Excess mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., on Tuesday told Canadian lawmakers that national mortality statistics show “screaming safety signals” following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — including increases in deaths among infants and children and increases in turbo cancers.
Testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, Rancourt also argued that COVID-19-era government interventions — including lockdowns, isolating the elderly, closing businesses and withdrawing government support programs — also drove excess mortality during the pandemic.
Rancourt based his arguments on his analysis of official mortality data from Statistics Canada and in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He described how COVID-19 vaccines directly harmed individuals, and how specific pandemic policies caused broader societal harm.
His presentation came on the opening day of the Allison Inquiry, a four-day hearing chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Dean Allison. The inquiry collected testimony from 50 Canadians injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with testimony from physicians, scientists and other witnesses.
4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. alone
Infant mortality had been declining in the U.S. before the pandemic. That trend reversed during the pandemic, according to Rancourt’s data — but not until 2022, nine months after COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women.
Rancourt estimated the change represented approximately 4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024.
He presented a similar case for Canada, although the raw numbers were much lower due to the smaller population. After Canada issued its vaccine guidance for pregnant women on May 28, 2021, he said mortality rose among infants, with a marked increase nine months after the recommendations.
He estimated there were 200 excess infant deaths in Canada during that time, with 10 excess pregnancy-related deaths.
Data show 2,000+ excess deaths among 1- to 4-year-olds in U.S.
Rancourt identified more than 2,000 excess deaths among children ages 1-4 in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024.
He attributed an initial increase in 2021 partly to the abrupt withdrawal of federal financial assistance in some states.
But Rancourt said the largest increase coincided with the June 17, 2022, authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for young children. Excess deaths peaked precisely with the vaccine rollout.
Canadian mortality data showed a similar age-specific pattern. Rancourt shared mortality trends for Canadian children ages 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14, showing each group experienced a pronounced increase during the year COVID-19 vaccines became available for that particular age group.
The spikes in excess mortality were “very sudden,” he said. The increases did not occur during the first two years of the pandemic, he emphasized.
“As soon as you vaccinated these age groups and not before, not when there was COVID, not in the first two years of the pandemic. But when you started vaccinating them, that is the signature that you see in the mortality [data],” Rancourt said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
He estimated 410 excess deaths among Canadian children ages 1-14.
‘Turbo cancers’ and excess cancer deaths
Rancourt said that rapidly progressing cancers, also called “turbo cancers,” are not a new phenomenon. Scientific literature on “hyperprogressive disease,” or HPD, has reported such cancers in some patients undergoing immunotherapy since 2015, when the new treatments became available.
However, excess mortality data now show signals of an unusually aggressive increase in cancer mortality following the vaccine rollouts, according to Rancourt.
Rancourt identified more than 4,000 excess cancer deaths among Americans ages 5-44 during the study period. An estimated 960 of those were among young people ages 5-24. He highlighted a sharp increase in deaths from cancers of the long bones and limbs.
Rancourt called the increase “definitely a safety signal.”
He also estimated that 240 excess deaths among Americans ages 25-44 involved multiple primary cancers — separate primary tumors occurring in different organs rather than a single cancer metastasizing to other parts of the body.
Approximately 1,500 excess deaths due to these cancers occurred in people 75 and older. He said his research group has observed similar signals in Canada, but researchers are still analyzing those data.
It’s not just the vaccines — pandemic policies also linked to excess deaths
The second half of Rancourt’s presentation focused on an argument his research group has built over several years of excess mortality analysis — that government policy responses to COVID-19 caused excess mortality.
For example, his research team examined more than 80 province-specific socioeconomic variables in Canada to determine which were linked to excess mortality.
They found that excess mortality correlated strongly with GDP per capita. “The more wealth generation you have in the province, the more excess deaths you have,” he said.
He surmised that when the economy shut down in provinces with vibrant economies, it had devastating effects on workers and their families.
Policies designed to protect elderly contributed to their deaths
Rancourt compared weekly excess mortality with an Oxford University index measuring the intensity of measures intended to protect elderly people, including isolation and lockdown policies.
Increases in the severity of those measures corresponded with large mortality peaks, Rancourt said. Those peaks were then followed by periods of unusually low mortality.
“And that’s because you’ve killed so many people in that first peak that there’s less people of that age to die in the weeks that follow,” he said. “That’s called the dry tinder effect.”
He interpreted the pattern as evidence that measures intended to protect elderly Canadians instead contributed to their deaths.
During questioning after his presentation, Rancourt was asked whether that meant elderly people should not have been isolated and locked down.
“Absolutely,” he responded.
Rancourt said social isolation and severe stress can have profound physiological effects, particularly among vulnerable populations.
“If you had not tried to save the elderly by isolating them and locking them in” the mortality outcome would have been different, he said.
“You have to know that isolation kills,” he said. “This is unambiguous.”
Cutting financial support also correlated with deaths
Rancourt said another mortality signal appeared when governments withdrew pandemic-era financial assistance.
Canada and the U.S. initially provided enormous financial support to workers and families after governments shut down large portions of the economy.
Those programs were so effective that poverty actually declined in Canada during 2020 and 2021, when more than $1 trillion was given out, Rancourt said.
But mortality increased following major reductions in financial assistance, according to the data he presented.
“It’s worse if you give money, if you give support and you cut it, it’s worse than if you’d never given it,” Rancourt said.
No evidence of viral pandemic, Rancourt argued
Rancourt said his team’s all-cause mortality research across North America and Europe failed to show the mortality pattern that would be expected if a spreading respiratory virus were the primary cause of excess mortality.
Rancourt described the spread in mortality as “geostatic,” rather than “geotemporal” — meaning mortality sometimes appeared to peak in one geographic location without spreading into neighboring regions.
As an example, he cited the dramatic differences between the area around Milan in northern Italy, which experienced massive early mortality spikes, and Rome, which had no comparable event.
Both cities had similar demographics and similar types of exposure — through international airports and other types of transportation networks — but very different outcomes.
If there had been a viral disease, they should have seen a similar type of spread and similar mortality rates.
“Identical systems, identical types of societies, just as many poor, high-density urban areas,” he said.
Rancourt said the geographic patterns were “inconsistent with the accepted theory of how a virus spreads” through person-to-person respiratory transmission.
‘Assaults’ drove excess mortality, ‘not a virus’
Rancourt ended his presentation by telling the members of the inquiry that his research led him to conclude that government policies and toxic vaccines were to blame for excess deaths in the COVID-19 period.
He said:
“History will record that the COVID period was, in effect, a massive and unnecessary multifaceted assault against people, exploiting fear and causing harm, injury and death, especially in the most vulnerable. All governments under U.S. hegemony and media influence cooperated or imitated. Canada was no exception.
“The vaccines are toxic and caused many deaths and injuries in plain sight of robust national statistics.”
He listed economic shutdowns, fear, mandates, isolation, medical interventions and vaccination among the “assaults” that he believes, based on the data he analyzed, caused excess mortality.
Rancourt singled out COVID-19 vaccination as the most devastating. Unlike other pandemic measures, it involved administering a pharmaceutical product directly to large numbers of healthy as well as vulnerable people, including elderly people, pregnant women and children.
Rancourt conceded that excess mortality data cannot, on their own, conclusively prove what caused individual deaths. He argued instead that uncertainty about causation should not become a reason to ignore unusual population-level signals.
“Science can never prove causality,” Rancourt said. But institutional capture can “always minimize and invalidate screaming safety signals and personal hardship.”
The patterns he presented should have triggered investigation and changes in government policy, he said.
“These are the signals I showed you today,” Rancourt said. They “needed to be acknowledged right away and used to change government and medical establishment behavior.”
Western spy agencies originally cultivated and trained Ukrainian hacker groups “to counter Russia”, but they all quickly spun out of control, mutating into fraud networks, the Aydınlık outlet reports.
As of 2026, an estimated 1,000 call centers operate in Ukraine, employing roughly 60,000 people and targeting citizens of at least 29 countries through a range of schemes—including fake investment pitches, romance-baiting, and impersonation of banks or government agencies.
Various criminal ploys are used, including threats and blackmail, and different schemes are employed for different countries — for example, fake official documents in Germany, bogus cryptocurrencies in France, “safe bank accounts” in Greece and “tax authorities” in Canada and the US.
