Quotulatiousness

March 24, 2026

“We will no longer rely on others to defend our Arctic security”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reacts to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unforced confession that Canada has been freeloading on US military protection for generations and yet is only now making the beginnings of moves to address it:

Rough transit routes to Canada’s Arctic from Esquimalt BC and Halifax NS

There is a fascinating if glum confession buried inside Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent announcement, given in the company of Canadian Armed Forces personnel in Yellowknife, of how Canada will spend $35 billion to build and upgrade existing military infrastructure. The major spending announcement was augmented by Carney’s promise to submit four northern road, electricity and port projects to the Major Projects Office for expedited (we hope) approval and completion.

The announcements are interesting, even if the bulk of the military spending was actually just re-announcing stuff Justin Trudeau had announced years ago. Nothing new there, alas. Even so, it was the phrasing of the PM’s remarks that jumped out at me. Striking a familiar tone, Carney said, “We will no longer rely on others to defend our Arctic security or to fuel our economy. We are taking full responsibility for defending our sovereignty.”

I like it! I’m glad we’re doing it.

What the hell were we waiting for? How did we ever get to a place where no longer relying on others to defend our security and fuel our economy became a decisive shift in policy worth highlighting in an announcement?

What was wrong with us?

This is not a column aimed at Carney. I’ve been dismayed and discouraged by a lack of progress on some key files so far, but I will grant that we won’t be able to truly judge this announcement for some time, and that he does at least seem more interested than other recent PMs in getting Canada’s military capability back to where it must be. So, for all the Carney fans out there, you can sheath your swords. I get it. I’ll keep watching and waiting, but my impatience is growing.

But I still think the broader question is still worth asking, even if we agree, for now, to leave Carney himself out of it. Why were we relying on others to defend our own territory? Or fuel our economy? Why were we not taking full responsibility for defending our sovereignty? How did that even happen?

There are some admitted historical factors here, including the fact that Canada was spun up as an independent state out of the British Empire, and obviously counted on the support of that empire for much of our early history. That set a tone, clearly. In more recent generations, there was also the obvious reality that the United States’s desire for continental security was always going to involve a lopsidedly large U.S. commitment, just due to the massive disparity between our populations and economies.

Let’s grant that at the outset. Our history and geography have conditioned us to view domestic defence as a collaborative effort where we are a junior partner even in our own territory — maybe not in a legal sense, but in practical one.

The point here isn’t to lament that Canada never had a fleet as large as the Royal Navy in the 1910s, nor an air force as large as the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s. We can all agree and understand that Canada’s contribution was always going to be more modest and given our massive landmass and air and sea approaches, Canadian defence was always going to be made much simpler with the cooperation of a friendly larger ally or benefactor.

But gosh, we really leaned into the helplessness, didn’t we?

Matt is happy that the PM seems more involved in taking Canadian territorial defence seriously, and there’s no dispute that this is a national concern that has been neglected for … well … decades, generations even. I’ve heard some attribute the withering of Canada’s defence establishment to the “peace dividend” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it actually began in 1968 with the first Trudeau era. We’re not going to be able to rectify six decades of neglect in a couple of years, no matter how many new programs and purchases are announced.

And not to be a Debbie Downer, but remember that the federal government has been addicted to the sugar high of making announcements and getting tongue-bathed by the tame media enough that the same project would get announced and re-announced for sometimes years before anything tangible resulted. The new Arctic defence announcements were, as Matt noted, already stated government policy before Carney entered politics. How many more dips in the PR bath will it take before anything real is implemented?

March 23, 2026

Canada’s NEW Rifle – the CMAR

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

The Armourer’s Bench
Published 22 Mar 2026

The Canadian Armed Forces are set to adopt variants of Colt Canada’s MRR as the Canadian Modular Assault Rifle (CMAR). The announcement stated that more than 65,000 rifles will be procured over the next 5 years to replace the Colt Canada C7 rifles and C8 carbines currently in Canadian service.

