Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2025

The legacy media are still fanatically pushing the “Tories in disarray” line

It’s good to see that sometimes you get good value for your money. In this case, it’s the massive financial subsidies the federal government pay out to most of the Canadian legacy media outlets, so that the media ignores stories that the Liberals look bad but push the living bejesus out of anything that makes the Conservatives look bad … even if they have to distort the story almost out of recognition. Brian Lilley has the details:

I told you this would happen, the legacy media is trying to make this whole floor crossing thing into a PC versus Reform Party thing. As I broke down all of the background information that I could muster and tried to present it in a straightforward way, I said this would be a narrative of the MSM.

The reality is, the frustrations exist for a number of reasons but Pierre being too conservative is not the main issue here, it’s that they didn’t win in April. It all goes back to that and how different people interpret that loss and the leader’s response to the loss.

If you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth your time just to understand some of the nuance that you won’t find from other media.

There is no party divide …

The idea that there is still a schism on the modern Conservative Party between old PC voters or members and those that came from the Canadian Alliance or Reform side is not only false, those pushing it are showing their ignorance. The parties merged more than 20 years ago, they governed as the Conservatives for 10 years, anyone that left over this supposed divide left years ago, but the media can’t give this up and so they play into it with Chris d’Entremont on the weekend.

That was followed by Adam Chambers, the Conservative MP for Simcoe North in Ontario who pushed back against the idea that middle of the road Conservatives like him aren’t welcome in Pierre Poilievre’s party.

A hat tip to CBC Watcher on X who grabs so many of these clips and posts them.

Well done by Adam, not that it will help. This is a narrative some in the media are deciding to run with.

They will ignore that d’Entremont first ran under Andrew Scheer, hardly a Red Tory and in fact a so-con and d’Entremont was comfortable with that. Maybe because as a local French CBC outfit pointed out, d’Entremont is also on the pro-life side, the one the Liberals normally hate.

Oh … and another point on CBC’s reporting here. Remember the claim that a staffer was shoved out of the way … this is at the bottom of the CBC article that made the claim.

The Toronto Star will not be outdone …

This is a headline that I can’t believe the Toronto Star actually ran.

I’m pretty sure that columnist Althia Raj is old enough to remember all the way back to the morning of December 16, 2024. I know that was a REALLLLLLY long time ago, like, literally decades (please read that with a Valley girl upspeak).

If you don’t know that date, you will know what happened, because that is the day that Chrystia Freeland stabbed Justin Trudeau in the front, not the back. On the day that she was supposed to deliver the federal government’s fall economic statement, she issued a scathing resignation letter instead.

This of course also came after months of Liberal MPs pushing Trudeau to resign. A letter had even circulated among caucus members demanding he stepped down.

Liberal MPs couldn’t make Trudeau leave, Freeland’s resignation couldn’t make Trudeau leave, the 20 point lead the Conservatives then enjoyed couldn’t make Trudeau leave – it was Trump that did it.

All of that was wilder, had more drama than last week, but sure, tell people we haven’t seen this in decades. The column penned by Raj doesn’t mention Trudeau, it doesn’t mention Freeland, but it does want you to believe we haven’t seen this in like, FOREVER!

November 7, 2025

Crossing the floor in Parliament

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

It’s not an everyday thing, but I saw someone mention on social media that there had been over 300 floor-crossings since Confederation. The latest Member of Parliament to switch parties … to literally walk across the floor in Parliament to join Carney’s Liberal party is Nova Scotia’s Chris d’Entremont:

The speculation in Ottawa about floor crossers is getting silly, some of the names being pushed don’t make any sense. Which makes me think that this is really an attempt by the Liberals to try and destabilize the Conservatives.

Sorry, that would be “destablise” in Mark Carney’s new English but more on that shortly.

We have seen Liberals push name after name including Chris d’Entremont who did cross, but others who have said they have no interest in crossing. That was the case for Dominique Vien the Conservative MP from Quebec’s south shore who had to post a video after jerks like me published her name following weeks of speculation.

If you don’t speak French, let me summarize, or sumarise in Carney English. She says that she’s heard the rumours that she would be leaving the Conservative caucus to sit as a Liberal or an independent, but that’s not true. She states clearly that she is and will remain a Conservative and that she doesn’t like Mark Carney’s budget.

Meanwhile, Joël Godin, the MP for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier a riding northwest of Quebec City, who has been named as a possible floor crosser declined to answer questions entering caucus on Wednesday. Does that mean he’s ready to cross or not just putting up with the BS?

Conservative insiders tell me that he won’t be changing teams anytime soon.

The rumour mill is insane, with Liberals pushing the idea that all kinds of Conservatives are looking to jump ship. I’ve had several Liberals tell me that Michael Chong has been looking to cross the floor, an idea that is so ridiculous that I didn’t even call Chong to ask him because anyone floating that doesn’t know the man or conservative politics.

After I mentioned that on 580 CFRA in Ottawa, Chong called me to assure me that he wasn’t crossing to the Liberals. Michael, I never doubted you.

It’s doubtful that other names Liberals are pushing will come to fruition.

