Quotulatiousness

September 15, 2026

A Fall election seems quite likely

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

One of the advantages of a Westminster-style parliamentary system is that election dates are not fixed, so that the Prime Minister can take advantage of perceived opportunities to win majorities when they arise. It must be very tempting to Mark Carney to call an election as soon as he can, as the Elbozos are still waving their arms and chanting his praises for “standing up to the Bad Orange Man”. His latest notion of trying to add Canada to the European Union as some sort of “associate member” is also popular among people who think that Canada should be more like Europe (the Venn diagram of Elbozos and Europhiles is almost a perfect circle). On X, Jay Currie stares into the abyss of yet another Liberal majority government with a renewed electoral mandate:

The Prime Minister of all the Canadas is prepping for his Davos 2.0 speech to the European Parliament on the 17th when, apparently, he is going to propose that Canada become some sort of associate member of the EU. God help us.

The developed world can be thought of as two camps: the progressives and, for want of a better term the nationalists (could be traditionalists but that is only one strain within the nationalist camp). The supra nationalist institutions, EU, UN etc are progressive to their core.

Progressives see borders as barriers to progress, believe diversity is strength, see international action as the only way to defeat the horror of “climate change”, want international controls on speech, technology and public health.

For progressives individual rights, the rule of law, property are all barriers to the greatest good for the greatest number. Citizenship is an antique concept best left in the 20th century.

Most importantly progressives see the state, rules and regulations, a constantly refreshed “New World Order” and managed decline as both beneficial and inevitable. Arc of History and all.

Nationalists begin with the tiniest unit in society, the individual, and take that unit seriously. What rights does an individual have? If you start there you automatically circumscribe the power of the state. You also set the state’s direction.

Taking individual rights seriously creates a state in which individuals matter, there their voluntary associations beginning with families, matter. “The greater good” is no more than a suggestion when it comes to protecting individual rights.

The Europe of the EU came out of the ashes of a world in which individuals were subjects rather than citizens (with the notable and sporadic exception of post Revolutionary France) and the concept of individual rights was fragile at best.

The progressive intent of the EU was to treat “Europeans” as interchangeable economic units whose value was locked to group identity and which must be prepared to share the burdens imposed for the greater good.

Nationalism was seen as regressive as was patriotism and the insistence that individuals had rights which over rode the “common good”. After all, the horrors of WWI and II were the products of patriotic nationalism.

The progressive European project worked quite well for the first twenty or so years when Marshall plan aid funded the rebuilding of Europe and membership in the EU was relatively restricted. Expansion and mass immigration strained the Community.

Part of the reason the EU worked quite well in the early years was that its goals were relatively modest, a trading bloc with harmonized economic regulation left individual countries to work out their social, legal and rights structures.

As with any progressive institution the modest goals of the early years were gradually replaced with “ambition”. The 1985 Schengen Agreement eliminated hard borders within the EU. The European Convention on Human Rights harmonized the rights of Europeans.

Part of the progressive ambition was the creation of a hitherto unknown entity known as “the European” superficially similar in concept to “the American”. Questions of nationality could be submerged as this new entity stepped into the world.

For the progressive camp the “European” was a giant step forward into a post national future. As indeed it was for a tiny minority of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, financiers and other members of a self appointed cognitive elite.

People who objected to this grand homogenization of the nations of Europe were obviously frightened of the inevitable future because, well, they were not well educated and, entre nous, not too bright.

For the “Europeans” the great cause of the 21st century was laid out in Rio in 1993 when a conference convened by Canadian Maurice Strong sounded the alarm about “global warming” currently rebranded “climate change”.

Now there was a global threat demanding a supra-national response where the “Europeans” could assume a leadership role by…well, by shipping all of their heavy industry offshore and building very expensive windmills and mandating electric cars.

To no one’s very great surprise the Europeans have managed to de-industrialize and regulate themselves to the point of actual poverty. Fortunately, it was all for the global greater good so the Europeans could congratulate themselves.

Not content with climate virtue, the Europeans (though not the regressive nationalist yobs) took it upon themselves to welcome millions of migrants. An act of humanity and also shrewd as the Europeans had given up having children.

