Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2026

Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Wayne Mathison shows how cultural boundaries changed radically over relatively short periods of time in what is now Manitoba, rather discrediting the fairy tale we tell our children about pre-contact First Nations living in peace and harmony:

Canada’s institutional obsession with land acknowledgements and historical guilt has officially jumped the shark.

Every university lecture, corporate meeting, school event, and government memo now seems to begin with the same rehearsed confession about whose land we are supposedly standing on. It has become a civic ritual, complete with liturgy, original sin, and mandatory public piety.

Strip away the administrative sermonizing and the whole thing rests on a very shaky version of history.

We are expected to pretend pre-contact North America was a peaceful, static, eco-friendly paradise where distinct peoples lived in permanent harmony until Europeans arrived and ruined everything.

That is not history. That is mythology.

Worse, it is patronizing. It strips Indigenous peoples of their full humanity by pretending they were somehow immune to the normal forces that shaped every other society on earth: ambition, conflict, trade, migration, alliance, conquest, revenge, and expansion.

The actual history of this continent was not a postcard. It was dynamic, complex, and often brutal.

The Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars reshaped huge parts of what is now Southern Ontario. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Erie peoples were devastated, displaced, or absorbed through war and political domination.

On the plains, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Iron Confederacy, and others fought long struggles over territory, trade, horses, resources, and survival. Peoples moved. Borders shifted. Alliances formed and collapsed. Some groups conquered. Some retreated. Some disappeared into larger political orders.

History did not begin when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.

This land was already a theatre of power, movement, conflict, diplomacy, and displacement long before Europeans arrived.

The modern Canadian narrative treats European colonisation as a unique cosmic crime, as if conquest and territorial displacement were invented in 1492. They were not. Europeans arrived as a technologically dominant global power and did what powerful groups had done across human history, including on this continent.

That does not make the suffering harmless. It does not erase broken treaties, residential schools, forced relocations, or government abuse. Those things happened, and they matter.

But a serious country cannot build its future on a childish version of the past.

Every habitable part of the world has been taken, lost, fought over, inherited, traded, defended, and taken again. The people Europeans encountered were not frozen in moral perfection. They were human beings living inside history, not outside it.

The guilt industry does not repair the past. It often paralyzes the present.

Canada cannot move forward by treating itself as a permanent crime scene or by dividing citizens into inherited moral categories of “settler” and “Indigenous”.

We can tell the truth about cruelty, conquest, broken promises, and injustice without pretending history had a correct stopping point right before European ships appeared.

A mature country does not need ritual guilt.

It needs honesty, equal citizenship, legal clarity, and the courage to build a future instead of endlessly prosecuting the past.

June 14, 2026

“99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people”

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

John Konrad explains why, despite agreeing that the vast majority of Canadians are “decent, law-abiding people”, he wants to see the US/Canadian border closed:

Yes. 99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people. Friendly neighbors. Good trading partners. Nobody serious disputes that.

I DO NOT CARE

CLOSE THE BORDER

Public safety is not built around the 99%.

We do not have laws, police, and prisons because most people are good. We have them because a small minority can inflict enormous harm on everyone else.

The argument for border enforcement is not that Canadians are bad people. It is that even a small failure rate matters when the consequences are catastrophic.

Free and open borders are a wonderful thing provided both countries are willing and able to identify, remove, and deter the small percentage of dangerous actors who exploit them.

If one side stops filtering effectively, the burden shifts to the other.

And yes, that creates unfairness. When enforcement breaks down, restrictions fall hardest on the innocent majority: families, commuters, truckers, tourists, and businesses. No one should pretend otherwise.

But there is also unfairness in asking another country to absorb preventable risks because difficult enforcement has become politically inconvenient.

A secure border is not an insult to a neighboring nation. It is a hedge against failure.

That is their sovereign choice.

But the United States also has a sovereign responsibility: to reduce risks to its own citizens.

If a partner cannot or will not reliably filter threats, then verification at the border becomes the default. Not because the majority deserves punishment, but because governments exist to manage tail risk, not assume it away.

Open borders require mutual trust.

Trust requires performance.