What is clear is that Carney and the Liberals are reaching out to Conservative MPs and making them offers to switch parties. Are they making illegal offers? I’d really like to know what has been put forward.

Is a “comfy landing” being offered for those that will cross? It wouldn’t be the first time that kind of thing has been offered.

As to the particular motivations for d’Entremont decamping to the Liberal benches, discussions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter indicate that he just barely got elected this time around, that he’d been fired by Pierre Poilievre as Deputy Speaker, and he decided he had a better chance of getting back into Parliament as a Liberal in the next election. Quinn Patrick reports that the Liberals had been trying to get d’Entremont to join them for quite some time:

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the Liberals had been courting former Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont behind the scenes for five years before he ultimately crossed the aisle.

“We’ve been trying to recruit him for a long time,” Joly told reporters in French on Parliament Hill on Wednesday. “Finally, he saw the light.”

D’Entremont had served as a Conservative MP for six years, after first being elected in the 2019 election.

As several people pointed out, that conveniently meant he’s qualified for the platinum-plated MP pension plan … but I’m sure that’s not why he switched parties.

Liberal MP Kody Blois, who also represents a riding in Nova Scotia, confirmed that he and d’Entremont had been speaking “for a long time about the ways in which we can collaborate.”

“It’s great to see Mr. d’Entremont join. If there’s other members of Parliament feeling the same way, again, I think we’re always welcome to those conversations,” said Blois.

While Blois didn’t explicitly say he had been attempting to enlist d’Entremont, he said the Liberals are a big-tent party with room to accept more “moderate” conservatives.

When asked if the Carney government was actively trying to recruit more MPs, Blois said that “wouldn’t be a conversation I’m going to have right here in front of the media.”

The former Conservative MP met with Prime Minister Mark Carney at a post-budget media conference on Wednesday, saying he didn’t believe his values as a “red Tory” were being “represented.”

“I didn’t find I was represented there … my ideals of an easterner, of a red Tory and quite honestly of trying to find ways to find solutions and help the community rather than trying to oppose everything that’s happening,” said d’Entremont.

He also alluded to the possibility of other Conservative MPs “in the same boat” but stopped short of naming anyone specific, saying he would let them share their stories “if the time comes.”

However, he has been the only one to cross the aisle thus far.

Conservatives and their supporters have accused d’Entremont of betraying his constituents and his values in pursuit of his own ambitions.

November 1, 2025

MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness

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

In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.

Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.

Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.

In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.

Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.

[…]

You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.

The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.

Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)

For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.

And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.

October 27, 2025

“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Daniel Jupp considers the recent schism in the Church of England, which has left the original church shorn of the vast majority of Anglican worshippers across the globe:

“Canterbury Cathedral aerial image” by John D Fielding is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Today, though, the English Church is broken. The Anglican Communion, which encompassed all the places across the world touched by English exploration, discovery, trade and power, where English Christian missionaries often led the way, has witnessed a devastating schism. At the start of this month Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. As is tradition, the appointment was approved by the Prime Minister and the King, but the nomination came from the Church.

Whether Anglican Christians worldwide approved doesn’t seem to have been considered. Based on multiple past fissures between the part of the Church active in the United Kingdom and the (much larger) Anglican communities globally which had each time been papered over, it may be that the hierarchy in England assumed that the same would happen again.

If so, they were wrong.

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (also known as Gafcon) represent the Anglican faith in Africa. Their response was to declare publicly that they would no longer send delegates to Church meetings in the United Kingdom, no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals or a seat of authority to which they deferred, and no longer consider themselves in the same communion as the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England within England. Perhaps even more tellingly, they asserted that they were the true Anglican communion, more loyal to the instructions of the Bible and Anglican interpretation of those than priests in England. There’s a subtle but powerful distinction there – they were saying not that they had broken away from an Anglican vision of Biblical instruction and Christian identity but that the Church in England had done so.

African Anglicans now assert that they are the true Anglicans, and that the organisation within the UK is not. And in terms of the number of people who follow their message, they are right to assert this.

In losing the African churches and the global, more conservative branch of Anglicanism, the Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet.

Imagine a company that lost 80 per cent of its customers. Or a political party that lost 80 per cent of its voters. Or a nation state that lost 80 per cent of its territory. These would in each case be recognised as unmitigated disasters.

Now imagine this following a previous disaster, which was the end of Justin Welby’s period as Archbishop over a scandal based on not being firm enough and honest enough about paedophile cases in the clergy. One would think the Church might be looking for a non-controversial appointment intended to restore moral trust immediately and defuse criticism.

They did not do this. Knowing the much more conservative and traditionalist stance held by the majority of Anglicans, they chose not to listen to those people, and did something it knew to be passionately opposed by them.