Be sure to check out our accompanying article for this video here – https://armourersbench.com/2026/03/22/canada-adopts-new-rifle/

March 22, 2026

Four million books published in North America during 2024

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers the size of the North American book market at most recent count:

Random photo of books stacked in my office about 15 years ago.

I’m often asked by writers about the prospects of a particular book. I try to be encouraging. If it’s a good book, there’s undoubtedly an audience for it. At the same time, I try to be realistic. It’s a crowded market and it’s often difficult even for a good book to find its audience.

If asked to explain just how crowded the market for books is today, I usually say something like, there are about two million books published in North America every year. I’m not sure where I got that figure from. Probably from some research I read five years ago.

Turns out it’s wrong. “The total number of books published in the US in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024 to more than four million books,” announced Publishers Weekly on March 17.

I can’t get over that number. Four million books.

An average reader might get through about 2,000 books in a lifetime. A long-lived super-reader churning through 70 or 80 a year may exceed 5,000. Gladstone’s reading logs suggest that he engaged with more than 20,000 books, but it’s not clear he read them all.

A large independent bookstore might carry between 10,000 and 30,000 books. A suburban chain store, 60,000 to 120,000. The Barnes & flagship at Union Square in Manhattan has hundreds of thousands of books on four massive floors. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, occupying an entire city block—you need a map to get from room to room—has at least a half million books, and by some counts a million. New York’s The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books, new and used, is probably the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer: it has 2.5 million books on incredibly dense shelving. You’d need a Powell’s, a Strand, and a couple of B&N Union Squares to hold four million titles.

Four million books is equivalent in volume to the holdings of a good-sized university library system, or a large public library system—collections built over a century. And these are published in a single year.

In 1939, the year Margaret Atwood was born, The Library of Congress, widely recognized as the largest library in the world, home to a civilization’s worth of books, boasted about six million titles, including pamphlets. It’s now holding about 25 million, and the US alone is on pace to produce that many titles between now and the end of the decade.

Four million books. That’s 11,000 books a day. Four hundred and fifty books an hour.

A year ago, there were “only” 3.15 million books, traditional and self-published, released. So 2025 represents an increase of 32.5 percent. Self-publishing was up just under 39 percent. Traditional publishing about 6.6 percent. Publishers Weekly doesn’t offer much of an explanation for the explosion of new titles. AI has to be a major factor (see this week’s publishing sensation in The New York Times.)

Of course, most of the four million books are not worth your time. Only 642,242 of the titles were released by traditional publishers. A traditional publisher doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests a minimum of vetting. The search for merit among self-published books is easily frustrated.

Bowker, the service that counts the ISBNs (the unique thirteen-digit identifiers attached to each book), does not distinguish among formats. Many of the four million were published only as ebooks. And some books published as print, ebook, and audiobook are triple-counted. There may only be about 2.5 million distinct works in that total.

If one were to take the colouring books, planners, puzzle books, and AI-generated garbage out of the equation, we might be down to 1.5 million meaningfully distinct books. And of all those, maybe 1 to 3 percent, or 20,000 to 50,000, will sell over 1,000 copies. That puts some perspective on the four million.

March 19, 2026

Government creates a problem – yet the solution is always “more government!”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains the vast drawbacks of asking governments to solve problems:

Government bureaucracy is like a snow machine that keeps blasting, then hires more people to shovel the mess it just made.

We’re told it exists to help. To protect. To serve. Nice story. But in practice, it behaves more like a self-preserving organism. It doesn’t solve problems cleanly. It multiplies them, then offers to manage the mess it helped create.

Here’s the part most people miss. Bureaucracies don’t grow because problems get bigger. They grow because complexity gets rewarded. The more tangled the system, the more valuable the people who run it. That’s not a bug. That’s the incentive structure.

William Niskanen called this decades ago. Bureaucrats maximize budgets, not results. Bigger department, bigger influence. If a problem gets solved too efficiently, the machine loses a reason to exist. So problems don’t disappear. They get “managed”.