Of course, the idea had been trial-ballooned recently to get Carney-friendly headlines ready in advance:

September 14, 2026

Performative Canadian politics again

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

Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:

This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.

Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.

The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.

And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.

So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?

Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.

Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.

Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.

Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.

It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.

September 13, 2026

Stellantis signs an MOU with Roshel for their Brampton auto plant

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

On the surface, this seems like excellent news, both for Stellantis who get rid of an auto plant they can’t economically operate and for Roshel who now will get manufacturing capability for their expanding military vehicle lines. But, as Martyupnorth points out, it’s only an MOU and will require placating the auto union:

Image from @Martyupnorth on X

Let’s recap what happened at this old facility in the last 3 years.

The Brampton plant built Chargers & Challengers until December 2023. Then Stellantis (the parent company of Chrysler) shut it down to retool for Jeep Compass. Taxpayers handed over hundreds of millions of dollars to make that happen.

Workers were told it was temporary. They receive a combination of Employment Insurance (EI) and company-paid Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB) that brought most of them up to about 70% of their regular weekly wage, plus continued health benefits. Their contract said they were good for 2 years of benefits.

In February 2025 the work stopped, because U.S. tariffs made building cars in Canada for the American market a losing proposition. October 2025 Stellantis moved the Compass to Illinois. The plant has sat empty ever since. Roughly 2,200 people have been collecting layoff cheques while the building rusts.

Now Stellantis has an MOU with Roshel, a local company that actually wants to use the place. The union’s response? Pause the contract talks. Declare an “impasse.” Demand the company keep pretending the old product plan is still viable.

Unifor spent years extracting benefits and job-security that assumed the world would stay the same. When the world changed, the union treated any other option, like a defence contractor, even just selling the asset so someone else who could hire people, as a betrayal.

The workers are the ones sitting at home. The union leadership is the one treating a mothballed factory like a sacred site that can only ever build Unifor-approved vehicles.

Markets don’t care about the last collective agreement. Tariffs don’t care. Customers don’t care. A plant that produces nothing is just expensive real estate with a Canadian flag out front.

The union’s job was supposed to be representing the people who used to work there. Instead it became another veto on anyone trying to turn the lights back on.

Unions are a scourge on Canada.

Velvet Glove and Sparrow II missiles: A Guide To Early Cold War Bomber Interception Tactics

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

Polyus
Published 6 Apr 2026

The Velvet Glove was a semi-active guided missile system developed by the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment. Its successor, the Sparrow II was developed by Canadair in association with the US Air Force. This is the story of the development of the missiles in the context of their contemporary weapons systems.

0:00 Introduction
1:00 NORAD and continental defense
3:21 Gun approach
5:32 Rocket pod approach
7:54 Nuclear option
8:35 Interception Tactics
11:56 Guided missile approach
14:38 Velvet Glove missile development
19:30 Sparrow missile development
22:03 Arming Canada’s future fighters
25:08 Conclusion

September 11, 2026

“The Army we have is not the Army we need”

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

The Canadian Army is re-organizing and the most visible sign of the new organization is the reconstitution of the 1st Canadian Division:

Formation patch for the 1st Canadian Division during the First World War.

On Sept. 10, the Canadian Army undergoes one of the largest changes in its history as it transitions from divisions responsible for geographic regions in Canada to divisions with purpose-driven mandates.

“The Army we have is not the Army we need“, said Lieutenant-General (LGen) Michael Wright, Commander of the Canadian Army, in Inflection Point 2025, which laid out the rationale for and plan to launch a full-scale modernization of the Canadian Army.

This means 3rd Canadian Division, which has represented Western Canada for nearly 40 years, will be stood down on Sept. 10.

In its place will stand up 1st Canadian Division, which will assume command of the Canadian Army’s three Regular Force brigade groups — 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (1 CMBG), 2 CMBG and 5 Groupe-brigade mécanisé du Canada (5 GBMC) — and 6th Canadian Combat Support Brigade (6 CCSB), the brigade designed to enable the rest of the Army to conduct its operations. In addition, 1st Canadian Division will also assume command over three newly formed formations: 1st Canadian Artillery Brigade, 1st Canadian Sustainment Brigade and 3rd Canadian Light Infantry Regiment.