There is an intense irony here that gets to the heart of the self-inflicted problems of the Church of England today. Sarah Mullally has been very clear on the kind of Church she believes in – she’s a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and activism, she has strongly backed asylum and migration, she is a self-declared feminist, and she is both politically and it seems religiously progressive. As Bishop of London, she boasted about representing a diverse and multicultural city, and put her experience in handling diversity as one of the key qualifications and evidence of positive experience she could bring to being the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This was an intensely reality-averse selling-point. London’s slightly lower trend on the relentless decline of Christian faith and attendance compared with the UK as a whole is based not on Mullally’s competence and persuasion. It is based on traditionalist, conservative-minded members of the African Anglican communion in London being more likely to go into a church.

And these people hate woke attitudes and politics.

Update, 28 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 26, 2025

QotD: The rightward political shift of American secular Jews

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift of American Jews towards conservatism is going to gut the Left, which has historically relied on secularized Jews to supply a much larger share of its leadership and backing donations than their single-digit-percentage representation in the general population would suggest.

I emphasize “secularized” because those are the Jews attracted to non-religious social reform movements. Because of the Ashkenazi genetic advantage in average IQ, they’re disproportionately likely to end up running those movements.

(Idiots, being idiots, think this is evidence of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Nope — you’re just comparatively stupid, and correspondingly bad at competing for leadership positions.)

All this is fine, until the Left’s totalitarianizing ideology takes its inevitable anti-Semitic turn. Oops …

That’s how you got what we’re now seeing, which is a shift in the Left’s leadership towards ethno-racial groups with average IQs down in the 80s. Yes, leadership competition is going to select for the right tail of the distribution, but it’s both thinner and shorter.

Expect to see more stupidity, violence, and short-termism from the new New Left. They’ll probably lose their historically impressive skills at institutional capture and run more riots.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-25.

October 24, 2025

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s Thatcher?

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

In UnHerd, Christopher Harding profiles the new Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, the first female PM who was elected to office on the 21st:

Sanae Takaichi, new Prime Minister of Japan, 21 October, 2025
Photo by the Cabinet Public Affairs Office via Wikimedia Commons.

As a teenager, Sanae Takaichi no doubt riled her parents now and again with her love of motorbikes and heavy metal. Today, poised to become Japan’s first female prime minister at the age of 64, she is polarising a nation. Some credit “Japan’s Iron Lady” with the steely resolve required to tackle the country’s domestic problems and stand up to China. Others lament the apparent fact that to succeed as a woman in Japanese politics you have to adopt the worst instincts of the men, from policies that prop up the patriarchy — men only on the imperial throne, compulsory shared surnames for married couples — to a nativist ultranationalism.

While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.

First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.

One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.

Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.

Update, 26 October:

October 23, 2025

Alberta considers rule changes to get rid of the “Longest Ballot” pranksters

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

The last couple of elections Pierre Poilievre has fought attracted the attention of a group of activists who claim their shenanigans are directed at effecting changes in our electoral system, by flooding the field with frivolous candidates to somehow change how we elect our members of parliament. It’s odd that these serial efforts were directed at the leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, who has no power to change the electoral system rather than, say, the Prime Minister or his cabinet ministers who, theoretically, do:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the last general election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

On Monday, Alberta Conservative House Leader Joseph Schow mentioned to reporters that the province’s government has legislation in the works to protect the Alberta electoral system from the shenanigans of the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC). That’s the protest group that has been flooding some federal election ballots with spurious candidates — most recently in the federal riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, where Elections Canada had to desperately improvise an all-new write-in system after the LBC persuaded more than 200 people to contest an August by-election.

Kieran Szuchewycz, one of the whimsical conspirators behind the committee, was the person who successfully (and without hired legal counsel) persuaded an Alberta Queen’s Bench judge in 2017 to eliminate statutory election-deposit requirements as unconstitutional. Justice Avril Inglis accepted that the purpose of deposits — which had already been made unconditionally refundable — was to deter frivolous candidates, and that this was desirable and rational.

But she concluded that “it makes little sense to suggest that the deposit requirement achieves any filter other than for those that cannot part with $1,000 for the duration of the election.” Deposits, which had been part of Canadian elections since before Confederation, had suddenly failed the Oakes test. Inglis’s ruling immediately led to an intentional explosion in openly frivolous federal candidacies, engineered by the very same gifted amateur who had talked her into it.

With deposits proclaimed unconstitutional, the only remaining defences against the Longest Ballot Committee’s DDoS attacks on democracy were the requirements for candidates to gather a hundred signatures of constituency residents on their nomination forms and to hire an official agent. The LBC skates around those by recruiting nominators who are willing to endorse anybody, using the same hundred signatures for many candidates, and by providing the same official agent, often somebody named Szuchewycz, to multiple candidates.

These days Mr. Szuchewycz’s brother Tomas is the public face of the LBC: earlier this month he appeared before the House of Commons procedure committee, which has dedicated a few meetings to the subject of LBC tomfoolery. (Kieran, the original smooth talker who got rid of election deposits, is currently listed as “on leave” from the board of electoral-reform group Fair Vote Canada.) There was a heated but unenlightening contretemps between Szuchewycz and Conservative MP Michael Cooper over whether the LBC had used unlawful techniques in their signature-harvesting efforts.

