July 1, 2026
Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith
It is possible — in fact, essential — to discover and disseminate the facts about Indian Residential Schools. Repeating the unproven (and to many, deeply discredited) narrative and denouncing those seeking the facts as “denialists” has nothing to do with scholarship but it’s very much in line with gatekeeping:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Let’s be honest about what is happening in this video.
This is not academic debate. It is a character attack dressed up as scholarship.
Dr. Travis Hay’s presentation at Mount Royal University, uploaded by Frances Widdowson under the title “Bad Faith: Residential School Denialism and the Academy”, is deeply disappointing. I expected a serious lecture. I expected evidence, argument, and a careful dismantling of claims he believes are wrong.
Instead, what we get is a bad faith lecture.
So yes, Bad Faith is a good title. Just not for the reason Hay thinks.
The real bad faith is pretending to defend scholarship while avoiding the hard work of open debate.
Hay spends much of the lecture drawing a line between “good faith” and “bad faith” criticism. But his standard for good faith appears to be simple: you may disagree only inside the boundaries of the approved framework. You can quibble over details. You can adjust the margins. You can offer polite corrections.
But if you challenge the premise itself, suddenly you are no longer mistaken. You are morally defective. You are a “denialist”, a “grievance merchant”, or some broken person who must be pushed outside respectable academic life.
That is not scholarship. That is gatekeeping.
None of this requires minimizing the real harm done by residential schools. It simply means historical claims should be open to examination. Evidence should be tested. Terms should be defined. Numbers should be scrutinized. Arguments should be answered.
Instead, Hay leans heavily on moral outrage, personal denunciation, and guilt by association. Rather than carefully taking apart Widdowson’s arguments, he drags in old controversies involving other people, uses emotional anecdotes, and builds a mood where the audience is being told what to feel before they are allowed to think.
The most revealing part is the conclusion. Hay says people like Widdowson do not belong in the academy. In other words, the answer to uncomfortable academic work is not better evidence, better reasoning, or open debate. It is expulsion.
That should bother everyone.
A university that cannot tolerate dissent is not protecting knowledge. It is protecting doctrine.
If Widdowson is wrong, prove it. Debate her. Bring the evidence. Take her claims apart in public. That is what serious scholars are supposed to do.
But when the response is censorship, exclusion, and personal insult, it starts to look less like confidence and more like fear.
I came away from viewing this lecture disappointed. Not because Hay disagrees with Widdowson. Disagreement is the whole point of academic life. I was disappointed because the lecture showed so little faith in the public’s ability to hear competing arguments and judge the evidence for themselves.
This lecture does not prove that Widdowson’s arguments are wrong. It proves that parts of the academy no longer know how to handle a serious challenge without reaching for moral panic and professional exile.
Comments Off on Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith
QotD: An imaginary obituary for a nation
I present the following thought exercise to you: if some overeager, industrious journalist were to write an obituary for Canada, how would it read?
Today, the world marked the passing of Canada, younger than most, older than some. Canada, on her best days was a beacon in the world for freedom, justice, inclusion, poutine and hockey. Canada gave the world the telephone, the lightbulb, the pacemaker, insulin and was the first nation to successfully complete a double lung transplant.
For the better part of her history, Canada was a trusted ally, a safe harbour for those fleeing persecution, a voice for the voiceless and an example for other nations. People from around the world flocked to her shores to bring the best of where they came from together with others contribute to building a nation that was unlike any other in the world.
But the last few years of her life did seem to be defined by a nearly psychopathic desire to get in her own way. Anointed by God with a natural bounty that, if mined and managed responsibly could have made her one the fairest and wealthiest nations in the history of the world. And yet that natural bounty remained largely locked away.
Canadians had built one of the fairest and most equal societies on the planet, and yet they seemed hell-bent on focussing on the minutia and sometimes the mirages that appeared to divide them.
The 21st century was poised to be the Canadian century, but through much fault of their own, Canadians squandered that opportunity, and today we bid farewell to a nation that had greatness within its grasp, but decided instead to become smaller, to become lesser, to marginalize itself and by extension, made the world a less wonderful place.