It’s all part of a push to move the Army away from “contribution warfare,” explained LGen Wright on the Feb. 4 edition of the Canadian Army Podcast. Going forward, the goal is to equip and position the Army to be capable of participating in major combat operations as an equal partner.

If you, like me, were wondering where the 3rd Canadian Light Infantry Regiment came from, it’s composed of existing battalions from the other regular infantry regiments, reducing them each to just their first and second battalions:

The first of the three new formations being stood up as part of 1st Canadian Division is 3rd Canadian Light Infantry Regiment, which is a reassignment of existing units. The third battalions from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, Royal Canadian Regiment and Royal 22e Régiment will be brought together to form the new regiment. LGen Wright explained the new formation will “ensure [the Army is] able to respond with high-readiness forces at scale”.

I’m sure there’ll be no morale issues at all with three battalions-worth of trained infantrymen being rebadged to a brand new unit with no history, traditions, or battle honours. And I’m sure we needed a few more combat postings for Colonels kicking around with nothing much to do …

September 10, 2026

The tragedy of the commons at sea

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When a valuable commodity isn’t directly owned by anyone, the incentives are for everyone to grab as much of the commodity as they can. Nobody will preserve it, because they wouldn’t get the benefit from it: it would be shared among all the other users. Fishing grounds outside coastal waters are valuable commodities that nobody owns:

Nobody owns the ocean floor off the Georges Bank, and so between 1960 and 1994 the New England cod population collapsed by roughly 70 percent while every fishing fleet on the Atlantic raced to pull up fish before a competitor did. This race is the entirely predictable consequence of absent ownership.

Garrett Hardin formalized the problem in 1968, but the mechanism is older than economics itself. When no individual owns a resource, no individual bears the full cost of depleting it. The cost gets distributed across everyone; the benefit goes straight to whoever acts first. You extract as much as you physically can before the next boat arrives. So does the next boat. The resource disappears, and everyone stands around pointing fingers at greed. The actual culprit is the property rights regime, or rather the absence of one.

State managers offer themselves as the solution: quotas, licensing boards, regulatory agencies. The Atlantic fisheries commission issued exactly these instruments. The cod is still not back. Bureaucrats lack the price signals, local knowledge, and personal stakes that make stewardship rational. A regulator who mismanages a fishery keeps his salary; an owner who does the same loses his capital.

Private ownership forces the owner to think in time. Iceland extended exclusive fishing rights to its own coastal fishermen in 1975, drove foreign trawlers out, and now holds one of the best-managed cod stocks in the North Atlantic. Property rights did what Brussels-style quota spreadsheets could not: they tied the fisherman’s future income to the health of the stock today.

Common ownership produces a sprint to zero.

September 9, 2026

The day after counter-tariff Tuesday

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

Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:

Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.

Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.

The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.

They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.

Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.

You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.

Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.

Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.

John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?

This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.

This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.

There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.

The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.

Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.

Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.

If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.

Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.

And that’s why we pile on.

And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:

… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?

Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.

But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.

I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.

But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.

And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.

Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.

But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.

The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.

And just when the hell did that happen?

We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.

Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.

September 7, 2026

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

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

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 4, 2026

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

September 3, 2026

John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”

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

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957

Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.

John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.

It was also a hell of a ride.

The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.

To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.

Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.

Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.

Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.

The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.

The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”

Canada’s “softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive” cadet movement

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

I was in the army cadets from 1972-76. We were still wearing British-style battledress uniforms rather than the CF Green delivery driver uniforms, but we weren’t in cadets for the pseudo-scouting experience … we wanted to be army cadets. Not long after I left cadets for the reserves, the leadership vision changed to (I assume) make cadet organizations more “inclusive”, as John Carter describes:

This unfortunately isn’t new. I was in Army Cadets back in the 90s. Even then female fatbodies in the adult officer corps weren’t unknown, and cadets was coed.

