Quotulatiousness

August 15, 2026

Debunking common Supply Management beliefs

On his Substack, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois debunks ten myths about Canada’s supply management cartel that interfere with Canadians’ ability to engage with the idea of dismantling the government’s favourite oligopoly:

Suddenly, everyone — and their grandmother — seems to be an expert on supply management.

That newfound interest is healthy. Canadians are finally examining the benefits, costs and contradictions of a complicated system affecting roughly one-quarter of the country’s agricultural economy.

A generation ago, few economists openly criticized supply management. Those who did faced fierce attacks, while the dairy lobby deployed a nationwide marketing budget approaching $200 million annually. Remember the Doug Gilmour milk advertisements? Today, the “Milk” logo appears on Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys through a multimillion-dollar sponsorship.

For years, criticizing supply management was almost politically taboo. Social media has changed that. Consumers can now see milk being dumped, compare Canadian prices with those abroad and question why Ottawa repeatedly compensates a protected industry.

Dairy farmers are not the problem. They operate rationally within rules created by governments and administered by marketing boards. But those rules should not be immune from scrutiny.

Here are 10 myths Canadians should stop believing.

1. Dairy farmers are poor […]

2. Supply management is saving the family farm […]

3. Canadian dairy farmers receive no subsidies […]

4. Trade agreements make every dairy farmer lose money […]

5. Ending supply management would automatically lower prices […]

6. Farmers alone pay for dumped milk […]

7. Milk dumping is unavoidable […]

8. Canada has fully respected CUSMA […]

9. Supply management guarantees food security […]

10. Reform means abolishing the system overnight […]

QotD: “The progressive is a walking paradox”

In economics, we cut through noise with a concept called “Revealed Preference”.

If I loudly claim to love vanilla ice cream, yet every time I return from the Mr Whippy van I’m holding a choc-ice, my revealed preference is evidently for chocolate — not vanilla.

Thus the truth of a person’s preferences is revealed through their actual choices and behaviour, not by what they claim to prefer.

It’s unfortunate we can’t simply listen to their words, but they are so oriented toward the external, the aesthetic, and the performative (“Theater Kid Progressivism”) that we must instead look at their proximal behaviours — where they actually choose to live and raise their families, for example, to extrapolate backwards their true feelings on mass migration and its consequences.

This is the lens through which we should try to understand our Progressive class.

The bitterest irony, the irony of ironies, is this: progressives, especially those who voted for it, self-evidently do not feel at home in the societies they helped create.

If they were genuine believers, they would live contentedly amidst their new friends.

Instead, they scuttle off into the countryside, the leafy suburbs, or gated enclaves, abandoning the very demographic transformation they imposed on others.

It is often said that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any at all, but while this is very funny (and true), there’s more to it.

It reveals a profound non-confluence between their stated attitudes and their actual behaviours, indicative of extreme cognitive distortion.

They protest performatively that open borders and rapid demographic change are a universal good, even moral imperatives and (admittedly less often nowadays) sources of strength.

Yet when it comes to their most intimate revealed preference — where they opt to live and raise their families — they consistently prioritise homogeneity, good schools, and cultural familiarity.

They lobby and vote without end for policies that maximise immigration into lower- and middle class neighbourhoods, then abandon those very communities for pastures anew, safely insulated by postcodes and house prices.

Their revealed preference is that do not want to live in the Canada (or Britain, or America, or Europe) they are busily helping to construct.

They enjoy the vibes, the moral status, the Instagram aesthetics, while quietly falling back to the leafy, high-trust environments their grandparents took for granted.

Progressives love to speak of taboos (indeed if there is a pastime more alluring and intoxicating to the progressive than “breaking taboos”, I am yet to come across it, but I digress) yet is the greatest taboo of all right in front of us after all, carrying a basket of organic fruit and veg from Waitrose?

To interrupt the Progressive in the midst of his communal dream state, to turn our collective eye away from the brave new world they are building for us and to instead look inwards, to look the Liberal cuckoo directly in the eye and put words to the disparity between their words and their actions …

The subject of lawful and legal deportations is increasingly mainstream, yet what of urban renewal and rewilding by means of progressive importations?

The Progressive is a walking paradox, he is both the centre of attention and the ghost at the feast all at once.

Æthelstan, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-14.

August 14, 2026

Ontario premier doubles-down on provoking Trump. What could go wrong?

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

At some point you have to ask yourself … if Canada was being run by people who wanted to destroy it, what would they have done differently in the trade negotiations with Donald Trump’s government?

Is Doug Ford the dumbest Canadian?

I know, it is a deep bench. But the tubby premier is extraordinary. You have to appreciate talent.