Canada: for many on the outside looking in, gone far too soon. Ironically, the assessment of the Canadian legacy by so many who, through the happy accident of birthright, or another privileged pathway to citizenship is markedly different: she overstayed her welcome.
Ben Mulroney, “Canada’s chance to find itself again”, National Post, 2025-11-10.
Comments Off on QotD: An imaginary obituary for a nation
June 30, 2026
A World Cup “first” – no new stadiums built just for WC matches
The 2026 World Cup broke new ground in several different ways, not least of which was that none of the venues for matches were built just for the tournament:
The 2026 World Cup is one for the books, a tournament of firsts. The first to be hosted by three different countries—United States, Mexico, and Canada. The first to feature 48 teams. The first time a single country, Mexico, has hosted the World Cup three times. The first time one stadium, the Azteca, opens a World Cup for the third time. The first time the final will stage a halftime show. And the first time since USA 1994 that no stadiums were built exclusively for the occasion. And while many stories are worth covering with the World Cup, let’s talk about stadiums.
World Cups, like many major competitions, face backlash for their heavy government funding, because once the fans leave, the citizens are stuck footing the bill. For most of these international tournaments, the model is first to build stadiums for the sole purpose of hosting, and then to figure out what to do with them afterward—that’s where most of the funding goes. South Africa built Cape Town Stadium from scratch in 2010, and it barely survives today as a rugby and concert venue, rebranded DHL Stadium. Brazil, the 2014 host, spent more than $3 billion on 12 stadiums, with its priciest venue, the Mané Garrincha in Brasília, a city with no major club, ending up as a parking lot for buses. While 2026 seems to have broken the pattern, at least for now, 2030 and 2034 already have preparations underway and are, in fact, building stadiums. But this time, not one venue was built for the occasion. Every stadium already existed: NFL stadiums in the United States, soccer grounds in Mexico, multi-use venues in Canada. It almost seems like the responsible version.
Almost, because even when you don’t build a stadium, hosting still sends a bill. Take Monterrey, where the stadium is privately owned and was renovated by FEMSA. Public money went elsewhere. Governor Samuel García’s administration poured billions of pesos into the city’s metro — 25 billion pesos — for three new lines to carry fans from the airport to the stadium, but it won’t be finished until 2027, a year after the fans have gone home. And in the weeks before kickoff, the government raised walls along the avenues tourists would travel, in order to hide the poor neighborhoods. Regios called them the walls of shame. It is the whole logic of the tournament in miniature: cover what you would rather the world not see. This isn’t new; hiding the poor before the international crowds arrive is an old Olympic habit.
Most of the stadiums today carry a corporate name, and because of that, most assume that the money behind them was private, too, but it wasn’t. Most US venues for the World Cup are publicly owned, all three Mexican stadiums are private, and both Canadian venues are public. Of the 30 stadiums that normally host NFL teams, only three were built entirely with private money. The rest took public subsidies, even as the name on the façade says otherwise. This wasn’t always the model.
Through much of the last century, private money built and ran arenas, and public funding for them was almost unthinkable. The shift is fairly recent. As historian Frank Andre Guridy tells it in his book The Stadium, grounds that once carried the names of places and local stories became corporate billboards. This modern wave is usually traced to 1985, when Sacramento developer Gregg Lukenbill sold the naming rights to the Kings’ new home to the Atlantic Richfield Company, and ARCO Arena was born. Naming rights themselves go back further, to Rich Stadium in Buffalo in 1973, but it was only after ARCO that the practice became the rule. Today, nearly every arena in the country answers to a sponsor.
Comments Off on A World Cup “first” – no new stadiums built just for WC matches
June 29, 2026
“The state of 24 Sussex Dr. [is] a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction”
For the vast majority of my readers, the address “24 Sussex Drive” might as well be “99 Sunset Strip” or “12 Grimmault Place”, but it’s a real place with some minor importance to Canadians: it’s the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. It’s also, famously, a dump (rather like the country has been allowed to become). It finally reached the point of structural decrepitude that the current and previous PMs never bothered to move in. Now, as related in the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, it’s supposed to be renovated.
The official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, 24 Sussex Drive, as seen from the Ottawa River. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (La résidence officielle du Premier ministre du Canada 24, promenade Sussex vu de la rivière des Outaouais).