I didn’t actually mind the coed aspect at the time, I picked up a lot of my hs gfs through cadets. What I did mind was how ridiculously soft it was. Weapons training, in particular, was essentially impossible to obtain unless you joined the marksmanship team (which I did for that specific reason), and even then they only gave us ancient Lee-Enfields with .22 inserts. We did a lot of camping and rucking, including in winter, which was great, but aside from the exercises being on army bases and conducted in combat fatigues using old surplus kit, there was almost nothing to mark it out as military in character. Nor for that matter was there anything in the way of physical conditioning.

I wasn’t the only one annoyed by that. The kids who joined cadets wanted to be little warriors. They wanted to crawl through mud with a knife clenched between their teeth, they wanted to get emotionally abused as they struggled through obstacle courses, and they wanted to handle firearms. There was a rumor that all of us had signed an agreement that in event of war, if the rest of the military had been wiped out, we could be called up for the last line of defence. I doubt that was true but we thought it was the coolest thing.

Instead, the only cadets who were allowed to handle C7s were the honour guard, who were issued (rubberized) rifles before parades.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter what the cadets themselves wanted. The adults had decided that softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive was the name of the game. I didn’t make the connection with the presence of female cadets at the time, though in retrospect that’s obvious. What was obvious to me at the time however was that this was all downstream of liberal females aghast at the very concept of a militarized youth, and weak men who couldn’t tell the females to shut their fool mouths.

As an epilogue, when I turned 17 I joined the Army Reserve, only to discover that this infernal feminine softening had long since infected the military, as well.

The cadet Lee-Enfields firing .22LR were an important part of our weapons training … although due to a weird bit of timing, the very first rifle I ever fired was a full-size .303 Lee Enfield that seemed to have enough kick to push me right out of the rifle pit when I fired it (I was small for a 12-year-old). We hadn’t yet learned about hearing protectors, so my ears were ringing for about an hour after the range trip.

September 1, 2026

Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference

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

The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:

It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.

On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.

Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.

DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.

The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.

Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.

Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”

In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.

August 29, 2026

On the scenic shores of “Lake America”

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

One thing Trump does better than any other politician is finding ways to send his opponents crazy. It’s not a skill I’d want to have myself, but it’s amazing how Trump can do or say something outrageous … and pretty much every time his opponents take the bait and make themselves even more ridiculous in trying to react to his provocations. Like randomly renaming Lake Ontario by executive order:

I don’t think Carney has Trump Derangement Syndrome, the citizens who vote for him do. Carney knows this, he counted on it to win the election. Elbows up was about preparing Canadians for a breakdown in relations with the U.S. – A breakdown that Carney and the other Laurentian elites who run things in Canada saw as inevitable. To anyone paying close enough attention, Carney is the de facto new leader of the globalists (the WEF mob). He ascended to that position at the moment he became the Canadian prime minister. Trump and the MAGA movement, on the other hand, are the singular force in the world effectively opposing globalism as it has emerged in the post-WWII “rules based order”.

This effectively places Canada at the center of an existential global struggle. However, we are not only at the center, but oppositionally set against the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, locked in a “trade war” with the largest economy in the history of humanity. Pardon my use of acronymic French as I blurt out an unruly “WTF!”

I am sure Carney has read The Art Of The Deal and knows how to win diplomatically with Trump – which is all one needs to read to gain the key insights prerequisite to mutually successful negotiations with the orange one. But Carney is not interested in mutually beneficial trade relations with the U.S. because that would mean tacit support for the American led reset of global political economy (which of course follows from America’s new economic policy, because yes absolutely America is that powerful), or put another way, it would mean Carney supporting the thing which is opposing the thing that he actually supports.

Elbows up Canadians have been manipulated by the most cynical government in the history of Canada. Carney is a smooth operator but a cunning wirepuller. He has essentially pulled the wool over the eyes of a malinformed citizenry who have been fed an endless diet of state-sponsored anti-American, Anti-Trump, and Anti-Poilievre propaganda since at least the final scenes of the Trudeau premiership set the stage for Carney the globalist show closer.

