Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2026

Carney’s EU dreams hit a rough patch

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

Canada’s propaganda outlets are doing everything they can to hide the fact that Carney’s EU love affair is going badly.

Although Canadian voters weren’t given any advance notice, the clear goal of Prime Minister Mark Carney is to move Canada deep into the orbit of the European Union. While I think this is a terrible idea, it’s very attractive to the urban managerial class in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver … they tend to think of the rest of Canada as being knuckle-dragging, low IQ chuds anyway, and already consider themselves to be simpatico with the Eurobureaucratic elites. Fulfilling Carney’s dream would go down well with those folks (who are already disproportionally Liberal voters). On Substack Notes, GJS links to an article on the attempt to Europeanize Canada saying:

Urban sophisticates are intoxicated by the idea of Canada “becoming more European” because they envision themselves lolling away the hours swilling café au laits and Beaujolais in quaint city squares, debating the meaning of life and whether Parmigiano Reggiano is superior to Le Gruyère. Tim Hortons, trucks and SUVs, and brutish blue collar workers will all instantly evaporate into the sky, and there’ll be no more talk of crude and barbaric matters like hockey, natural resource extraction, or Nickelback. Don Cherry and Stephen Harper will be erased from our history and we’ll ride bicycles with baguettes tucked under our arms.

At Haultain Research, Marco Navarro-Génie discusses eight things that make Carney’s EU dreams unrealistic and unlikely to come true:

How does a country become more sovereign by joining a union that makes rules but cannot vote on them? Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament this week that Canada will.

Ursula von der Leyen offered the title of “first associate member” the day before, and he welcomed it, then said at his press conference that the term was hers. But the term has no substance yet. No treaty article defines an associate member, no text sets out what Canada would take on or give up, and the two sides have agreed only to “define together” what the words mean. The sovereignty he promised rests, for now, on an aspiration with a name. The question is how it could ever work.

Start with what nobody disputes. Canada sells roughly seven of every ten export dollars to one customer, and that customer has spent almost two years proving it will use the fact against us. Albertans have been saying this since Quebec and BC blocked new pipelines to tidewater. Ottawa treated the complaint as a regional grievance, killed Northern Gateway, let Energy East die, and bought Trans Mountain only after its owner gave up. If the federal government has finally discovered that Canada needs more customers, the West welcomes the conversion, however late. Closer ties with Europe are part of any sensible answer; Europe is wealthy, democratic, and already bound to us by a trade agreement. Its future, however, is questionable.

The argument rests on emotional primacy and the claim that a closer embrace makes Canada freer.

Eight things about that claim do not add up.

The first is the use of the word sovereignty. Mark Carney used it six times in Strasbourg. He defined it as a country’s ability to make its own choices without being dictated to. Then he listed what he wants from Europe: common standards for artificial intelligence, pooled computing power, an integrated market for financial services, membership in European research and student programmes, alignment on energy and digital rules. How much of that requires Canada to follow rules made by institutions in which it has no seat and no vote? Members surrender powers and get a vote in return. A non-member who follows the rules gets the obligations without the empowering vote.

At Davos in January, Carney had a phrase for accommodating a hegemon. He called it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Everyone understood which hegemon he meant. The sentence today fits Brussels without changing a word.

The second is the title. Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the chance to become “the first associate member of the EU.” Carney said that the substance matters; the substance has a name. The Union’s treaty provides, in Article 217, for agreements “establishing an association” with outside countries. Turkey has had one since 1963 and is still in the antechamber; nobody with an association agreement is a member. The adjective in von der Leyen’s sentence is inaccurate. It describes an old arrangement.

The third is where the word associate comes from. Official Canada has spent a decade repudiating colonialism: the 2008 parliamentary apology, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justin Trudeau accepting the word genocide, a new citizenship oath, the Vimy Memorial removed from the passport, Canada Day cancelled in city halls, names changed, and statues pulled down.

Now the same official Canada seeks its independence in the embrace of a project founded by colonial powers, with the development of their colonies written into its birth certificate. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 devoted a whole chapter, Part Four, to “the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories“, meaning the colonies of France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, from the Congo to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, twenty-five kilometres off Newfoundland.

That chapter is where the word “association” enters the Union’s law. It survives as Articles 198 to 204, and its annex still lists Greenland and Saint-Pierre. Canada would be the third North American party to an association with Brussels; the other two hold the word under the colonial chapter.