Photo by sookie via Wikimedia Commons.
Hallelujah.
We’re responding to the announcement on Friday that the Canadian government will finally deal with the mess that is 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada (at least in theory). Successive Canadian prime ministers have refused to spend the money necessary to keep the building, which dates to the 1860s, in a state of good repair. PM after PM has been too terrified of the optics of spending taxpayer money on their own mansion.
Rather than solve this problem like a grown-up country by pushing control of a reasonable maintenance budget to a non-political body — something like the National Capital Commission, come to think of it — we instead simply sat around and allowed the building to decay to the point where it was no longer habitable. Stephen Harper and his family gritted their way through their time there. Justin Trudeau and his family never bothered moving in, settling instead at Rideau Cottage, on the grounds of the Governor General’s residence.
Mark Carney, God bless him, has decided that enough is enough and it’s time to bite the bullet and just fix the damn thing.
We repeat: hallelujah.
We are actually fairly agnostic on one of the central debates here, namely whether the mansion should have been rehabilitated or simply knocked down and replaced. You can make the argument fairly either way. In making his announcement on Friday, Carney indicated that he had chosen rehabilitation because Canadians need to do more to stand up for their heritage and their history, and that includes 24 Sussex.
That struck us as an astute reading of where public sentiment is, and a way to buy at least partial political cover for what will remain controversial.
We were less impressed by the rest of what he announced. Instead of simply hiring a reputable firm to come up with a new design for the renovated building, getting some quotes and then proceeding directly, the government will instead dramatically overcomplicate things, as Canadian governments tend to do, by commissioning some kind of design competition to be overseen by eminent Canadian designers and architects. We wouldn’t be shocked if David Johnston shows up somehow. Louise Arbour is, of course, recently spoken for, but we’ll see if any other retired Supreme Court justices end up giving their design skills a whirl.
Renovated building this way is dumb. But we think the next part of what was announced was weirder, and certainly riskier for the government. To offset the costs, this will become something the government fundraises for.
Okay. We guess?
Hey, The Line has no problem with fundraising. (Ahem. See below.) But we aren’t a national government? The devil will be in the details here. If this is structured in a way that limits donations to Canadian citizens and residents, caps donations at a set dollar value, and includes strong transparency requirements, we guess it’s fine. Canadians have been feeling patriotic of late, especially boomers and Liberals. If the prime minister has figured out a way to offload the financing of this project onto them, we’ll find a way to live with that.
Gosh, there’s risk here. Will foreign donations be permitted? Corporations? If corporations are allowed, must they be Canadian? Will Canadian subsidiaries of foreign corporations be able to contribute? What about foreign governments? Will the future dining room of the official residence of the prime minister of Canada be brought to you by the People’s Republic of China? Will the front foyer be a gift of the people of Qatar?
We’ll see. Those details are still pending. We suspect, or at least hope, that the government was smart enough to foresee the optics of having the prime minister’s official residence sponsored by Brookfield Asset Management, to pick one example out of thin air.
So we don’t love the process, but we love that we’re at least doing this. The state of 24 Sussex Dr. has not only been a long-standing national embarrassment, it’s been a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction. Taking care of the damn house, or fixing it or replacing it, is a really easy thing by the standards of the problems the federal government is often faced with. But both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau curled up into tiny little balls and melted into jelly instead of just doing their jobs and taking care of a national infrastructure asset. That they did this simply to avoid the optics of spending a little money on themselves and future prime ministers is easily understood through the lens of politics, but no less pathetic for it.
For the record, I have no problem with the government spending the money to maintain or even upgrade the PM’s official residence, but it’s been a political liability for so long that fixing the place up will likely be far more expensive than any amount of deferred maintenance might have cost if we’d just committed to keeping the place in good condition. I’ve always been puzzled why it isn’t in the purview of the National Capital Commision anyway, so that it wouldn’t become a cheap political point-scoring opportunity every time it springs a leak or needs a window pane replaced.
