Cops won't cop, courts won't court, politicians won't lead

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on May 23, 2025, Matt and Jen check in on the early turbulence of the Carney era.

First up: the new cabinet. There’s a new energy minister visiting Calgary, staffing delays across the board, and yes — god help us — Marco Mendicino is still around. That’s bad news for almost everyone, but possibly justice of a sort for Mendicino himself. They also start to sketch out what could prove to be Carney’s eventual undoing. Along the way, Matt makes a rare — and oddly impassioned — defence of Justin Trudeau: no, he says, Trudeau wasn’t great. But he wasn’t as bad as some Liberals now seem desperate to believe.

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In the second segment, your hosts look ahead at the storm clouds gathering. A royal visit. A looming postal strike. And Jen has a message for the posties: doing this twice in one year might come back to bite you. Then Matt walks through Trump’s latest missile defence announcement — yes, the so-called “golden dome” — and raises a pointed question: is Canada about to join a multi-hundred-billion-dollar ballistic missile defence system? If so, is this an elbows-up or elbows-down moment? And more importantly: did anyone ask Mike Myers first?

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Finally, Matt and Jen turn to a grim and serious story: the brutal murder of two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. They discuss the how it really shouldn’t be this hard to stake out a moral position on this issue, and yet, some people sure did find a way to screw it up. From there, Matt explains how a cascading failure of institutions — police, courts, politics — has created a dangerous void in Canada. And, tragically, the people being failed first and hardest are Canadian Jews.

All that, and more, in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. Like and subscribe at ReadTheLine.ca, or find us on your favourite podcast app so you never miss an episode. If you’re enjoying the show, share it with a friend, post about it online, or yell it at the mail carrier before they go on strike. We’ll take it.