On Sunday (September 20) the Prime Minister flies to Saint-Pierre, French colonial territory a short boat ride from the Burin Peninsula, to affirm sovereignty beside President Macron, whose country, let me remind you again, has not ratified CETA. Nobody in Ottawa seems to have looked up St.-Pierre’s address.

Ottawa claims to fight second-hand colonialism at home but embraces it in the splendour of colonial metropoleis.

October 30, 2026

New National Security Policy – The Plan for a Stronger Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

At True North Strategic Review, Noah discusses the latest formal revision of the federal government’s national security policy:

Canada has a new national security policy!

After much anticipation, Canada’s new national security policy has finally been released after some delay. Then-Prime Minister Trudeau directed officials in 2024 to deliver a renewed policy in 2025. That policy had been pushed back and delayed as we transitioned into the Carney era, until a relatively quick, almost surprise drop today.

Canada’s last national security policy was Securing an Open Society back in 2004 (when I was in kindergarten) under Paul Martin’s Liberal government. It was billed as the first policy of its kind in Canada, coming off several major events and crises all arriving in the same period. 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, SARS, the 2003 blackout …

It came with $690 million in new initiatives and built the foundation that much of the current system still bases itself on, including the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, the Government Operations Centre and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

It also promised a National Security Committee of Parliamentarians, which wouldn’t exist until 2017. Its first chair was David McGuinty, now the Minister of National Defence. That was followed by the International Policy Statement in April 2005, and then a progress report a month after. That was the last time we had such a policy published, over twenty years ago.

Unlike Securing an Open Society, the new policy is more a framework rather than a plan, running at 11 pages of actual information. It presents:

  • Five areas of national interest
  • Eight Strategic Capabilities
  • Five foundations, which will each get their own detailed policy

We’re going to try and break this down as we usually do for these kinds of strategies, but with a bit of a difference in how we usually do it. While usually we go line by line, breaking down the strategy piece by piece, there isn’t a whole lot to go off of here. It is after all only really 11 pages, many of which are recaps and such.

So, like the EU Arctic Strategy, we will instead be focusing on the main points that matter to us. I highly recommend in turn that you read the whole policy yourself. Again, it isn’t that long in the slightest.

October 28, 2026

Operation Maple Curbstomp – an imaginary US invasion of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As every red-blooded American knows, an invasion of Canada would be as one of the Founding Fathers put it, “a mere matter of marching”. So glance at the thumbnail summary of the two nations’ military capabilities should some future American president decide that the US should formally own “America’s Hat”, courtesy of Operational Art of War (most of the article is paywalled … this is an excerpt from the teaser email send out to cheapskate free subscribers like me):

Manifest Destiny, 2025? Big Serge’s updated map for the Ontario portion of the old US War Plan Red for an invasion of Canada.

The first two posts looked at the capabilities and force structure of the Canadian and American side of this highly unlikely conflict. This post will look at what Force structure America would be able to assign to an invasion of Canada given its other security concerns.

The short answer is that the U.S. military can only deploy a minority of its combat power against any one enemy. This is a geostrategic problem faced by every global great power in history. It explains why the British Empire was strangely vulnerable even at the peak of its power. It also explains several patterns in post-World War II American geopolitical strategy, such as holding back the majority of its Corps HQs during Desert Storm or currently being quite silent about China while it resolves the Iran conflict.

A Summary of Military Capabilities

Conclusions about Canada

The first post concluded that a significant insurgency in Canada is very unlikely. The groups capable of one are rarely those interested in one, mainly because Canada’s rural-urban gap in firearm ownership is far wider than America’s.

The Canadian military is a different story. At least initially, it would resist a US invasion if ordered. Those citing political, ideological, or cultural reasons otherwise misunderstand the profession of arms.

It is small but highly professional, largely because its non-commissioned members serve nearly twice as long as their US counterparts.

Counting all categories, it has about 103,000 personnel, rising to about 123,000 with 30-60 days’ notice. Lower figures usually reflect misunderstandings of the Canadian Armed Forces’ structure.

Canada’s small but capable navy and air force cannot challenge American air and sea dominance, and their expeditionary design would make them near non-factors in a US invasion.