The Line editors also declare they’re on Team Art Deco against the anti-human monsters of Brutalist architecture and point out that there actually is a uniquely Canadian architectural style:
Look, if the decline of 24 Sussex had become symbolic of Canadian vices like dysfunction and cheapness, there was an opportunity here to signal symbolic virtues like decisiveness and seriousness by just — announcing the government was going to fix a known problem using an architect that Carney had personally approved. There is absolutely no reason to use this building as an opportunity to create a travelling roadshow of the country’s architectural “greatness” by holding a design competition that will produce 15 different varieties of the AGO Crystal or the Edmonton Public Tank/Library. To be blunt, this country’s talent pool in architecture is as shallow as every other cultural industry we can name. It can be summed up thusly; we produce the odd star in the field who moves elsewhere. What gets left behind is derivative government-funded schlock that allows us to keep up appearances and maintain our national illusions. Our ability to create world class art of any kind at present is right up there with our ability to build a pipeline, scale a company, or manage an efficient regulatory process. Our decline is a universal problem.
“Chateau Laurier, 1927 with the new extenstion” by Ross Dunn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
.
Meanwhile, Canada already has a unique and rich architectural style that we should be using on all federal buildings intended to convey authority and heritage — it goes by many names, ranging from Railway Gothic, to neo-Chateau. It can be seen in beloved buildings ranging from the University of Toronto’s Hart House, to the aforementioned railway hotels that spread across the land. It’s turn of the century gothic revival meets French Chateaux and Scottish Kirk; romantic, a little ornate, and always grounded in the landscape and climate, and using the local materials. In other words, we already have a uniquely Canadian aesthetic language. We just stopped designing buildings this way when our cultural institutions decided that our history was a problem rather than the prima materia of our complicated national identity. We’ve been stuck with glass buildings and cheap concrete Soviet suicide boxes ever since.
And to be clear, we don’t think every Canadian building needs to look like it was built in 1919. Form ought to meet function. For buildings that are trying to convey modern values, or to align with environments sporting an updated aesthetic, there’s nothing wrong with a modern style. Museums and art galleries, for example, offer fine opportunities to push artistic envelopes. But when we’re considering buildings intended to convey government power, institutional authority, and the establishment of democratic legitimacy through continuation and heritage, that’s when we ought to be leaning back into our shared historic design languages. That’s the time to convey gravitas, solidity, and confidence; stone, ornate woodwork, traditional aspects and classical symmetry.
An updated version of Railway style, working in tandem with the existing structure of 24 Sussex, is the very obvious answer to the problem of the Prime Minister’s residence. If we can incorporate First Nations motifs or building materials, all the better.
But this country’s current architectural culture is profoundly derivative and fundamentally uncomfortable with the very institutional heritage this building needs to convey. Restrained and old fashioned is not the kind of thing that wins international acclaim. So instead, what we’re going to get is the generic, omnipresent, and pathologically insecure style better defined as “Modern Canadian Try Hard”. Think updated farmhouse, black window frames and white walls à la Studio McGee. Wavy glass Eurotrash that makes no sense for the climate of Canada and offers no gesture toward the symbolic value of the building.
Comments Off on “The state of 24 Sussex Dr. [is] a painfully obvious symbol of broader Canadian dysfunction”
June 26, 2026
No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies one of the biggest reasons the Canadian economy is falling ever further behind other industrialized nations:
AI-generated image from L. Wayne Mathison
Canada does not have a talent shortage.
It has a capital formation shortage.
In Q1 2026, Canada managed one growth-stage VC deal. One. Worth $1M.
That is lemonade-stand money in a global tech race.
The U.S. pulled in $267.2B in VC investment. Capital is not confused. It goes where risk is rewarded, scale is possible, and success is not treated like a moral offence.
Carney and the Liberals keep talking about “building the economy” while presiding over a country where founders raise seed money here, then scale somewhere else.
That is the real brain drain.
Not just doctors. Not just engineers. Builders. Founders. Investors. People who can turn ideas into payrolls.
They look at Canada and see taxes, red tape, weak productivity, political favouritism, and a government more interested in managing decline than getting out of the way.
Carney was sold as the adult in the room. OK. Then explain this: why is Canada producing press releases while the Americans are producing companies?
Because capital can smell fear.
And right now, Canada smells like a country that punishes ambition, subsidizes failure, and calls it fairness.