Then comes the language game.

Confusion gets dressed up as compassion.
A program no one understands becomes “comprehensive”.
A policy that creates dependency becomes “support”.
Failure becomes “underfunding”.

It’s like hiring a mechanic who loosens parts just to bill you for tightening them later.

Now zoom in on Canada. Then zoom in tighter on Manitoba.

We don’t just have bureaucracy. We have an oversized public sector that’s crowding out the very engine that pays for it. In Manitoba especially, government employment makes up a huge slice of the workforce compared to the private sector that actually generates wealth. More administrators, fewer producers.

And here’s the quiet problem. Public sector growth doesn’t face the same discipline as the private sector. If a business bloats, it dies. If a department bloats, it asks for more funding.

So the balance drifts.

More people administering. Fewer people building, investing, risking.
More rules. Less output.
More spending. Slower growth.

It creates a kind of economic inversion. The part of society that redistributes wealth starts to outweigh the part that creates it. That’s not sustainable. It’s like living off the interest of a bank account you’ve stopped contributing to.

Politicians don’t fix this because growth is easy to sell. Cuts are not. No one gets applause for saying, “We’re going to do less”. So the system expands in one direction only.

Forward. Always forward. Never back.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are handed the bill and told it’s the price of caring.

Here’s the hard reframe. Bureaucracy isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it’s rewarded to do. Expand. Protect itself. Justify its existence.

If you want a different outcome, you need different incentives.

Measure outcomes, not spending.
Reward efficiency, not headcount.
Shrink what doesn’t work, no matter how “important” it sounds.

Because if you don’t trim the machine, it doesn’t stay the same size.

It learns to eat.

March 17, 2026

Will Canada Outpace the UK in Surface Fleet Numbers?

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

Warships & Warriors
Published 13 Mar 2026

The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) is facing a critical turning point in 2026. Caught between a massive 20% personnel shortfall and the urgent need to project power globally, Canada is being forced to make difficult decisions, including the early retirement of eight Kingston-class warships. However, despite these severe manning challenges and aging hardware, Canada is quietly executing one of the most ambitious naval modernisation programs in the Western world.

In this video, we break down the complete state of the Royal Canadian Navy’s surface and subsurface fleet in 2026. We explore the twilight years of the Victoria-class submarines, the heavy burden placed on the aging Halifax-class frigates, and the massive success of the new Harry DeWolf-class Arctic and Offshore Patrol Vessels.

Looking to the future, we analyse Canada’s generational leap in naval technology. With the highly advanced River-class Destroyers entering production, boasting AEGIS combat systems and Tomahawk missiles, and a new fleet of conventionally powered submarines on the horizon, the RCN is transforming into a Tier 1 maritime force. But with 15 new destroyers and up to 12 new corvettes planned, is Ottawa actually taking its future maritime defence more seriously than London?
(more…)

March 16, 2026

Preparing for Operation Veritable – First Canadian Army’s biggest battle of WW2

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Patreon, Project ’44 has posted an extensive article on the setup and preparation for Operation Veritable in February 1945, with the First Canadian Army under General Crerar preparing to attack into the Reichswald as part of Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group:

Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges (US First Army); General Harry Crerar (First Canadian Army); Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (21st Army Group); Lieutenant General Omar Bradley (12th Army Group); and Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey (British 2nd Army), 21/08/1944 (Taken by Sgt. John Morris, No. 5 AFPS-AFPU, B9473).

In the early hours of the 8th of February 1945, the combined weight of the First Canadian Army and 21st Army Group’s massed artillery unleashed an immense orchestration of firepower, shattering any semblance of a peaceful morning and pounded German positions across the Reichswald. Massed in unprecedented density, with dump piles exceeding half a million shells, some 1,034 field, medium, heavy, super-heavy, and multi-barrelled rocket launcher platforms opened in concert. In accordance with their detailed fireplans this combined artillery effort was tasked with destroying enemy headquarters; severing lines of communication; disrupting road networks and infrastructure; rendering enemy defensive positions inhospitable; and, plainly, reducing the enemy’s force as much as possible, leaving survivors in a state of “shell happiness”. As the guns opened fire at 0500hrs, they quickly formed part of the largest artillery bombardment undertaken by Commonwealth forces since the battle of El Alamein in 1942.

