Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2026

Epic bad takes – “Justin Trudeau wasn’t a bad prime minister”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to someone who we shouldn’t mock, because perhaps he was dropped on his head too many times as a child or perhaps he’s a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party:

There’s a reflex in Canadian politics that drives me nuts. If you criticize a prime minister hard enough, someone eventually says, “You’re just emotional. History will fix it.”

No. History doesn’t fix weak math.

Let’s stop pretending this is about vibes. Under Justin Trudeau, federal spending didn’t just rise during COVID. It exploded before it. Deficits were normalized in good years. Productivity flatlined. GDP per capita drifted backward relative to the U.S. Housing costs detached from incomes. Regulatory layers multiplied while investment quietly left for friendlier jurisdictions.

That isn’t hysteria. That’s structural decline.

The “he governed for the times” excuse is soft thinking. Leaders are supposed to anticipate trade-offs, not amplify them. When you stack carbon taxes, capital constraints, pipeline cancellations, and endless approval timelines onto a resource economy, you don’t get moral progress. You get stalled growth and capital flight. Then you blame grocers and global headwinds.

And let’s be blunt. The brand was performance politics. Identity theatre. International applause. But governance is boring. It’s about compounding effects. Interest payments. Productivity curves. Regulatory drag. Trudeau governed like narratives create wealth.

They don’t.

Even his defenders quietly admit course corrections were needed. If policies now require rollback or “revision”, that’s not vindication. That’s damage control.

Time won’t turn fiscal drift into foresight. It won’t convert stagnant productivity into hidden genius. Mulroney is respected because NAFTA and fiscal reforms strengthened the country long term. Results earned that.

If in twenty years Canada’s energy capacity, housing stock, productivity, and fiscal health look stronger because of Trudeau’s foundations, fine. I’ll concede it.

But if the next generation is still digging out from regulatory paralysis and debt overhang, nostalgia won’t rewrite the ledger.

Simple standard. Did living standards rise sustainably?

If not, no amount of mood reframing saves the record.

November 12, 2025

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

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

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!

October 25, 2025

Foreign interference? In our elections? Say it ain’t so …

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

Oh, but it is, fellow Canadians, and it’s going to continue because our government can’t or won’t lift a finger to stop it:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

[Vancouver-East MP Jenny Kwan]’s recent comments, which correctly noted the incredible hardship that Canadians targeted by foreign regimes endure, typically with no help from an apathetic Canadian government, are important and deserve amplification — we must all hammer home just how vicious a foreign influence campaign can be for those on the receiving end, and how little help they can normally expect from Canadian officials.

But mystifying? I wish.

A recap of the timeline is useful: The Liberals were “actively considering” such a registry as early as 2021. Late the next year, the magnificent Marco Mendicino, living embodiment of Trudeau-era ministerial excellence, was talking about launching a consultation, to see if it was an idea worth pursuing. A few months later, Justin Trudeau himself said that Mendicino would be “moving forward” to study “various proposals” in the coming weeks.

And then, well. You know. Nothing happened. In short order the government had the foreign interference scandal blow up in its face. A public inquiry was eventually called, after a long, drawn out process of increasingly pathetic attempts to dodge the issue. The initial report by Justice Hogue was released in May of 2024, and that month, the House unanimously passed Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act. This gave the government the legal tools to establish the registry, a process they said would take about a year. That year ran out five months ago, and at that point … the office wasn’t even operating yet, even just in preparation for eventually going live. The Carney government then said they’d appoint a commissioner by September of this year. This would mark the beginning of the registry’s work.

It’s now late October, with nary a new-fangled commissioner to be found.

The Hill Times article places Kwan’s comments, and the government’s overall lackadaisical effort on this front, in the specific context of the Carney government’s efforts to offset our lopsided reliance on trade with the United States by improving relations with China and India. These are not countries with which we have lately been swapping friendship bracelets, and a foreign influence registry would largely — not exclusively, but largely — be intended to address their interference. “I am constantly worried about [foreign interference], but that doesn’t mean I’m not also worried about affordability issues for Canadians; I can do both,” Kwan is quoted as telling The Hill Times. “The Carney government needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time; they need to address both with the level of seriousness and attention they require.”

Later in the article, Dan Stanton, a former senior CSIS official and current national security expert at the University of Ottawa, adds that the Carney government has likely postponed any further announcements on the registry to avoid complicating ongoing talks with the Asian giants.

Well, yeah. That’s pretty clearly an issue. Kwan and Stanton have the government about dead to rights on that one. You can see the proof of that everywhere — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s recent trip to India and China, after which she called China a “strategic partner”, is a pretty clear signal. The latest blowup in U.S.-Canada relations, with Trump cancelling all trade negotiations with Canada because (or so he claims) Ontario ran anti-tariff ads on U.S. TV, will only increase the desire in Ottawa to realign our economy toward literally anyone else but the Americans.

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 9, 2025

Freedom Convoy 2022 – “… proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce”

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

In the National Post, Michael Higgins states the obvious fact that Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, and the rest of the Freedom Convoy protesters were never insurrectionists. Trudeau had decided in advance that the convoy was a maple-flavoured January 6th attempt to overthrow the government — if not an attempt to re-stage the storming of the Winter Palace — and merely waited for the violence to break out and/or the Parliament buildings to be stormed. But nobody other than a few particularly glowy federal provocateurs was interested … because they were there to protest government policy not to start a revolution:

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister of the day, portrayed them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government.

