Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2025

Canada’s flawed Industrial and Technical Benefits scheme – “We’re architects of our own dependency”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Posted a few days ago, but still of interest — Omar Saleh discusses a part of Canada’s defence acquisition process that provides the illusion of military self-reliance while actually allowing foreign companies to control more and more of our domestic defence manufacturing capacity:

Graphic stolen from Small Dead Animals.

On November 4, the federal government tabled one of the most consequential defence budgets in Canadian history: an $81.8-billion expansion over five years, anchored by a $6.6-billion Defence Industrial Strategy, procurement overhauls, and a vow to claw back sovereignty from decades of polite deferral. It was framed as a national awakening – an overdue recognition that geography is no longer a moat, Russian submarines are testing our Arctic resolve, and allies are no longer willing to pretend Canada is pulling its weight.

But buried underneath all the ambition is a policy that will quietly sabotage it: the Industrial and Technological Benefits (ITB) framework – the mechanism Canada uses to ensure foreign defence contractors reinvest in the Canadian economy and the quiet architecture of our own dependency.

On paper, it’s a sound industrial strategy. So much so that other countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE – both of which are aggressively seeking to onshore the lion’s share of their own defence spending – have implemented very similar policies as part of their respective Vision 2030 programs.

In practice, however, Canada’s ITB is a compliance machine that has mastered the art of doing nothing loudly. It is a mechanism through which American and European primes deepen their control over Canada’s industrial base while giving Ottawa the comforting illusion of self-reliance. We’re not victims of clever contractors. We’re architects of our own dependency, moralizing away the muscle to build someone else’s blueprint.

The numbers are damning. Since 2011, more than one hundred thousand industrial activities have generated over $64 billion in promised economic activity. And for all of that motion, not a single global defence technology titan has emerged. The work done in Canada – machining, composites, test benches, components – is real, but when the world shifts and architectures evolve, the capability evaporates. It was never ours. The most strategically important capabilities are designed abroad, integrated abroad, and updated abroad. We have activity without ownership – a nation performing sovereignty instead of exercising it.

Call it what it is: Phantom Capacity. The illusion of industrial muscle – until the country is forced to lift something heavy.

The core flaw is structural. ITB rewards dollars spent, not capability created, even as it dangles multipliers of up to 9x for R&D and startup work. A prime receives one-to-one credit for $5 million in routine machining, yet could theoretically earn nine times that for backing a Canadian breakthrough. But the theory collapses in practice. Multipliers accounted for less than one per cent of fulfillment between 2015 and 2019, and auditors still cannot prove they delivered any meaningful innovation. The system does not discriminate between activity and advancement. And when a system does not discriminate, the market follows the path of least resistance.

Predictably, primes funnel work to the safest, most administratively convenient suppliers. It is the industrial equivalent of a potluck where everyone insists on homemade dishes but quietly prefers the store-bought tray. Innovation is welcomed rhetorically and ignored in practice.

This leads to the second, more corrosive consequence: Canadian startups are structurally excluded from shaping Canada’s defence future. They move on six-month innovation cycles. Their technology evolves. Their architectures iterate. But in a system where every offset must be pre-approved, credit-verified, documented, and mapped against a prime’s global program calendar, startups cannot operate on their own terms. They must reshape their roadmaps to fit into architectures designed abroad, updated abroad, and controlled abroad. The result is not partnership but subordination.

A Canadian company can build a breakthrough sensor, a next-generation autonomy stack, or a northern detection layer – but it cannot enter a Canadian program of record unless a foreign prime decides to adopt it. The startup becomes a module inside someone else’s strategy. Sovereignty becomes subcontracting with better branding.

November 12, 2025

Bike lanes are only the start

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff explains how aspirational schemes proposed by our technocratic governments at all levels seem to quickly and effortlessly shift from a nice non-intrusive improvement in life to an overbearing imposition of ever tighter controls on our lives:

Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View

The adoption of cultural novelties follows a predictable path. Some bright idea is proposed and there is nominal support or at least not widespread opposition.

Soon after implementation begins its opposite is condemned. This is the first warning the lunatics have taken over the asylum. We move from a positive, optimistic drive to condemning a perceived negative. By then the intolerant are amassing, attracted to a secular pulpit with which to lecture the rest of us.

More time passes and condemnation of the opposite is not enough. We are commanded to behave in ways more pleasing to our public servants. We learn a key aspect of our future has been decided by a shadowy committee we have never heard of. A well-meaning experiment has become an imperative used to control us.

This absurd sequence is more common than it should be.

A common example in Britain is the creation of bike lanes.

The idea sounds benign. Let’s build cycle lanes to encourage exercise. It is broadly popular, a kind of inoffensive fad to encourage better health despite the weather being an impediment for most.

Few people actively object which is taken to mean they endorse these projects.

It is not long before support for helping cyclists degenerates into discouraging cars since people should be cycling more anyway. The initiative lends moral weight to an otherwise fringe view. The construction of the bike lanes accelerates these ideas as roads are narrowed and traffic slows, frustrating many. There are too many vehicles on the road we are told, all the more reason to get on your bike.