The network’s total monthly revenue is estimated at roughly $1 billion, with a single call center alone pulling in $8 million from Germany and approximately $1 million from the Baltic states, the outlet adds.
The documentary Silencing Detective Grus, produced by the Grus Justice Project with Matador Films, concerns Detective Helen Grus of the Ottawa Police Service. Her case became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The question at its center was whether a police officer is permitted to investigate a possible link between the COVID-19 injections and a cluster of infant deaths. The tribunal’s answer, delivered March 25, 2025, was no. This essay engages material that establishment institutions frame in their own vocabulary. Product designations, agency names, and documented adverse events appear in the language in which they were made and recorded, since those are the terms of the record. The analysis operates from a different register: injection harm, institutional capture, and the responsibility of agencies that knew and pushed the shots regardless. The occasion is the release of the film, and the reason it matters now.
The Keystroke
January 13, 2022. Detective Helen Grus, in her nineteenth year with the Ottawa Police Service, opens the Records Management System from her desk in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Section.¹ A colleague in her unit has mentioned at the water cooler that they have seen a doubling to tripling of sudden infant deaths over the previous year. Ottawa normally sees two or three a year. “I took it on myself,” Grus recalls, “on January the 13th, 2022, to look into the database to see if it was true.”²
It was.
She pulls one case that had been closed as non-suspicious. The investigator had never reviewed the autopsy results. The SUDI questionnaire, the multi-page document in which parents are asked what the child ate that day, what medications the household received, what vaccinations the child had, was not in the file. Grus follows up over the following days to see whether the autopsy report will appear. It never does.
The detective who signed off on that closure was, and is, the sister-in-law of the prosecutor who would lead the case against Grus at her disciplinary tribunal.³
That is the shape of the story. What follows is what happens to a Canadian police officer who runs a database query her employer did not expect her to run.
What She Found
The pattern was real. In one case, an infant had died in the parents’ arms. “To me, that is suspicious,” Grus says. “In twenty years of policing, I had never seen that happen.”⁴ Another death involved an enlarged heart, a presentation she describes as abnormal for an infant fatality.
The field around the Ottawa file was already noisy. Eighty-six stillbirths in the Waterloo region between January and July of that year, against a normal rate of roughly one every two months.⁵ A physician who appears in the film describes a patient who had received her second injection at eleven weeks of pregnancy. Two months later, at a routine October checkup, there was no fetal heart rate. Her three prior pregnancies had all been healthy.⁶
A bereaved mother in the film describes her own loss. She was thirty-two weeks pregnant. She woke feeling something wrong, went to the hospital, was told everything was fine, and was sent home. The next morning there was no heartbeat. Two prior pregnancies had been healthy and full-term. “Because then you look at her, and there’s nothing wrong with her. Like, nothing. She was a perfect little baby. She was big, and she was healthy.”⁷ She describes what happens next: the C-section for a baby who has already died, everything she had bought becoming “a memory that you put away, stick in a box,” the suggestion of antidepressants as a solution. “We will really never know. But that is the only thing in my life that was different, was putting the COVID vaccination in my body.”⁸
Grus had institutional context she could not have known she had. Pfizer’s own February 2021 adverse event review had already identified placental changes, increased fetal deaths, and one child born with severe dyspnea, or shortness of breath, all attributed by the manufacturer’s own reviewers to the injection itself.⁹ In the same month, the Canadian Medical Protective Society was writing to the federal Deputy Minister of Health asking about liability protection for doctors administering the shots.¹⁰ The public messaging was, and would remain for years, “safe and effective.”
None of that was in her mind when she opened the database. She was checking a colleague’s observation, the way an investigator checks any tip. What she saw when she looked was enough to keep looking.
Who She Was
Helen Grus is the third of ten children born to Czechoslovak immigrants who left the communist bloc in the 1960s and met in Canada.¹¹ Her father worked three full-time jobs and eventually bought a motel in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The family bounced between motels in the United States before returning to Canada and settling in Arthur, Ontario. Ten children in a small Ontario town in a Czech immigrant family formed a polka band, because that was what the father wanted.
Grus joined the Ottawa Police Service on August 14, 2003. She spent her early years on patrol, worked as a breath technician and a coach officer, and moved to West District Investigations in 2007.¹² She describes her work as puzzle-solving. “I love investigating. It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together every day. So I love finding the truth.”¹³ In one Ontario Police Association nomination cycle, she was the most-nominated officer for the province’s Top Cop award. She did not receive a mention.¹⁴
She is not an activist. She is a career investigator from an immigrant family who liked her job and was good at it. When Canadian institutions moved to punish someone for asking about the deaths of infants, that is who they moved against.
The Suppression Begins
The database was not Grus’s only move. She had also been briefing her command about what her unit was seeing. In late 2021 and early 2022, she twice briefed Chief Peter Sloly and other senior Ottawa Police officers on the cluster of infant deaths, Pfizer’s exclusion of pregnant women from its trials, the advisories on myocarditis in children, and her concern that harms were going unreported. Command took no action. In early February 2022, she was suspended.¹⁵
Within days of her suspension, Ottawa Police secretly wiretapped Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, provisions written for abductions, hostage situations, and terrorism. The wiretap produced no evidence.¹⁶
The first charge was insubordination, on the theory that Grus should not have accessed the RMS at all. That charge collapsed once she was permitted to explain what she had been doing. It was replaced, in the same interview, with discreditable conduct.¹⁷
The stated rationale for the new charge was that the CBC had run a story on her database query, framing it as an unauthorized access for personal reasons. The story was false. Someone inside the Ottawa Police Service had leaked to the CBC. Grus asked for an investigation into the leak. Her request was declined. She was now to be held responsible for the reputational damage caused by a leak she did not authorize, about an investigation she had been running lawfully.¹⁸
The rumors introduced against her in the disciplinary process ranged from the strange to the trivial. That she believed the mRNA injections contained tracking nanobots. That she had lied to local hockey arenas to get her children ice time. Neither had any relationship to the substance of her investigation. Both traveled through her file.¹⁹
She was offered a plea. Thirteen bullet points, a small penalty. When she read the sheet, her badge number was wrong and eight of the thirteen bullets were inaccurate or misleading. “I’m not going to sign off on a document that is not accurate,” she said.²⁰ She took the matter to a hearing.
From March 2022, personnel from the Public Health Agency of Canada monitored the Grus file, communicated with Ottawa Police officials, and shaped the investigation. Two of those PHAC personnel were the mother and grandmother of one of the nine deceased infants Grus had been investigating. The grandmother was a senior PHAC scientific manager associated with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, whose recommendations underwrote Canada’s mandatory-injection policy for employment and travel and its recommendation that pregnant and breastfeeding women receive the shots. The federal officials whose work had shaped the policy Grus was investigating were among those shaping the prosecution of the officer investigating it.²¹
The Tribunal Machinery
What followed became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The Ottawa Police Service retained outside counsel to prosecute the matter, the firm of Linda Bordeleau, wife of the retired Ottawa Chief of Police Charles Bordeleau. Cost estimates to the Ottawa taxpayer run into the seven figures.²²
The hearing officer was retired Superintendent Christopher Renwick. Under the applicable rules, hearing officers who are not trained lawyers may seek independent legal advice for the proceeding. Renwick declined it and relied instead, when confused, on the arguments of the prosecution.²³
The prosecution’s conduct in the room is on the record. Constant objections before defense counsel could complete a sentence. Objections during defense closing submissions, which in ordinary legal practice are sacrosanct. During one exchange the prosecutor said “objection,” slammed her laptop shut, and walked out of the hearing.²⁴ In one line of questioning she compared Grus’s conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams, the Canadian Forces officer convicted of murder and sexual assault.²⁵ To compare a detective’s database query about infant deaths to a serial rapist and murderer requires a particular quality of malice.
