee issues renewed our connection, as did my own appointment as ambassador to the UN in 2020. Despite his health battles, he was a keen follower of all things political, and he remained vigilant in his assessments.

I spoke with Stephen a few days before he died, and he made it clear, as only he could, that he remained adamant about the “error of your apostasy”, as he put it, but we also shared warm reflections of the difficulties of combining passion and accepting the discipline of diplomatic protocols.

I told him that he had left nothing on the table in fighting for his beliefs and had given it his all. I told him he should be especially proud of his work on AIDS, a battle we agreed was far from over.  He ended the call by saying “I shall see you on the other side and shall greet you warmly.”

It was an emotional call for me, and I was struck by the clarity and precision of his unforgettable voice.

Stephen was the best of us.

Policy Columnist Bob Rae teaches and writes on law and public policy. He is the Visitor of Massey College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Forum of Federations and a Matthews Fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. He served as Ontario’s 21st Premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

https://davidmalonememories.ca/

Malcolm Muggeridge, Cyril Connolly, Orwell’s sister Avril Blair and his wife Sonia Brownell talk about Orwell with Eton, the countryside and Jura in the background.

Fascinating chit chat and anecdotage, but miss the point about Orwell’s politics. Muggeridge gets the point about freedom but misses the point but Orwell’s commitment to equality and solidarity.

The accents give them away…but fun to watch. You’ll be hearing more about Orwell from me in the days ahead.

I knew Fink well and worked closely with him through our shared interests.  He served with me on the board of the Forum of Federations, and we worked together in the field in Nigeria, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Afghzanistan, Iraq and New York.

The outpouring of tributes in the last week has been remarkable.  He was the opposite of a self promoter - he pushed hard for what he believed in, not for himself.  Thoughtful, funny, boisterous, he cared, loved and celebrated deeply.  I was lucky to be his friend.

From the Daily Telegraph -

Nicholas “Fink” Haysom, who has died aged 73, was the chief legal and constitutional adviser to Nelson Mandela during his South African presidency and later, on behalf of the UN, brought his negotiating skills to bear on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Handsome and charismatic, he was a widely admired and well-liked presence on the international political scene, a man who wore his intellectual achievements lightly and whose appetite for fun was ever present.

Nicholas Roland Leybourne Haysom was born to a former RAF Battle of Britain squadron leader pilot and Oxford-educated mother in Durban, Kwazulu-Natal on April 21 1952. The baby was mis-labelled “Finkelstein”, and for the rest of Haysom’s life his family, friends and colleagues called him “Fink”.

After studying African history at the University of Natal he read law at the University of Cape Town, where he became head of the activist National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and an important voice in the anti-apartheid movement.

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These were the dark days of granite apartheid. Haysom was detained without trial on several occasions and served with a banning order that put him under house arrest for two years until 1982. An impressive 6ft 3in tall, in his youth he was a pugnacious sportsman who was fitted with a plate after losing his front teeth on the rugby field – from which he was also once sent off for punching an opponent.

He began his career at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was an associate professor and deputy director until 1994. In the early 1980s he co-founded the human rights law firm, Cheadle, Thompson & Haysom Attorneys, cutting his teeth as a negotiator in disputes between the then mineworkers’ leader Cyril Ramaphosa and the white-owned mining companies.

Haysom, left, Deputy Special Representative for Political Affairs in Afghanistan, in 2012 with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon 

Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, Haysom became a trusted adviser to the ANC leader (who also called him “Fink”) and a constitutional negotiator during the multi-party talks that led to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, after which he became chief legal adviser to President Mandela.

It was Mandela who set Haysom on the path of international peace negotiation when he asked him to assist the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, in his role as facilitator of the Burundi peace talks which led to the Arusha power-sharing agreement of 2000 – an important step towards the peace that was eventually concluded in 2005. It was during the Arusha negoti ations that Haysom displayed characteristic derring-do by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro dressed in his work clothes and formal black shoes.

On Mandela’s behalf he also became principal adviser to the mediator in the Sudanese peace process which led in 2005 to the agreement paving the way for the independence of South Sudan.

Haysom then joined the UN as adviser in post-war Iraq, helping to draft the country’s 2005 constitution. In 2012, after five years as director for Political, Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs under the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he was appointed Ban’s special representative for the UN mission in Afghanistan.

Haysom had no illusions that the South African experience could be applied directly to other situations. Following the formation of a government of national unity in Kabul in 2014, he observed that while the South African equivalent in the early 1990s had been embraced by ANC, National Party and Inkatha Freedom Party politicians as a transitional mechanism to foster a sense of joint responsibility for the success of the transition to democracy, in Afghanistan “it often appeared to take the form of a contest for the spoils of government.”