Comments Off on No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian
June 24, 2026
This is why the media didn’t want to share the murderer’s manifesto
In short, it does not support the narrative. Ezra Levant shares the details of the manifesto left behind by an Alberta man after he killed a police officer in Côte-des-Neiges, a Jewish section of Montreal the other day:
READ HIS MANIFESTO: The Montreal murderer was a Jew-hating Communist censor
The murderer in Montreal has been named: Seth Hatfield, from Alberta. He murdered a policeman in a shooting spree in a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal.
Soon afterwards, government journalists at the CBC and elsewhere started describing a manifesto that he had left behind. But none of them published the actual document — they just quoted the odd phrase from it, and called him an “incel”. That’s a term for someone who was “involuntarily celibate”, or someone who didn’t do well with women. The usual suspects were doing the media circuit claiming that Hatfield was a “right wing” extremist.
But if that was true, why was the manifesto being shown only to selected, government-friendly journalists? Why were the rest of us blocked from seeing it for ourselves?
Well, that just changed. Rebel News has acquired a copy of the full, 104-page manifesto. You can read it for yourself right here: https://rebelnews.com/manifesto_reveals_alleged_montreal_gunman_s_antisemitic_far_left_and_incel_ideology
It’s true that the murderer had extreme ideas about women. But that was only a small part of his world view. In most of the rest of his rambling remarks, he was indistinguishable from left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Avi Lewis, or half the Liberal cabinet.
He praised Communism. He called for the abolition of private property. He railed against the Jews, and Zionism. And — like Mark Carney himself — he demanded the censorship of the Internet.
Read the manifesto of a crazed, left-wing extremist.
And never forget: the mainstream media lies to you about everything important.
If you trust Grok, here’s a summary of the manifesto:
Comments Off on This is why the media didn’t want to share the murderer’s manifesto
June 22, 2026
ADATS – Air Defense Anti-Tank System; Canada’s high tech cold warrior
Polyus
Published 19 Jun 2026While designed mainly in Switzerland, over the years its identity became distinctly Canadian. It was produced in Toronto by Oerlikon Aerospace Canada and was operated by Canadian forces from 1988 to 2011. This is the story of the Air Defense Anti-Tank System, or ADATS
ADATS was a very interesting and highly advanced air defense system designed to fight a cold war that never materialized. It was operated for a little over 20 years, so it was by no means a flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, Canada has since given up its short ranged air defense capability and all of the human expertise that was built up over the years. Hopefully in the future a new system can be acquired and Canada can again expand its sovereign air defense capabilities.
This video was made without the use of Artificial Intelligence (No AI). Long live people power!
0:00 Introduction
0:29 European Background
2:09 Technical Details
4:05 Engagement Sequence
5:38 Comparison to other Systems
6:06 Canadian Adoption
7:48 American Testing
8:32 Thai Adoption
8:57 Advanced Variants
10:23 ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads
Comments Off on ADATS – Air Defense Anti-Tank System; Canada’s high tech cold warrior
June 21, 2026
Gad Saad discovers that Canada has an “exit tax” … and it’s insane
The other day, I shared a post from Gad Saad that alerted me to something I’d never heard of before: a steep tax the federal and provincial governments levy when a Canadian emigrates to another country:
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Vesper provides more information:
The Great Scam
After what @GadSaad posted yesterday, something I had no idea existed … an “Exit Tax” I did some digging. This is what I found.
Canada’s departure tax is one of the biggest scam taxes on the books. Apparently when you leave the country, the government treats you as if you sold every investment you own, even if you sold nothing.
You get hit with a tax bill on money you never touched, never withdrew, never spent. They literally invented a fake sale to justify taking your money.
Here’s what makes it even worse. The stocks they’re taxing? Those are foreign companies. Apple, Samsung, whatever you hold, those grew because of what those businesses did in their own countries, their own markets, with their own workers.
Canada had absolutely nothing to do with it. Zero. But they still want a cut just because you happened to live here while you owned them. They did nothing and still want to be paid like they did.
And before 1996 this didn’t even exist the way it does now. Chrétien’s government expanded it that year and buried it in section 128.1(4)(b) of the Income Tax Act like they hoped nobody would notice. Italy doesn’t do this. Portugal doesn’t. Belgium, Switzerland, the UK, none of them pull this shit.