The expert witnesses Grus had prepared to call, whose function was to demonstrate that the medical basis for her investigation was sound, were not permitted to testify. Five witnesses in total, including three medical doctors, were barred.²⁶ The affidavit her defense filed contained federal correspondence showing that Canadian public health officials knew of injection-associated harm to pregnant women and infants and continued to promote the shots as safe. When Grus attempted, during her own testimony, to explain what the Pfizer trial records showed about infant outcomes, the hearing officer lurched forward and ordered her to stop.²⁷
Shortly before her scheduled testimony, Grus received an email from Inspector Hugh O’Toole, head of the Ottawa Police Professional Standards unit, ordering her not to use records in her affidavit that had already been filed and disclosed. Her defense counsel, Bath-Sheba van den Berg, described the email in one word. Intimidation.²⁸ No charges were laid against O’Toole. He resigned. During the same period, a different Ottawa officer facing criminal charges for sexual assault and forcible confinement was actively defended by his police association, while Grus, facing discipline for doing her job, was refused association support.²⁹
Of the witnesses who testified against Grus, all but one received promotions during or after the hearing.³⁰ Steve Bell, the acting chief during the initial charging period and the officer who designated Renwick as hearing officer, is now the Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.³¹
The evidence Renwick did allow into the record showed that three of the nine infants Grus had been investigating died from causes officially listed as known adverse effects of the COVID-19 injections.³² He convicted her anyway.
Grus’s own frame did not move. “For me,” she says, “the victims in this are those families that lost the babies.”³³
The Ruling
On March 25, 2025, Superintendent Renwick found Detective Grus guilty of discreditable conduct.³⁴
His written decision holds two propositions that Canadians should understand plainly.
The first is that a police officer facing a misconduct charge has, in effect, no defenses available. It does not matter whether the underlying investigation was warranted, whether the officer’s suspicion was reasonable, or whether what the officer found was later confirmed by evidence. What matters, per the ruling, is whether the officer crossed an administrative line. Substance is legally irrelevant.³⁵
The second is that a police officer cannot conduct an investigation into government officials without prior authorization. The Police Services Act, which had long granted officers the discretion to open an investigation on their own initiative, was amended in this period to require supervisor permission. The Grus ruling made explicit what the amendment had permitted implicitly. In Ontario, and by clear signal to every other Canadian jurisdiction, police may no longer look at the state without first asking the state.³⁶
Take those two propositions together and what you have is a specific legal architecture. A single office, the office of the chief of police, controls every institutional lever in the process by which an officer can be disciplined for asking about the state. The chief authorizes the charge and designates the hearing officer. The prosecuting counsel is retained on his authority. The officers who testify against her serve under his command. There is no independent institution anywhere in the process. This is not the failure of a system built to hold police accountable. It is the system working exactly as its recent redesign intended. The message to every constable in Ontario is precise.
What the Film Is For
A scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the documentary makes a point about films of this kind that is easy to miss. He is asked whether the film should aim to open the minds of people who still believe the official narrative, to persuade the unpersuaded. His answer is that this is not what films do. Books and films of this kind, he says, do not convert. They consolidate the people who have already understood that something is wrong. They give shape to the sense that those people were right to be concerned. They create cohesion and rationality among those who are already drawn to being critical.³⁷
That framing is the essay’s answer to a question a promotional piece has to address. If the film does not convert, what is the point of watching it, sharing it, screening it?
The point is that in a country where a career detective can be destroyed for opening a database, where a ruling now strips an entire profession of the right to investigate its own government, the people who suspect that the official messaging on injection safety was wrong need a common reference. They need to see what a real Canadian tribunal looks like when its purpose is signaling rather than adjudication. They need to hear the parents of babies who died speak for themselves. The film shows them the career professional from an immigrant family who queried the database that day, and what happened to her when she did.
The film is that common reference. It is calmly made. Its subject describes her career and her investigation in her own words. Her lawyers walk through the tribunal they watched. Parents describe what they lost. A scholar addresses how compliance is maintained in institutions under pressure. The film neither editorializes over its own material nor pleads with the viewer. It records what happened, and the record is severe enough that it does not need help.
The Firing Squad and What to Do
The film closes on a story from the scholar’s childhood. He watched a World War Two film at the public library. In it, the German army lines a group of civilians against a wall. Every German soldier except one raises his rifle. The officer walks over and speaks with the soldier who did not. After a moment, the soldier lowers his rifle, walks to the wall, and joins the civilians. The command is given. Everyone against the wall is killed.
Most viewers think the point of that story is the soldier who chose principle. It is not. The significance of the story is that every other soldier raised his rifle.³⁸
Detective Helen Grus is the soldier who did not raise the rifle. The story the film tells is what the Canadian institutional structure did to her for it, and what that reveals about the readiness of every other soldier in the formation.
If any of this has landed for you, the film is where the record lives. Watch it. Twenty-four-hour rental at grusjusticeproject.org for twenty Canadian dollars.³⁹ That is the cost of seeing what happened to a career detective who queried a database about a cluster of infant deaths, told in her own words, in the voices of her lawyers, and in the voices of parents whose children died.
Once you have watched, send the link to people you know who have been asking their own questions. The Grus Justice Project offers a Host a Screening pathway for community groups who want to bring people together in a room. Contributions to the ongoing legal work go through the project’s donation page.⁴⁰ The costs of defending the case remain real: the March 2025 conviction stands, and sentencing continues into 2026.⁴¹
Which of those pathways is right for you is your decision. Canadian police in Ontario may no longer investigate the state without the state’s permission. Where you fit in what comes next is a question the film will not answer for you.
The ruling is not the end of the story. It is the precedent. Somewhere in Ontario a detective is about to notice something in a database, and the ruling was designed to determine what she does next. The film exists so that when she weighs the cost of asking, she knows the name of at least one person who paid it, and knows the kind of person that officer was before she asked.
The keystroke was on January 13, 2022. The verdict was on March 25, 2025. What comes between them is on record, and the record is on the screen.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine a teacher who notices that more children than usual are getting hurt on the playground. Way more. Two or three times as many. That is her job to notice, because she is one of the grown-ups who watches out for the kids.
She looks a bit closer. She finds that the other teachers, the ones who were supposed to check what was going on when a child got hurt, had not filled in the forms properly. Some of them had not even asked the parents what happened. She wants to know why.
Before she does anything else, she goes to the principal and tells him. She tells him twice. She says: something is happening on the playground, and I think it might have something to do with the new shots that all the children have been given this year. She says: some of these injuries look like the ones that were already known to happen after the shots. The principal does not tell her she is wrong. He just does not do anything about it.
So she keeps asking, because that is what a good teacher does.
Then things get strange. Grown-ups start showing up in her file who should not be there at all. Some of them work in the office that decided all the children should get the shots in the first place. One of them is the grandmother of one of the children who died. She helps write the rules about the shots.
So the principal punishes the teacher. First he makes up a small reason. When the small reason falls apart, he makes up a bigger one. He sends people to sit outside her house and listen to her phone calls, as if she were a dangerous person. She was not. They found nothing.
Then he does something bigger still. He makes a new rule. From now on, no teacher in the whole school is allowed to ask questions about the playground without first asking his permission. Not one teacher. Not one question.
The film is about the teacher.
It is also about what happens to a school when the principal makes rules like that. And it is about the teachers who come after her, who will one day notice that more children are getting hurt, and will have to decide whether to say something.
References
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus is identified as a veteran investigator in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit.
Grus Justice Project. Silencing Detective Grus. Directed by Todd Harris. Produced with Matador Films. 2026. Available at grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus’s direct account of the January 13, 2022 database query.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the closed case and the familial relationship of the investigating detective to the prosecutor who led the disciplinary case against her.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the case in which an infant died in the parents’ arms.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding Waterloo region stillbirth figures. The figures are as presented in the film and have not been independently verified in this essay.
Silencing Detective Grus. Physician’s on-screen account of the loss of a patient’s pregnancy following her second injection.