Szuchewycz explained the goals of the LBC ballot-fouling. The group’s supporters and leaders are obviously garden-variety election-reform nerds, but they now focus on the need for taking election design away from the House of Commons and delegating it to an “independent, non-partisan” body. Election reformers have an absolutely terrible track record of advancing their ideas when they’re put to direct referendum tests, and they were hilariously betrayed by Justin Trudeau in the Commons itself, so it is natural that they would seek a side door to the reforms they want. Even if that side door itself has an anti-democratic rule-by-expert character, which it absolutely does.

Update: Added missing URL to the main story.

The Liberal-funded legacy media all chorus that the Conservatives are collapsing

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley contrasts what the legacy media are all pushing with the actual conversation among Conservatives:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre Poilievre stood before his caucus Wednesday morning and was contrite. The Conservative leader has caused himself and his party headaches since his comments about Justin Trudeau and the RCMP on the Northern Perspective podcast last week.

Will it be enough?

Time will tell but his Conservative MPs who are upset will have forgiven him long before the media will. The stories about Conservative MPs or supporters being upset have not abated and hours before Poilievre did his mea culpa, Radio-Canada, the French wing of CBC had a story with MPs sniping at Poilievre.

Of course, none of them were on the record.

Later in the day, the rumour mill started that at least one Conservative MP, most likely a Quebec MP, would cross the floor by the end of the day. I’ll tell you from experience that when rumours start on Parliament Hill, they can take on a life of their own.

Will someone cross the floor?

Perhaps, and I’ve been given names of the potential floor crossers by Liberals, but none of them have done it so far.

We wait.

It’s all part of crafting a larger narrative…

If you only consumed legacy media, you might think the Conservative Party was falling apart, that the Conservatives were falling in the polls and that fundraising had dried up. None of that is true no matter how often they tell you it is while the facts tell a different story.

Were Poilievre’s comments helpful with swing voters? Absolutely not, and while he’s not focussed on them yet, he will need to be one day so he needs to be more careful.

As I’ve stated though, Poilievre was right on the RCMP dropping the ball on SNC-Lavalin and someone should have been charged with obstruction of justice in that case.

But none of this means the Conservatives are falling apart at the seams.

Will you get people grumbling, absolutely. Will some of them turn to the media as anonymous sources, considering many turned to me months ago, sure, it’s going to happen.

I also have my own anonymous sources telling me there is no one in caucus organizing against Poilievre. Speaking to veterans of the Scheer and O’Toole palace coups, they say this is a very different feel.

People are tired, they are tired of losing, but they aren’t looking to replace Poilievre. That’s not just because there is no one waiting in the wings, they genuinely want to give him a second chance.

Given the latest Abacus poll, I’d say he’s doing okay. That poll would show a minority government if an election were held today, one that could go Liberal or Conservative.

October 22, 2025

The Anti-Coynist Manifesto

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

In a guest post at Without Diminishment, Michael Bonner takes a blowtorch to the boomer hippies and particularly to Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. But first, the obnoxious boomers:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.

In their own minds, they invented rebellion; they stopped a war; and they discovered sex. The latter phenomenon, they still believe, was quite unknown in former ages. So were drug-taking, vulgarity, and poor hygiene. These, as it was believed, were the means of “finding oneself”, and there was no more important task in life. Automobiles were likewise a singular obsession, and the Good Life meant not only driving but also eating, attending films, and copulating in cars.

They were an unusually forthright lot, who were apparently well educated, but who nevertheless espoused many absurd and contradictory notions. Their parents, who had gone to war to fight Nazis, were themselves branded as fascists by their own children. They professed to revolt against money and materialism; and yet, when they came of age, these were their primary interests. They were the generation that attended Woodstock in defiance of a flu pandemic, and were later the most assiduous followers of Covid-19 restrictions.

At the frightening name of Woodstock, it will be obvious who I mean. The Boomers were born to the men and women who had endured the privations of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and everything in between. It is the Boomers who prove the adage whereby good times make weak men and weak men make hard times. They disliked the ease and prosperity into which they were born, and sought to erode them. The 20th-century fear of Soviet subversion or nuclear annihilation was therefore misplaced. For where the Soviets failed, the Boomers triumphed, leaving our culture and our politics in ruins. They are still at it, as the gravitational field of their huge demographic mass continues to distort our politics. Worst of all, the Boomers’ peculiar vision of personal freedom, norm-busting, and individualism at any cost now passes for conservatism.

And on to Mr. Coyne himself (full disclosure: I’ve met Mr. Coyne a few times at early Toronto blogger gatherings and he seemed quite a sensible chap 20 years ago):

Does this Boomer conservatism have any luminaries or pundits? In Canada, it has one and he towers over his acolytes and opponents alike as a learned giant among intellectual pygmies. Or rather, that is how Andrew Coyne undoubtedly imagines himself. So great a spokesman of the Boomer conservative mentality is Coyne that the entire movement could be named after him: Andrew Coyne-ism.