Against an invasion, Canada could field about 8.5 maneuver brigades:

  1. Regular Force Army: 3x CMBGs (equivalent to US Combined Arms Brigade Tactical Groups).
  2. Regular Force special forces at brigade (-) strength.
  3. Reserve Force: 10x CBGs (motorized infantry at brigade (-) strength) and an Arctic reconnaissance brigade. The CBGs currently generate 10x TBGs (equivalent to US light infantry task forces or British infantry battle groups).
  4. Under total mobilization after an invasion, the CBGs would likely generate 15x TBGs, about 5 infantry brigades.

At brigade level and below, Canadian Army equipment roughly matches that of US Army field units. America’s on-paper advantage stems mostly from strategic reserve stockpiles, which Canada lacks but which would not matter in a 2-4 week war.

Conclusions about America

In defense spending and high-end weapon systems, America is the unquestioned dominant power. At the highest level, America outnumbers Canada 21:1 in military personnel and 63-14:1 in key equipment (aircraft, tanks, and AFVs).

But raw-number comparison is the hallmark of poor military analysis. To understand the U.S. military, we must look at what it is designed to do and what combat power it could bring to bear in an invasion of Canada.

Militaries broadly fit two types: Volunteer Professional Expeditionary and Continental Conscript. Expeditionary militaries field a few maneuver brigades that can fight anywhere indefinitely, at enormous cost in money and manpower per brigade.

Continental militaries mass maneuver brigades to defend the homeland and its borders. This is far cheaper, but they can only mobilize briefly and cannot project power.

The U.S. has the most expeditionary focused military in history, able to project power globally on a scale matched only, perhaps, by its own World War II and Cold War forces.

Conversely, it devotes a smaller share of resources to ground operations than almost any other nation. Within its ground forces (the U.S. Army and the USMC’s non-air component), much of the personnel and spending goes to capabilities of little use in invading Canada.

The brigade slice ratio illustrates this best: for every soldier in a maneuver brigade, how many serve in supporting units outside it? Continental militaries run about 0.5 to 0.6:1, other expeditionary militaries 0.8 to 1.3:1, and the US Army 3.1:1. That reflects capabilities like a flat-pack petroleum port and over 100,000 soldiers whose only job is moving supplies between continents. These let America project power like no one else, but they are largely irrelevant in an invasion of Canada.

After all this, the Active Duty US Army has 32 maneuver and 3 special forces brigades; the National Guard adds 27 more.

Sixty-two brigades is huge by modern standards, but small for an army of 1,028,6000 and a $954 billion military budget.

Investing half your budget in strategic and operational logistics does little in a war needing no strategic and minimal operational logistics. A 2-4 week invasion of Canada would be almost entirely tactical logistics, where America has an edge over other Western militaries, but not a dominant one.

So while America outnumbers Canada 21:1 in personnel, the ground ratio is 15.9:1 and the maneuver brigade ratio just 8.8:1, still enough to curb stomp Canada. But as this article explores, Canada can commit every maneuver brigade to defending its homeland; America cannot commit even most of its brigades to invading Canada (or any single country).

I’m sure the full article considers this in-depth, but the Canadian military would be extremely vulnerable to a “bolt from the blue” attack, given where the bulk of troops and equipment are located relative to the most likely areas of incursion from the continental US.

The major population centres of central and western Canada are in easy reach of the border and it might be a race between American advances and Canadian reaction forces to get to most big cities. Activating the reserve would also be very difficult, as it’s highly likely the US would degrade or interdict most channels of communication at the start of such an operation, and as Canadian reservists do not keep their personal weapons at their homes, they’d need to get to their local armouries to draw weapons and what minimal amounts of ammunition stored locally. Forming the reserve units into combat-ready formations would take a lot of time that the Canadian military might not have …

October 26, 2026

Canada’s economic plight is largely self-inflicted

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a Substack Notes post by Jasmin Laine:

I agree with Jasmin. What Carney calls a “global rupture” is, in many respects, the accumulated consequence of political decisions made right here in Canada.

For more than a decade, Liberal governments have pursued policies whose economic consequences deserve far more scrutiny.

Climate mandates and regulatory costs have made investment and industrial development more difficult. Immigration expanded faster than housing, infrastructure and public services could reasonably accommodate. Rather than addressing why young Canadians struggle to afford homes and raise families, Ottawa increasingly relied on immigration to sustain population and labour-force growth.

High taxes, regulatory uncertainty and unfair foreign competition have weakened the conditions for domestic manufacturing. Government employment expanded much faster than private-sector employment, while productivity and business investment remained persistent concerns.