Soon suggestions are made to ban cars completely. The new idea proposed is to shut down the congested roads and replace them with even more bike lanes and pedestrian zones.

Some even openly discuss intentionally making driving awkward and expensive as an explicit goal. The technocratic mind often forgets its charges are people not slaves.

Before long everything shifts, then we wonder how we got to the point our own paid employees can openly gloat we will soon be banned from travelling in ways they dislike as if they are our controllers.

An idea appealing to a minority is imposed on all. Acquiescence to novelties becomes weaponized and subsumed into the ambitions of others. No one ever votes for these things. They seem to just appear.

The end result is often the destruction of goodwill as popular initiatives are rammed down our throats and used to berate us for failing to live up to the standards our public servants impose upon us.

We then tire of the lectures. We wonder where these lunatics come from.

A moment of complacency means unwanted bike lanes but before long it is banned cars, government-controlled IDs and digital currencies. Those who pay attention to the activist world often sense they’d build concentration camps if they could get away with it and all thanks to some benign-sounding scheme we didn’t object to.

November 2, 2025

Canada finally getting serious about the military? Ignore the words and wait for concrete actions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian military used to be one of the best in the world. We “punched above our weight” as the hoary old cliché had it. But it was true. Then came Lester Pearson and the notion of peacekeeping, which is related to but not the same thing as having a military prepared to fight. Then came Pierre Trudeau and his loyal acolyte Paul Hellyer and the notion that merging the Canadian army, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) into a single organization — the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) — would magically reduce our military spending while maintaining our military power. It may have saved some money on paper, but its real impact was allowing the federal government to cut, cut, cut until the CAF was no longer capable of fielding significant numbers of combat troops, aircraft, or naval vessels and we began quietly withdrawing from our NATO and UN commitments (while still propagandizing about being a “soft power” superpower and persuading Canadians that we were still world leaders in peacekeeping).

Later Canadian governments have made noises about correcting the mistakes of the past half century and getting proper equipment — and enough of it to matter — and resurrecting the fighting capabilities (and numbers) of the CAF … even bringing back the proper names of the RCN and RCAF … but the promises were rarely implemented and even more rarely maintained beyond the life of a given government.

Our allies have been urging us to take the military more seriously for so long that it seems inevitable that any new expansion plans will fade into the mist just as quickly as all the previous fever dreams. Even when the government actually provides new funding, the bureaucracy is so incapable that time expires before they actually spend some or even all of it. All of which is why I’m highly skeptical that ongoing noises about increased military spending will actually result in anything more than a higher head-count in the civil service and lots (and lots, and lots) of re-announcing the spending plans:

In summer 2023, NATO held its largest-ever air exercise in Germany. Canada did not take part because its fleet was up on bricks.

Understaffed by around 10,000 regular soldiers, thanks to a 12 per cent attrition rate, the CAF was rocked by sexual misconduct scandals and chastised by a government more focused on culture change than war fighting.

Critics like Mark Norman, a former vice-chief of the defence staff, said Canada was increasingly seen as irrelevant in Washington.

But Norman said he is encouraged by the Carney government’s moves.

“Let’s be clear, the Forces are still in a decrepit state. We haven’t resolved the fighter jet or recruitment problems, or produced a defence industrial strategy. But I acknowledge that the prime minister has done a lot to try to refocus the government and, more broadly, Canadians,” he said.

A major problem for all governments has been actually spending money approved by Parliament. This week’s PBO report said that between 2017/18 and 2023/24, actual capital spending fell short of planned expenditure by $18.5 billion. Every year, the Department of National Defence failed to spend an average of $2.6 billion of its procurement budget.

“The scale of the planned increase raises questions about the government’s capacity to manage a higher volume of procurement activity and the domestic defence industry’s ability to support it,” the report said.

Norman suggested the new Defence Investment Agency, headed by former banker Doug Guzman, is a positive development. “The public service is not designed to produce operational outcomes, so the (appointment of an outsider) is encouraging,” he said.

According to David Pugliese, the Canadian Army is looking to vastly expand the existing army reserves:

The Canadian military has set in motion an initiative to increase the number of its part-time soldiers from the current 28,000 to 400,000 as part of an overall mobilization plan, according to a directive approved by senior leaders.

The directive, signed by Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan and defence deputy minister Stefanie Beck on May 30, 2025, outlines the need to increase the current reserve force from 23,561 to 100,000 and supplementary and other reserves from the current 4,384 to 300,000.

Beck and Carignan approved the creation of a “tiger team” which will work on setting the stage for a Defence Mobilization Plan or DMP to accomplish such a goal. That team will examine what changes are needed to government legislation to allow for such a massive influx of Canadians into the military.

Beck and Carignan pointed out that the plan would require a Whole of Society or WoS effort, meaning that all Canadians would have to contribute to the initiative.