There are, apparently, two schools of Canadian thought on the trade fracas with the US. “Punch the bully in the nose.” and “For God’s sake get a deal already.” As I prefer a Canada with an economy, I pick door number 2.

Our Chief Trade Negotiator Janice Charette, is more combative. If Trump brings in his retaliatory tariffs in a week she’s packing up and going home. That’ll learn him.

The idle threat school of negotiation enjoys wide currency in both Ottawa and Queens Park. Meanwhile, Canadian businesses are looking [longingly] at the low tax, low reg world inside the Trump tariff wall.

I’m having a beer with a buddy who is in “founder’s mode” on a startup and, frankly, he’d be crazy not to be looking at domiciling his business in the States. Sure, have a Canadian sub, but why put your main business in Canada?

And decisions like this are being made all over Canada and, indeed, the world. People might hate Trump and all his works but the business attractions of Red States make Ontario and BC look pathetic.

You would think that after Ford’s Super Bowl ad fiasco he would have the wit to remain silent as his province’s fate is being negotiated. You know, avoid more damage. But no, the tubby premier likes to “talk tough”.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Carney having to deal with the fallout of this idiot’s remarks. Unless, of course, like the Super Bowl ads, Carney actually encouraged these remarks … In which case the competition for dumbest guy in Canada has tightened up.

“Ultra vires“

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eva Chipiuk explains why it’s never a good thing to have your government ever extending the things it is involved in:

Governments going ultra vires should concern every citizen.

Ultra vires means “beyond the powers”. In a democracy, governments and public institutions do not have unlimited authority. They can only exercise the powers the law actually gives them.

Yet increasingly, we see governments, regulators, agencies, and other public bodies stretching their mandates, assuming powers they were never granted, and acting as though their authority is limited only by what they can get away with.

That turns the rule of law on its head.

The question should never be: “Where does the law say government can’t do this?”

The question is: “Where does the law give government the authority to do this?”

That distinction matters.

Government is not above the law. Public institutions are creatures of law, and their power has boundaries. When those boundaries are ignored, courts must enforce them, legislatures must correct them, and citizens must demand accountability.

Because once we accept government exercising powers it was never given, the limits on government become meaningless.

Staying within your legal jurisdiction is not optional. It is the foundation of the rule of law.

August 13, 2026

A minimum 12-year sentence

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’ll probably be no surprise to anyone who’s met me, but I was a terrible student in school. While I quite enjoyed learning (about some things, anyway), I hated the environment where that learning was supposed to be taking place. I did well enough in primary and middle school, but I dropped out of high school and finished my diploma through correspondence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those kids who don’t fit into the institutional framework, as I certainly didn’t feel I fit in during my sentence. (It’s often worse for boys, as it’s more difficult for boys to sit still and stay quiet, and teachers readily interpret distraction and fidgeting as something needing medical intervention rather than signs of normal human development for half the species.) At Without Diminishment, Sam Dagres considers the plight of the vast majority of children locked in to that minimum 12-year incarceration:

You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.

Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose “child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy”, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.

In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.

As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.

We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.

The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that “children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use.”

Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme “has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates.”

The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?” To that I respond, “Have you been paying attention?”

We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, “In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher”.

We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.

August 12, 2026

“It might be Carney’s unconditional surrender to Trump, but it’d be worse under Poilievre”

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

I exaggerate a tad in my choice of headline, but Canada’s bought-and-paid-for relic media will always choose to present a spectacular Carney faceplant as being somehow better than any theoretical action by Poilievre. If Carney’s going to surrender to the Yanks unconditionally, it would obviously be far worse if the Leader of the Opposition had been PM instead. eLbOwS uP, everyone!:

The new Canadian trade flag – The Line

Well, it looks like our prime minister is losing his nerve, eh?

Reports are now leaking fast and furious that Trump’s surprise August 19 tariffs have worked to break our strategic patience. Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.

Worse — and, to be frank, I do think this is the worst part of all of this — it’s the exact opposite of what we elected Mark Carney to do. When facing economic and political aggression from a neighbour and once-ally like the United States, surrender vs. resistance is a valid conversation to have. Given our circumstances, one could make a legitimate case for either choice. However, as a people, we did have that conversation, in the spring of 2025. We did make that choice. We chose resistance. We chose sacrifice. That was the premise of the last election, and that was the value proposition Mark Carney made for himself.

Instead, what we’ve actually done in the past year-and-a-half is a counter-productive middle path: yes, we’ve made moves toward strengthening our economy internally, and this is all to the good. But when it comes to measures that require a willingness to stand up to real power, all we’ve offered has been performative resistance in the form of angry social media sputtering and grandiose global speeches, followed in private by concession after concession. This has left us with the worst of both options. We’ve demonstrated that we lack the collective will to sustain real economic sacrifice. And we’ve just annoyed the Americans, which has clearly only increased their desire to make an example of us.