Who has not heard of Andrew Coyne? He is now a columnist with The Globe and Mail and a member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National. He wrote for the National Post and once edited its editorial and comment section, but resigned in 2015 during the federal election. The cause was a dispute with executives over the rejection of a column composed for election day, in which Coyne failed to endorse the Conservatives. Coyne described the dispute as an unwelcome intervention that threatened his editorial independence, stating on Twitter that he could not allow the precedent to stand and needed to protect his reputation as a columnist.

That incident is a microcosm of the problem. One may fairly complain, as Coyne did, that the Harper Tories failed to please every member of their coalition equally, though such a thing is rarely possible. But the rest of Coyne’s complaints concerned a “bullying, sneering culture” of “the low brow and the lower brow”. The imperfection of policy merely annoyed him, but he hated the Conservatives’ tone. They were not sufficiently respectful, they traded in insults and did not agree that “learning and science are to be valued, not derided”, apparently. In contrast, “a politics of substantive differences, civilly expressed” was “the formula that just elected Justin Trudeau”.

Trudeau: a paragon of civility? Surely some other Trudeau is meant, not the opposition MP who called the Minister of the Environment a “piece of shit“. Not the man who, at a “ladies’ night” campaign event, was asked which country he most admired and said it was China’s “basic dictatorship“. Not the man who announced that the excitement of a political campaign amounted to “pizza, sex, and all sorts of fun things“. Not the man who mused about such subjects as “making Quebec a country” if Canada were to become too conservative and the need to put Quebeckers in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda” — whatever that means. Not the man who once halted an interview with a French-Canadian journalist in order to demonstrate the right way to fall down a flight of stairs. I pass over the more lurid stories of groping a reporter’s buttocks, wearing blackface, and singing the “Banana Boat” song.

Alas, it is the same Trudeau. Nevertheless, Andrew Coyne-ism can excuse all such behaviour along with the decade of sanctimonious bullying and decline that followed it. For none of it is as bad as the wishes and worldview of the mostly rural, western, and blue-collar Conservative base. Such people are too angry and too vulgar for their own good. Including them within the benefits of Confederation must be rigorously circumscribed, and allowing them to shape public policy cannot be allowed at all.

October 21, 2025

Everyone benefits from Germany’s political “firewall” except the people that created it

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

Checking in with eugyppius on the situation in Germany, where the centre-right parties apparently feel they have no enemies to the left, as they maintain the “firewall” against the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and the beneficiaries are … the left and the AfD:

The brings me to the crazy and ridiculous firewall against the AfD – the unending Antifa-enforced political tabu upon achieving anything with AfD votes at the state or federal level. AfD support is held to be contaminating, regardless of whatever it is the AfD happen to be supporting. It can turn even the most ordinary routine legislation into dark evil malicious fascism.

The firewall against the AfD splits the right and so it is a great gift to the left. For example, it’s the only reason the SPD has a say in the federal government after their disastrous showing in the traffic light coalition. It’s the only reason the left is still a force in East Germany outside Brandenburg at all. Should we get new elections, the firewall will probably bring the Greens into government too. If it didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it, that is how well the firewall is working out for them.

The AfD also benefits enormously from the firewall, even though it’s not of their making. The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD‘s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.

The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD are evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified [become an end in itself].

In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leadership had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD are stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems and just govern pragmatically with whatever majorities are at hand.

Let us survey the damage: The firewall has helped the AfD supplant the CDU as the standard right-of-centre party across the entire East. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt, the Evil Hitler Fascists are within striking distance of outright majorities. Ballooning AfD popularity is fuelled by the failures of Merz’s federal government, where the firewall has locked the Union into a doomed coalition with the radicalised and hostile Social Democrats. The SPD have so far obstructed all major federal initiatives, probably for the purpose of hurting the CDU still further and driving them into the arms of the AfD. It is a strategy the left first tried during the federal election campaign, and one they have so far refused to abandon.

Various preeminent Union personalities, eager to stop the destruction of their party, have demanded a change in course. These firewall-rethinkers include former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber – the very man who played a leading role in devising the firewall strategy in the first place. Shortly after Stern published Tauber’s mild and very careful dissent, a series of CDU politicians from East Germany lined up to say that they, too, would desperately like to see a new approach to the AfD. As I type this, CDU leadership have withdrawn for a highly secret meeting to discuss this dilemma and how they will deal with the AfD in the future.

Alas, endification is a powerful force. You can’t just turn it off. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose political instincts rival those of most earthworms, has used the days and hours ahead of this meeting to sing the praises of the firewall. In response to a journalist’s question last Tuesday, Merz intoned absurdly and for no reason at all that “We are the firewall!” And yesterday, at some political event in Sauerland, he ruled out cooperation with the AfD in any form – “at least not under me as party leader of the CDU“. Merz further claimed that “there is no common ground between the CDU and the AfD” and complained that AfD opposition to the European Union, NATO and the European Monetary Union means that the party “is against everything that has made the Federal Republic of Germany great and strong over the past eight decades”.