“In order to assure the defence of Canada against domestic threats ranging from a low-intensity natural disaster response to high-intensity large scale combat operations, the DMP will be developed to empower a timely and scalable WoS response by achieving pre-conditions for the expansion and mobility of the CAF,” according to the nine page unclassified directive.

The initiative has drawn some critical responses on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

QotD: The “Blob”, aka the Deep State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The parasitic unholy alliance of Big Corporations, Big Government, Big Bankers and their entire fan club and cheer squad of supporters. Dangerously, this also includes the watchdogs: the Spy Agencies and large parts of the media. The Blob takes money from citizens, pays other parts of the Blob (eg USAID, The UN, The BIS, The World Bank etc), pretends to “help” some token victim group or environmental cause, or even to monitor or audit The Blob, but the outcome benefits The Blob more than the victims. They line their own pockets and increase their own privileges.

The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.

Jo Nova, “The Secret Ruling Class – Why the anonymous Blob needs to be invisible”, JoNova, 2025-07-18.

November 1, 2025

EBTpocalypse imminent?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The US government’s extended “shutdown” may trigger the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to around 10% of America as of Saturday. A few years ago, Nathan Mayo pointed out that despite the good intentions of the SNAP program, it isn’t actually doing the job it is meant to be performing:

A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.

The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food …”

To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.

Government researchers determined that average SNAP recipients increase their food expenditure by only 30 percent of the value of their benefits. In other words, a person previously spending $300 on food a month who qualifies for $100 of food stamp benefits will start spending $330 on food and shift the $70 from his existing budget to other purposes. This surprisingly low percentage suggests that food is not recipients’ top priority, as people who were in dire need of food would be expected to boost their food budget by the full value of the benefits.

What of the hope that needy families will buy nutritious food? According to a study of a major retailer, recipients spend about 20 percent of their total grocery budget on junk food, with soft drinks as the top purchase—enough to supply a family of four with 20 two-liters of soda per month. Given the marginal amount of SNAP spent on food and the typical benefits for a family, SNAP literally expands the grocery budget by the exact amount needed to cover the junk food. SNAP recipients also spend about 27 percent less on fruits and vegetables than non-SNAP households. This difference cannot be attributed to a lack of access because around 85 percent of SNAP purchases are made at large chain grocery stores with vast produce selections. However, one factor in these choices is likely smaller grocery budgets and the fact that fresh produce is more expensive.

A less savory contributor to this poor nutrition may be that SNAP encourages unhealthy purchases through the “house money” effect. When gamblers win money, they are less careful with their winnings since they view the “house money” as more disposable than their own cash. Similarly, when people receive SNAP dollars, they are sometimes less careful about their purchases than they would be with their hard-earned dollars.

On the one hand, the lack of SNAP benefits might be lower impact than expected, or it might mean most major American cities go “full Mad Max“:

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is … zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get … interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

H/T to Clayton Barnett for that link.

Oh, but wait … yet another judge has issued a ruling directing the federal government to ignore the lack of congressional approval or funding:

An order today from a federal judge in Massachusetts requires the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits even though Congress hasn’t funded the current operation of the program.

Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations.

[…]

Defendants — the Trump administration — are required to use contingency funds to pay for current operations, whether or not Congress has funded current operations. A court has just concluded that a federal program must operate in the absence of current appropriations. That’s … an interesting choice.

Update, 3 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 30, 2025

Unlabelled cloned meat – coming soon to Canadian grocery stores

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois on a recent Health Canada decision to allow cloned meat to be sold in Canada with no label to differentiate it from ordinary meat:

Sometimes the most significant food-policy changes happen not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whisper.

According to Health Canada’s own consultation documents, Ottawa intends to remove foods derived from cloned cattle and swine from its “novel foods” list — the very process that requires a pre-market safety review and triggers public disclosure. Once this policy takes effect, cloned-animal products could enter the Canadian food supply without announcement, notice, or label.

From a regulatory standpoint, this looks like an efficiency measure. From a consumer-trust standpoint, it’s a miscalculation.

Health Canada’s rationale is familiar: cloned animals and their offspring are, by composition, indistinguishable from conventional ones. Therefore, the logic goes, they should be treated the same. The problem isn’t the science — it’s the silence.

Canadians are not being told that the rules governing a deeply controversial technology are about to change. No press release, no public statement, just a quiet update on a government website most citizens will never read.

Cloning, after all, is not about making food cheaper or more nutritious. It’s a genetic management tool for breeders and biotech firms — a way to reproduce elite animals with prized traits. The clones themselves rarely end up on the dinner plate; their offspring do. The benefits, if any, are indirect: perhaps steadier production, fewer losses from disease, or marginally more uniform quality.

But the consumer sees no gain at checkout. Cloning is costly and yields no visible improvement in taste, nutrition, or price. The average shopper might one day unknowingly buy steak from the offspring of a cloned cow — and pay the same, if not more, for it.