Silencing Detective Grus. Continuation of the bereaved mother’s testimony regarding aftermath and the injection as the sole differentiating variable from her prior healthy pregnancies.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen commentary regarding Pfizer’s February 2021 knowledge of injection-related pregnancy outcomes, including placental changes, fetal deaths, and dyspnea in one child. See also Pfizer, “5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” released under U.S. court order following Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency v. FDA, for the underlying pharmacovigilance record.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the February 2021 correspondence between the Canadian Medical Protective Society and the federal Deputy Minister of Health.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of her policing career.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding her investigative work.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding the Ontario Police Association’s Top Cop nomination process.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of Detective Grus’s two late-2021 and early-2022 briefings to Chief Peter Sloly and senior Ottawa Police officers, and the subsequent February 2022 suspension.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Ottawa Police wiretap of Detective Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, and the tribunal testimony that the wiretap produced no evidence.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the sequence of charges.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the CBC leak and the declined internal investigation into it.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the rumors introduced into the disciplinary file.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s direct statement in response to the plea offer.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Public Health Agency of Canada personnel monitoring and influencing the Grus file from March 2022, the familial relationship between two PHAC personnel and one of the nine deceased infants, and the grandmother’s senior scientific manager role at PHAC and association with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the outside counsel arrangement and the estimated cost to the Ottawa taxpayer.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the hearing officer’s decision to forgo independent legal advice.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the prosecutor’s conduct during hearing objections.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the prosecutor’s line of questioning comparing her conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the exclusion of all five defense expert witnesses, including three medical doctors.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of being ordered to stop testifying about the Pfizer trial infant outcomes.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of Inspector Hugh O’Toole’s email to Detective Grus shortly before her testimony, and defense counsel Bath-Sheba van den Berg’s characterization of the email as witness intimidation.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the differential treatment between Detective Grus and Officer Eric Post by the police association.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the promotions of witnesses who testified against Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen identification of Acting Chief Steve Bell and his current position as Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the trial evidence showing that three of the nine deceased infants died from causes officially recognized as adverse reactions to the COVID-19 injections. See also Vincent Gircys, “For Police: A Message to Serving and Retired Officers,” grusjusticeproject.org.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding the families of the deceased infants.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. See also the on-screen date of verdict in Silencing Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the ruling’s “no defenses” reasoning.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the change to the Police Services Act requiring supervisor permission for investigations, and the ruling’s application of that framework to investigations into government officials.
Silencing Detective Grus. Statement by a scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the film on the function of critical books and films.
Silencing Detective Grus. Scholar’s closing story on the firing squad and the significance of the soldiers who complied.
Grus Justice Project. “Silencing Detective Grus – 1 Day Access.” grusjusticeproject.org/buy/silencing-detective-grus-1-day-access/. Twenty-four-hour rental at CA$20 (regular CA$40).
Grus Justice Project. “Home.” grusjusticeproject.org. Host a Screening and donation pathways.
Donald Best, “Sentencing Update: September 5, 2025,” Grus Justice Project, grusjusticeproject.org. Report of the September 4, 2025 adjournment of the sentencing hearing to a date in 2026.
In Print
Ten of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.
Three take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself — the paradigm question underneath the whole shelf.
Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman has issued a critique of Canada’s participation in the US-led war against Iran, highlighting the contradiction between Ottawa’s military cooperation with Washington and the Trump administration’s ongoing economic and diplomatic assault on Canadian sovereignty.
In a pointed social media post on Monday, Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, mocked Canada’s submissive stance toward the United States despite repeated humiliations from President Donald Trump.
“Washington calls Canada its 51st state; Washington imposes tariffs on Canadian goods; Washington insults Canada and threatens to punish it over wildfire smoke,” Baqaei wrote, accompanying his statement with an image of a hockey match. “Ottawa’s response: Understood, Sir!”
The Iranian spokesman’s remarks come amid escalating US economic aggression against its northern neighbor. President Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the “51st U.S. state,” proposing to erase the 5,525-mile-long border that separates the two nations.
Most recently, on July 20, 2026, Trump invoked Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to impose devastating 50% additional tariffs on certain Canadian imports, further straining ties with America’s second-largest trade partner.
The administration has also threatened to impose 100% tariffs on all Canadian imports should Ottawa finalize certain trade agreements.
Trump has even blamed Canada for wildfire smoke affecting the United States, accusing Ottawa of “wilful negligence” over forest management and threatening additional punitive measures.
Ottawa’s military complicity
Despite this relentless hostility, Canada has positioned itself as a willing participant in the US-led military campaign against Iran.
On March 19, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated that Canada is willing “to contribute to efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz,” signaling Ottawa’s readiness to support US military objectives in the region.
While Canadian officials have publicly claimed that the country was “not consulted, did not participate, and has no plans to participate in the offensive actions against Iran,” experts have pointed out that Canada’s military is deeply integrated into American command structures.
A Canadian military base, Camp Canada, located within the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, was struck by Iranian missiles on March 2, 2026, revealing the extent of Canada’s involvement in the conflict zone.
Additionally, a Canadian colonel’s receipt of a military medal raised questions about Canada’s actual role in supporting US operations against Iran.
Baqaei’s critique drew a sharp analogy to Canada’s beloved national pastime, stating: “THIS IS NOT HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA; IT IS WASHINGTON’S FARM TEAM.”
The irony has not been lost on Canadian observers. Despite Trump’s economic warfare against Canada, which has contributed to the country slipping into technical recession, Ottawa continues to align itself with Washington’s [actually Israel’s] military agenda.
Domestically, the Iran war has raised energy prices and inflation in Canada, leading to elevated transportation costs and food prices for Canadian consumers.
Public opinion remains strongly opposed to military involvement, with nearly six in ten Canadians (58%) opposing US and Israeli bombing of Iran.
The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denounced the latest claims by Israeli officials over the occupied Golan Heights, emphasizing that the strategic region is an “inseparable” part of Syria.
The ministry, in a statement released on Thursday, vehemently condemned the rhetoric of criminal Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Golan Heights, occupied by the Tel Aviv regime for almost 60 years, will remain part of Israel “for eternity”, and his fierce opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Basically, the leader of the criminal gang and mafia ruling over the occupied Palestinian territories is not in a position to comment on the formation of an independent Palestinian state, because the Palestinian land belongs to the Palestinian people, and the racist illusions of the genocidal Zionist regime cannot change this reality,” the statement added.
It added that “the Golan Heights are an inseparable part of the territory of Syria, and the colonial ambitions of a usurping and occupying entity cannot change its legal and historical realities.”
The Iranian foreign ministry also condemned Colombia’s recent recognition of the Israeli regime’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, calling it a violation of the UN Charter and international law.
“Within this framework, the Colombian government’s recent decision to recognize the sovereignty of the Zionist regime over the occupied Golan Heights is completely rejected and condemned, and constitutes a clear violation of the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law concerning respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states,” the statement also read.
It noted that such an action also conflicts with the recognized principle of international law prohibiting recognition of the effects of unlawful acts and entails international responsibility of the Colombian government.
While emphasizing the legal, moral and humanitarian obligation of all governments, particularly Muslim countries, to help Palestinians achieve their right to self-determination and freedom from the Zionist regime’s occupation, apartheid and colonialism, the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled the responsibility of the UN Security Council to stop the occupation and relentless aggression of the Zionist regime against occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and other countries in the region.
The statement went on to note that the Palestinian issue remains the most important humanitarian and moral subject of the contemporary world, which began in 1948 with the creation of a fabricated entity in the historic land of Palestine and, through its cancerous expansion, has made the entire West Asia region and the world insecure.
“There is no doubt that the comprehensive support of the United States and certain Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, for the genocidal Zionist regime has been the main factor behind its impunity and has led to the continuation and intensification of its expansionism and crimes in the region,” the statement pointed out.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, while reiterating its principled position in support of the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people to liberate their land from occupation, strongly condemns any attempt to marginalize the Palestinian issue, the Iranian foreign ministry concluded.
An undercover investigation by Al Jazeera reveals how western donors evade charity law to provide aid to illegal Israeli settlements.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank. More than 230 of them are children. Attacks by settlers on rural Palestinian communities have increased, destroying property and capturing livestock, driving families from their homes. At the same time, the Israeli military has launched a large-scale assault on the densely populated Jenin refugee camp.
This film provides a comprehensive picture of the tactics the Israeli government uses to support the settlers and then, through infrastructure and building programmes, annex Palestinian land.
Western governments claim to oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and uphold international law. However, undercover reporters from Al Jazeera expose how donors based in some Western countries fund the expansion of illegal settlements.
Al Jazeera journalists secretly film meetings with pro-settler organisations in Israel, claiming to be donors based in the UK looking to make large contributions to their projects. They’re told how funds can be paid as tax-deductible donations to charities in the UK and Canada who then pay the money on to their organisations. It is unlawful for charities in the UK and Canada to use donations to support the illegal settlement of the West Bank.