This impressive symphony of artillery, along with the days of preliminary bombardments by both artillery and heavy bombers that preceded it, marked the very beginning of the month-long “Operation Veritable”. This operation was the 21st Army Group’s northern pincer movement, aimed at permitting a crossing of the river Rhine and, subsequently, a drive into Western Germany by dislodging and rupturing the German position between the rivers Mass and Rhine in the lower Rhineland.

Conceived by Canadian General Harry Crerar (commanding the First Canadian Army), part of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, Veritable was set to be General Crerar’s largest and most complex undertaking of the war – and for that matter, Canada’s too. At its height, the First Canadian Army commanded almost half a million personnel, with the majority of its formations British in origin, and its personnel strewn from Canada, Britain, Poland, and the Netherlands. Though 450,000 personnel would not be involved in Operation Veritable, it would still come to command the entirety of the British XXX Corps and Canadian II Corps.

Veritable would not be the rapid breakthrough many had envisaged it to be, especially not in the style of operations the year prior. Instead, it would evolve into a month-long, multi-operation offensive fought over some of the most arduous terrain in northwestern Europe. Advancing across deep mud, inundated lowlands, and through dense forests and urban centres, against an often-fanatical enemy manning prepared defensive structures, Veritable was quickly turned into a troublesome slog.

As Sergeant Alex Troy of the 5th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery would write:

    they [the Germans] fought really tough because the enemy had always before been fighting in some other poor devil’s country; now he was defending his own land.

The Allied Situation:

By early December 1944, the German force opposing Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group had been dealt a series of important blows, none more recent than its forceful uprooting from the west bank of the river Maas as far south as Maeseyck. In that, the German position was believed to be, notably by Montgomery, strong – but undermined by a lack of equipment, trained troops, and suffering from rampant logistical shortages.

HQ Twelfth Army Group situation map, 6th December 1944. Produced by the Army Group Headquarters, 12 Engineer Section.

During a meeting on the 6th of December, Field Marshal Montgomery directed General Crerar to plan an offensive to the southeast of Nijmegen, and to support this transferred XXX (30) Corps to his command. Over the days that followed, two major operations were conceived. In the south, the British 2nd Army was to clear the triangle between Sittard, Geilenkirchen, and the river Roer as part of Operation Shears; whilst in the north, the First Canadian Army, as part of Operation Veritable, was to advance into the Reichswald, securing the settlements of Xanten, Geldern, and Sonsbeck, before taking charge of the river Rhine’s western bank.

March 15, 2026

Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:

Typical. He blocked without further discussion.

But, he’s wrong.

There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.

Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.

The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.

The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.

This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.

Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.

A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.

The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.

Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.

So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.

March 14, 2026

Quid pro quo – something that is given in return for something else

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper considers what the Parliamentary floor-crossers got in exchange for their loyalty:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout has now become the fourth opposition member to join the Liberals in just the last five months, joining three Conservative MPs.

While there have been more than 100 MP floor-crossings since Canada’s 1867 founding, the circumstances have never looked quite like this. In any prior instance where multiple MPs shifted party loyalties in a short period of time, it was almost always because of a seismic political issue such as First World War conscription or Quebec separatism.

But in this case, all four floor-crossers gave vague reasons for the move, if they even tried to explain it at all. Idlout’s statement, issued by the Liberal Party, explained her switch as endorsing “strong and ambitious government that makes decisions with Nunavut — not only about Nunavut”.

Unmentioned is that the four also saw personal benefits for their defection to the government benches. A cursory summary is below.