And without labels, any potential efficiencies or cost savings stay hidden upstream. When products born from new technologies are mixed with conventional ones, consumers lose their ability to differentiate, reward innovation, or make an informed choice. In the end, industry keeps the savings, while shoppers see none.

October 24, 2025

QotD: What airlines could learn from supermarkets

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you go to a supermarket at certain times of the day, you’ll find that the deli counter can be quite busy, so you pull a little ticket from the dispenser and mooch around in the general area, loading up the yoghurt and Pop-Tarts until your number’s called. For 15 billion bucks, maybe the airlines could buy a couple dozen dispensers apiece. But apparently not. They want you backed up in lines shuffling your bags forward a couple of inches at a time because your misery is their convenience.

Mark Steyn, “Flight From Reality”, The Spectator, 2001-11-17.

October 19, 2025

Mandating the use of bodycams for ICE agents

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses the results of mandating bodycams for police officers, suggesting that bodycams on ICE agents won’t drive the changes activists are hoping for:

This is a followup on my earlier post about the expected effects of requiring bodycams on ICE agents.

I used Grok to do some digging into the literature examining the effects of bodycams on measurable statistics of unlawful police violence.

I did not have any strong expectations about what I was going to find.

Do the query yourself if you like, but I can tell you that the answer is going to reduce to two sentences:

1. Bodycams do not have any statistically significant effect on measures of unlawful police violence.

2. Body cams do have a statistically significant effect, reducing allegations of unlawful police violence.

This means that the only statistically significant effect of bodycams is to deter false claims of police brutality and bigotry.

Note: do not read this as me claiming that cops are untarnished angels. I know people who have been brutally abused by police. I know this does occasionally happen, and I condemn the police culture of silence about such abuses.

What I am saying is that what you see on bodycam footage, which is almost always police exercising commendable restraint in dealing with extremely violent and stupid people, reflects reality. If it didn’t, reality would leak around the edges of the camera non-coverage as an observable effect on incident statistics.

I don’t expect the effect on ICE to be any different. I expect mandatory body cams to backfire rather badly on people who pushed them in the hopes of exposing ICE as some sort of out-of-control Gestapo.

If anything, I expect the consequence to be an increase in already high levels of public support for mass deportations of illegals. Because I know what the results of lots of bodycam and security camera footage has been about public perception of underclass criminality. It gets more difficult to sell the narrative of these people as innocent victims of a repressive society after you’ve seen your 47th video of a screaming semi-psychotic trying to knife a cop during a traffic stop.

Some of the activist orgs that wanted the body cams made mandatory for street cops now want them turned off. I think it’s pretty likely the same thing is going to happen with immigration enforcement sooner or later. Most likely sooner.

QotD: The Indian Civil Service

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s actually a great book called The Ruling Caste. It’s a “collective biography”, for lack of a better term, of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), by Sir David Gilmour. You can of course find biographies of the individual Governors-General (Gilmour wrote one, also excellent, on Lord Curzon), but this is the only study I know of the lower levels — i.e. the guys who really ran the Raj. Gilmour is literally a gentleman amateur, so while he’s also an excellent historian (and The Ruling Caste conforms to all the canons of scholarship), he tells an engaging story, too.

I think about The Ruling Caste often when I think about the turds in the Apparat. Looked at from the outside, the ICS were apparatchiks, too. Indeed, even more so than actual apparatchiks, since “apparatchik” means something like “expert without portfolio” and while the ICS had two broad “tracks” (if I recall correctly), “civil” and “legal”, in practice most every ICS man was supposed to be able to do pretty much everything, including (again IIRC) assume military command of local forces if necessary.

Given that there were never more than 200K Britons in the Raj at any one time, how could it be otherwise?

And the ICS was as fully ideologized as the Soviet (or AINO) Apparat. The French gave us the lovely phrase mission civilisatrice, but that’s what the ICS was doing, too. Lord Macauley was the big mover behind the English Education Act of 1835, which explicitly designed to

    form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

There were two huge differences between the ICS and the Apparat, though, that really come out reading Gilmour’s book. First, and actually least important, was the obvious fact that English education was superior. Macauley really gave “native” literature both barrels — nobody condescends like an Englishman — but he wasn’t wrong. In 1835 you could take the “scientific” literature of every other race on the planet combined and get … the Iron Age? Maybe? 200K Britons could dominate 750 million Indians because

    whatever happens, we have got
    the Maxim gun, and they have not.

Or “steam power” or “replaceable parts” or “calculus” or what have you. Season to taste.

The second — and far, far more important — difference between the ICS and the Apparat, though, was that the ICS was in general composed of decent people. In a very real sense, all imperialism is “cultural imperialism”. Rome became an empire by whomping all its enemies, but it stayed an empire by giving its enemies a great deal. Life was simply better — orders of magnitude better — inside the Empire than outside.

And the reason for this is simple, so simple that you need many years of long and hideously expensive training, by highly skilled and fanatically motivated indoctrinators, to miss it. Macauley, Caesar, Confucius, anyone who wrote anything on barbarian management at any point, anywhere in the world, well into the 20th century, said basically the same thing: Our material culture is the result of our cultural culture.