The Israeli organisations tell our undercover reporters how donations can be used to campaign for the demolition of Palestinian homes and provide military-grade security equipment such as drones and night vision cameras to settlers. We are also told that funds can be used to buy guns for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem and equipment for soldiers serving in the Israeli army.
The Israeli organisations are aware that their activities are considered unlawful in Canada and the UK and suggest ways to disguise the intended purpose of the donations, routing the funds through affiliated third parties and, in some cases, misreporting the true nature of their spending.
Charities in the UK and Canada are required to do extensive due diligence on how funds paid overseas are spent and to ensure they comply with the law. Al Jazeera’s evidence points to serious failings in this process.
Washington has blocked the issuance of SSL security certificates for Fars News Agency‘s website, cutting the country’s most visited news outlet off from browser-trusted encryption, the agency revealed on 17 July.
Without valid certificates, visitors to the site face security warnings and restricted access, while the agency’s content has been removed from Google search results.
Technical assessments confirm that all major internationally recognized Certificate Authorities – including Let’s Encrypt, DigiCert, and Sectigo – have rejected certificate requests for the agency’s domains, citing US sanctions pressure.
The measure is the latest in a series of US actions against the outlet. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control seized the agency’s .com domain in 2020, and in September 2023 added Fars and its CEO to the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list.
The EU and Canada have since imposed sanctions of their own.
Fars has faced repeated efforts to restrict its reach, including the removal of its Instagram account, which had nearly three million followers.
Iran’s Computer Emergency Response and Coordination Center (MAHER) says the agency has been the primary target of sustained cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the country’s domestic media infrastructure.
The block forms part of a broader western campaign to dominate the media narrative against its geopolitical adversaries by suppressing opposing voices while artificially amplifying its own.
Western governments are simultaneously dismantling online anonymity at home through identity verification laws that, under the pretext of child protection, tie every post to a legal identity – backed by biometric verification requirements, VPN restrictions, and the scanning of private messages.
The measures tighten control over expression both abroad and within their own borders, amid ongoing crackdowns on pro-Palestine and pro-Iran speech.
An investigation by TIME revealed that Israel has been paying $1.5 million per month to Clock Tower X, a firm owned by US President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to run a covert influence campaign targeting young US conservatives through paid influencer networks, coordinated messaging in private group chats, and websites designed to shape how AI chatbots characterize Israel.
US officials now believe the operation turned against Trump himself, as paid influencers attacked the now broken ceasefire with Iran.
In May, Israel allocated roughly $730 million to its 2026 Hasbara propaganda budget, more than four times the previous year’s allocation, even as polling shows 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with experts dismissing the spending as unable to offset the impact of its genocide in Gaza.
The Cradle analyst Mohamad Hasan Sweidan previously detailed how Israel operates a “Digital Iron Dome,” a system combining mass reporting campaigns to take down content exposing its crimes in Gaza, algorithmic ad warfare that floods timelines with state propaganda, and hundreds of millions of dollars in influencer contracts and AI-targeted campaigns to manipulate global perceptions.
Marie Stopes lobbied Parliament to compulsorily sterilise people she called “parasites.” She branded her contraceptives “Prorace” and “Racial.” She bequeathed her clinics not to the Family Planning Association but to the Eugenics Society. She also sits in the BBC viewers’ top 100 Great Britons, appears on Royal Mail postage stamps, and is remembered as the woman who gave British women reproductive choice. Mark Halliday Sutherland’s grandfather was the doctor Stopes sued for libel in 1923 after he accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment.” The trial ran two-and-a-half years across three courts. Dr Halliday Sutherland won.
Behind Stopes stood a longer tradition. Thomas Malthus wrote in 1798 that population would outrun food supply and that poverty was therefore a natural law rather than a consequence of governance. Mark traces the pattern forward from there: through Galton’s eugenics, Stopes’s sterilisation campaigns, H.G. Wells’s “faith to kill,” Margaret Sanger’s plan to corral millions of Americans onto government farms, Paul Ehrlich’s proposal to add sterilants to water supplies, and John Holdren’s “planetary regime.” The same three solutions keep reappearing across a century: more top-down control, restricted births, increased deaths. What changes is the marketing.
Mark grew up believing a simpler version — the one still repeated by the BBC — in which his grandfather was a backward Catholic obstructing a feminist pioneer. In 2013 he found Halliday’s papers in the cellar of his mother’s house. Seven years of research later he published Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it, drawing on primary sources with nearly 700 citations across 320 pages. He is Sydney-based, currently working from London as a coach and facilitator, and writes on Substack about how the ideas that drove Stopes’s clinic never really went away — they just changed clothes.
The interview traces how organisations rename themselves to soften their image (the Eugenics Society is now the Adelphi Genetics Forum; the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is now Dignity in Dying), why the Society’s 1960 decision to pursue “crypto-eugenics” still shapes what gets said and what doesn’t, and what Mark reads in a Canadian paper modelling CAD $1.273 trillion in savings from expanded MAiD. Halliday Sutherland predicted in 1929 that the end of European civilisation might come from “a lack of European children.” A century on, fertility rates across the developed world are collapsing.
With thanks to Mark Halliday Sutherland.
1. You’re an author, researcher, facilitator and coach based in Sydney — but a lot of your work centres on a libel trial in 1920s London involving your own grandfather. How did you end up here, and what was the journey that led you into this material?
The first two parts were intentional: I met an Australian girl in London. I emigrated to Australia and we got married. I work as a freelance facilitator and coach in the field of leadership and management.
The author/researcher parts arose from circumstances.
My grandfather, Dr Halliday Sutherland, died in 1960. I was born six months later and was named in his memory. During his life, Halliday was a well-known doctor, author and public speaker but after his death, his fame faded fast.
If he was remembered at all, it was as the man who had attacked Marie Stopes, the woman who founded Britain’s first birth control clinic. In 1922, Halliday accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment” and (she said) called for her to be jailed. She sued him for libel and they fought a bitter legal battle for two-and-a-half years.
Marie Stopes died in 1958. She was famous in her lifetime and, in some ways, her fame increased after her death. She was the subject of five major biographies and things were named after her: buildings, multi-national organisations and memorial lectures. Blue plaques appeared on the buildings in which she had lived and worked.
In short, Stopes was the secular saint of Britain’s birth control movement and was said to have given British women reproductive choice.
To learn about my grandfather’s legal battle, I went to the biographies of Stopes. These cast him as a backward-looking Roman Catholic who wanted to tie women to the kitchen sink. This was the fellow after whom I had been named, and in the context of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s it was, to be honest, a bit of an embarrassment.
In 2013 I rediscovered Halliday’s papers in the cellar of my mother’s house, and I began researching his life more closely. I found that while the biographies of Stopes had included many true facts about him, they had omitted many other true facts that told a very different story. I learned that in 1920s Britain, Halliday had been at the forefront of the opposition to eugenics.
Back then, eugenics was at its height and had many supporters in the establishment and the intelligentsia. Stopes’ clinic was a eugenic project that sought to transform Britain (and Britons). Her aim was to eliminate the reproduction of people she considered “undesirable” while increasing the numbers of those who were “fit”. Zoe Williams of The Guardian wrote that Stopes’ “… eugenics programme was actually slightly to the right of Hitler’s, just because her definition of defective is so broad.”
Stopes’ biographies and the articles written about her often repeated Sutherland’s libel that she was “Exposing the poor to experiment”, but they always left out the crux of Halliday’s argument: “if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes” especially in the lower grades of work. He warned that Britain would become a “servile state” – essentially, a slave state in which poor and working class people had no societal role other than as workers.
As you might imagine, my views changed. For all the talk about the “Roman Catholic doctor” I learned that Halliday’s opposition to eugenics began long before his conversion to Roman Catholicism. It arose from his work as a specialist in Consumption – TB of the lungs – a disease of poverty that killed 50,000 Britons and disabled a further 150,000 each year at that time.
Mainstream eugenicists believed that Consumption was a “racial disease” primarily caused by a person’s heredity. Yes, they knew that germs were involved, but they said that the crucial factor was the narrow lungs inherited from their parentage. Halliday disagreed. Based on his work and research, he said that Consumption was caused primarily by infection and bad living conditions. He said that Consumption could be prevented and, if caught early enough, cured.
It wasn’t merely an academic difference. Karl Pearson, professor of eugenics at London University said the way to eliminate Consumption was to “let nature take its course” and prevent the reproduction of the tuberculous. Sir James Barr was the 1912 president of the British Medical Association who said:
“Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit … if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.”
