National
Quebec Premier François Legault says he wants to ban public prayer in province

From LifeSiteNews
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), announced it had sent a “demand letter” to Legault regarding his plan to ban public prayer. “Such a ban is a totalitarian suppression of the freedoms of expression and of conscience and religion”
Quebec Premier François Legault has tasked his top cabinet officials with putting in place a law that would ban all praying in public in Canada’s only historically and culturally Catholic province.
“Seeing people praying in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec,” Legault said last week on Friday afternoon.
While Legault directed the ban at “teachers implementing Islamist religious concepts in schools,” the reality is the ban would apply to all faiths, including Catholicism, which is the founding faith of the province.
He was quoted by La Presse recently as saying “We have seen teachers implementing Islamist religious concepts in schools.”
“When we want to pray, we go to a church, we go to a mosque, but not in public places. And, yes, we will look at the means where we can act legally or otherwise,” he said.
Legault said it he has asked members of his cabinet to produce a plan to put the ban in place during the new year and says if he gets pushback he will use the province’s notwithstanding clause to do so.
Canada’s notwithstanding clause, which is in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows provinces to temporarily override sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect new laws from being scrapped by the courts.
In 2019, Quebec passed its so-called secularism law, or Bill 21, that bans all public servants, public school teachers, police officers, government lawyers, and wildlife officials from wearing any religious symbols while at work, including crosses or crucifixes.
The province’s highest court upheld the law earlier this year after an appeal to overturn it failed.
Legault, speaking about his proposal to ban public prayer, said he wanted to send a “very clear message to the Islamists.”
“We will fight, and we will never, never accept that people try to not respect the values that are fundamental to Quebec,” he said.
Banning public prayer is a ‘totalitarian suppression’ of free speech, says legal group
While the Canadian Muslim Forum noted that Legault’s words were “deeply troubling,” Canada’s leading constitutional freedom group, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), announced it had sent a “demand letter” to Legault regarding his plan to ban public prayer.
“Such a ban is a totalitarian suppression of the freedoms of expression and of conscience and religion,” the JCCF said Tuesday regarding its notice of sending the demand letter.
The JCCF wrote in the demand letter that far from reinforcing secularism, the ban on praying in public places would “contradict the principles on which the secularism law is based: “(1) the religious neutrality of the State, (2) the equality of all citizens, and (3) freedom of religion.”
In the demand letter, lawyer Olivier Séguin wrote that Legault’s “approach to the situation” suggests a “militant, anti-religious and dogmatic conception of one of the healthiest and oldest practices that human beings have maintained in their relationships with their fellow human beings and with a higher power.”
“The ban on prayer announced by the Premier borrows from the intolerant overtones of a state atheism that flourished east of the Iron Curtain during the 20th century, and of which history has retained only sad memories. In so doing, our government would be violating the principles of religious neutrality, equality and freedom of religion on which the secular state is supposed to be based,” he added.
When it comes to the historical fact of Quebec’s Catholic heritage and past, Quebec Life Coalition President Georges Buscemi earlier this year observed to LifeSiteNews that laws such as the secularism one in reality reflect the rejection of faith by today’s Quebecers.
“This decision is completely consistent with the recent historical trend in Quebec, which is one of rejecting its Catholic heritage in favor of a liberal ‘enlightened’ worldview, which considers religion to be a purely private matter,” he told LifeSiteNews.
National
Women and girls beauty pageant urges dismissal of transgender human rights complaint

There has not been a human rights case in Canada that has dealt with whether children’s emotional, mental, and physical safety should take precedence over a transwoman’s desire to access a female changeroom.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that Canada Galaxy Pageants (CGP), a beauty competition based in Mississauga, Ontario, continues to face a drawn-out human rights complaint filed in 2019 by Ms. Jessica Yaniv (also known as Ms. Jessica Simpson). Despite repeated delays, missed deadlines, and inadequate filings by Ms. Simpson, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (Tribunal) has allowed the case to continue—imposing years of uncertainty, stress, and reputational harm on pageant activities and its organizers.
On July 8, 2025, lawyers provided by the Justice Centre wrote to the Tribunal requesting that the complaint against the pageant be dismissed.