You can learn to operate our stuff. Obviously so — with only 200K Britons throughout the Subcontinent, the Raj was quite obviously run by Indians. And they did a bang-up job, too, such that India at independence had the real potential to become a first world country (note to folks getting ready to break away from a globe-spanning empire: Never elect a lunatic socialist yoga dude as your first prime minister. He’ll go full retard and set you back 50 years … and he’ll be shooting for 500). You might even learn how to maintain our stuff, maybe even build a few cheap knockoff copies of our stuff.

But it’ll never be more than that — shitty knockoff copies, gruesomely expensive, and available only to the elite — unless you embrace as much of the culture that created the stuff as you can stand. The English themselves are a great example: They were blue-assed savages when Caesar found them, but they got with the program, and look how well that worked out. Ditto the Gauls (“Our ancestors, the Gauls!”) and all the rest.

It’s the culture, stupids. The culture of the ICS was English culture — “play up, play up, and play the game!” sounds like baloney to jaded Postmodern ears, but listen:

    The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
    Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
    The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
    And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
    The river of death has brimmed his banks,
    And England’s far, and Honour a name,
    But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
    “Play up! play up! and play the game!”

As poetry it’s shit, but if that doesn’t make you want to get up out of your chair and take a swing at somebody, then you, sir, have no hair on your scrotum, and will never know a woman’s touch (trannies don’t count).

They really believed that, those Eton schoolboys out there East of Suez. Or, at least, they behaved as if they did, and everything else flowed from that behavior. Recall that it was a coin flip, going East of Suez — chances are you wouldn’t be coming back, or if you did, it would be as a malarial ruin. But they went anyway, though England’s far and Honour a name, because that’s just what they did. Even at their worst — and their worst was very bad; Gilmour pulls no punches — you can’t help but admire them a little, the arrogant bastards. Their convictions were sometimes awful, but they had the courage of them … and courage is magnificent.

Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.

October 18, 2025

The corporate world is (slowly) backing away from DEI

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle describes what he calls the “death rattles” of the diversity, equity, and inclusion grifters:

In 180 AD, the Roman satirist Lucian wrote an account of a man called Alexander who had founded a cult of the serpent-god Glycon. According to Lucian, Alexander was much in demand as a prophet, and would charge money to answer questions from those seeking the wisdom of the serpentine deity that he had invented. Lucian records that he “gleaned as much as seventy or eighty thousand [drachmas] a year”.

Some of our modern-day Alexanders take the form of “diversity experts” who have made a fortune from the snake-god of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). These cheerless mountebanks form part of an industry that rakes in a whopping eight billion dollars annually. According to Glassdoor, a website that provides salary estimates, a Chief Diversity Officer earns an average of $250,000 per year. Oppression is a lucrative business.

Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Robin DiAngelo, a self-proclaimed expert in “whiteness”, who charges $14,000 for every speech, and earns $728,000 every year. At one of her speeches at Coca Cola, DiAngelo’s advice to employees was to “try to be less white”. As the comedian Heydon Prowse observed: “anyone who has had the misfortune of passing a group of Eton boys at Notting Hill Carnival will know that trying to be less white is literally the whitest thing anyone can do”.

But it looks as though the gravy train might finally have been derailed. Yesterday, the This Isn’t Working podcast posted an image of a statement from Jake Graf, a regular DEI speaker who, according to his website, “works with organisations to improve LGBTQ+ representation, mental health awareness, and trans inclusion”. In his statement, posted on LinkedIn, Graf struck a sombre note:

    The pendulum of progress swings in mysterious ways. Just months ago, following the Supreme Court ruling and subsequent EHRC interim guidance, businesses rallied with open arms and vocal support for their trans team and clients. Now, that warmth has slowly given way to a worrying silence, as if someone pressed pause on the march toward inclusion.

The half-hearted poeticism barely masks the anxiety of man who fears that his racket has been exposed. The predominance of the creed of DEI, and its usurpation of meritocracy as the guiding principle in the corporate world, is a testament to the success of culture warriors. They have made plenty of know-nothings very wealthy by promoting ideology as though it were uncontested truth. But now it might well be coming to an end.

October 17, 2025

Civilizational collapse is … female

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo addresses the unpalatable contention that female power leads to civilizational disaster:

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

Multiple surveys (see, for example, with thanks to James Nuzzo, here, here, here, here, here and here) suggest that when women hold power, they pursue typically feminine preferences and policies. Female-led institutions become more oriented to social justice than objective truth. Feelings matter above facts, context above law, and victimhood above expertise.

Protecting and promoting the allegedly vulnerable — through censorship, shaming, coercion, or lawbreaking/lawfare — becomes a greater priority than excellence or impartiality. Truth-tellers find themselves cancelled, Nobel prize winners reduced to tears, laws and policies applied unequally, white men accused and vilified, criminals cossetted, mental illnesses affirmed, and destructive policies embraced. No one who has paid attention over the past 20 years can be surprised by the findings.