But the real threat is not the 1% of evil bad actors. The real threat is the 1% of far left lunatics in your government who are facilitating and funding the 1% of criminals.

YOU. The ninety nine percent are the only ones who can demand election reform. YOU are the only check left on their power.

So I absolutely endorse punishing YOU as incentive to demand change now.

A full and total stop of VISAs, temporary and permanent, will cause real stress to your economy, it will make international and domestic travel more difficult, will unfairly hurt Canadians studying in USA, it will hurt many Americans too.

But it’s worth temporary extreme pain is a small price to pay for long term stability.

You are a frog slowly boiling in water. We have asked you to jump out of them pot but you refuse. You just croak “elbows up”

So our choice as Americans is to watch you die slowly or remove you from the pot and chop a leg off so you don’t jump back in.

I believe the latter is the only option. And I believe it’s the lore humane option knowing that the leg will grow back just fine.

June 13, 2026

The Laurentian Elite

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The people who actually rule Canada — including but not limited to Liberal Party members — don’t mind “populists” who want to “spread awareness”, because it’s about as ineffective as can be and dissipates some of the energy that might otherwise be used to oppose the Laurentian Elite’s preferred outcomes:

Homesteaders, agrarians, and populists relying on “spreading awareness”, protesting, or Americanisms like “we the people” and “the silent majority” aren’t nearly as effective or influential as people think they are.

A deeply unpopular Laurentian liberal elite minority, one that increasingly LARPs as blue-state Americans and takes its cues from them, managed to transform the country against the popular will.

Over a roughly twenty-year period between the 1940s and 1960s, they spent decades scheming behind the scenes. They changed the flag, lured French Canadians into supporting them through the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism by promising greater national recognition of Canada’s French heritage, then dropped the whole thing almost immediately. They pulled the rug out from under them and basically said, “SYKE, you thought. Here’s infinite immigrants instead.”

In 1971 they pushed multiculturalism and the cultural mosaic, abolished assimilation while polling showed around 80% of Canadians opposed increased immigration. They later entrenched their ideology through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stacked and empowered a judiciary that would future-proof it, formalized the project through the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, and gradually consolidated influence over the media, education system, and cultural institutions.

The result was a decades-long effort to indoctrinate Canadians into viewing their country as a post-national economic zone built on stolen land called Turtle Island, where Canadians don’t exist, but foreigners are just as Canadian as you and me, borders are morally questionable, and none is illegal on stolen land.

This isn’t going to be reversed through awareness campaigns, symbolic protests, or endlessly posting facts online. Political systems are ultimately shaped by elites and counter-elites. The only way this order gets replaced is if a rival elite, or a political force capable of becoming one, displaces the existing ruling class and takes its place.

That process will almost certainly involve some degree of populism, but populism by itself is not enough. You need people who can actually build institutions, wield power, and replace the current establishment rather than just complain about it or bug off into the woods, or try to balkanize the country.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

June 10, 2026

To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.

What is the government reportedly about to introduce?

According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.

Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?

Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.

Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?

I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.

Does the ban actually work?

The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.

Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?

The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.

Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?

The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”

Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.

“Don’t talk to the police”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Canadian lawyer Ian Runkle (aka “Runkle of the Bailey”) jokingly suggested that he needed to make a change to his normal billing practice:

This rustled the jimmies of Jake Sun:

Which led to a more extended discussion from Ian:

Okay, ignoring the whole Canadian vs. American thing, let’s talk about this notion that it is somehow un-American to advise people not to speak to the cops.

Cause holy shit that’s funny.

First, when the cops want to put you in jail, cooperating with them and making that easier for them is a real dumb move. If you’re sitting in the interrogation room it’s not because the cops are looking to help you find a burglar or because you’re calling 911. It’s because they want to put you in jail, potentially for years. Wanting to help them at that point is as dumb as it gets.

Second, your right not to talk to the cops is enshrined in the Constitution in both Canada and the U.S. In other countries, likely not as much, which means that being able to tell the cops “Fuck you, no” is absolutely American, both because it is a thing in America and because exercising your Constitutional rights is an American and patriotic thing to do.

