Need to Know: Progressive politicians’ public safety problem

Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments Hub readers need to be keeping their eyes on.

Zohran Mamdani and the radicalism of today’s Left

By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large

For the past five years or so, I’ve lived in New York City with my wife and two young children. As a Canadian, I’ve always tried to be respectful about engaging too much in U.S. politics. But the Democratic Party’s nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor may force me to reconsider.

This isn’t just about ideological disagreement. Mamdani’s views on public safety aren’t merely at odds with my preferences. They’re a direct threat to my family’s well-being.

Like many New Yorkers, I remember the “defund the police” movement that emerged during the COVID-era protests. The rhetoric was fashionable. But the policies that followed—including less policing, weakened enforcement, and a culture of excusing criminal behaviour—were predictably disastrous. Crime rose. Disorder spread. And the most vulnerable communities, as always, bore the brunt.

Mamdani isn’t running from those ideas. He’s running on them. He’s promised to reimagine law enforcement by deprioritizing policing and centring “sociological” responses to crime. This isn’t reform. It’s radicalism.

New York’s hard-won transformation from the chaos of the 1980s to the relative safety of the 2000s was no accident. It came from restoring public order, through consistent enforcement, data-driven policing and a basic commitment to the safety of ordinary people. Mamdani would return New York to a city that once again treats criminality as a social misunderstanding rather than a civic breach.

I care about taxes. I care about the economy. But there’s a hierarchy of needs, and public safety is foundational. My kids need to be able to play in the park without fear. That’s more important than any redistributive scheme or government-run grocery store.

Progressives like Mamdani often speak in the language of compassion. But true compassion begins with protecting people from harm. A city that cannot keep its streets safe cannot claim to be just.

That’s why this feels personal. When public safety is treated as optional, it’s families like mine who end up paying the price.

Canada’s MAID regime: cautionary tale or template? 

By Alexander Raikin, a visiting fellow in bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

A spectre is haunting the global debate on euthanasia: Canada. On the same day that the New York State Legislature voted to pass the “Medical Aid in Dying Act” earlier this month, the American Medical Association reaffirmed for the sixth time its position that physicians ending the life of their patients is “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer” and criticized the use of the term “aid in dying” as “unacceptable” in its implicit replacement of palliative care.

But New York legislators weren’t looking at the American Medical Association, or even the 11 states where the practice is legal in the U.S. They were looking instead at Canada: the first country to coin the term “Medical Assistance in Dying,” replacing the more accurate clinic terms of “physician-assisted suicide” or “euthanasia,” depending on whether physicians only prescribe or administer lethal medications. It also wasn’t the only Canadian contribution to the bill: the New York legislation is the first legislation in the U.S. that does not include any waiting period between assessment and death from physician-assisted suicide, a safeguard that Canada already removed in 2021.

No other Canadian public policy has ever been as influential as MAID. For both supporters and critics of euthanasia, Canada remains both a model and the most dangerous canary in the coal mine. The editorials of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post criticized the New York legislation as setting a path to Canadian-style MAID. Even at the start of an election year last January, both Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth and Republican Senator Marco Rubio explicitly condemned Canada’s MAID program.

The backlash to Canada’s MAID program is so intense that supporters of assisted suicide globally have begun to backtrack. Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, whose bill to legalize assisted suicide in the United Kingdom narrowly passed its final reading in the House of Commons last week, fought off repeated claims by critics that she is bringing Canada’s MAID program to the U.K.: “I’m not looking at the model that is going on in Canada.” But other organizations continue to look at Canada. In March, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities explicitly rebuked Canada’s MAID program as running in contravention of the “right to life for persons with disabilities” and strongly urged Canada to stop euthanizing persons with disabilities on the basis of non-terminal disabilities alone.

The response by Patty Hajdu, the minister of jobs and families? To state to the committee that Canada is working to “build a country free from barriers, where no one is left behind.”

The Canada-EU Summit—what does it mean? 

By Christian Leuprecht, visiting fellow at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, and professor at the Royal Military College and Queen’s University

Drowned out by upheaval in the Middle East and the NATO summit circus was the 20th European Union-Canada summit on Monday. As I recently wrote, Canada and Europe are a Schicksalsgemeinschaft: a community bound together by a common fate. For a century Canada has leveraged Europe to counterbalance against the vagaries of U.S. unilateralism. But in recent years Canada suffered amnesia about the political importance of European allies: over the past decade energy-poor Europe came asking, to Canada, repeatedly, for energy supplies, defence, and investments in the Canadian defence industry—Canada demurred.

With the second coming of President Trump, it dawned on Canadians that we need allies and friends to stand up for us. That means investing in instruments of statecraft, the military first and foremost among them, for Canada to add value to those allies.

This necessarily implies shifting at least some of Canada’s attention to Europe.^{1A sin of omission of free trade over the past three decades was not realizing how economically close and integrated we became with the United States. North American integration was the path of least resistance. Canada shares a continent with the United States, which necessarily makes the U.S. Canada’s closest trade and security partner. Prime Minister Carney’s pivot to Europe is about restoring a degree of balance.}

After the United Kingdom, Canada became the second country to sign a Security and Defence Pact with the European Union; a third is in the works with Australia. The European Union is a global power with regional ambitions. This is about the EU maturing into a global role, and it is courting the Anglosphere to build a durable relationship with its closest friends.

Together, they are building a strategic and institutional framework to project common interests, values and power. After spending three quarters of the century drafting being U.S. foreign policy, the EU and Canada are now vying to assert their collective strategy autonomy, at the heart of which is a regular political and security dialogue.

This intent is an integrated approach to crisis management, military mobility, maritime security, cyber resilience, hybrid threats, space and satellite security, defence research and technology, support for Ukraine, and digital governance. It enables Canada to diversify defence supply chains while giving Canada a seat at the table to influence European defence procurement priorities.

Canadian governments have not invested in defence because that meant being able to avoid having to make controversial decisions on foreign policy. But it also means Canada no longer has a voice in the world. Having left international security up to the Americans for over a quarter century, Europe and Canada are coming to the realization that this has not worked out all that well.

The consequences of the EU-Canada summit are about burden-shifting: assuming greater responsibility, in an effort to shape the future, rather than watching the global train wreck helplessly from the sidelines.