And years of public frustration over repeat violent offenders exposed serious weaknesses in our bail and justice systems.

These problems have different causes, and global pressures are real. But governments must accept responsibility for the consequences of their own decisions.

Carney speaks about rebuilding Canadian sovereignty, competitiveness and economic security. Those are worthwhile objectives. The question is whether his government is prepared to reconsider the policies that contributed to Canada’s vulnerabilities.

You cannot spend years weakening the foundations of an economy and then describe the resulting cracks as an unexpected global rupture.

Jasmin is asking the question every government should face: How much of the problem are you actually responsible for creating?

QotD: When Lester Pearson “invented” peacekeeping

Filed under: Cancon, History, Middle East, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… most Canadians neither know nor care much about either foreign or defence policy. They, the societal mainstream, were and are still being fed a load of codswallop in schools and universities about Canada’s military history. It begins with the lie about how Canada “invented” peacekeeping. Anyone who believes that “baby-blue-beret” style United Nations peacekeeping was Lester B. Pearson’s idea is too bloody stupid to walk around loose. In fact, Dr. Ralph Bunche, a distinguished American diplomat got the Nobel Prize (1950) for “inventing” peacekeeping in the late 1940s. The outcome of his negotiations was UNTSO, The United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, the UN’s first ever peacekeeping mission. There was parallel work going on at the same time, involving Canadians like General Andrew McNaughton and Lester Pearson, to use military officers to supervise the India-Pakistan truce in Kashmir. The two original missions, UNTSO and UNMOGIP (the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) are still working.

What Lester B. Pearson did was to use his diplomatic and political skills — and both were of a high order — to, almost literally save the Western alliance after Britain and France made a strategically stupid decision to capture the Suez Canal after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized it. That move infuriated US President Eisenhower because it upset his own Middle East strategy, and nearly destroyed the Western alliance. Mike Pearson, under orders from Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, repaired the damage before the USSR and its cronies could take strategic advantage of the rift that had opened in the US-led West. Mike Pearson moved peacekeeping from small observer and truce supervisory missions to major undertakings involving troops in a “trip-wire” role. He and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld were able to stick handle a complex plan through President Eisenhower and around the Soviet bloc in just a few days. Some people said the pair “saved the world”; they certainly saved the Western Alliance.

If you don’t know that then you are a typical Canadian who has been failed by the education system.

Ted Campbell, “Being prepared”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2020-12-17.

October 23, 2026

Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):

People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.

Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.

Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.

Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity

Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.

Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.

French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers

Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.

October 19, 2026

“If alternative energy is a ‘lower-cost’ solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state”

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

John Robson points out that words do have meanings and calling expensive things “cheap” and cheap things “expensive” doesn’t actually change their economic or environmental value in the real world:

Martian fighting machines striding over Horsell Common … no, wait, these are actually wind turbines on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario.

When it comes to the alleged green energy transition and its flood of cheap power and paradisaically green, lucrative and fulfilling jobs, those with even fairly short historical memories will recall that the “Green New Deal” legislative package was meant to do for the US economy what Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had supposedly done in the 1930s. Those of us who think the main achievement of the “New Deal” was to extend a sharp recession into a decade-long depression through a massive set of taxes and regulations driven by inane economic theory, for instance plowing crops under to fight hunger under the AAA, didn’t even find that claim appealing. But others sure did, and with about as much to show for it.

As Wikipedia put it, after tracing uses of the term back to 2007:

    The 2019 United States congressional resolution Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey advocated a ‘just transition’, counteracting previous systemic injustices that had disproportionally hurt vulnerable communities. A ‘just transition’ relies on increasing social and economic equity and access to opportunity which are crucial components of the Green New Deal and principles of environmental and social justice.

For these hyper adherents to Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”, just saving the planet isn’t enough. You also have to save the economy, eliminate injustice and after lunch world peace.

In Canada, where we pride ourselves so fiercely on our “elbows up” independence from the United States that we call our system of socialized medicine brought in back in 1966 “Medicare” after um uh the American program from 1964, there are calls for “A Green New Deal for Canadian Sovereignty” which appears to be the US version with maple syrup:

    This will allow us to quickly transition from an economy excessively reliant on serving the United States and based on exploitation and the burning of fossil fuels, to one that is more self-reliant, driven by dignified work, clean renewable energy, more equitable and with efficient public services for all.