Third, if we’re talking about the United States specifically, we’re not talking about a country founded on respect for and obeisance to authority. The slogan was never “Give me Liberty, if the government allows it”. No one asked for a permit to throw tea in the harbour. The U.S. was not founded on the principles of obedience and deference to authority, but instead the rights of the individual against authorities are fundamental to the American experience.

America is not and never was about “Yes, sir.” It’s far more about “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”

June 8, 2026

A Brief History of Nuclear Weapons in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Polyus
Published 6 Jun 2026 #aviationlovers #canadianaerospace #PolyusStudios

Canadians themselves were largely opposed to nuclear weapons but their utility in a full out conflict was impossible to ignore. And so up until fairly recently the Canadian government’s position on the matter was deliberately ambiguous. Promoting peace while supplying the means of war. Now with the luxury of hindsight we can see the true extent to which these weapons played a central role in the defense of this country during the Cold War.

Like it or not, Canada was a threatening and potent nuclear-armed force during a 9 year period between 1963 and 1972. The posturing was offensive in Europe, and defensive on Canadian soil. The last defensive weapons were relinquished in 1984. Nuclear weapons were adopted as part of its network of alliances, when it became obvious that the Soviet missile threat could only be defeated by deterrence. Politically the nuclear question was a hot potato, John Diefenbaker tried to keep the weapons out, Lester Pearson let them in, and Pierre Trudeau kicked them back out again.

This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!

0:00 Introduction
1:20 Uranium mining in the North
2:31 Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project
4:10 Post war fears of Soviet army and Canadian build up in Europe
6:04 Air threat from Soviet bombers
8:05 The case for nuclear weapons
9:28 Cancellation of the Arrow in favour of nuclear weapons
10:55 Defensive nukes
13:39 Offensive nukes
16:15 Nuclear capable platforms
16:59 Types and numbers of deployed weapons
18:30 Legacy and impact of these weapons
19:55 Conclusion

Support me on Patreon – / polyusstudios

Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn Heads

June 6, 2026

D-Day landings on Sword, Gold, and Juno Beaches

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Imperial War Museums
Published 5 Jun 2020

On 6 June 1944, Sergeant Ian Grant was among the thousands of men landing on Sword Beach in Normandy on D Day, armed only with a revolver and a cine camera. He was part of the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) and captured this incredible mute footage of the landings. Fewer than a dozen men filmed the D Day landings and this extraordinary record is now held exclusively by the Imperial War Museum. Film curator Michelle Kirby introduces us to this film.
(more…)

June 5, 2026

Canada’s AI “strategy”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:

AI in Canada lost before it even got started.

They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.

Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.

1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”

2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”

3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.

4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”

5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”

The Canadian economy, RIP

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne writes an obituary for the Canadian economy:

For the record.

In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies.

The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid-style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting”.

On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre-pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non-pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid-1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless.

And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity.

Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession-dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience”. In some quarters, the answer to this slow-motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate.

Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private-sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent.

Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience”. It is delusion.

Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up.

Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend”. They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay.

The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient”.

As the propagandists of the mainstream media do everything they can to deflect any hint of blame from their Liberal paymasters, we can still see that things are getting worse, not better:

The federal Liberals are getting fantastic return on their investment … giving our money to the presstitutes of the legacy media in return for kid-glove treatment of the government and attack-dog tactics against the opposition:

Why Do 50% Still Support Carney? My long-winded response.

That is a question we need to take seriously.

Leger’s latest federal polling has the Liberals at 50% support among decided voters, their highest level in that firm’s tracking since the Liberals first formed government in 2015. Abacus also found the political environment still favourable for Carney and the Liberal government. So this is not imaginary. This is not just CBC fairy dust sprinkled over Ottawa. The support is real. The harder question is whether it is rational.

My answer is simple: many Canadians are not voting for results. They are voting for the illusion of relief.

Even though Carney was in the economic background since 2020 he appeared to arrive after the Trudeau years like a man in a clean suit walking into a room after the dog crapped on the floor. Trump threatened 51st State. Carney looked calm. Unlike Trudeau. He spoke in complete sentences. He had the central banker aura. For exhausted voters, that was enough. They did not examine the wiring. They just saw someone who did not seem to be setting the curtains on fire.