At this stage, I suspect a lot of German voters would like to respond to Merz’s “not under me as party leader of the CDU” by doing the meme:

October 14, 2025

The Thatcher Centennial

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Monday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada, Columbus Day in the United States and — at least for some — the Margaret Thatcher Centennial in Britain:

Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983. She was in office from May 1979 to November 1990.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

One hundred years ago – October 13th 1925 – Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, an English market town in the East Midlands. She was raised in the flat above her father’s grocery shop. That’s to say, she came from the same class as the ladies out on the streets of Epping and elsewhere protesting the rape of their children and their demographic dispossession in one of the oldest nation-states on earth, and despised by Starmer et al for not getting with the death-by-diversity programme.

Young Margaret grew up to become a research chemist, a barrister, and finally a politician called Mrs Thatcher — always “Mrs Thatcher”: I cannot claim to have given her any other specific advice but I did suggest she should not accept her alleged upgrade to “Baroness Thatcher”, as if one of the rare consequential members of the political class was of no greater rank than such wretched figures as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. The only guy who got any mileage out of it was CNN’s Larry King, who took to introducing her as “Margaret The Lady Thatcher”, like Sammy The Bull Gravano. She achieved greatness as a missus, and should have remained so, like Mr Gladstone rather than Mr Gravano.

Mrs Thatcher shaped events as opposed just to stringing along behind them. There have been nine prime ministers since, but, like a guest on my Saturday music show, I can’t name them, can you? Trimmers and opportunists, charlatans and at least one traitor (Johnson). Her present successor has momentarily thrilled the pseudo-Tory press by being marginally less disastrous in her conference speech than she was expected to be, so weird kinky mummy fetishists like the Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley are now drooling excitedly if dementedly that “Mummy is back“. The Conservative Woman is rightly contemptuous. Mrs Badenoch seems a pleasant enough lady after a fashion, but a third-of-a-century ago, when I last lived in London, certain types of women would put their business cards in red telephone boxes offering, ah, specialised services to middle-aged men whereby one could be fitted with an oversized nappy and put in a giant pram to throw your toys out of, after which Nanny would have to discipline you. It does not seem to me a useful political framing.

It does, however, testify to the long shadow of Mrs Thatcher. At the Tory conference, she was much invoked — for the same reason pre-Trump Republicans used to cite Reagan: he was the last good time before Bush/Dole/more Bush/McCain/Romney … So it goes with Maggie, the last good time before Wossname/Whoozis/Whatever/the “Heir to Blair”/Fat Blair/the Hindu Hedge-Funder … It is forty-six years since Mrs T arrived in Downing Street. She quite liked “Winston”, as she was wont to refer to him (although whether to his face remains unclear), but she would have found it odd had the 1986 Conservative conference banged on about him incessantly. That is not an encouraging sign, either for the party or for the country.

Mrs Thatcher’s success bred a lot of resentment, not least among the resentful twerps of her own party, who eventually rose up and toppled her — over her attitude to Europe, of course. Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, the “radical” “poet” Seething Wells, decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for “in the absence of her loco parent”. After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher’s various crimes, he leaned into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: “Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes”.

Carol was a jolly good sport about it, as always, and bought him a pint. And it has to be said that this terrible indictment loses a lot of its force when you replace the word Thatcher — or “Vatcha!”, as the tribunes of the masses liked to snarl it, with much saliva being projected down the length of the bar — with the rather less snarl-worthy formulation “your mum”.

October 12, 2025

Restricting activism from the bench

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

As we’ve seen far too many times in Canadian courts, when judges become politically active, they can produce far worse situations than the politicians who cynics might say are specialists in that discipline. British judges, however, are still well ahead of their Canadian counterparts:

Until judges are replaced by robots, we will have to accept the reality of activist judges. Even the most august patriarch of the bench cannot wholly escape his innate human biases. And so perhaps there was something in Robert Jenrick’s speech at this week’s Conservative Party Conference, in which he announced that, if elected, the Tories would empower the Lord Chancellor to appoint judges and more carefully scrutinise their political activities.

Those who have supported the ideological capture of our major institutions were understandably furious. The New Statesman claimed that Jenrick had “declared war on the judiciary”. But then, the New Statesman is an activist publication which can make no serious claim to impartiality or sound journalistic standards. (Those in any doubt about its mendacity should take the time to read about its shameful treatment of Roger Scruton.)

The problem of an activist judiciary is currently preoccupying the White House, given that a number of federal judges have attempted to block executive policies or have issued nationwide injunctions. Trump himself was convicted on thirty-four felony counts by a judge who had made small political donations to Democratic-aligned causes. It seems clear that given these circumstances he ought to have recused himself. The entire case, of course, was an example of the law being twisted for politically partisan ends. (The best overview is by the senior legal analyst for CNN, Elie Honig, which can be read here.) Little wonder that Trump now appears to be seeking revenge through the courts.

In the UK, there have been a number of revelations of judges tied to political causes whose claim to impartiality seems shaky at best. During his speech, Jenrick spoke of those judges who have been associated with pro-immigration campaign groups and have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country”. Many commentators have observed a generalised bias toward asylum applications, sometimes to an absurd extent. Who could possibly forget the Albanian criminal whose deportation was halted by an immigration tribunal on the grounds that his ten-year-old son did not like foreign chicken nuggets?