Thus far, there are no tangible goodies to d’Entremont’s surprise November floor-crossing. He hasn’t received a position in cabinet, a pay raise or any special titles. What he did seem to secure, however, was his job.

When rumours first began to leak out that the Liberals were actively seeking floor-crossers among the Conservatives, one commonality emerged among the MPs being solicited: They all represented tightly contested ridings that were now polling for the Liberals.

This was particularly true of d’Entremont’s Acadie-Annapolis riding in Nova Scotia. He won it for the Conservatives by just 536 votes in 2025. And given a surge in Liberal popularity across the Maritimes in interim months, it now seemed likely to swap back to the Liberals; which it had done as recently as 2015.

D’Entremont’s former Conservative colleagues would allege quite directly that the defection had been done purely to remain as the MP for Acadie-Annapolis.

After the floor-crossing, Conservative MP Rick Perkins would allege that d’Entremont had told him the weekend prior, “If an election is held now, I will lose my seat. I might as well not run.”

“There is nothing in his floor crossing about principles. It was about keeping his job,” Perkins wrote in a Facebook post.

Ma also represents a tightly contested riding. Markham-Unionville had gone Liberal as recently as 2021, and he won in 2025 with just 50.65 per cent of the vote as compared to 47.05 per cent for his Liberal opponent.

But it only took a few days after the floor-crossing before Ma was conspicuously added to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s delegation headed to the People’s Republic of China and Qatar.

As noted by National Post‘s Chris Nardi at the time, Ma was the only member of the delegation who wasn’t a minister or a parliamentary secretary. His highest applicable rank was that he was vice-chair of the Canada-China Legislative Committee, a group comprising 11 other MPs and senators who didn’t similarly receive a seat on the plane.

March 12, 2026

Carney’s Liberals buy gain another seat in Parliament

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

What couldn’t be obtained at the ballot box can apparently be constructed through non-electoral methods. After the Liberals fell short of a majority in the 2025 federal election, they’ve now gained four more seats through attracting opposition MPs to join their caucus:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Consider several ridings from the last election where Conservatives defeated Liberals by extremely small margins. Terra Nova–The Peninsulas was decided by only a handful of votes. Milton East–Halton Hills South by just a few dozen. Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore by fewer than a hundred. In Markham–Unionville and Edmonton Riverbend the margins were still narrow by federal election standards, measured in the low hundreds.

In ridings with tens of thousands of ballots cast, those margins are not ideological fortresses.
They are statistical coin flips.

Now imagine you are a strategist trying to change the parliamentary math without calling another election. Would you target MPs who defeated your party by twenty thousand votes? Or would you look at ridings where the electorate was already split nearly fifty fifty? Where persuading one individual changes everything!?

That is where the Moneyball logic appears.

Instead of persuading fifty thousand voters, you persuade one MP. The scoreboard shifts instantly. No campaign. No election. No voters trudging through snow to mark an X. Just a quiet change of jersey on the House of Commons floor.

Now consider the MPs who have crossed the floor or whose ridings are currently the focus of speculation. Seats like Edmonton Riverbend held by Matt Jeneroux and Markham–Unionville represented by Michael Ma sit squarely in that category of competitive swing ridings. Even Nunavut, represented by Lori Idlout, illustrates how single seats in geographically unique ridings can dramatically affect parliamentary arithmetic.

Notice the pattern.
Not massive strongholds.
Swing ridings.
Seats where the Liberal candidate already came within striking distance.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

Is this coincidence?
Or strategy?

Because if a riding was decided by one hundred votes, persuading the MP to change parties is dramatically easier than persuading fifty thousand voters to change their minds. The parliamentary math changes instantly.

The voters never get another say.

    Just like Canadians did not get a say when 131,674 votes from Liberal Party members at Mark Carney’s leadership race installed Mark Carney as defacto Prime Minister. He effectively became the Prime Minister of Canada through installation, not election.
    That is 0.33 percent of Canadians.
    Or, put another way, roughly one third of one percent of the country’s population participated in choosing the Liberal leader who then became Prime Minister through the parliamentary system without being elected by the people of the country.
    • 131,674 people chose the leader
    • out of about 41 million Canadians

Of course nobody in Ottawa will describe it this way. Politics prefers softer language. You will hear phrases like cooperation, evolving priorities, responsible leadership, and national unity.