The conflict began in 2019, when Ms. Jessica Simpson (identifying at the time as Ms. Jessica Yaniv) was asked whether she had fully transitioned to female prior to competing in a CGP beauty pageant. Ms. Simpson refused to answer and filed a complaint with the Tribunal, seeking $10,000 in damages for “injury to dignity and feelings” and a ruling against the pageant that it must allow biological males to participate alongside biological females and young girls.
CPG pageants are private events that include female competitors as young as six years old, and require participants to change together backstage.
The pageant has a policy of accommodating fully transitioned transgender women, but has expressed safety and privacy concerns about allowing individuals with intact male genitals to access these female-only spaces.
There has not been a human rights case in Canada that has dealt with whether children’s emotional, mental, and physical safety should take precedence over a transwoman’s desire to access a female changeroom.
In January 2025, the Tribunal directed both parties to file hearing materials. While the pageant complied, submitting nine witness statements, including from concerned parents, Ms. Simpson repeatedly failed to meet deadlines and produced inadequate submissions. Ms. Simpson was nevertheless granted multiple extensions, but still failed to submit a proper case summary or witness list beyond naming her own mother.
The Tribunal has not yet indicated whether it will proceed to a hearing or will finally dismiss the claim.
Constitutional lawyer Allison Pejovic stated, “This beauty pageant has already made reasonable accommodations for fully transitioned transgender females without male genitals.”
“It is imperative that biological women and girls have safe, secure, female-only places where they won’t have to worry about seeing male genitals, or about having individuals with male genitals looking at them,” Ms. Pejovic continued. “Little girls should not be exposed to male genitals. Period.”
Canada Galaxy Pageants continues to express gratitude for the legal support it has received from the Justice Centre.
The Tribunal is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether it will finally dismiss the complaint or extend further leniency to Ms. Simpson.
National
How Long Will Mark Carney’s Post-Election Honeymoon Last? – Michelle Rempel Garner

From Energy Now
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to be enjoying a bit of a post-election honeymoon period with voters. This is a normal phenomenon in Canadian politics – our electorate tends to give new leaders the benefit of the doubt for a time after their election.
So the obvious question that arises in this circumstance is, how long will it last?
I’ve had a few people ask me to speculate about that over the last few weeks. It’s not an entirely straightforward question to answer, because external factors often need to be considered. However, leaders have a lot of control too, and on that front, questions linger about Mark Carney’s long-term political acumen. So let’s start there.
Having now watched the man in action for a hot minute, there seems to be some legs to the lingering perception that, as a political neophyte, Mr. Carney struggles to identify and address political challenges. In the over 100 days that he’s now been in office, he’s laid down some proof points on this front.
For starters, Mr. Carney seems to not fully grasp that his post-election honeymoon is unfolding in a starkly different political landscape than that of his predecessor in 2015. When former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau secured a majority government, he inherited a balanced federal budget, a thriving economy, and a stable social fabric from the prior Conservative government. These favorable conditions gave Trudeau the time and flexibility to advance his political agenda. By contrast, Canadians today are grappling with crises in affordability, employment, and crime – issues that were virtually non-existent in 2015. As a result, public patience with a new political leader may wear thin much more quickly now than it did a decade ago.
So in that, Carney doesn’t have much time to make material progress on longstanding irritants like crime and affordability, but to date, he really hasn’t. In fact, he hasn’t even dedicated much space in any of his daily communications to empathizing with the plight of the everyday Canadian, eschewing concern for bread and butter issues for colder corporate speak. So if predictions about a further economic downturn in the fall ring true, he may not have the longer term political runway Justin Trudeau once had with the voting public, which doesn’t bode well for his long term favourables.
Carney’s apparent unease with retail politics won’t help him on that front, either. For example, at the Calgary Stampede, while on the same circuit, I noticed him spending the bulk of his limited time at events – even swish cocktail receptions – visibly eyeing the exit, surrounded by an entourage of fartcatchers whose numbers would have made even Trudeau blush. Unlike Trudeau, whose personal charisma secured three election victories despite scandals, Carney struggles to connect with a crowd. This political weakness may prove fatal to his prospects for an extended honeymoon, even with the Liberal brand providing cover.