Oh. Just that? Who knew giving up oil and gas in a cold northern country could fix government health care? Well, Greenpeace Canada, for one, with their 2019 infographic that includes “Create a plan for 1 million good green jobs” (shades of Mole from Pogo exclaiming “A plan! You’re right! I’ll need a plan!”). And with this one, wait, you also get “Indigenous rights” and “proportional representation” and “BETTER LIFE FOR ALL” and “Build clean industries”. Oh and “Grant personhood protections to forests and bodies of water”. And interfaith harmony and a guy in a wheelchair and all that there.

Mind you, the bit where you “Build clean industries” still appears to face a few minor hurdles, like building clean industries. And why just 1 million good green jobs? Why not 5 million, or 53 million, or 628 billion? Since climate transition enthusiasts don’t do practical well.

For instance Canary Media just launched a publication “California Wire” dedicated to telling you the transition that failed in California worked in California:

    I’m launching this newsletter at an intriguing moment in California politics. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom – who everyone knows is eyeing a run for the White House – has one last chance to show his true colors on energy and climate change. Rising electricity costs are a major issue in California, and Newsom must decide by the end of this month whether to sign a host of bills that could help cut utility rates while also advancing the state’s clean energy transition. What message does he want to send to Californians and the rest of the country?

Dude, he already “sent a message” that this GND is pie in the sky and energy gets more expensive not less. And not because he hid his “true colors on energy and climate change” but because he waved them in everyone’s face while shouting about the subject. So now all he needs to do is wave his pen? Yup:

    a few bills on his desk now could at least start the long slog of reforms that experts say will help make power more affordable.

Oh wait. Experts say. But long slog? Help make it more affordable? Why the Dickens isn’t it already more affordable since these kinds of people keep telling us wind and solar are now cheaper than oil and gas, and let’s not even mention coal, and Newsom’s true colours are wind and solar?

Indeed, he calls for:

    a precursor to setting up regulations that could steer them [utilities] toward prioritizing lower-cost solutions over expensive grid upgrades.

Talk about leaping into verbiage. And also error, since if alternative energy is a “lower-cost” solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state, and if they’re not, you’re just making things worse by persisting in your delusion.

British Columbia’s David Eby

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

I barely pay attention to politics in my own province, so my knowledge of British Columbia politics is far less detailed. I do rather think of BC’s political class as maple-flavoured understudies to California politicians, which may not be fair … I’m not sure if it’s not fair to BC politicians or to the folks running California into the ground. At Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ looks at whether David Eby actually seems to love his adopted province or if he just values it for what it allows him to do:

David Eby, Premier of British Columbia
Photo from the Government of British Columbia via Without Diminishment

In the only televised debate of British Columbia’s provincial election, Premier David Eby tried to make it clear that he loves our province.

Are we sure about that?

We know there are people who come from afar to make a home here and go on to do incredible things for B.C. Names like Alberta-born Trevor Linden, W.A.C. Bennett from New Brunswick, and others are all enshrined in the pantheon of West Coast heroes.

If Eby’s record is any indication, he loves what B.C. can do for him. He uses provincial taxes to fund his political experiments and the premier’s office as a pulpit, while milking the treasury to save a buck in his personal life.

The best example of this was the way in which he took advantage of the $10-a-day subsidised daycare program, using it to save money despite the fact that he and his wife earn well over half a million dollars per year.

There was nothing illegal about Eby, a resident of B.C., putting his child in the daycare program. However, that scheme is clearly intended for struggling families and single parents, not a highly paid premier and his well-paid spouse. It was a gross, indecent decision, and there is no way around that.

All of Eby’s alleged affection runs in one direction.

Under his watch, the term “British Columbian” has been replaced in official guides with “people living in B.C.” because the former is allegedly harmful to Indigenous peoples, refugees and other newcomers, like the premier himself. As for British Columbians, the premier seems determined to give away every kilometre of public land in the name of “reconciliation”.

Who British Columbians are has been rendered a source of embarrassment that can only be handled with safety gloves, for they are “uninvited guests” in the government’s cosmology. More broadly, his party’s politics have converted that suspect sentiment into a permanent division between Indigenous peoples and, in the government’s view, apologetic interlopers. This is what constitutes “reconciliation”, according to the one indispensable figure.