What we absolutely did not vote for was the prediction offered by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a political risk analysis firm with long ties to Carney and the Liberals. Last year, Bremmer wrote: “Canadian leaders have a political incentive to put up a bigger fight because Trump’s threats toward Canada’s economy and sovereignty have sharply inflamed nationalist sentiment north of the border in the run-up to the April 28 elections. However, I expect Ottawa will quietly fold shortly after the vote to ensure that ongoing relations with the U.S. remain functional.”

Congratulations, Canada. You got punk’d.

In honesty, I can’t think of a worse strategy for achieving a remotely fair trade deal with the United States than the one Carney chose to follow. If he’d been dealing with George W. Bush, this plan might have worked, but I think that Bush was the last US president who would put up with the juvenile performative “strategy” Canada used. Barack Obama would have easily turned the tables, as the relic media loved (and still love) Obama more than they love maple syrup and oxygen. Even Joe Biden’s handlers could have highlighted just how J.V. Canada was acting. But for some reason, the Liberals decided that constantly pissing in Donald Trump’s cornflakes was a winning strategy. And now we’re looking at a maple-flavoured Appomattox Court House meeting … and Trump has no interest — quite the opposite, in fact — in being as generous to a defeated foe as Ulysses S. Grant was to Robert E. Lee.

August 11, 2026

How the Royal Navy’s budget cuts built foreign navies

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

Warships & Warriors
Published 10 Apr 2026

When the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence faces a budget crisis, the rest of the world goes shopping. Welcome to Warships And Warriors! Today, we are exploring the global “Ghost Fleet” of the Royal Navy.

Through decades of cyclic Strategic Defence Reviews, the UK has repeatedly cut its fleet, selling off highly capable surface combatants, submarines, and massive amphibious assault ships decades before the end of their mechanical lifespans. In this video, we track down these decommissioned British warships to see how middle-power navies in South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia have transformed them.

From Brazil snapping up the Royal Navy’s amphibious heavyweights like HMS Ocean (now the Atlântico) and HMS Bulwark, to Chile bolting advanced missile systems onto ex-British Type 22 and Type 23 frigates, we uncover how foreign navies are gaining massive frontline capabilities at bargain prices. We also look at the strategic transfers of Upholder-class submarines to Canada, armed patrol vessels in Bangladesh, and the legally complex deployment of Sandown-class minehunters in the Black Sea.

0:00 – The Royal Navy Fire Sale
01:16 – Chapter 1: The Amphibious Heavyweights (Brazil)
04:31 – Chapter 2: The Frigates (Brazil, Chile & Romania)
07:16 – Chapter 3: The Submarines (Canada)
08:36 – Chapter 4: The Offshore Upgrades (Bangladesh & Philippines)
10:27 – Chapter 5: Clearing the Minefields (Lithuania, Greece, Ukraine & Estonia)
13:01 – Chapter 6: Mapping the Deep (Bangladesh)
13:48 – The Wrap-Up & The Tragic Fate of the Type 22 Batch 3
(more…)

August 10, 2026

Was Canada’s Victoria-class submarine deal a massive procurement failure?

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

Dominion Defence Review
Published 8 Aug 2026

Plagued by chronic low availability while also being expensive to maintain, the purchase of used British submarines seems to be a good reminder that a low sticker price isn’t everything …

August 9, 2026

The drift toward socialism in the west

I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:

Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.

The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.

Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.

Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.

Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.

Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.

The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.

Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.

That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.

Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:

This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.

Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1

Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.

Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.

The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.

If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2


    https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
    https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

August 1, 2026

Supreme Court of Canada surprisingly rules against the federal government

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

For the last ten years, it’s been a running joke that the federal government’s conflicts of interest would, at most, result in a $500 fine and an insincere promise not to do it again. Because that’s pretty much what has been happening since the early years of the Trudeau government. In a shocking development, however, the Supreme Court of Canada kicked over the apple cart and struck down the relevant section of the Conflict of Interest Act which the feds had found so useful over the years:

So the Supreme Court of Canada just did something almost no one in Ottawa expected. They ruled against the government. Unanimously. On a case the people who run this country spent five years trying to kill.

Yesterday the Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, said section 66 of the Conflict of Interest Act is unconstitutional. That was the clause designed to keep the federal Ethics Commissioner’s rulings largely beyond the reach of the courts. Errors of fact. Errors of law. None of your business. Parliament put a lock on the door and the Supreme Court just kicked it in.

This is not some abstract legal theory. This is the shield that protected Mario Dion’s May 13, 2021 report clearing Justin Trudeau in the WE Charity scandal. That clearance is no longer sealed. Stage 2 of Democracy Watch’s case now goes forward at the Federal Court of Appeal. The actual mistakes in that report finally get examined in open court.