You paid income tax every year. You paid sales tax. Property tax. You held up your end of the deal the whole damn time. And when you decide to go live somewhere else, they hit you with a bill for money that was never real to begin with.
Canada under any Liberal is a Scam!
And followed up with:
FYI- Just to make clear why I posted that image instead of Clause 17 it was meant to make an additional point, that I’m not sure Gad was informed about. The system is one-directional and rigged.
That image explains that The exit tax locks in your gains the day you leave at whatever the market says that day. You have no choice, no timing, no flexibility.
If your portfolio drops 30% the week after you leave, too bad. Canada already took their cut on the higher number. The gain was real to them the moment you packed your bags. The loss that came after is entirely your problem.
If you want to see the stocks section it’s this
You can read it for yourself:
Update: After some online mockery, Gad Saad explains that he’s not just upset on his own behalf.
People are astoundingly stupid. My comments about the departure tax is not that I should be treated differently from anyone else. I am making a point about the extent to which taxes are confiscatory. As I have previously explained, there was a time when ZERO cents of income tax were levied in Canada and the US. Then bit by bit, that “temporary” measure, to be applied to only a few, and at a very low percentage rate of your income, becomes a mammoth monster that takes more than 50% of your earnings. It can occur because there are no repercussions if governments do not balance their budgets (other than voting them out). Hence, what starts off as a small temporary tax on a few becomes an existential theft that is orders of magnitude larger than the so-called illegal extortion tax of the Mafia. It can exist only because the great majority of people BENEFIT from this form of parasitic taxation. But someone has to pay for everyone else, and when you are that someone, you are not necessarily pleased to be funding the ultimate Ponzi scheme. I’m making a moral, philosophical, and ethical argument. It’s not just about me.
Comments Off on Gad Saad discovers that Canada has an “exit tax” … and it’s insane
June 20, 2026
Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”
Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:
Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.
The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.
If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.
The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.
As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:
– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”
– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).
– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.
– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.
– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin
– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.
– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.
– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American
Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism
While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement
It impacts you too
Comments Off on Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”
June 19, 2026
Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!
The Liberal Party, having engineered themselves a majority in the House of Commons, are on a speed-run to the kind of dystopian police state we used to read about in science fiction novels:
Millions of Canadians are beginning to see the similarities between communist regimes and the direction of current government policy.
The pattern is always the same.
It begins with noble promises: safety, equality, compassion, protection, the greater good.
It ends with censorship, coercion, surveillance, prisons, ruined lives, and a police state.
Always.
It comes wrapped in slogans, experts, committees, emergency powers, censorship, enemies of the people, and the belief that the state has the right to crush the individual for the greater good.
Consider…
C-2 – Strong Borders Act
C-22 – Lawful Access Act
C-34 – Safe Social Media Act
C-36 – Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act
C-9 – Combatting Hate Act
C-25 – Strong and Free Elections Act
S-209 – Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography ActAll seven are live in the 45th Parliament right now. None has received royal assent yet.
Consider that good, law-abiding Canadians are being gradually and systematically disarmed.
This is not a warning about some distant future.
In 2022 the federal government invoked emergency powers it did not have, froze the bank accounts of citizens over their political views, and banned Canadians from funding a protest. Two levels of court have since ruled it unconstitutional — a violation of the very Charter rights every one of these bills now circles.
That was the trial run. It needed an emergency as the excuse.
The seven bills above are the permanent version — the same reach, made routine — so that next time, no emergency need be declared at all.
A free country is not lost in a single day. It is legislated away in pieces, each one introduced with a reassuring name and defended as necessary, while good people keep assuring themselves it could never happen here.
It already did. The only question is whether enough Canadians notice before it becomes permanent.
Read every bill. Watch every one of them. Because this is the stage where it can still be stopped … and perhaps our last chance.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is trying to get Canadians to pay attention to what just one of these bills will do:
Bill C-34 will affect every Canadian. Age verification. AI regulation. A new Digital Safety Commission. Most Canadians have never heard of it. Here’s what it will do.