Carney’s appeal is not built mainly on performance. It is built on contrast. Compared with Trudeau’s theatre-kid government of slogans, selfies, and moral lectures, Carney looks serious. But “serious” is not the same as right. A surgeon can look serious while operating on the wrong leg.

Canada’s economy is now weak enough that Carney himself has had to acknowledge ugly economic data. Reuters reported him addressing Canada’s technical recession and warning that some data will be “uneven” “ah ah ah” as the government pushes through policy changes. The Wall Street Journal reported GDP weakness, including two consecutive quarterly contractions, while Carney framed the pain as part of a broader economic rebuild.

That is where the sales pitch gets slippery.

When the economy weakens under Conservatives, it is called failure. When it weakens under Liberals, it becomes “transition”, “restructuring”, or “long-term transformation”. Same corpse, nicer label on the toe tag.

The deeper problem is that Canadians were never really asked whether they wanted Carney’s ideology. They were sold competence, not doctrine. They were sold expertise, not a governing philosophy that puts the state, regulators, climate finance, and elite managerial planning at the centre of national life.

Nobody knocked on doors saying, “Would you like a prime minister who believes markets should be bent around elite-defined social and environmental values?” No. They said, “He is smart. He ran banks. He knows Trump. He will steady things.”

That is not a mandate. That is a branding exercise.

And this is why the Conservative attack has to get sharper. Not louder. Sharper.

Calling voters stupid is a dead end. Many Carney supporters are not stupid. They are terrified of Trump. They are tired. They are anxious. They are looking at housing, debt, food prices, crime, productivity, health care, and a country that feels smaller than it used to, and they want someone who looks like an adult. Carney gives them the visual. He gives them the voice. He gives them the vibe.

But vibes do not build houses. Vibes do not raise productivity. Vibes do not lower debt. Vibes do not attract investment. Vibes do not make young Canadians believe they have a future.

The Carney government’s strongest weapon is not success. It is emotional permission. It lets Liberal voters tell themselves they have moved on from Trudeau without admitting the Liberal machine remains fundamentally intact. Same operating system, cleaner looking wallpaper.

That is why 50% still support him.

They are not endorsing the results. They are postponing the verdict.

Canada does not need a better-spoken manager of decline. It needs a government willing to reverse the policies that caused the decline in the first place.

Because a tight ship headed toward the rocks is still headed toward the rocks.

June 4, 2026

Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”

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

L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:

AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison

If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.

This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.

The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.

Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.

Now it wants to control the dictionary.

Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.

Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.

But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.

What did your words mean?

What did your symbol represent?

What was your motive?

What cultural message did your expression create?

That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.

The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.

That was not a loophole.

It was a guardrail.

But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.

So the guardrail has to go.

And what does government offer instead?

Trust us.

Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.

Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.

Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.

That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.

But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.

Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.

It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.

It manages symptoms by expanding state power.

It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.

The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.

The joke is on everyone.

The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.

Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.

It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.

And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.

June 3, 2026

“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:

In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.

If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.

Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.

Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:

    The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!

You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.

[…]

He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:

    Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.

Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:

    remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.

Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.

May 31, 2026

Canada slips into recession: state media rally to attack official opposition

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Even before they became explicitly subsidized presstitutes for the Liberal Party, the Canadian mainstream media have always been far more critical of conservatives, so this pivot to defend the government after official statistics show the country is in a technical recession is very much on brand:

Stuart, this is exactly the problem.

You’re acting like annualized quarter-by-quarter numbers are some exotic partisan invention. They aren’t. That is one of the standard ways GDP is reported and understood.

And the “reporter’s narrative” point is weak. The reporter framed the question as if calling it a recession was irresponsible, even though the numbers show real weakness: contraction, stalled growth, falling investment, weak productivity, and Canadians losing ground.

Pierre did what more politicians should do: he challenged the frame.

Because the frame matters.

When Conservatives warn about decline, it’s “doom”.

When Liberals preside over decline, it’s “complex global headwinds”.

When Canadians get poorer, it’s “resilience”.