It’s also too early to tell if Carney has anyone in his inner circle capable of grasping these concepts. That said, leaders typically don’t cocoon themselves away from people who will give blunt political assessments until the very end of their tenures when their political ends are clear to everyone but them. Nonetheless, Carney seems to have done exactly that, and compounded the problem of his lack of political acumen, by choosing close advisors who have little retail political experience themselves. While some have lauded this lack of political experience as a good thing, not having people around the daily table or group chat who can interject salient points about how policy decisions will impact the lives of day to day Canadians probably won’t help Carney slow the loss of his post-election shine.
Further proof to this point are the post-election grumblings that have emerged from the Liberal caucus. Unlike Trudeau, who started his premiership with an overwhelming majority of his caucus having been freshly elected, Carney has a significant number of old hands in his caucus who carry a decade of internal drama, inflated sense of worth, and personal grievances amongst them. As a political neophyte, Carney not only has to prove to the Canadian public that he has the capacity to understand their plight, he also has to do the same for his caucus, whose support he will uniformly need to pass legislation in a minority Parliament.
To date, Carney has not been entirely successful on that front. In crafting his cabinet, he promoted weak caucus members into key portfolios like immigration, kept loose cannons in places where they can cause a lot of political damage (i.e. Steven Guilbeaut in Heritage), unceremoniously dumped mavericks who possess big social media reach without giving them a task to keep them occupied, and passed over senior members of the caucus who felt they should either keep their jobs or have earned a promotion after carrying water for a decade. Underestimating the ability of a discontented caucus to derail a leader’s political agenda – either by throwing a wrench into the gears of Parliament, leaking internal drama to media, or underperformance – is something that Carney doesn’t seem to fully grasp. Said differently, Carney’s (in)ability to manage his caucus will have an impact on how long the shine stays on him.
Mark Carney’s honeymoon as a public figure also hinges upon his (arguably hilarious) assumption that the federal public service operates in the same way that private sector businesses do. Take for example, a recent (and hamfistedly) leaked headline, proactively warning senior public servants that he might fire them. In the corporate world, where bonuses and promotions are tied to results, such conditions are standard (and in most cases, entirely reasonable). Yet, after a decade of Liberal government expansion and lax enforcement of performance standards, some bureaucrats have grown accustomed to and protective of Liberal slipshod operating standards. Carney may not yet understand that many of these folks will happily leak sensitive information or sabotage policy reforms to preserve their status quo, and that both elegance and political will is required to enact change within the Liberal’s bloated government.
On that front, Mr. Carney has already gained a reputation for being dismissive and irritable with various players in the political arena. While this quick-tempered demeanor may have remained understated during his relatively brief ascent to the Prime Minister’s office, continued impatience could soon become a prominent issue for both him and his party. Whether dismissing reporters or publicly slighting senior cabinet members, if Carney sustains this type of arrogance and irritability he won’t be long for the political world. Without humility, good humor, patience, and resilience he won’t be able to convince voters, the media, the bureaucracy, and industry to support his governing agenda.
But perhaps the most important factor in judging how long Mr. Carney’s honeymoon will last is that to date he has shown a striking indifference to nuclear-grade social policy files like justice, immigration, and public safety. His appointment of underperforming ministers to these critical portfolios and the absence of a single government justice bill in Parliament’s spring session – despite crime being a major voter concern – is a big problem. Carney himself rarely addresses these issues – likely due to a lack of knowledge and care – leaving them to the weakest members of his team. None of this points to long term political success for Carney.
So Mr. Carney needs to understand that Canadians are not sterile, esoteric units to be traded in a Bay Street transaction. They are real people living real lives, with real concerns that he signed up to address. He also needs to understand that politics (read, the ability to connect with one’s constituents and deliver for them) isn’t an avocation – it’s a learned skill of which he is very much still a novice practitioner.
Honeymoon or not, these laws of political gravity that Mr. Carney can’t avoid for long, particularly with an effective opposition litigating his government’s failures.
In that, I think the better question is not if Mark Carney can escape that political gravity well, but whether he’ll stick around once his ship inevitably gets sucked into it.
Only time – and the country’s fortunes under his premiership – will tell.
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