Leaving such outliers aside, most of us will have noticed patently ideological remarks occasionally uttered by judges during sentencing. In the Lucy Connolly case, the judge explicitly expressed his support for the creed of DEI before sentencing her to 31 months in prison for an offensive and hastily deleted post on social media. “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive”, he said. It couldn’t be much clearer than that.

That lawfare has become a major weapon in the settling of political disputes should trouble us all. Judges are not accountable to the electorate, and so any suggestion that they are exercising power for their own political ends is bound to be interpreted as a threat to democracy. Inevitably, Jenrick’s criticism of activist judges, and his call for them to be removed, has led to some commentators assuming that he would prefer judges who simply acted according to the government’s bidding. That way lies tyranny.

October 9, 2025

Enoch Powell: The Father of Brexit?

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

The Rest Is History
Published 6 Oct 2025

Who was Enoch Powell, the deeply controversial British conservative politician? Why is he the father of Brexit, and possibly even Reform? And, how did he come to make his inflammatory “Rivers of Blood speech”, in 1968?

00:00 Intro
00:23 Hive
01:46 Introducing Enoch Powell
07:41 A very peculiar childhood
09:19 The least clubbable man in Cambridge
13:30 War years
14:48 An imperial dream thwarted
17:02 An eccentric MP
23:26 The anti-American
24:53 Immigration in post-war Britain
31:09 Smethwick 1964: campaign, slogan, shock result
33:34 Uber
34:14 Mid-60s Britain
35:59 Powell pivots to immigration
41:44 English identity in Powell’s mind (“united people in an island home”)
44:12 Politics & ambition: differentiating from Heath
45:03 The role of US race riots in Powell’s evolving opinions
46:24 Kenyan Asians crisis; Labour’s response
49:47 Race Relations Bill setup: Powell prepares the speech
50:59 The “Rivers of Blood” speech
56:07 Immediate fallout: sacking, friends’ reactions
57:42 Public opinion divides
1:00:04 His legacy
1:04:02 Was Powell racist?
1:08:12 Long-term legacy: why politicians avoided the topic

Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Enoch Powell — one of the most incendiary and contentious figures in all of British political history — and his enduring shadow today.
(more…)

September 20, 2025

Feds move to neuter the “notwithstanding clause” to frustrate Alberta

To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when it was forced down our throats in 1982, on the basis that if Pierre Trudeau thought it was a good idea then it must be the opposite. All these years later, although I’m still not a huge fan, I support the provinces who now need to combat Mark Carney’s minority Liberal government’s attempt to use the Supreme Court to limit or eliminate the provinces’ use of the notwithstanding clause:

You might be hearing a lot about the notwithstanding clause these days and wondering what is going on. The fact is, the Carney government is trying to change the constitution via a Supreme Court case on Bill 21 – a heinous bill in my opinion – but not an excuse to scrap or weaken the notwithstanding clause.

We’ve been here before with this debate before and I’m still of the same position, leave the clause alone.

It was in 2018 that Ontario Premier Doug Ford was looking to use the notwithstanding clause to shrink the size of Toronto city council. He should never have had to do this, but a lower court ruled that Ford’s actions were unconstitutional.

Which is really weird because the constitution is clear, municipalities are creations of the province. A provincial government can merge municipal governments, they can even abolish them if they wish.

Eventually, a higher court overturned the very politically driven decision against Ford, but for a time, he seemed to need the notwithstanding clause, otherwise known as section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

I’ll never understand why some claim the notwithstanding clause is against the Charter when it is part of the Charter.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sean Speer notes the Liberals seem to be taken by surprise at the negative reactions to their plans:

I suspect that non-conservatives are a bit surprised by the magnitude of the reaction to the Carney government’s factum on the notwithstanding clause. That’s mainly because I think liberals and progressives don’t quite understand how much the past decade or two of judicial activism has come to animate Canadian conservatism. Even as a somewhat moderate conservatism, I admit to being radicalized on these issues.

The Carter decision on MAID was a key moment in this evolution. Not necessarily because of the issue per se — though a lot of us oppose it. But mainly because it was such a naked example of judicial lawmaking. The clearest case that it’s just power and politics all the way down.

After having ruled that there was no right to physician-assisted death in the Charter, just over twenty years later the Supreme Court unanimously decided there was indeed such a right.

There had been no constitutional amendment in the meantime. Parliament had considered the issue and carefully and consistently voted against it. And yet nine judges decided that the right should exist and so they created one.

If the judiciary isn’t merely protecting constitutionally-prescribed rights but manufacturing them based on the political preferences of judges themselves—if it’s in effect just politics from the bench — then we might as well have the politicians who we’ve duly elected to be making these decisions for us.

Before Carter I would have said that I was broadly supportive of S.33 as part of our constitutional order but today it’s much bigger part of my core political identity as the only check we have on judicial politicking.

The Carney government’s factum then isn’t just objectionable because it threatens to constrain the notwithstanding clause but precisely because it invites the Supreme Court to once again alter the constitution in its own image.