Haysom briefing the Security Council meeting on the situation in Sudan and South Sudan, 2022 Credit: Manuel Elías/UN Photo

He remained cautiously (and, in retrospect, unrealistically) hopeful that the Taliban might conclude that there was no prospect of a military victory and come to the negotiating table: “I think that while undoubtedly the Taliban have the capacity to disrupt… I don’t think there will be a Taliban takeover.”

Haysom admitted that his UN experience had led him to “increasingly appreciate what Mandela brought to the table – which was somebody who was bigger than th e divisions in society: the absence of a unifying figure in either Iraq or Afghanistan is noticeable.”

In 2016, he was appointed UN Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, then Special Representative in Somalia in 2018. After only four months, however, he was expelled from the country by Muhammed Abdullahi’s government after he had questioned the arrest of Mukhtar Robow, the former terrorist leader who had laid down arms and renounced violence to pursue politics.

Haysom’s indomitable spirit was on display to his last days. Just two weeks before he died, he had planned a Saturday night out in Manhattan with two old friends that was to take in a lavish dinner, a Broadway show and a late-night session at a jazz club. The following day he was due to fly to Geneva for the UN. At the last minute, grave illness overcame him and he was forced to cancel.

Haysom was twice married, first (dissolved) to Mary Ann Cullinan, with whom he had two daughters and a son, and, secondly, to Delphine Bost, with whom he had two sons.

Nicholas Haysom, born April 21 1952, died March 19 2026

*When Human Decency Passes On - A Tribute to Prof. Nicholas Fink Haysom *

When human decency passes on,

you wonder how the world endures its own weight.

How it continues to turn,

as though nothing sacred has been lost.

It is not often that we encounter

decency, fully formed—

not performed, not proclaimed—

but lived, quietly, in the spaces between duty and grace.

I remain suspended in disbelief,

a silence that refuses comfort.

For Fink was, above all things, a decent man.

A man who believed in this continent,

not as an idea, but as a living promise—

one he chose, again and again, to serve.

He loved deeply—

as a husband, as a father—

finding time, even within the weight of history,

to stand by still waters

and teach his sons how to fish,

while gently preparing them

for the storms of the world. His smile, always refreshing when he spoke of his love for Delphine. 

He carried kindness without spectacle,

wore wisdom without arrogance.

Unassuming in presence,

yet vast in understanding.

When he spoke of great leaders he had known, like late Presidents Nelson Mandela and Mwalimu Nyerere,

his voice would soften,

his gaze turning inward—

as though reflecting not just on them,

but on the quiet ideals he, too, embodied.

He laughed easily,

and in that laughter

he made the world feel lighter,

made people feel seen,

made difficult rooms feel human again.

To work beside him

was to confront your own limits—

for how does one advise a mind so measured,

so deeply attuned to the complexities of men and nations?

And yet, he made space,

he listened,

he guided without diminishing.

He understood this world

in ways many of us only strive to grasp.

He understood broken places

not as lost causes,

but as unfinished stories.

From distant lands to this continent’s heart,

his service was unwavering—

each task carried

as though the fate of humanity

rested quietly upon it.

And perhaps, in his way,

it did.

Now, the world feels altered—

not because it has stopped,

but because something within it has.

A rare kind of goodness

has taken its leave.

And so we do not only mourn—

we bear witness.

We remember.

We carry forward

what he so effortlessly gave.

Rest gently, son of the soil.

Your decency remains—

not buried,

but planted.

And in time,

may it rise again in your sons and indeed all of us who had the honour to serve beside you. 

Hamba kahle,

mnumzana. 

Boitshoko Mokgatlhe

The Continuity of Fink Haysom

Tribute to a Patriot. 18.03.2026

I met Fink Haysom and Mary Ann Cullinan in 1979, at a time when South Africa was burning with repression and possibility. I was a young activist shaped by the aftermath of the Soweto Uprising and the brutal murder of Steve Biko. We had gone underground. Many were detained. Many others went into exile.

It was in this crucible that I encountered Fink and Mary Ann, among the first white comrades who treated me as an equal in struggle and in life. I was 25. Through them, and through the emerging union movement, I began to understand organisation, discipline, and the deeper meaning of working class solidarity.

Fink Haysom was, and remains to me, a deeply principled patriot. As a revolutionary, I bow my head to him. He carried integrity not as a slogan, but as a way of being, quiet, consistent, and unwavering. He sought common ground, mediated with humility, and stood firmly for justice without ego.

Like Nelson Mandela, he understood that compassion and forgiveness are the lifeblood of freedom.

But like all of us in the freedom struggle, the journey came at a cost.

It was not easy on our families especially our children. Our long absences, the constant danger, the demands of the struggle these left deep wounds. Many families were stretched, some broken. This is the unforgiving side of politics that history does not always record.

I know personally the pain that prolonged absence brings. The quiet cost carried by those who wait, who endure, who hold the home while we fight in the world.