You remember the scandal. Summer of 2020. The Trudeau government hands WE Charity a near-billion-dollar sole-source deal to run the Canada Student Service Grant program. WE had deep family connections to the Prime Minister. Sophie Grégoire Trudeau volunteered as an ambassador and hosted a podcast for them. Margaret Trudeau and Alexandre Trudeau had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. Justin Trudeau himself had been a regular at their events for years.

The optics were so bad even Trudeau eventually admitted there was an appearance of conflict and that he should have recused himself. Bill Morneau got dinged. Dion cleared the Prime Minister.

Democracy Watch filed for judicial review in June 2021. They pointed to four specific problems with Dion’s ruling.

First, Dion refused to find a real or potential conflict of interest. He had previously defined private interests to include social and political interests. The grant advanced Sophie’s standing with WE and the family’s political brand. Dion simply ignored his own earlier reasoning.

Second, he claimed the Conflict of Interest Act does not cover apparent conflicts, only real or potential ones. That is not what the statute says. The purpose clauses and the prohibitions in sections 4 and 6 are broader. A Federal Court of Appeal decision from 2009 already confirmed the Act reaches appearances. Dion’s own report noted that recusal is always advisable when an appearance exists. Trudeau had already conceded the point.

Third, Dion would not find that Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers were friends. The Act prohibits furthering the private interests of friends. Craig Kielburger had publicly called Trudeau a friend. Trudeau had described them the same way in a speech. The relationship was not distant. Dion waved it away.

Fourth, he refused to apply the broad prohibition against improperly furthering another person’s private interests. In his earlier SNC-Lavalin report, Dion treated violations of the Prime Minister’s own ethical code as improper. That code specifically bans appearances of conflict. Dion carved the law into pieces to reach the result he wanted.

These are not technicalities. They go to whether the Ethics Commissioner enforced the statute Parliament wrote or rewrote it to protect the Prime Minister.

Then the system did what the system always does. The Attorney General of Canada, not the Ethics Commissioner, defended the ruling in court. The same government whose Cabinet is regulated by the Commissioner gets to defend the Commissioner when he clears those same people. Classic.

July 30, 2026

Canadian conservatives need different leaders, say Liberal media

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

Unlike the Liberals and NDP, whose leaders get a media honeymoon that sometimes lasts for years, Conservative leaders are never given the slightest break by presstitutes paid by the Liberals. (Anyone further to the right than the centrist Conservatives get almost no media attention at all, as Maxime Bernier can attest.) L. Wayne Mathison responds to “helpful” suggestions for how the Conservatives can get rid of their current unpopular-with-the-state-media leader and replace him with someone more “acceptable”:

The pattern is obvious.

Scheer was supposedly too awkward. O’Toole was too inconsistent. Pierre is now too aggressive, too divisive, too nasty. Change the leader and the criticism changes with him. The objective stays the same: keep Conservatives apologizing, retreating and replacing leaders while the Liberals remain the default governing party.

The elite Red Tories never wanted Pierre Poilievre as leader because he threatens the arrangement they are comfortable with. They prefer a Conservative Party that manages Liberal policies a little more efficiently, attends the right receptions and never seriously challenges Ottawa’s permanent political class.

Put on the economics hat and the incentives become clear. The people closest to government often do very well under bigger government. Consultants get contracts. Lobbyists gain influence. Bureaucracies expand. Well-connected corporations receive subsidies and protection. Housing owners watch scarcity drive up their assets. Ordinary workers get higher taxes, weaker wages, expensive housing and declining public services.

Pierre’s real offence is that he speaks directly to the people paying the bill.

Canada has nearly every advantage a country could ask for: energy, minerals, farmland, fresh water, educated people, stable institutions and access to the largest market on Earth. We should be one of the wealthiest and strongest countries in the world. Instead, our political class keeps managing scarcity, blocking investment and teaching Canadians to expect less.

Conservatives should stop chasing approval from commentators and insiders who will never support them. Back Pierre. Defend the principles. Make the economic case clearly.

Prosperity should not be reserved for the people who already know how to work the system.

The best investment the Liberals ever made was buying the loyalty of the relic media with a dollop of cash from the government’s coffers. They already were mostly onboard with the Liberals — those that didn’t think the NDP was too far right — but the financial leash made even the mavericks think twice about substantive criticism of the man who co-signed their pay cheques.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

The changing nature of Canadian patriotism

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:

Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne

The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.

Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.

From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.

And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?

On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.

As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?

Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.

Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.

People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.

The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.

The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.

At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.

Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.

It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.

The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.

Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.

In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.

Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.

Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.

Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.

Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.

If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.

July 25, 2026

Modern careers – the permanent protest class

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

Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.

These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.

There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.

Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.

A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.

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