Moreover, our ability to discuss this feminine revolution in values is hampered by the very logic of the revolution, as I will show. Both women and men, deeply disinclined to “harm” women, fail to confront the problem adequately.

Two discussions of the subject — an essay by two social psychologists at Quillette and, more recently, a conference speech by a feisty conservative woman — draw a line under the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse. Even faced with that alarming prospect, most pundits cannot bear to imagine an alternative to the female-led assault on our core institutions.

Cheering on Women’s Empowerment

A 2022 article in Quillette, “Sex and the Academy“, provides a stark illustration of my thesis. The subtitle rules out the very conclusion the data supports, with the authors emphasizing that “The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?”

The “great achievement”, as it turns out, will almost certainly be a lethal one.

The article was written by two academics, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, both PhDs in social psychology. Winegard, a male scholar, had an unfortunate run-in with academic orthodoxy that led to his loss of employment; Clark, a female scholar, has a secure academic position. Both authors express enthusiasm for the takeover of academia by women even as they point out its damaging consequences. Neither one advocates any form of resistance, no matter how mild, to feminine academia’s assault on truth.

Summarizing the results of many surveys, Clark and Winegard demonstrate that while a majority of men favor free speech and the advancement of knowledge over emotional comfort, a majority of women prefer conformity, safety, and the protection of victim groups’ feelings. Not all women are indifferent to the traditional underpinnings of western civilization (and not all men support those underpinnings), but the general trends are clear.

Women are significantly more likely than men to support the cancellation of controversial speakers or the suppression of controversial research.

Women also tend to favor the existence of snitch lines to report people who cause offence. Women are more supportive than men of diversity quotas that exclude white men from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions. (It would be interesting to know how many white women support diversity quotas that exclude white women from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions.)

[…]

Asserting that both sides are pursuing worthy goals, the authors downplay the shock value of the findings, which show that women are, overall, less interested in truth and accuracy than men are. Imagine assessing such a finding as anything but catastrophic. Imagine calling the disregard for truth moral.

In place of truth, women value a utopian ideology that they perceive — usually without any consistency or adherence to fact, but nonetheless granted by Clark and Winegard — as “morally desirable”. But morally desirable for whom, and to what end? The use of the phrase, a misnomer, demonstrates how thoroughly the authors themselves are in thrall to the corrosive feminine culture they examine.

There is nothing moral (or generally desirable) about the suppression of truth-seeking research when it conflicts — or is perceived to conflict — with an allegedly emancipatory social goal. There is nothing morally desirable or indeed “protective” about shouting down an academic speaker because of the alleged harm of the speech. Naturally, social justice proponents would be outraged if their speeches were shouted down or their research blocked and censored.

I saw a link to this Helen Andrews article which seems to go well with Janice Fiamengo’s article linked above describing the “Great Feminization”:

… Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

[…]

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—”colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

[…]

The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place. There are many people who think the Great Feminization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance to compete with men, and it turned out they were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms, running our political parties, and managing our corporations.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter comments on Helen Andrews’ article:

One thing Helen misses in this otherwise excellent analysis is the role played by prestige. Cancel culture was enabled by the unique circumstance of women weaponizing the prestige of freshly feminized legacy institutions. So long as those institutions retained their prestige, what the people who ran them said really mattered.

Unfortunately for the ladies (but luckily for civilization), this is self-limiting, because prestige is fundamentally an emergent property of masculine competence hierarchies. We see this demonstrated whenever a profession becomes coded as women’s work: its prestige immediately crashes. Feminists have complained about this for years, though of course they misunderstand the mechanism (prestige is a component of male sexual attractiveness, but not of female, and this is biologically hard-wired).

This prestige collapse is now affecting essentially every coopted, feminized institution — universities, news media, publishing houses, movie studios, large corporations, various government agencies, hospitals, courts, churches, all of them wield far less cultural power than they did even a few years ago. The only people who really care what these legacy institutions say are the women who took them over. To everyone else, the angry sounds they make are nothing more than background noise.

This is probably the main reason for the vibe shift. Once the prestige of feminized institutions declined below a certain threshold, their ability to enforce social consensus began to evaporate.

It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).

All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are – for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.

October 16, 2025

The hereditary aristocrats of the People’s Republic of China

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

To many western liberals, an aristocratic system is a disparaged and vestigial remnant of the distant past. An echo of the “bad old days” of anti-meritocratic wealth and privilege enjoyed by the lucky descendants of ancient conquerors and oppressors. Yet among the most well-connected and powerful people in China can only be described as “princelings”, as they are literally the children and grandchildren of the leaders of the Communist Party, especially those who took part in the “Long March”:

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1926, five years after becoming one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao Zedong listed China’s enemies as “the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class [businessmen dealing with foreign interests] and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them”. It is ironic that Mao would eventually create a new aristocracy, often referred to as the “princelings” (taizidang), every bit as hierarchical as that against which he had previously railed.