Brian Peckford, the last surviving signatory to the patriation of the Constitution in 1982:

Tragically, it is not surprising that we see this further emasculation of our 1982 Constitution.

It has been ongoing almost since its inception. Witness the 1985 Court Opinion twisting the meaning of the opening words: “the Supremacy of God”.

And the constant distortions ever since, accelerated during the false covid crisis.

This is The Tyranny of The Judiciary —The Destruction Of Parliamentary Democracy!

How important is Section 32 — the notwithstanding clause?

There would be no Constitution Act 1982 — no Charter of Rights and Freedoms without Section 32.

When PM Trudeau Sr. tried to unilaterally Patriate the Constitution and failed miserably because of the Provinces’ opposition before the Courts, he validated the suspicion most Premiers had about the Federal Government and its intentions during that time. The ability of the Provinces to continue democratically to initiate specific exemptions was crucial to solidify the federal nature of this country.

The Supreme Court was right in Sept 1981 in denying the Federal Government such sweeping powers.

None of the 10 First Ministers who signed the Patriation Agreement intended for this Section to be amended in any other way except by the Amending Formula that was achieved for the first time in our history in that Agreement.

The Federal Justice Minister’s action to ask the court is wrong — totally against the intent of those who authored the Patriation Agreement and defies and denigrates one of major accomplishments of 1982, The Amending Formula, a crucial part of the earlier 1981 Agreement, the foundation document, “The Patriation Agreement”.

The Canadian Press carries this:

    OTTAWA — The federal government’s request to Canada’s top court for limits on the notwithstanding clause isn’t only about Quebec’s secularism law, Justice Minister Sean Fraser said on Thursday.

    In a media statement, Fraser said he hopes the Supreme Court’s eventual decision “will shape how both federal and provincial governments may use the notwithstanding clause for years to come”.

Excuse me, Mr Fraser, this is the job, the solemn responsibility, for Canada’s Elected First Ministers and Their elected Parliaments not the Judiciary. Making law is the job of the elected, interpreting law the role of the Judiciary.

This brazen action of the Federal Government would enlarge the Judiciary power to make law — it deciding the powers of The Governments of this Nation.

Ironic in the extreme it is to ponder that Canada sought for decades to find an amending formula — self criticizing itself for not having a legitimate avenue for Constitutional Change.

Now that it has such an avenue instead of using it, it cowardly asks The Court?

Should not a majority of the Provinces have to agree — that’s what the Supreme Court said in 1981?

Hence, the Supreme Court, consistent with it predecessor views of 1981 should refrain from hearing the matter, and inform the Governments that it is they who have the power through the legitimate constitutional process present in the Constitution to make such significant change ie the powers of the Governments, adhering to Section 38, the Amending Formula.

September 18, 2025

Broken feedback paths lead to broken organizations … like government

Lorenzo Warby on the ever-increasing dysfunction of most western governments due to the deliberate sabotage of what used to be functional feedback paths:

That institutions within Western democracies have deteriorated in recent decades is clear. That the march of progressivism through the institutions is at the heart of this deterioration is also clear.1

This has been progressives acting like progressives, with all the perverse relationship with information that is at the heart of progressivism. A perverse relationship that leads directly to their degradation of institutions.

Progressives use the imagined future as their benchmark of judgement, but there is no information from the future, so there is no reality-test in their benchmark of judgement. The imagined future can, however, be as glorious as one likes.

Conversely, anything actually created by humans will have downsides and even sins attached. This gives progressives a great rhetorical advantage over anyone who attempts to defend anything humans have actually built. All of the painful history of human achievement is rendered as naught, as mute, in the face of the splendours in their head.

Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model.

If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work.

For using the glorious imagined future as the benchmark of judgement creates the basis for denigrating anything that comes from the past: which is all the information we have about what works and does not. This includes denigrating the embedded learning in institutions. Even fundamental questions about what is required to sustain a social order get written out of acceptable discourse as not fitting with their imagined-future benchmark of judgement, with the splendours in their heads.

Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark of judgement also naturally leads to concluding that one owns morality, as any opposition to the glorious imagined future is clearly immoral. This leads to, at best, comprehensive disengagement with, and at worse, systematic denigration and delegitimisation of, those who disagree. A systematic denigration and delegitimisation that often involves systematic misrepresentation of those who disagree. The consequence of all this is to block feedback about one’s political projects.

The most extreme instance of this has been the UK, where the BlairBrown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could do their thing, insulated from voters. This made the UK a state, a polity, with broken feedbacks.

Modern Western civilisation is a civilisation with broken feedbacks — as I discuss here, here, here, here and here — but the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism extended that pattern of broken feedbacks systematically to the British state. The consequences have become grimly obvious. Massive waves of unwanted migrants as part of a massively dysfunctional British state.

If you systematically kill feedbacks from voters, you systematically kill accountability. Of course dysfunction will spread across the organs of the state, as it has. (See here for a discussion of aspects of that horrifying dysfunction.)


  1. Feminisation of institutions has also been a corrosive factor, but that is deeply intertwined with the march of progressivism through the institutions.

Update, 19 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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 Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress