First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. Read More

Our cookbook of the week is Linger by Hetty Lui McKinnon. Read More

With the Christmas mailing season upon us, Canadians are once again reckoning with the bleak future of traditional mail, and familiar troubles of Canada’s most troubled Crown corporation. After Canada Post's annual meeting this week revealed it is running an operating loss of something like $5 million a day, the National Post explains where things stand in national mail delivery, and where they might be going. Read More

A network of seemingly legitimate professionals in Canada and abroad are accused of keeping a billion-dollar drug cartel afloat under the violent leadership of former Canadian Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding. Read More

Japan’s first female prime minister Sanae Takaichi, a hardline conservative, has taken a hawkish stance on China since being elected last month. In one of her first parliamentary speeches, she affirmed, in unusually explicit terms, Japan’s commitment to militarily defending Taiwan from any future Chinese invasion, instigating a diplomatic meltdown from Beijing. Read More

On October 7, Hamas murdered 1,200 innocent people in one of the most barbaric massacres on the planet in recent decades. Many of these murders were committed by military fatigue wearing terrorists with the Palestinian flag sown into the sleeve of their uniform. The beheading of young children; the burning of entire families huddled together in fear; the shooting of the elderly in the back and the heinous misogynistic rape of young girls — these crimes against humanity were all done under the flag of "Palestine." Read More

Recent polling shows that more than half of Canadians now believe immigration levels are too high — double the number from just three years ago. One-third think immigration increases crime, and six in 10 say too many newcomers fail to adopt Canadian values. These are not the views of a suddenly intolerant country. They reflect a public losing confidence in a system that no longer seems to protect their safety or the integrity of Canadian citizenship. Read More

After two years of benign neglect, Ottawa seems to have woken up to the threat to its plan to double non-U.S. exports from an obscure dispute at the Port of Prince Rupert in British Columbia. Read More

In the far northeast of Afghanistan, among the soaring mountains of Badakhshan province, a quiet transformation is taking place. Here, in a region where history runs deep through stone and soil, the New Life Trust Organization (NLTO), named this year as a Global Pluralism Award laureate by Canada’s Global Centre for Pluralism, works to find careful, culturally rooted ways to bring women together through reviving crafts that were once a proud symbol of the country’s cultural pluralism. Read More

OTTAWA — The Carney government is proposing to grant the Crown corporation behind the high-speed railway between Toronto and Quebec City sweeping new powers to accelerate the acquisition or expropriation of land for the project. Read More

OTTAWA — The federal government's plans to resume a compensation program for retailers for inventories of formerly legal guns that were subsequently banned by the Liberals have been delayed from this fall until an unspecified date. Read More

A 28-point peace plan floated by U.S. and Russian envoys would force Ukraine to cede large chunks of territory taken by Russia, cap the size of its military and lift sanctions on Moscow over time, acceding to many of President Vladimir Putin’s wartime demands. Read More

A newly announced permanent exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg is being met with heightened concern from Jewish groups. Read More

The tricky thing about boundary-pushing is that, if you unwisely take it too far, it might snap back in your face. That’s what the regulators of lawyers, doctors, psychologists and every other job gatekept by professional bodies are now facing in Alberta after their sister entities across the country started dabbling in political policing. Read More

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff, Marc-André Blanchard, drew a sharp rebuke from Conservatives on Thursday when he compared Carney’s sprawling conflicts of interests to Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright’s situation. Read More

When it comes to housing, Ontario Premier Doug Ford says too much and does too little. Read More

Hundreds of delegates at a Francophonie conference hosted by Canada’s parliament in Montreal last spring went home with “musical spoons” ordered from Amazon at a cost of more than $1,300, according to federal financial reports. Read More

“Diddlers,” as Ontario Premier Doug Ford called child-molesters in a news conference this week, have been big in the news lately. Earlier in the month, Ford joined Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in demanding the federal government invoke the notwithstanding clause to protect the one-year mandatory minimum sentence for accessing or possessing child pornography. This after the Supreme Court narrowly struck it down. (The feds say they can address the bare majority’s concerns without resorting to the clause.) Read More

A Canadian Jewish advocacy group is demanding answers after an anti-Israel tribunal was held at the Senate of Canada over the weekend. Read More

OTTAWA — Ottawa’s fiscal watchdog says there’s a “low probability” that the Carney government will reach any of the three targets that it has referred to as its fiscal anchors, just months after establishing those key long-term benchmarks. Read More

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday evoked the death penalty for Democratic lawmakers who urged the military to refuse illegal orders, calling them traitors and accusing them of sedition. Read More

Dick Cheney, celebrated as a master Republican strategist, but defined by the darkest chapters of America's "War on Terror," was honoured Thursday in a funeral attended by Washington's elite. It pointedly left out President Donald Trump. Read More

Recently resigned federal Liberal cabinet minister and former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland will be the next Warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust, the U.K.-based global educational charity’s trustees has announced. Read More

Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, told an audience in Ottawa that he thinks Canada has recently meddled in American politics, but that he also doesn't understand why Canadians are angry about comments regarding this country becoming his nation's 51st state. Read More