Perversely, when Mao Zedong came to power in China in 1949, there were not many structures of authority left to destroy. In the period of warlordism that succeeded the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by Sun Yat-sen in 2011 and ended with the consolidation of nationalist (Kuomintang) power by Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, the aristocracy of imperial China had been swept away. So too the Mandarin class, the Chinese bureaucrats selected by civil service examination, a system that started with the Sui dynasty in AD 581. As for the Chinese aristocracy, its last vestiges ended with the abolition in 1935 of the Dukedom of Yansheng which belonged to the descendants of Confucius.

So, in terms of social hierarchies, Mao inherited a clean sheet when he established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The CCP leadership soon proved that, in the immortal words of George Orwell in his novel Animal Farm, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. In Beijing, Mao and China’s CCP leaders took residence in the palatial compounds located in Zhongnanhai, a waterside park established by the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century.

There is not even equality within the “red aristocracy”. Gradations are as clear-cut as if there were princes, dukes or marquises. The highest rank is accredited to the offspring of those CCP leaders who participated in the Long March. This iconic fighting retreat to a remote plateau in Shaanxi province followed the defeat of the Red Army in October 1934.

It is perhaps difficult for people in the West to understand the scale of Chinese veneration for the individuals who completed the Long March. With the possible exception of the migratory treks along the Oregon Trail, there is no comparable event in American or European history. Throughout their lives, leaders of the Long March enjoyed unparalleled prestige; it was a prestige that passed down to their children – hence the princelings.

The creation of the red aristocracy started with Mao himself. Within a few years of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao became a de facto emperor. On occasions he even referred to himself as such. He certainly lived the life of an emperor. At his commodious palace in Zhongnanhai, Mao surrounded himself with a harem of dancing girls who would occupy his bed and his swimming pool. In time-honoured fashion, China’s head of security and intelligence, Kang Sheng, procured girls for Mao as well as thousands of volumes of pornography.

[…]

My own experience of the princeling world confirmed that in China, despite its vast population a very small group of families form a governing nexus that has power far beyond its numbers. It is a group that seem to be getting stronger. The princeling proportion of the CCP central committee rose from 6 per cent in 1982 to 9 per cent in 2012. When I spoke to a princeling friend about the politburo standing committee that was elected in 2012, she told me that she personally knew five of its seven members; to her great delight three of them were princelings. It was through her that I met Deng Xiaoping’s daughters and spent a “country house” weekend with them and her princeling pals.

Here it became clear that, while most of the princelings I met were reformists in the Deng mode, there are also factions that are hard-line Maoists, like the one led by Xi Jinping. At the moment it appears that the reformist princelings have gained the upper hand. More light on Xi Jinping’s future and the outcome of this princeling tug of war may be shed at the Fourth Plenum of the 20th CCP Congress starting on October 20.

October 14, 2025

QotD: The trade in fake doctor’s notes

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A suspended doctor in England is running a company that sells people sick notes to excuse them on medical grounds from their work. “When you’re ill,” said an advertisement for the company, “our prices will make you feel better”.

A reporter for the Daily Telegraph newspaper managed to obtain a certificate from the company to excuse him from work for five months, because he claimed (falsely) to be suffering from the long-term effects of COVID. He obtained the note without providing any medical evidence whatsoever.

The only thing that surprised me about this was that anyone thought that it was necessary in Britain to buy or pay for such a certificate. I thought of the famous lines of Humbert Wolfe, the otherwise all-but-forgotten England man of letters:

    You cannot hope
    to bribe or twist,
    thank God! the
    British journalist.
    But, seeing what
    the man will do
    unbribed, there’s
    no occasion to.

The same might almost be said of British doctors, many of whom, I suspect, issue such certificates incontinently, for one of two reasons: fear of their patients, and sentimentality.

Not surprisingly, doctors do not like unpleasant scenes in their consulting rooms, and refusal of requests for time off sick can easily lead to such scenes, and occasionally to threatened or actual violence.

Naturally, no doctor likes to think of himself as a coward, the kind of person who caves in to such threats. The best way to avoid so humiliating a thought is never to risk having to think it, that is to say by granting the patients’ wishes in this matter immediately.

But in order to do this without feeling self-contempt, it is necessary to rationalize, that is to say to find supposed reasons for why everyone who wants a certificate should be given one. The English philosopher F.H. Bradley once said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, adding however that it was a human propensity to do so. In like fashion, we could say that doctors find bad reasons for giving sick certificates when they suspect that not to do so might lead to a confrontation with a patient.

Thus they convince themselves that if a person tells them that they are unfit for work, for whatever reason, it would be wrong to question it. No one would make a claim to be unable to work unless he were in some way discontented, unhappy, depressed, anxious, stressed, in a word suffering, and it is the object of doctors to reduce human suffering.