[…]

And at last we come unceremoniously to the supreme troller who has cast his line in the newly anointed Lake America. He is fishing for a major catch of Canadian TDS, and he is bound to fill his nets. Indeed, Trump has signed an executive order officially changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Canadians are of course triggered and are whining insufferably. I think it is funny, and I like that for once an Indian name is being changed to a European one. Trump is the greatest troller in the history of trolling. However, the move is a serious one, in twenty years the world will be flooded with maps and globes that label the former Lake Ontario as Lake America, in spite of the impotent protestations of butt hurt Canadians. America has vastly more power in this world, if they want our lake known as Lake America it will be so. Canadians who have a hard time accepting this simply have no clue about the dynamics of power.

Carney’s response to Trump’s redesignation of the lake was replete with a self-own only one as invested in a globalist “new world order”, and oblivious to actual domestic concerns could muster. He posted the following to X:

    The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

    The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

    We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

    Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

A hilarious response to this which appeared on X was posted by Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal, which I am assuming is a parody account since Miranda was a recurring character in the 1980s sitcom Married With Children. MVdlJC wrote:

    “How dare Trump rename Lake Ontario!”

    “Anyways, here I am at Sankofa Square …”

If that is not the cat’s pajamas then I have no idea what type of a response to Carney’s boundless smugness would adequately compliment a feline’s slumber. Carney says that Canadians know about “naming reality”, yet how many unpronounceable aboriginal terms have been grafted over the real names of Canadian places in the past decade or so.

August 28, 2026

“The Maple Mujaheddin Insurgency is not going to happen”

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

Of all the potential military conflicts facing the west, a US invasion of Canada has to be among the least likely — not just because it’s been attempted more than once in the past. For one thing, I don’t think even the best social media posting is going to bring ordinary Americans around to getting boots on the ground across the 49th parallel … there’s remarkably little passion about seizing our maple syrup and confiscating our strategic reserves of poutine among voters. Unlike places that Americans have strong feelings about, Canada just doesn’t move the needle.

The Operational Art of War has the first of a promised three-part series on Operation Maple Stomp, the biggest and best invasion of Canada — everyone says so:

In the latest round of “let’s do everything the dumbest way possible” the two nations in the world sharing the most in common keep taking to social media to fantasize going to war with each other.

It is deeply annoying, brings out the worst tendencies on both sides, and (to my mind worst of all) illustrates no one understands the Operational Art of War!

Americans take to social media and claim Canada doesn’t have a military, the military wouldn’t fight and be so outnumbered that resistance would collapse within hours.

Canadians usually agree the conventional war would be over in an afternoon, but then America would face a long and bloody insurgency (just wait till Uncle Sam meets the Maple Mujahedeen!).

Google AI’s idea of what a Canadian Insurgent looks like.

You can definitely count me as a member of Team Mere-matter-of-marching, at least as far as the tactical operations necessary to occupy the most populous parts of Soviet Canuckistan. Here’s a sketch map that Big Serge updated for the 2020s, based on the mid-1930s details for an attack on southern Ontario from War Plan Red:

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

The distances are short enough and the chances of significant military resistance low enough, that US Army vehicles would probably not need to refuel before reaching the initial stop-lines for their advance. Canadian infrastructure is not pre-wired for destruction, so unless local hotheads manage to temporarily block road bridges, volume of traffic will be a bigger friction factor than actual defensive fire.

Trump’s legions would reap the benefit of more than a century of demilitarized populations and the (small, but real) Canadian military being oriented to expeditionary operations rather than home defence. But taking the territory is only the first step. There are Canadians scattered throughout the continental United States, looking and sounding pretty much like any other American, and it wouldn’t take too many of them to decide that Trump’s fight was also their fight. Canada isn’t the only one enjoying the benefits of decades of lack-of-worry about homeland defence. Look how exposed the US has been to Islamic terrorists who, for the most part, don’t look or sound like Americans and still managed to pull off one of the greatest terror attacks of the modern age.

I mean, don’t misread what I’m saying here: the US would win. That’s not even remotely in doubt. There are at least ten of you for every one of us, and more of you have military training and access to personal weapons. (One wonders if the Canadian government’s fanatic devotion to civil disarmament is a kind of pre-surrender to this imagined US invasion we’re discussing …)

But the cost of winning might be more than even the most government-worshipping progressive might be willing to pay. We look like you. With a few exceptions (French-speaking Quebecers and Newfoundland-speaking Newfoundlanders, mostly), we fit in very well with you. We come from very, very similar cultures (some like Vancouver vlogger J.J. McCulloch argue it’s the same culture). Rather than a war of conquest, this would be much more like that “Second Civil War” that’s been so much a topic of conversation on far left and far right social media. The kind of civil war that takes far too long to settle back into peaceful co-existence.