And perhaps this is why the inner journey mattered so much.

Madiba often reminded us that the most difficult path is the one within from the cesspool of the mind, with its ego, cravings, and attachments, toward a place of pure compassion and forgiveness and seat of soul in a heart centered leadership.

It is a lifelong journey.

And in Fink, I saw someone who walked that path with sincerity. He had a good head and a good heart. And to hold both, in balance, is no small achievement.

What is striking about Fink’s life is its continuity.

There was no rupture between the struggle years and what came after. When he served alongside Madiba in the Presidency, it was not a shift into power, it was a continuation of service. The same values that guided him in the underground and in the labour movement integrity, dialogue, non-racialism, and justice remained intact.

And when he moved into his work with the United Nations, that continuity deepened rather than diluted.

He carried the lessons of South Africa into the global arena:

• the understanding that peace cannot be imposed it must be negotiated

• that dignity is the foundation of stability

• that reconciliation is not weakness, but strength

• and that humanity must always come before power

In conflict zones and fragile states, he did not arrive as a bureaucrat. He arrived as a comrade of humanity someone shaped by struggle, grounded in humility, and committed to building bridges where others saw divisions.

His life was not a series of roles. It was a single thread of service.

From the streets of resistance, to the Presidency, to the United Nations there was a seamless arc. No contradiction. No loss of moral centre.

This is what made him rare.

In a world where many are changed by proximity to power, Fink remained anchored. His journey reminds us that true leadership is not about position it is about continuity of values across time, place, and circumstance.

And perhaps that is his deepest lesson to us:

That the struggle does not end when freedom is won.

It simply changes form.

And those who carry it with integrity become bridges between worlds.

🙏🏾❤️

By Bob Rae

March 19, 2026

Two recent tweets by Donald Trump on Truth Social reflect a dangerous unravelling of his Middle East war strategy, to the extent that there was one.

The first is about the refusal of many countries to send military personnel or equipment as part of operation “Epic Fury”:

“The United States has been informed by most of our NATO “Allies” that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, this, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon. I am not surprised by their action, however, because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need. Fortunately, we have decimated Iran’s Military — Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti-Aircraft and Radar is gone and perhaps, most importantly, their Leaders, at virtually every level, are gone, never to threaten us, our Middle Eastern Allies, or the World, again! Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer “need,” or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The second missive is about yesterday’s Israeli attack on a major gas field in Iran, revealing a significant fracture in the US/Israeli strategy:

“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar – In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before. I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

On the first one, about NATO, I am reminded of the signoff from Max Jackson, a radio sports broadcaster. “If you want to have a friend, be one!” President Trump’s contempt for his allies and partners has been on display since he took office. His tariff policies have put the global economy at risk, and he entered the war in Iran with only one ally, with an incoherent strategy, and no sense of what Iran’s response could be.

The vitriol he expresses toward allies follows attacks on the sovereignty of Greenland, Denmark, and, yes, Canada.

He has sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the recently circumspect vice president, JD Vance, to support the autocratic Viktor Orban in Hungary.

He has withdrawn support to Ukraine, unilaterally lifted sanctions on Russia, and given Putin a huge boost.

President Trump sounds surprised and offended. He should not be. NATO is a defensive alliance. It is supposed to work by consensus. If President Trump wanted to create a NATO initiative, discussions should have started months ago. And he would have had to justify the “imminent threat” precondition to garner the support of countries that are bound by the rule of law and the treaties and conventions they have signed.

The message on the Israel/US strategy on the gas attacks in Iran, with consequences for Qatar, and other Gulf States, reflects the divergent objectives of President Trump and PM Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s popularity grows in wartime. The US President’s approval rating is not getting such a bump. One sees a benefit in chaos. Trump is sounding increasingly desperate.

He is in midstream, with no off-ramp in sight. Whichever route he follows will be difficult.

The choices are not entirely in anyone’s control. The Gulf States, Russia, Ukraine, NATO, China and India all have a stake.  Not just oil, but the wider supply chains of agriculture, critical minerals, semiconductors, and beyond. The affordability implications are expanding by the day.

As Barbara Tuchman points out in “The Guns of August” — well worth a re-read — no country was planning a long-term war as Europe stumbled into World War I. High Society in Washington went to watch the first battles of the Civil War hoping to be entertained on a Sunday afternoon. They came away with the realization that war is not a tea party.

The challenge for middle powers such as Canada is real. PM Carney has set out the direction in the Davos speech: talk to others, build coalitions, build stronger alliances. Now comes the execution, both at home and globally.

It is a challenging time, and we need all shoulders to the wheel. These are indeed the times that try our souls.

Policy Columnist Bob Rae teaches and writes on law and public policy. He is the Visitor of Massey College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Forum of Federations and a Matthews Fellow in public policy at Queen’s University. He served as Ontario’s 21st Premier, interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.