The link between tuberculosis and Stopes was that, when she opened the Mothers’ Clinic in 1921, it was the restriction that Barr had been hoping for. He wrote a letter of congratulation:
“You and your husband have inaugurated a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.”
He became a vice-president of her Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress (CBC) and testified on her behalf in court.
Having learned these aspects of the story, what was I to do?
To begin with, I contacted historians, biographers and others who wrote articles about Stopes and, when relevant, I told them about my research. Sometimes, I would provide digital copies of unique documents from Halliday’s personal papers. I was always polite – friendly even – hoping that the evidence would start a dialogue and even, down the track, lead to them incorporating my research.
High hopes indeed! I never heard back and only rarely received reply.
I realised that if I didn’t make a permanent record of the true story, such as writing a book, the truth would die with me. That’s when “Exterminating Poverty. The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it” was born. I published it in paperback in August 2020.
Obviously, being a grandson means that people will accuse me of bias. For this reason, I have focused on the words, actions and artefacts of both Stopes and Sutherland from primary sources. “Exterminating Poverty” has almost 700 citations in its 320 pages.
2. You’ve said you grew up believing a false story about your own grandfather — the “Catholics against contraceptives” version. When did you first realise the accepted history was wrong, and what was that moment like?
It wasn’t a single moment rather than many. Initially I felt indignant anger that the story had been falsified and simplified to a “good-guy-versus-bad-guy” trope to favour Stopes.
When I appreciated the size of the project, there were moments of bewilderment and the realisation that if I didn’t finish the book, I would have wasted an enormous amount of time.
There were moments of intense elation when I found key pieces of evidence.
One highlight was spending two days with my brother and co-author in the Wellcome Institute Library in London. Stacks of boxes containing Stopes’ papers, reading what she had written and taking photographs. Frisson and disbelief when I saw evidence that she had interfered with the sworn statements of her witnesses and induced even induced one of them to lie to the court! Followed by a curry and a few beers in the evening. What’s not to like?
Sometimes the construction or the wording of the biographies was odd, or there were significant documents that should have been easy to find but were not. This made me suspicious and I sensed that I should follow that path. It was very rewarding because I found huge gaps in the accounts that had been published.
These days, I feel frustrated at the inertia of the “accepted” history remaining in place despite evidence to the contrary, especially by the BBC which bangs on and on about misinformation and disinformation but which will not amend its accounts of the trial.
3. For readers who’ve never heard of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial, what was actually at stake in that courtroom — beyond the surface dispute about contraceptives?
It was about the future of Britain: would contraceptives become commonplace and, if they did, would it be subordinated to eugenic ideology?
The ‘Tenets of the CBC’ and Stopes’ testimony in court clearly expressed the eugenic direction of her work. It was just as much her aim:
“… to secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.”
In the early 1920s, Stopes was the preeminent name in birth control and, backed by some of the leading lights of that era, she planned to create a network of clinics across Britain. She had rivals though and was intensely sensitive to criticism. She was itching to sue some of them and Dr Sutherland was chosen because he represented two groups that criticised her: Roman Catholics and the medical doctors.
Had she won the case, she would have silenced her critics and her project would have gained momentum. Because she lost and had costs awarded against her, it slowed her down. It delayed the eugenic aspects of birth control and the agitation for the compulsory sterilisation of defectives. This latter part did not regain momentum until the late 1920s/early 1930s and when a private member’s bill was introduced to Parliament in July 1931, it was defeated.
I think that her desire for publicity was the Achilles heel of her strategy. Too much time was spent in the trial of her eminent witnesses testifying what an upright person she was. In addition, Stopes decided to testify in the trial, something that she was not required to do.
That was all very well, but a better approach would have been to put the full weight of the burden of proof on Sutherland: he had to justify that what he had written was true. The approach that Stopes took gave the defence ample opportunity to undermine the veracity of her witnesses.
4. Marie Stopes appears on postage stamps and was voted one of the “Greatest Britons.” You argue this celebration rests on a serious omission. What’s the part of her story that consistently gets left out?
In around 2000, the BBC announced a list of its viewers’ “Greatest Britons” and Stopes was listed in the top 100. The Guardian newspaper urged its readers to “find out why Dr Marie Stopes deserves to be called a Great Briton,” followed by this:
“Women, can you imagine your body being the property of your husband? Being permanently pregnant through ignorance? Then thank Dr Marie Stopes. The lifestyle and personal fulfilment enjoyed by British women today owes more than many realise to this remarkable character.”
In other words, Stopes gave women reproductive freedom. The bit they always leave out is that Stopes campaigned and lobbied for laws to compulsorily sterilise people she considered “undesirable”. Had the laws that Stopes campaigned for been enacted, “reproductive choice” would have been made by a state official.
Another thing is that, while there is greater openness about Stopes’ eugenic beliefs today, academics and biographers present her eugenics as being adjacent to her birth control work rather than central to it. The “Tenets of the CBC” and her brand names for her contraceptives – Prorace and Racial – show that eugenics was central to her work. Indeed, when she died, she bequeathed her clinics not to the Family Planning Association but to the Eugenics Society.
5. Why do you think authors and researchers leave it out?
While one thinks of academics and biographers as being free to write what they like, I have formed the opinion that in relation to Stopes they are not. I get the impression that there is a relatively small network and, if you want to be included in it, you must toe the party line. To publicly dissent from what your well-established predecessors have written is a no-no and it will lead to your exclusion.
I formed this opinion when I read an interview with June Rose (author of “Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution”) in The Independent newspaper.
What the author reveals about her subject will cause a great deal of controversy, possibly exposing the biographer to ridicule, perhaps even cries of betrayal. ‘I am very apprehensive about the book’s reception,’ she said.
She does not talk easily about herself and is somewhat fearful of being known as the woman who brought Marie Stopes crashing from her pedestal … But Miss Rose has left us with a creature who could never find a place in the saintly calendar.
She said: ‘I hope this book celebrates Marie Stopes’s achievement as a sexual revolutionary. I would be upset if it didn’t. But I recognise there are sections which will alienate people, including feminist friends of mine.’
This surprised me because Rose’s book is well-researched and based on primary sources. Given this firm footing, why was she worried? And as for betrayal, who or what were being betrayed?
One of the things that Rose did was to destroy a foundation myth of Stopes’ story – that she was entirely ignorant about sex prior to and during her first marriage to Reginald Ruggles-Gates in 1911. According to the myth, it was only after the failure of her first marriage that she found out about sex by studying in the British Library.
Fortunately, I am outside that field, so am free of those constraints.
6. Thomas Malthus has been dead for nearly two centuries, yet you call him the prototype for a way of thinking that’s still with us. What did he actually argue, and why did your grandfather call it “a quack remedy for poverty”?
The entirety of Dr Sutherland’s 1922 book “Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians” is a root and branch demolition of Malthusianism, too lengthy to go into here.
More was G.K. Chesterton’s withering attack which Sutherland quoted to great effect:
Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G. K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce:
“Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats, — all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we are talking of houses and not of hats …. The fundamental fallacy remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we have never troubled to consider at what end to begin.”
What Dr Sutherland really hated about Malthusianism was that Malthus:
“… forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions.”
7. H.G. Wells wrote in 1901 about “the faith to kill” and a future state that would euthanise the “feeble, ugly, inefficient.” How did a celebrated novelist — and someone widely seen as a progressive thinker — arrive at that?
H.G. Wells was not alone in advocating the killing of the unfit to achieve the perfection of mankind.
In 1900, Dr W. Duncan McKim had advocated “a gentle, painless death; and this should be administered not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims—too defective by nature to find true happiness in life—and as a duty toward the community and toward our own offspring.”
Wells’ fellow Fabian, G.B. Shaw said that people should go before a committee once every few years to justify their lives: “If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”
Novelists Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence also advocated the killing of the feeble.
These prejudices were given academic backing. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s “Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living” (“Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens“) was published in 1920 and was later used as the basis for the Nazi party’s T4 Aktion. Apparently, when Binding and Hoche learned this, they expressed surprise saying that it was an academic thought experiment rather than an instruction as to what should be done.
In fact, there was so much talk of killing the feeble that it would have been surprising had it not happened.