When GDP shrinks, it’s “not quite the word we’d prefer today”.

Give me a break.

Canadians do not live inside a Statistics Canada footnote. They live inside rent, mortgage renewals, grocery bills, job insecurity, and taxes. Pierre is speaking to that reality.

The press gallery can massage the vocabulary all it wants. The country is weaker, poorer, less productive, and more expensive.

That is not a narrative.

That is the room.

The Liberals are getting great value for their money — well, our money — as even though the economy is tottering, media-massaged messaging is reflected in polls (feel free to doubt the accuracy of polls like this if you like):

May 30, 2026

Unlike Canada, Sweden can have a sensible, rational public discussion on indigenous issues

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

Yeah, I know. I’m just as shocked as you are, but Warren Mirko and Laurisa Dohm have the receipts:

“Swedish flag” by JSolomon is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Something happened in Sweden recently that would be nearly unthinkable in Canada.

There was a substantive public discourse about the tension between Indigenous rights, the broader public interest, and the state’s jurisdiction, in prominent newspapers and on television.

Ebba Busch, Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, stood at a press conference in Luleå and argued that reindeer herding should no longer be classified as a riksintresse, a formal national interest designation that grants legal protection in land-use planning. She proposed that reindeer stocks should be cut and subsidies re-allocated to other cultural programs in order to ease tensions between competing land-use interests in northern Sweden. Her reasoning: reindeer herding affects very large areas of Sweden’s land mass but carries limited economic significance.

The response was immediate. Indigenous Sámi groups called it election propaganda. The chairman of Girjas Sámi village published a rebuttal arguing that Sámi rights to hunt and fish are grounded in ancient tradition, and that her party’s framing mischaracterizes those rights as economic interest rather than constitutionally recognized Indigenous rights. The Swedish public broadcaster’s own reporter called the debate “a hornet’s nest“.

And yet the debate actually took place. On the nightly news, no less.

Deputy Prime Minister Busch made a substantive argument about how she thinks the state should weigh competing interests in its northern regions, with her reasoning stated plainly, and Sámi leaders answered in kind. That is democratic governance.

Canada’s political class has spent decades avoiding exactly this kind of clarity and honest intellectual engagement. It has been sacrificed at the altar of conflict avoidance and by the acceptance of canned platitudes carefully crafted to say precisely nothing at all.

Sweden ranks fourth in the world on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, with a near perfect score of 9.4/10 for political culture. It also takes Indigenous rights seriously, having established an independent truth commission in 2020 to study historical abuses against the Sámi.

And yet Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld the government’s decision in June 2024 to grant an iron ore mining concession at Kallak in northern Lapland, despite contentious opposition and legal arguments that insufficient consultation had violated Sámi’s rights to free, prior, and informed consent. Now, its Deputy Prime Minister is arguing publicly that the state must regain clearer authority to make decisions across its entire territory, and that the interests of reindeer herding cannot be allowed to dominate and block decision making processes as they do today.

Sadly, Canada does not seem to take lessons from more mature nations. Or any lessons, really. Our politicians are so afraid of “third rail” issues and controversy that they avoid any hint of actually addressing real problems in favour of performative announcements, repeated endlessly with no attempt to actually perform actions.

Buying W.W. Greener: Tales from the Golden Age of Surplus

Filed under: Britain, Business, Cancon, History, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jan 2026

I am joined today by Val Forgett III of Navy Arms for the first in a series of videos telling some of his stories form growing up in the golden age of surplus, with a father who was one of the largest arms dealers in the US. Today, we are talking about how his father ended up owning the W.W. Greener company for five days, and taking a look at a sniper rifle from the Greener museum collection — a .280 Ross fitted with a Zeiss optic used by Greener’s nephew to significant effect in the First World War.

Minor correction: The guns Val still has were duplicates for Edward VII, not Edward VI.

In addition, Mr Bailey’s story has a happy ending. Val’s father gave him the machine tools from the Greener shop and prepaid for six months lease on a nearby building for him to start his own business. He eventually partnered with a former Greener employee named Leonard Onions and they formed Bailons Gunmakers Ltd, which was in business for many years.
(more…)

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