Michael Geist posts a Substack Note about bill C-22:
Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, has been reported back from committee and is headed toward passage. There are some amendments, but many concerns remain. The updated bill with changes is at
There are two changes to metadata retention. First, the maximum retention period the government can impose drops from 1 year to 6 months. Second, it can now mandate a category of metadata only if satisfied the category and all its elements are essential to investigations.
The committee rewrote the definition of systemic vulnerability. A “substantial risk” becomes a “credible risk, based on recognized international technical standards”. But it also added a carve-out: a flaw exposing only a target’s data is not “systemic”.
Added a new section on decryption that says nothing in the Act can be read to compel a provider to decrypt user-encrypted data, unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the key. Borrowed from US law, but doesn’t fit the same way.
Compliance with ministerial orders is now expressly subject to the systemic vulnerability exception. That addresses a contradiction in the original text, where the duty to comply appeared to be unconditional.
The original bill set no maximum duration on these ministerial orders. This now changes to a two-year cap without the open-ended review-and-extend mechanism.
The amendments will rightly leave many still concerned. Companies considering exiting Canada due to Bill C-22 are unlikely to conclude that it fully addresses their issues. Yet the government is likely to push it through the House today.
Comments Off on Nobody voted for this kind of dystopian nightmare, Mr. Carney!
June 18, 2026
Unexpected increase in legal gun ownership in Canada
The federal government has been doing everything it can to curtail Canadians’ access to firearms since 2015, most recently imposing bans on literally thousands of different gun models and almost completely restricting purchase, sale, or transfer of legal handguns. Under these circumstances, you’d expect that interest in legal gun ownership would be on a pretty steep decline. But that’s emphatically not the case:
Here is something the government does not talk about.
Canada’s handgun freeze took effect on October 21, 2022. Since that date, very few people who have exemptions have been able to buy, sell, gift, or inherit a handgun. The market for new restricted handguns is effectively closed.
So you might expect the number of Canadians holding a Restricted PAL (the licence required to own handguns and other restricted firearms) to be flat or declining. Why bother completing the restricted component of the Canadian Firearm Safety Course if you can’t use it to buy a handgun?
The data says otherwise.
According to the RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, the number of RPAL holders has grown every year since the freeze:
2022: 716,348
2023: 752,002 (up 5.0%)
2024: 775,266 (up 3.1%)
2025: 794,768 (up 2.5%)That is a net gain of 78,420 restricted firearm licence holders in three years, a 10.9% increase, all during a period when the primary reason most people get the restricted designation on their PAL (to buy a handgun) was legislated away.
Canadians are still taking the safety course, submitting to the background checks, and getting licensed. The freeze did not stop the demand for restricted licences. It just stopped the legal market from serving the people who hold them.
Source: RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Comments Off on Unexpected increase in legal gun ownership in Canada
Ross 1912 Cadet: Straight Pull .22 Rimfire Training Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jan 2026The Ross model 1912 Cadet rifle was introduced in 1912 as a diminutive rimfire companion to the 1905 and 1910 military Ross rifles. It was a single-shot straight pull rifle, with a somewhat unusual locking bolt system. Somewhere between 13,000 and 17,000 appear to have been made, for civilian commercial sale, Cadet Corps, and Militia use. Production ended in March 1917, when the Ross company collapsed. Today these are quite rare rifles.
(more…)
Comments Off on Ross 1912 Cadet: Straight Pull .22 Rimfire Training Rifle
June 17, 2026
Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite
L. Wayne Mathison shows how cultural boundaries changed radically over relatively short periods of time in what is now Manitoba, rather discrediting the fairy tale we tell our children about pre-contact First Nations living in peace and harmony:
Canada’s institutional obsession with land acknowledgements and historical guilt has officially jumped the shark.
Every university lecture, corporate meeting, school event, and government memo now seems to begin with the same rehearsed confession about whose land we are supposedly standing on. It has become a civic ritual, complete with liturgy, original sin, and mandatory public piety.
Strip away the administrative sermonizing and the whole thing rests on a very shaky version of history.
We are expected to pretend pre-contact North America was a peaceful, static, eco-friendly paradise where distinct peoples lived in permanent harmony until Europeans arrived and ruined everything.
That is not history. That is mythology.