Politics prefers poetry.
Arithmetic prefers patterns.

Individually every floor crossing can be explained. Each one comes with its own “so-called” story, its own “so-called” reasoning, its own “so-called” justification.

But collectively something else begins to emerge.
A seat here.
Another seat there.
Nothing dramatic.
Until one day the standings look different.

Exactly the way Moneyball worked. No blockbuster moves. Just quiet arithmetic accumulating advantage until the outcome changed.

In the past I’ve been comfortable with the Parliamentary tradition that voters elect individuals as their representatives so if that MP leaves the party they were elected for, it doesn’t change the representation of the constituents. Historically, when most MPs were free to vote their conscience except for a minority of “whipped” votes, where they were obligated to vote on party lines, this made sense. I’m becoming less comfortable as this pattern of “recently elected opposition MPs suddenly discovering they’d run for the wrong party” repeats, indicating that it’s not just ordinary politics, but a deliberate strategy on the part of the Liberals.

Some have speculated that a major factor in the latest defection was a recent federal financial benefit to the territory, but it might perhaps have been something more concrete:

Homelessness can’t be solved by just throwing more money at the problem

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to someone explaining their family’s tragic problem of a homeless relative:

The post hits a nerve because it exposes the part of the homelessness debate people prefer not to talk about.

A lot of the public story says homelessness is mainly about housing and compassion. If we build more units and remove stigma, the problem fades. That sounds humane. The trouble is that it ignores what families dealing with severe addiction and psychosis actually face.

Emily Baroz describes the reality many relatives know too well. The person on the street is often not just poor. They are deeply mentally ill, addicted, paranoid, sometimes violent, and frequently refusing help. Families try everything. Housing. Money. Treatment. Support. The illness itself destroys the ability to cooperate. Meanwhile the legal system often blocks intervention until someone gets hurt.

So the public debate becomes strange theatre. Compassion is defined as leaving the person alone. Authority is treated as cruelty.

That brings us closer to home. Manitoba’s NDP government is now moving toward supervised consumption sites. The argument is harm reduction. The idea is that if people are going to use drugs anyway, the state should at least make it safer.

The problem is that the evidence across Canada is far from comforting. Vancouver, Toronto, and other cities expanded harm-reduction sites over the last decade. Yet overdoses, street disorder, and visible addiction kept rising. Recovery rates did not suddenly surge. In many neighbourhoods the result was more normalization of drug use without a clear path back to stability.

If a policy is supposed to reduce harm, the basic question is simple: are fewer people addicted, dying, or trapped in the street?

If the answer is no, the policy deserves scrutiny.

Safe consumption sites may prevent some immediate overdoses. But they also risk locking people into a long-term cycle where the system manages addiction instead of helping people escape it. Families who are begging for treatment beds, detox spaces, psychiatric care, and recovery programs often watch governments invest more energy in enabling use than in ending it.

That’s the tension people feel but rarely say out loud.

A compassionate society does not abandon people to addiction while calling it care. Compassion sometimes means structured treatment, involuntary intervention when someone is clearly incapable of making rational choices, and serious investment in recovery infrastructure.

Otherwise we are simply managing decline.

And families like the one in that post already know it.

Update, 14 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Update, the second: Devon Eriksen had a relevant-to-this-topic aside on a longer post –

One of the most common sources of confusion is “using the wrong word”.

For example, if you have a drug zombie problem, and you call it a “homeless” problem, then you spend a lot of tax money giving houses to drug zombies, who turn them into rat-infested drug dens.

The wrong word implies the wrong understanding.