That indispensable man arrived from Kitchener, Ontario, with a nose for creating trouble. At both the Pivot Legal Society and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, Eby introduced himself to his new neighbours by disrupting the Olympics and trying to undermine the local police.

Like so many other Ontario-born transplants in the B.C. NDP, Eby decided that he, and he alone, knew what was best for British Columbians. Never mind that the Ontario NDP have only headed one disastrous government.

October 14, 2026

There’s nothing preventing the Canadian government from using propaganda

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

And now that the majority of the relic media are addicted to government subsidies, the propaganda efforts are that much more effective:

Here’s something that not many Canadians both know and understand in Canada. There are currently zero laws in place regarding our Government’s ability to use propaganda against it’s citizens.
Not only can they do it, but they have teams of behavioral scientists & psychologists figuring out how to do it effectively.

In 2016 there were only 6 federal employees in the role. Since 2021 there are now over 70

In the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) there are over 16

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada there are over 5

Treasury Board Secretariat over 3

Environment and Climate Change Canada over 2

And there are more working in the Privy Council Office

During Covid they admitted to using these individuals to push COVID-19 compliance up amongst the population, They ran research surveys & experiments to test messaging and interventions, and designed choice architecture or communications to drive desired behaviours.

These ghouls manufactured consent amongst the population & nudged people to make decisions they didn’t want to.

Fast forward to today and what we are witnessing in regard to the U.S. and Europe. They are using the same tactics to convince people that the U.S. is our enemy & the EU is our savior. Stop falling for their propaganda, step back and think for a moment, why are they bombarding you daily with anti-U.S. rhetoric, climate fear, pro EU messaging. Are you being manipulated to accept their plan’s & decisions.

QotD: The rise of the Reform Party of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A rejection of the new Canada, especially the largesse and overreach of the federal government into economic matters, was the perfect match for importing the new kind of libertarian-infused conservatism that became dominant in the 1980s with figures like Reagan and Thatcher. “Small government” conservatism provided a solid ideological foundation on which to build a new kind of conservatism to oppose aspects of the new regime, and it was also one that didn’t require nostalgizing for the old Dominion.

This small government conservatism wasn’t a homegrown ideology, it was adopted and imported from elsewhere. America especially. The dominant paradigm in postwar American conservatism became the fusionism that was associated with publications like National Review, and eventually became a dominant political force in Ronald Reagan. The success of this fusionism also made it appealing, and ready-made, to be imported to Canada and fused with this rejection of big government Liberal nationalism. In the process, Canadian conservatism begins to sound more American.

I’m not using this pejoratively and I don’t see this so much as a form of cultural imperialism. The adoption of this kind of conservatism made sense in response to the new Liberal nationalism. But it does present some serious problems for Canadian conservatism. This anti-nationalism and small government conservatism will appeal to some, especially in the West, but it’s not something that a national movement could be forged around.

This is what I mean when I say lots of conservatives don’t like Canada all that much. In adopting small government American conservatism, this kind of conservatism sounds like an American critique of Canada. Canadian healthcare looks “socialist” to American conservatives, and small government ideologues in America look at Canada and see big government “Soviet Canuckistan.” This is what Canadian conservatives adopting this kind of ideology sometimes sound like, and you can see why this has limited electoral appeal.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

October 11, 2026

“Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking”

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

L. Wayne Mathison on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I watched this video about Indigenous education and reconciliation in BC schools. It raises some questions we should be asking across Canada.

Schools should teach history, including residential schools, treaties, colonization and the treatment of Indigenous people. But history should be taught honestly, with evidence, context and room for disagreement.

When students hear slogans like “Indigenous brilliance” and “land back”, are they being encouraged to examine what those terms mean, or simply expected to agree?

Orwell warned us about political language that substitutes slogans for clear thinking. Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results rather than their intentions. Hayek warned against assuming anyone possesses all the necessary knowledge. Bastiat reminded us to consider the costs nobody bothers to mention.

Those principles belong in every classroom.

Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking. Historical injustices deserve examination, but so do competing historical accounts, modern treaty obligations, property rights, individual responsibility and the consequences of government policy.

Students should be free to question every claim, including those made by teachers, politicians and Indigenous leaders.

If a historical claim is true, it should withstand scrutiny. If a political proposal is sound, it should withstand debate.

Education should produce independent thinkers, not obedient political activists.

We owe young Canadians an honest education, not a preferred political narrative dressed up as unquestionable truth.