Worse, it is patronizing. It strips Indigenous peoples of their full humanity by pretending they were somehow immune to the normal forces that shaped every other society on earth: ambition, conflict, trade, migration, alliance, conquest, revenge, and expansion.
The actual history of this continent was not a postcard. It was dynamic, complex, and often brutal.
The Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars reshaped huge parts of what is now Southern Ontario. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Erie peoples were devastated, displaced, or absorbed through war and political domination.
On the plains, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Iron Confederacy, and others fought long struggles over territory, trade, horses, resources, and survival. Peoples moved. Borders shifted. Alliances formed and collapsed. Some groups conquered. Some retreated. Some disappeared into larger political orders.
History did not begin when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.
This land was already a theatre of power, movement, conflict, diplomacy, and displacement long before Europeans arrived.
The modern Canadian narrative treats European colonisation as a unique cosmic crime, as if conquest and territorial displacement were invented in 1492. They were not. Europeans arrived as a technologically dominant global power and did what powerful groups had done across human history, including on this continent.
That does not make the suffering harmless. It does not erase broken treaties, residential schools, forced relocations, or government abuse. Those things happened, and they matter.
But a serious country cannot build its future on a childish version of the past.
Every habitable part of the world has been taken, lost, fought over, inherited, traded, defended, and taken again. The people Europeans encountered were not frozen in moral perfection. They were human beings living inside history, not outside it.
The guilt industry does not repair the past. It often paralyzes the present.
Canada cannot move forward by treating itself as a permanent crime scene or by dividing citizens into inherited moral categories of “settler” and “Indigenous”.
We can tell the truth about cruelty, conquest, broken promises, and injustice without pretending history had a correct stopping point right before European ships appeared.
A mature country does not need ritual guilt.
It needs honesty, equal citizenship, legal clarity, and the courage to build a future instead of endlessly prosecuting the past.
Comments Off on Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite
June 14, 2026
“99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people”
John Konrad explains why, despite agreeing that the vast majority of Canadians are “decent, law-abiding people”, he wants to see the US/Canadian border closed:
Yes. 99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people. Friendly neighbors. Good trading partners. Nobody serious disputes that.
I DO NOT CARE
CLOSE THE BORDER
Public safety is not built around the 99%.
We do not have laws, police, and prisons because most people are good. We have them because a small minority can inflict enormous harm on everyone else.
The argument for border enforcement is not that Canadians are bad people. It is that even a small failure rate matters when the consequences are catastrophic.
Free and open borders are a wonderful thing provided both countries are willing and able to identify, remove, and deter the small percentage of dangerous actors who exploit them.
If one side stops filtering effectively, the burden shifts to the other.
And yes, that creates unfairness. When enforcement breaks down, restrictions fall hardest on the innocent majority: families, commuters, truckers, tourists, and businesses. No one should pretend otherwise.
But there is also unfairness in asking another country to absorb preventable risks because difficult enforcement has become politically inconvenient.
A secure border is not an insult to a neighboring nation. It is a hedge against failure.
That is their sovereign choice.
But the United States also has a sovereign responsibility: to reduce risks to its own citizens.
If a partner cannot or will not reliably filter threats, then verification at the border becomes the default. Not because the majority deserves punishment, but because governments exist to manage tail risk, not assume it away.
Open borders require mutual trust.
Trust requires performance.
But the real threat is not the 1% of evil bad actors. The real threat is the 1% of far left lunatics in your government who are facilitating and funding the 1% of criminals.
YOU. The ninety nine percent are the only ones who can demand election reform. YOU are the only check left on their power.
So I absolutely endorse punishing YOU as incentive to demand change now.
A full and total stop of VISAs, temporary and permanent, will cause real stress to your economy, it will make international and domestic travel more difficult, will unfairly hurt Canadians studying in USA, it will hurt many Americans too.
But it’s worth temporary extreme pain is a small price to pay for long term stability.
You are a frog slowly boiling in water. We have asked you to jump out of them pot but you refuse. You just croak “elbows up”
So our choice as Americans is to watch you die slowly or remove you from the pot and chop a leg off so you don’t jump back in.
I believe the latter is the only option. And I believe it’s the lore humane option knowing that the leg will grow back just fine.
Comments Off on “99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people”