The doctor is aided in this train of thought by the looseness of psychiatric diagnosis, so that practically all forms of distress can be fitted into the procrustean bed of diagnosis. Even outright faking can now be construed as an illness or disorder, provided only that it goes on for long enough or is deceptive enough.

Does this mean that the patients seeking sick notes are all faking it? The matter is more complex than this would suggest. There is, of course, conscious, outright fraud, but this is comparatively rare. Just as doctors don’t like to think of themselves as cowards in the face of their patients, so patients don’t like to think of themselves as frauds.

Distress can be conjured out of almost anything and is not necessarily proportional to whatever causes it. Dwelling on the ill treatment one has suffered — and who has not suffered ill treatment at some time in his life? — can magnify something minor into something major, to the point at which it seems almost to have ruined one’s life. And it is certainly capable of rendering a person unfit for work in his own estimation — though in fact continuing at work would be a remedy for, rather than an exacerbation of, the problem.

However, where economic loss is not too severe when stopping work on medical grounds is possible, medical grounds will be both sought and found. In the days of the Soviet Union, the workers had a saying: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In our kinder and more enlightened societies, we pretend to be ill, and they pretend to treat us — except that the word “pretend” does not quite capture the subtlety of the transactions between doctor and patients.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Make Me Sick”, New English Review, 2025-07-04.

October 10, 2025

A POSWID analysis of the contention that “Canada is broken”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s my strong opinion that Canada is indeed “broken”, and much but not all the blame for that goes to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and increasingly to current PM Mark Carney. It hasn’t all been the direct action or deliberate inaction of the Liberal party and their bureaucratic minions in the civil service, but their fingerprints are on a lot of the damage. Eberhard Englebrecht analyzes Canada using POSWID framing and concludes that “the Purpose Of Canada is What It Does”:

Now, one of the core criticisms made of POSWID by its opponents is that it leans heavily on a consequentialist interpretation of events, completely discarding the roles human intention, error, and agency play in how things transpire.

However, these critiques only hold validity if you take POSWID and make it your singular mode of analysis — something that I don’t encourage, nor intend on doing myself. Rather, POSWID should be understood and used as a specific tool with a specific purpose — that is, to peel back the noxious platitudes, gaslighting, and wishful thinking that envelop our politics, and hinder our ability to view our present situation with clarity and honesty.

And, unfortunately for the citizenry of Canada, Canadian politics is — and has been for some time — a domain chock full of the misguided idealism and obfuscation that POSWID seeks to erase.

It is why many Canadians — despite their country having experienced a precipitous decline in both general prosperity and the integrity of the common social fabric — remain willfully blind to such an absurd degree.

POSWID, as I will be applying it, can tackle many of the polite pleasantries and mindless incantations that have become embedded in Canada’s “consensus” of acceptable political discourse, exposing them as misaligned with reality. This will take one of two forms: the first is to demonstrate that a common belief in the trope in question has led to results contrary to the intentions of those who originally pushed the trope; the second is that the trope was always purely abstract and aspirational, never described reality, and any attempts to align reality with said trope have failed miserably.

Many of these tropes are sacred cows of Canada’s political establishment — ideas that they would insist define “what it means to be Canadian” or are things that “we all believe”. Going against them, or merely questioning their validity or suitability, would be considered “UnCanadian”. These tropes have, in many cases, dictated the direction of Canadian society since the 1960s and created the foundations for the paradigms that currently define Canadian politics. Therefore, the deconstruction of these tropes constitutes the deconstruction of these paradigms — something that would have cascading ramifications for our country.

It is worth noting, however, that my intention in writing this piece is not to make granular policy prescriptions. My job is merely to provide a clear-eyed account of how three of the values and policy programmes of Canada’s chattering class (you could substitute “chattering class” with “professional-managerial class” or “Laurentian Elite”) are out of step with how this country actually exists — a reality felt and experienced at an intuitive level by many, but rarely articulated in public.

The federal government’s gun “buyback” program pilot in Nova Scotia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tim Thurley responds to a report about the gun “buyback” pilot program:

This reads like a government flailing for a message. We know this is incorrect, the Minister knows it is incorrect, and we know the Minister knows it is incorrect, and yet.

(The “Ensure…” section is also painful to read, but that’s another matter.)

https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/federal-minister-denies-political-motivation-in-choosing-cape-breton-to-pilot-gun-buyback-program

He’s suggesting the risk is posed by stolen firearms. Not only do we know this is a small portion of risk — and easily substituted by other sources — but to say we must confiscate your property because someone else might misuse it sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.

Nobody bought an AR-15 under the assumption it was legal when they bought it (unless FRT banned, then it gets complex).

If a licensed user bought and registered it pre-OIC (or just bought if non-restricted) then it was legal when they bought it, period. No assumptions needed.

A rebate is also incorrect. A rebate is something a customer gets back after purchase.

They get to keep both the rebate and the product.

The part about only getting some money back is at least accurate.

The government is not offering full compensation for many users based on the list prices, and has reiterated that it does not plan to offer further compensation once the initial pot runs out.

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