You don’t like government surveillance? Too bad, bucky, because every level of government is going to be eager to ensure that you’re a good, loyal American … at all hours of the day and in everything you do. Cut down a Flock camera? That’s not going to be a mere vandalism issue … that’s tantamount to treason. What if that Flock camera was watching one of those undercover Canucki guerilla fighters?

Don’t like the feds watching every financial transaction? Too bad, bucky, ’cause you giving $5 to that sketchy Canuck for some bootleg maple syrup might be funding a terror attack on your nearest USAF base.

To fight the threat of Canuck infiltration, your every car trip will need to be logged, and your patterns of travel will need to be recorded and analyzed. Who you talk to will also need to be observed, in case one of your buddies is a covert maple-slurping spy!

Oh, wait, there’s more from the Operational Art of War:

There Won’t Be a Maple Mujahadeen

If the United States annexes Canada, there will not be a long-standing violent insurrection by a nation of hunters. The Maple Mujahadeen isn’t going to happen.

A successful insurgency has several requirements:

  1. A pre-existing structure to organize around;
  2. The structure having access to weapons;
  3. The insurgent group not having a future in the new regime; and
  4. The broader population being willing to shelter the insurgency.

Canada does have factions that meet all four of these factors, but spread across different factions. Like any complex modern society, Canada does have pre-existing structures of voluntary organizations. Virtually none of them are organized around any kind of collective defense or skills that easily translate to an insurgency.

For #2 (access to weapons) you either need armed citizens, government weapons cashes or weapons brought in by a rival power supporting the insurgency. In Canada’s case, the only viable supply of weapons for an insurgency is its armed citizens. As with most statistics, Canada only looks like a gun free country because it’s beside America.

The graph below shows the top 10 countries for estimated firearms per 100 people, plus the EU and global average for comparison (excluding countries with a population under one million). Countries that were recently warzones are in orange, as their rate of firearm ownership is something of a special case.

The number for Canada is likely too low. This is based on a 2017 data set, and firearm ownership is growing faster than the population. It also assumes there are five unregistered firearms to every registered firearm in Canada. The last time Canada had hard data on unregistered firearms (2003 to 2012) the ratio was 10:1. Assuming a similar ratio today, firearms per 100 jumps to 1/2 that of America and nearly 4x the European average.

August 27, 2026

Memoranda of understanding: the illusion of action

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

One of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s signature differences from the Trudeau era is his passion for negotiating and signing memoranda of understanding with foreign governments, corporations, organizations, and NGOs. Most Canadians had probably never encountered the term before 2025 brought a regular stream of media reports of yet another MoU signed in a nice little performance for the cameras. Carney loves MoUs because they allow him to travel around the world, meet foreign dignitaries, bankers, and business leaders in luxurious settings, and produce mediagenic signing ceremonies on the regular. Most MoUs are about as valuable as the paper they’re signed on in real-world terms, but they allow Carney and his ministers to present a façade of purposeful motion, action, and success for minimal effort. Perfect for a government that lives and breathes to the media cycle.

L. Wayne Mathison points out that previous flurries of MoU negotiations have resulted in almost no change, regardless of the media fuss at the time of signing:

This is why I am skeptical when politicians announce billions of dollars in MOUs as if the money is already in the bank.

We have seen this movie before. Jean Chrétien’s Team Canada missions produced hundreds of signed agreements and plenty of impressive headlines.

Yet research by UBC economists Keith Head and John Ries found no statistically significant increase in bilateral trade attributable to those missions.

That does not mean trade missions are useless. Relationships matter. Opening doors matters. Some individual companies may land real business.

But an MOU is not a completed investment, a new factory, an export shipment or a permanent job.

Judge governments by what actually gets built, invested and sold after the cameras leave.

Announcements are easy. Results are the hard part.

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