October 10, 2026

Tim Worstall argues that the BC drug decision was correct

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

I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall‘s takes, but he’s quite convinced that the recent decision in British Columbia to create a new human right to buy and sell drugs is correct and will lead to better outcomes than the existing law:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

Drug dealing — branded drug dealing — is now legal. Or it will be once the 6 month stay expires or the Canadian Parliament changes the law.

The change in the law that should — won’t, but should — is that branded drug dealing should be legal.

That humans like to get blitzed is true. That humans like to get blitzed so much that every time anywhere tries to stop it — short of immediate execution for users and dealers — means that whatever the law says there’s always that market in ways to get blitzed. There are two arguments for making it legal to get blitzed. One is the simple liberal point that it’s our own life to waste and we each get to chart our own path — whether sooner or later — to the inevitable grave. The other is that for most drugs the consumption of the pure stuff doesn’t do much harm.

Sure, sure, cocaine turns people into obnoxious wankers but decent heroin has few physical problems and users tend to spend their time contemplating the joys of an enhanced reality. Not my thing but, you know, Meh.

The illegal stuff kills at least tens of thousands to get to us and then tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more through being stepped upon, cut, polluted and then the basic public health problems of AIDS ridden whores — of both, or any, sex — tricking to pay for the next dirty needle full.

We have a solution to this. A known solution. Capitalism. Capitalism in the full light of day and under the rule of law. We don’t just want we positively lust after corporations to make pure junk. Branded, pure, junk. Their brand dependent upon how good the highs are at the price of how few deaths. Their profit depends upon maintaining the value of that brand.

That is, turn that always present human greed into our purity guarantee. Same thing that keeps the rats out of our bread supply — WonderLoaf finding that rat bits in the sandwich reduce their sales.

So, Marlboro branded heroin, that’s the thing. And, yes, Marlboro, they’ve already got that association with horse, haven’t they?

QotD: JFK’s soft coup to destroy Diefenbaker and install Pearson

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the winter of 1963, an American crossed into Canada travelling under a passport that was not his own.

His name was Lou Harris. He was John F. Kennedy’s personal pollster, one of the handful of men who had just put a president in the White House, and he was moving under a false identity because the job he had come north to do could never be seen to be done. He had come to take down the Government of Canada.

It worked. Within months, John Diefenbaker’s nationalist Conservative government was gone, and the Liberal campaign that replaced it had been quietly run on American polling, American media tactics, and American psychological warfare, with Harris directing from the shadows. No shots were fired. No tanks crossed the border. Most Canadians lived out their lives never knowing it happened at all.

That is not a theory. This is documented history, laid out in painstaking detail in John Boyko’s Cold Fire: Kennedy’s Northern Front, and once you know it, you cannot look at this country the same way again. Because here is the question nobody has had the nerve to ask in the sixty years since: if Washington toppled a Canadian government in 1963 and paid no price of any kind, why on earth would it have stopped?

It didn’t stop. That is the argument of this essay, and I intend to prove it with receipts. What began as a Kennedy operation against one stubborn prime minister became the permanent condition of Canadian politics. Blue America captured our governing party, its money, its methods, its personnel, and eventually its policy. Red America, more quietly, built our opposition, supplying the ideas, the operatives, and the reflexes of what now calls itself Canadian conservatism. Two parties, two foreign patrons, one country in between, and not one law against any of it. By the end, you will understand why every election feels like choosing between American factions. Because it is. And you will have, in plain terms, the only program that can end it.

Start where the occupation started: with the prime minister who said no.

Diefenbaker’s crime, in Washington’s eyes, was sovereignty. JFK despised him for defending Canadian autonomy, and teamed up with Lester B. Pearson’s Liberals to permanently rewire this country’s trajectory. Harris and his fake passport were only the covert half. The overt half played out in public, and it is somehow more shocking. The breaking point was Diefenbaker’s refusal to accept American nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles Washington had parked on our soil, and refusing to put our forces on alert on Washington’s schedule during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He insisted a Canadian government would decide these things in Ottawa. For this, on January 30, 1963, the United States State Department did something no ally had ever done to another: it issued a press release publicly calling the Prime Minister of Canada a liar about the state of defence negotiations. A foreign power’s foreign ministry, openly contradicting our head of government, in writing, to force his hand. Within a week, Diefenbaker’s government fell on a non-confidence vote. Within months, Kennedy’s friend Ben Bradlee put Diefenbaker on the cover of Newsweek in a hit piece so vicious it read like an obituary. The pollster in the shadows, the press release in the open, the friendly magazine on the newsstand. Every layer of American power, aimed at one Canadian who said no.