Dr Sutherland for one was not surprised. In 1921, his article in the Westminster Gazette referred to “a Super-Eugenist, greatly daring” who would “slay every consumptive in the land tonight”.
In his 1925 book, Birth Control Exposed, he wrote:
“If a wave of madness passed over our country, and this eugenic nightmare came true, we might very well ask what tribunal is to decide as to which of us is unfit. About you who are reading this book, I know nothing whatever, but I have a shrewd suspicion that the neo-malthusians have already decided about me. The point is that when these people discuss sterilization, they picture themselves sitting round a table and ordering other people to be sterilized. In the same way Communists, when they talk about the bloody revolution, always picture themselves knocking other people on the head, and indeed they become very angry when I tell them that the other people will retaliate. And thus do all enemies of freedom.”
In 1933 his short story called “The Perfect Eugenic State” incorporated a poison gas lethal chamber which was used to rid society of its defective elements.
To someone who had his eyes open, it was clear where it was all going. And yet sadly this line of thinking continues today.
Giubilini and Minerva’s “After birth abortion: why should the baby live?” was published by the British Medical Journal on 23 February 2012.
In it, the authors asserted that “‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” When the article caused controversy, the authors expressed surprise on the grounds that it was an academic paper, not a manifesto.
More recently, Renate Lindeman of Substack’s “Liberty Letter” posted an article about a Canadian study that:
“… explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to CAD $1.273 trillion by 2047. With an estimated 2.6 million deaths in the voluntary scenario, mostly among mentally ill and elderly populations, this cost-saving measure raises significant ethical concerns. Financially incentivizing MAiD could shift healthcare priorities away from providing necessary support, potentially devaluing vulnerable lives and fostering a troubling reliance on assisted death as an economic solution. The findings highlight a need for ethical scrutiny of MAiD policy expansion.” [Emphasis added]
No doubt the authors of this papers will express surprise if and when it is used as the basis to “off” Canadian citizens to save money. Plus ca change …
8. You’ve traced how organisations repeatedly rename themselves to soften their image — the Eugenics Society becoming the Galton Institute and then the Adelphi Genetics Forum, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society becoming Dignity in Dying. What does that pattern tell us, and why does it work?
It is all about marketing and making your ideas acceptable. Part of this is to make it appear as if what you are saying is new and important. This is because people are obsessed with novelty, so presenting old ideas won’t work. Further, your ideas have to be repackaged to conform to the mores of contemporary society.
It is a good idea to choose a name that does not clearly state your agenda. Better still, choose one that will make your opponents prima facie look bad. For instance, calling your society “Dying with Dignity” is good because if your opponent says: “I disagree with dying with dignity”, they appear to be callous. “Killing Old People,” not so much.
The stated motivation also plays a role: to advocate eugenics for the purposes of national efficiency and racial purity is now not permitted. Using it in the cause of “science” is, such as the promise to prevent genetic diseases. And there are a number of organisations that will facilitate your zygotes (through IVF) and then test them for personality traits, height, IQ and so on to give you the ideal designer baby. So what is now forbidden to nation states is permitted to families – if they have the money.
9. You’ve highlighted a 1960 decision by the Eugenics Society to pursue its aims through what it called “crypto-eugenics.” That’s a striking phrase. What did they mean by it, and where do you see that approach still operating?
In the aftermath of the Second World War, membership of Britain’s Eugenics Society fell by almost one-half. To address this, it resolved: “the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society.”
Of course, “crypto” means secret, not less obvious, but maybe I am nit-picking.
What it meant is that they were going to continue what they were doing and were going to do it covertly. For instance, it meant that the name of their journal changed from The Eugenics Review to The Journal of Biosocial Science. It took longer for the Society to change its name to the “less-evocative” Galton Institute in 1989, and in 2021 it changed its name to the even less evocative Adelphi Genetics Forum.
Eugenics and population control are controversial. While I don’t think that today’s eugenicists, whether in the Adelphi Genetics Forum or elsewhere, would feel bound by a 1960 resolution, I do think that they are aware that secrecy facilitates a quiet life.
Owing to the essential nature of secrecy, it’s hard to see if it is being applied or not. Occasionally though one gets whiffs of smoke. For instance, on page 296 of “Life Without Birth” (1970) Stanley Johnson wrote about:
“An inter-departmental committee of senior civil servants was set up to advise the government of population matters. It has now operated for over a year, reporting direct to the powerful home affairs committee of the Cabinet, and advises how legislative and administrative acts can be made to further a policy of population stabilization. Its existence has been deliberately kept secret for fear of political repercussions, and not many people either in Whitehall or Westminster are aware it is there at all.”
I don’t know if the committee is still going.
10. Across roughly a century of figures — Galton, Stopes, Wells, Shaw, Sanger, Ehrlich, Holdren — you argue the same three solutions keep reappearing: more top-down control, restricting births, and increasing deaths. Why do you think that particular combination is so persistent?
I think that the solutions are consistent because whether they realise it or not, they draw on the same traditions. At the heart of this is a deep-seated anger at God (the ultimate expression of which is to profess that God does not exist), a deep-seated hatred of humanity, and the hubristic belief that they alone can fix the problems.
While the names you mention are presented as great intellects, their solutions they present don’t arise from some great intellectual feat. In fact, their “solutions” are rather obvious.
As Dr Sutherland put it in 1936:
“When responsible and thoughtful members of society begin to advocate the prevention and destruction of human life by means of contraceptives, abortion, infanticide, sterilisation, and euthanasia, it is an evil omen, and the sign of a civilization whose creative power is spent.”
In his Letter to the 21st Century, I think Isiaih Berlin was on the money:
“If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter … then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.”
“But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelet is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And, in the end, the passionate idealists forget the omelet and just go on breaking eggs.”
11. You’ve drawn a direct line between earlier euthanasia advocacy and Canada’s MAID programme today. What specifically are you seeing in MAID that connects it to that older tradition?
Both concern killing of humans and changing the law so that it isn’t categorised as murder. The only difference is the way it is marketed.
If you think that Canada’s MAiD program is all about compassion, I suggest you read “Government Economics of Expanding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and the Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death” by Uzair Jamil and Joshua M Pearce which indicates the direction in which MAiD is going. Hat tip to Renate Lindeman of Substack’s “Liberty Letter” for drawing this to my attention.
12. Paul Ehrlich wrote about adding sterilants to the water supply. Margaret Sanger proposed corralling millions of people onto government farms. These sound almost cartoonishly extreme today — yet they came from mainstream, celebrated figures. How should a reader make sense of that?
I think that Ehrlich’s and Sanger’s solutions were aligned to the mores of their times so were less conspicuous then than they are now. The solutions being advocated today would appear to be cartoonish to people who don’t live within the context of our times.
Things change so fast these days that it doesn’t take long for the context to change and for things that look sensible to become ridiculous and cartoonish.
The reaction to Covid provided a lot of these: hospital staff dancing in TikTok videos, the normalisation of collapsing sportsmen and women, Perspex partitions on school desks and so on.
For me, the idea that cows and, in particular, their farts are a huge problem to the extent that the herds need to be culled. And the W.E.F.’s “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” And to ignore the impact that solar weather has on the earth’s climate and to focus on carbon dioxide. All of these ridiculous and clownish things will be seen for what they are in due course (if they are not perceived that way already).
13. You’ve placed climate change advocacy in the same lineage as Malthusianism and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. What are the tells that make you see it as a continuation of an older pattern rather than something genuinely new?
It has the same “scarcity” mentality. Our existence on the earth, wonderful to behold and evidence of an Almighty and loving God for some, is in fact a cosmic prank! There are lots of people, but there isn’t enough stuff!
The tradition of Malthusianism and Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is to predict disasters to frighten people to act. It is also traditional that, when the predicted disasters don’t occur, they don’t apologise or admit that they were wrong.
Human nature hasn’t changed all that much. Many people feel the need to tell other people how to live their lives and even whether to live their lives. When you look at problems at the highest levels, they do appear to be insoluble, but that is sometimes because of the level at which you are looking at the problem makes it insoluble.
To the Malthusians, the problem is always the population. Poverty, war, shortages and famine are always caused by over-population, rather than by defective governance, injustice, incompetence, greed, selfishness and corruption.