March 11, 2026

The Supreme Court of Canada in Santa Claus mode (even if they no longer use those robes)

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

In a pretty conclusive 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada seems to have overturned not only the Quebec childcare entitlement at issue in this case, but the notion of citizenship in a much wider sense:

The SCC recently abandoned their traditional red robes for black robes more similar to those of the US Supreme Court. This is a case where the older robes would be more appropriate for other reasons.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its latest stupefying ruling. According to an 8–1 majority in the case of Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Charter requires the Quebec government to extend subsidized daycare benefits to refugee claimants — asylum seekers who have not yet proven the legitimacy of their claim to refugee status. Founded on a prevalent but contentious reading of constitutional equality rights, the court’s reasoning has far-reaching potential to destabilize parts of the nation’s immigration and social welfare systems.

Until last week, Quebec law granted daycare subsidies to certain categories of parents, including Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and those with approved refugee status. When Bijou Cibuabua Kanyinda, the plaintiff in this case, arrived in the province and sought asylum in 2018, she fell into none of those categories. Aided by cause lawyers, and a coterie of social justice interveners (third party interest groups who submit arguments to the court), Kanyinda argued that the exclusion of refugee claimants from this welfare scheme amounted to unconstitutional discrimination.

Remarkably, the majority of the Supreme Court not only agreed with Kanyinda that the Quebec daycare scheme violated Section 15(1) of the Charter — which provides for “the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination” — but bypassed the Quebec legislature by “reading in” a remedy directly into the law. In other words, the court rewrote the statute to immediately grant subsidies to “all parents residing in Quebec who are refugee claimants”.

More troubling than the outcome itself, however, will be the judicial reasoning that rationalized it. Writing for the majority, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis held that the Quebec scheme created a distinction “on the basis of sex”, a proscribed ground of discrimination under Section 15. But rather than fostering a distinction between men and women, Justice Karakatsanis asserted that the scheme discriminated between “men and women refugee claimants” — even though neither group was eligible for benefits at all. Because Quebec’s exclusion of refugee claimants worsened the economic disadvantage of the female claimants, she concluded, it constituted discrimination that violated Section 15.

The court’s reasoning is convoluted, to be sure. Readers may be forgiven for struggling to understand how a ruling that extends benefits to “refugee claimants” can follow from a supposed distinction on the basis of “sex”. In fact, the judgment exposes the incoherence into which the Supreme Court’s equality rights jurisprudence has fallen.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

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

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

March 8, 2026

The comfortable illusions Canadians tell themselves about the criminal justice system

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

L. Wayne Mathison describes how far too many Canadians see crime in Canada and how their pleasant imaginings depart from reality:

Let’s talk about the fairy tale we keep telling ourselves about crime in this country.

If you listen to a certain very loud and very sheltered crowd, you would think our justice system is basically a giant vacuum cleaner wandering the streets accidentally sucking up innocent people who somehow tripped and fell into a robbery charge. Apparently every person behind bars is just a tragic first-timer who made one bad decision on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.

That story collapses the moment you look at the numbers.

Statistics Canada shows something much less romantic. Our prisons are not packed with unlucky amateurs. They are filled largely with repeat performers. If someone is standing in court for a property crime, there is about an 80 percent chance they have already been convicted of doing the exact same thing before. For a lot of these offenders, theft is not a moment of desperation. It is a routine. Court is not a moral reckoning. It is paperwork.

Breaking into garages, lifting bikes, stripping catalytic converters. That is not chaos. It is a job description. Getting caught is just an occupational hazard.

Meanwhile the public is told to take a deep breath, retreat into their “inner Stoic,” and accept that having your property stolen is just part of modern urban weather. File the police report. Replace the lock. Pretend the system is working. It takes real mental gymnastics to watch the same small group of chronic offenders rack up dozens of charges while experts patiently explain that we simply need more empathy.

Look at what happens when these people are actually caught. Most walk out with bail conditions that amount to a polite note asking them to please behave. Unsurprisingly, a huge chunk of new convictions in Canada are administration-of-justice offences. That means breaching bail, skipping court, ignoring probation. They break the rules almost immediately. The revolving door barely slows down.