What happened to Canada was not an isolated incident. It was one front in a global campaign of regime change Washington ran throughout the 1960s. The same decade they were meddling in Ottawa, they were toppling governments worldwide to secure their sphere of influence. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration laid the groundwork for the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, finalized in Mobutu Sese Seko’s military coup. In 1961, the Kennedy administration financed race riots and engineered an electoral coup in British Guiana to depose the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan. By 1963, Washington was backing the violent coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. A year later, the Johnson administration ran Operation Brother Sam, providing military backing to the coup in Brazil that replaced President João Goulart with a military dictatorship.

By installing Pearson, Washington broke Canada’s nationalist resistance using the exact playbook it deployed on developing nations, locking us permanently into a continentalist framework.

And look at what the new management delivered, and how fast. Within two years of taking office, Pearson gave Washington the warheads Diefenbaker had refused. In 1965 he signed the Auto Pact, integrating the commanding heights of Canadian manufacturing into the American industrial system, the economic annexation the National Policy had been built to prevent, accomplished with a signature. And in the same year came the new flag. Understand what that meant to the men who fought it. The Red Ensign, the banner Canadians had carried up Vimy Ridge and across the beaches of Normandy, was struck, and with it the visible sign that this country belonged to a British inheritance rather than an American continent. Diefenbaker fought the flag change with everything he had left, and he was mocked for it as a relic, because the men mocking him understood exactly what he understood: a country’s symbols are its memory, and a country stripped of its memory will accept a new identity from whoever supplies one. The supplier was already chosen.

That 1963 intervention laid the structural tracks for Pierre Trudeau to dismantle our traditional British and Loyalist inheritance entirely, replacing it with official multiculturalism, a weaponized Charter, and a hyper-progressive legal order. The horrors you see today are not random accidents. They are the long-term realization of the colony Kennedy and Pearson engineered decades ago.

But here is what even the people who know the Diefenbaker story get wrong. They think 1963 was a coup against Canada’s right. It was bigger than that. It was a proof of concept. Washington learned that Canadian politics could be run from outside, cheaply, legally, and without consequence. And in the sixty years since, both American political tribes have taken the lesson. Blue America perfected the Pearson playbook and used it to capture our government. Red America ran a quieter operation and captured the opposition. Not two conspiracies. One condition. A satellite country whose entire political spectrum, left flank and right flank, answers to a foreign capital’s internal quarrels.

Upper Canadian Cavalier, “The Occupied Dominion”, Upper Canadian Cavalier, 2026-07-06.

October 9, 2026

CMAR – Canada’s Newest Service Rifle – 2026

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Josh Bortolotti
Published 5 Jun 2026

Connaught Range Primary Training Centre

The Canadian Army is in the final stages of testing for the C25 General Service Rifle, the first weapon being delivered by the Canadian Modular Assault Rifle project. Since awarding the contract to Colt Optics to provide the 1-6x LPVO, key stakeholders are brought out to Connaught Range to fire the weapon from differing distances and provide feedback. Some members of the Army Headquarters also got the opportunity afterwards to have a familiarization shoot with the C25 and C26.

C25 General Service:
Colt MRR 5.56x45mm (13.7″ barrel)
Colt Optics 1-6x Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO)
Millbrook Strategic Sciences Multi-Function Muzzle Device (MFMD)
Magpul Back Up Sights and Furniture

C26 Full Spectrum:
Colt MRR 5.56x45mm (15.7″ barrel)
Colt Optics 1-10x Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO)
Millbrook Strategic Sciences Multi-Function Muzzle Device (MFMD)
Magpul Back Up Sights and Furniture

October 6, 2026

The insanity of the Kamloops Residential School allegations

Filed under: Cancon, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For whatever reason, the Canadian government decided to not challenge the claims that 215 First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves (media often changed that detail to a “mass grave”) at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC. On X, Tristin Hopper outlines the story as it was relayed to the public:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

I still don’t think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could …

The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it’s usually something like this.

The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific “knowing” was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school’s apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.

What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they’d found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.

Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that’s why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.

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