14. You write that “many current events are noise that distract us from reading the signal,” and that history helps separate the two. For a reader who wants to start spotting the pattern themselves, what are the practical tells — the things to watch for when someone says “we have to act now”?
The way history is taught is “this is what happened in the past,” in other words, something removed and distant from your life. The reality is that history is the continuation and encapsulation of ideas (in the broadest sense of that word) in the present. Study history in that context.
Get to grips with the fact that no one can know everything about any particular event, so be sceptical of the explanations you are given. It doesn’t mean you reject good explanations, so much as realise that at best, they are only approximations, albeit good ones.
And be sceptical that revolutions happen spontaneously, without leadership, planning, organisation and money. “People were hungry, they needed bread, so they overthrew the king and set up a republic,” – what nonsense!
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement was a real organic movement. It didn’t translate into political change because it lacked leadership, planning, organisation and money. So be skeptical when movements (and leaders) arise from nowhere and are presented as organic and grass-roots.
I think Hudson’s Law is sound. It states that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admits only global solutions (3) and suppresses dissent, is definitively a scam.
I think you should be acquainted with the “MINDSPACE” paper produced by the Behavioural Insights unit. You can download a copy at: https://www.bi.team/publications/mindspace/ The Behavioural Insights unit – colloquially known as the “Nudge Unit” – advises governments on the deployment of psychological techniques in implementing their policies. If you are aware of their techniques, you will be better able to see when they are being used against you.
Finally, try to develop discernment. Be patient with yourself when you get it wrong, but do keep going!
15. Your grandfather predicted in 1929 that “the cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.” Nearly a century later, fertility rates are collapsing across the developed world. What do you think he’d want people to take from that?
One sentence: “If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline.”
This comes from the final paragraphs of Birth Control (1922):
“Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by partial endowment of motherhood and by saving infant life. Physiologists are now seeking the endocrinous glands and the vitamins for a substance to assist procreation. ‘Where are my children?’ was the question shouted yesterday from the cinemas. ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.
“And all these thoughts were once in the mind of Augustus, Emperor of the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Mount Atlas to the Danube and the Rhine. The Catholic Church has never taught that ‘an avalanche of children’ should be brought into the world regardless of consequences. God is not mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline. There is only one civilisation immune from decay, and that civilisation endures on the practical eugenics once taught by a united Christendom and now expounded almost solely by the Catholic Church.”
16. What are you working on now, and where can readers follow your work and stay in touch with what comes next?
I have a Substack which is free, and I curate hallidaysutherland.com (I am contactable through these sites).
I have been living in London for the last 18 months, so I am focusing on rebuilding my coaching practice and facilitation work.
I continue to promote “Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it” through speaking engagements and interviews like this one. I hope that one day it will be made into a feature film.
Thank you for the opportunity to tell your readers and subscribers this important story.
The Canadian government drew up a plan to take individual citizens to court over what they post online. That plan sat inside a 35-page internal memo from the Department of Industry, most of it blacked out before the public could see it.
Blacklock’s Reporter pried the document loose through an Access to Information request. Dated March 31 and titled “Misinformation And Disinformation Strategy,” it belongs to the department run by Minister Mélanie Joly, known as ISED. The memo weighs “legal action” against people who post what the government calls “false and misleading information” on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
What kind of legal action? The redactions hide that. What survives the black ink is the logic. “This strategy seeks to uphold the integrity of and public trust in government information,” the memo says. The department is appointing itself guardian of its own reputation, with lawsuits as one available tool.
Here is who would decide. ISED itself would judge whether a post is “factually incorrect, misleading or out of context.” The same department that dislikes a post gets to rule on whether the post is true. No court makes that call first and no independent reviewer checks the work. The government writes the definition of misinformation and then enforces it against the people it defines.
The memo describes any punishment as “proportionate and subject to senior level approval.” That language reassures no one. Proportion gets measured by the same officials pushing the complaint, and senior approval means a manager signs off, not a judge.
Officials already watch. Managers “already monitor the department’s official social media channels and media outlets on a daily basis for comments and recurring inaccuracies,” the memo says. The strategy would push that surveillance from reaction toward “prevention and early detection,” catching disfavored speech earlier in its life.
The chilling effect writes itself. A citizen who knows a federal department is reading posts, grading them for accuracy, and holding a lawsuit in reserve thinks twice before typing. The threat does the work a courtroom never has to.
The government’s own files admit the problem. Its research found Canadians feel capable of spotting fake news and do not want Ottawa “declaring what is true or not.” The memo concedes that answering misinformation can amplify it, and that going after individuals risks “further backlash.” The department understood the public would object and mapped the plan anyway.
Compare the tune from four years back. This same Liberal government declared that “the rights and freedoms that individuals have offline must also be protected online.” That promise reads differently next to a memo about suing people for their posts.
Ottawa has not explained how the monitoring runs, how often lawsuits were floated, or what a post must do to land on the department’s radar. The memo sets no threshold. It names no outside check. It leaves a federal department free to decide which citizens spoke falsely and what the price should be.
A government sure of its facts answers speech with more speech. This one drafted a plan to answer speech with lawyers.
To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, Canada has passed a slew of dystopian legislation and handed down tyrannical Supreme Court rulings that further enslave the Canadian people. But even if you have been paying attention, you might not know the true extent of these new developments. Today James talks to independent Canadian journalist Dan Dicks about these latest moves and what they mean for Canadians and for people around the world.
Canada has moved forward with plans for a major new oil pipeline aimed at reducing its reliance on the United States and positioning itself as a supplier to Asian energy markets.
Alberta has formally submitted proposals to the federal Major Projects Office for a pipeline exceeding 1,000 kilometers, intended to carry as much as one million barrels of crude per day to the British Columbia coast, with construction slated to begin by September 2027.
Prime Minister Mark Carney described the initiative as a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for the country, announcing that the new line would largely trace the path of the existing Trans Mountain corridor.
The project would be built by Trans Mountain Corp, a federal Crown corporation, in partnership with Pembina Pipeline Corp.
Billions in investment
Carney tied the pipeline to a broader economic strategy, projecting that Thursday’s announcements would spur more than C$200 billion (US$141 billion) in fresh investment.
Alongside the pipeline, the plan includes nearly tripling Canada’s liquefied natural gas capacity through five new terminals over the next ten years, as well as a C$10 billion upgrade to the Port of Vancouver.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith further called for the province’s oil production to double and for the pipeline to be operational by 2035.
Washington’s shadow looms over decision
The push comes as Canada seeks to loosen its economic dependence on Washington.
The US currently absorbs about three-quarters of Canadian exports and roughly 60 percent of its oil imports, some 4 million barrels a day, nearly all of it drawn from Alberta’s oil sands, among the largest crude reserves in the world.
Carney has vowed to double Canada’s non-US trade as President Donald Trump has threatened tariffs of up to 100 percent on Canadian goods and repeated calls for Canada to become the “51st state.”
Trump also declined this week to commit to a long-term renewal of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement he signed in his first term.
Environmental groups
Environmental groups and First Nations communities welcomed Carney’s decision to preserve an existing tanker ban along BC’s northern coast, with Heiltsuk Nation Chief Marilyn Slett calling it “a good day” for efforts to prevent oil spills.
Carney, a former UN climate envoy, has also acknowledged that the fossil-fuel-driven strategy will push Canada’s emissions higher, distancing his government from predecessor Justin Trudeau’s more restrictive approach to the oil sector.
Industry groups, meanwhile, argue that regulatory hurdles and an uncompetitive tax structure continue to discourage investment.
The plan also unfolds against a backdrop of internal strain, with Alberta’s separatist movement gaining traction and a referendum vote on independence set for October 19.
Trump threats fuel patriotism among Canadians
Trump’s confrontational posture toward Canada appears to be reshaping how Canadians see themselves. A new Politico poll found that 52 percent of Canadians now describe themselves as very proud of their nationality, up sharply from 34 percent in December 2024.
Analysts link the surge to Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada and his tariff measures targeting Canadian exports, including a 25 percent tariff imposed by executive order in February 2025 that triggered retaliatory measures from Ottawa.
Those tariffs were later struck down by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose them was unconstitutional.
Even so, the poll suggests the rise in patriotic sentiment has not translated into a sense of national unity, with most respondents saying Canada remains internally divided.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
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