We do not need some grand philosophical rewrite of the social contract to fix this. We just need to stop pretending the public cannot see what is happening. A very small group of highly active repeat offenders causes a huge share of the damage in our communities.

Until the justice system stops treating career criminals like lost lambs who simply wandered off the path, the rest of us will keep paying the bill.

March 7, 2026

“Canadians were told there were 215 graves”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Rustad expresses his anger at the federal government’s apparent connivance in concealing information from Canadians in the not-really-an-investigation into the alleged mass graves at a former Residential School in British Columbia:

Canadians were told there were 215 graves.

The country lowered the national flag for months. Churches were burned. International headlines declared the discovery of mass graves at a former residential school. The federal government responded by allocating $12.1 million in taxpayer funding specifically to support investigation and exhumation work to verify those claims.

Now we learn that no remains have been exhumed.

At the same time, the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has released the activity reports tied to that funding, but every meaningful detail has been redacted. The reports describing what work was carried out, what investigations were conducted, and how public money was spent have been blacked out and labelled confidential.

That is unacceptable.

When the federal government spends millions of your taxpayer dollars to investigate a claim that shook the entire country, Canadians have a right to transparency. They have a right to know what work was performed, what evidence was found, and how their money was used.

This is not about denying history. It is not about attacking Indigenous communities. It is about basic public accountability.

If the government funded an investigation, the public deserves to see the results of that investigation.

Let me be clear: The records should be released in full. The spending should be explained clearly.

Canadians deserve the truth about what was done with their money. And if that money was not spent for the purpose it was granted for, then the public deserves accountability, including repayment of those funds.

March 6, 2026

The “security clearance issue” demonstrated by, of all people, Mark Carney

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

Melanie in Saskatchewan explains why the constant Liberal talking point that refusing to get a particular security clearance “proved” that Pierre Poilievre was next-door to a traitor will probably not be raised any more:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Open Letter to Canada’s Security Clearance Scolds: Carney Just Proved Pierre Right!

To every Liberal and NDP partisan who has spent the last year yelling “security clearance” like it is a magic spell that turns criticism into treason, congratulations. Mark Carney just demonstrated Pierre Poilievre’s point for him, on camera, in real time.

The moment came on March 3, 2026, during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Indo-Pacific trip. After meetings in India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Carney held a press availability with Canadian media while travelling through the region. The topic journalists wanted clarified was not subtle. They asked about foreign interference linked to India and the 2023 assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia, the allegation that detonated Canada’s diplomatic crisis with India.

The question came from Dylan Robertson of The Canadian Press during the media scrum. He asked directly whether Carney believed India continued to engage in foreign interference or transnational repression targeting Canadians.

Carney swerved. He was asked again. And again.

Eventually, after the careful circling that seasoned politicians deploy when a straight answer would be inconvenient, he landed on the tell. Not the kind you need a polygraph for. The kind you publish in a civics textbook.

Here is what he said, exactly:

    There will not be consequences for those officials … There are aspects of those briefings that I can’t share in public, and I’m not going to betray them. I will tell you that there is progress on these issues.

Read that again, slowly, with a spoon handy in case you choke on the irony. Because this is the whole debate in one neat little ribbon.

Pierre Poilievre’s argument, from the start, has been that the particular classified briefings being pushed would place him inside a legal box. Once inside it, the rules governing those briefings restrict what he can say publicly and how he can use the information while doing his job as Leader of the Opposition. Global News reported Poilievre’s office saying officials told them the briefing structure could leave him legally prevented from speaking publicly about certain information except in narrow ways, which they argued would “render him unable to effectively use any relevant information he received”.

Now watch what just happened.

Carney, the man with the clearance and the briefings, is asked direct questions about one of the most explosive foreign-interference files in modern Canadian politics.

And his answer, translated into plain English, is simple: I cannot share what I know.

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