“This so-called ‘freedom convoy’ called for the overthrow of the government. They called for the Governor General to unilaterally remove the Prime Minister from office,” Mendicino told a Commons parliamentary committee.

Indeed, the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General was inundated with calls and emails by protesters demanding then prime minister Justin Trudeau be fired.

But since the Governor General can’t just decide to sack a prime minister, these email-writing anarchists were particularly inept as well as being constitutionally illiterate.

It was Shakespearean farce, but Liberals like Mendicino were happy to play politics and paint the convoy protesters as lawless subversives bent on destroying democracy.

Although, to be fair, Trudeau only said they were a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” — more retrogrades than revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s Keystone Kops had all the laws, rules and regulations needed to disband the convoy, they just lacked the leadership.

Days into the occupation, Ottawa Police Services chief, Peter Sloly, appeared to have thrown up his hands in resignation, stating, “There may not be a policing solution” to the crisis. Two weeks later, he quit.

In his report, the public inquiry commissioner Paul Rouleau would later criticize the “serious dysfunction within the OPS’s leadership”.

The government theatrics escalated with the imposition of the Emergencies Act, proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce. Within days, police had cleared the convoy and several other blockades without incident.

This was less the power of the Emergencies Act and more to do with getting the police to just act.

September 24, 2025

It won’t work – the minister responsible knows it, but they’re going ahead with it anyway

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

The “it” in the headline is the federal government’s gun confiscation program, which they claim will reduce crime but they already know it won’t do any such thing. What it will do is take away from literally the most law-abiding, responsible citizens their legally purchased property and leave illegal guns in the hands of criminals … at an ever-increasing estimated cost to the taxpayer. In The Line, Matt Gurney covers the details:

The federal gun confiscation program […] is illogical. It won’t save lives or make the public safer. The federal government doesn’t really even expect it to work, and is only going ahead with it because they’ve been stuck with a dumb proposal the Trudeau government made almost five years ago. If they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t, but they feel like they’ve blocked themselves in and have no choice but to proceed so that they don’t anger part of their electoral coalition, mainly voters in Quebec.

That might sound like a blistering criticism of the program, the kind of thing you’ve read in any number of my columns before. It’s actually what the public safety minister thinks about it. He just didn’t know he was being tape recorded when he said so. In a 20-minute conversation Gary Anandasangaree had with a firearms owner he rents a home to, which was recorded and then leaked, the minister says all of the above things. (He has also confirmed the recording is legitimate.)

Awkward for the minister, clearly, but I actually give him credit. The minister’s comments on tape are a confession, and an admission of defeat. They’re also, hands down, the most honest thing a Liberal government official has said on the gun control file in five years. Given that the minister responsible is freely telling people the program is a bad idea he’s stuck with and that won’t work, a sensible government would probably take this opportunity to walk away from the program.

Unfortunately, that’s not what this PM has chosen. It’s full speed ahead with an idea so bad Anandasangaree wishes he’d never been saddled with it.

Let’s talk about what this program is for a second. And forgive me, there’s quite a bit of history here. During Justin Trudeau’s first term, his only majority, his government had proposed a series of fairly moderate changes to the gun control laws they had inherited from Stephen Harper. As I’ve written often since, the proposals were a mixed bag. Some were okay. Some were bad. But they more or less left the well-functioning Canadian gun control system intact. They nibbled around the edges enough so that they could tell their voters that they had gotten tougher. But they generally didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.

But then politics got in the way, as it always does. Trudeau lost his majority in 2019 and became ever-more dependent on voter efficiency and wedge issues. And then in 2020, there was a horrible massacre in Nova Scotia. That catastrophe had nothing to do with our gun control laws; the weapons used were brought in illegally from the United States, as is typical of guns used in gun crime. But the Trudeau government seized on the opportunity — never waste a crisis, right? — to announce that they were “banning” “assault rifles”.

A lot of quotes above. So let me explain. First of all, there really wasn’t much of a ban. Anyone who owned one of the newly banned rifles was allowed to keep them. And as for assault rifles, actual assault rifles — rifle-calibre weapons that use high-capacity detachable magazines and can fire in fully automatic mode — have been banned in Canada for decades. This isn’t a problem that we actually had. And the government tacitly admitted as much when they began fudging the words they used to describe them. In acknowledgement that there were no actual assault weapons to ban, they started talking about assault-style weapons.

“Style” is a tell. You wouldn’t take medicine-style pills, or munch on a food-style snack. Because you’d know better. Trudeau et al knew better. It didn’t stop them. They needed something to announce, and by God, they were going to announce it!

And as we’ve noted several times, the Trudeau government got addicted to the media high of making big showy announcements. So they started doing repeat announcements over a period of time, and thanks to the spinelessness of Canadian legacy media even before Trudeau started directly subsidizing them, the media sugar high got repeated as well. It didn’t take long for the lesson to be learned that making an announcement was cheaper than doing the thing that was announced, and we quickly transitioned to a world where it was the announcement that mattered, not the thing.

At Junk Economics, Bryan Moir sums up the stupidity:

You want blunt? Fine. Here it is:

Listen: politics is kabuki theater and promises are props. Here we have a government rolling out a nationwide confiscation-style buyback and calling it “voluntary” — which is like calling income tax “optional” if you want to be arrested. The minister tells citizens, in public, “it’s voluntary”, then admits in private he’ll criminalize non-compliance, will “bail you out” if it goes that far, and says the whole exercise exists because the party must keep the promise and because the Quebec caucus wants to show muscle. That’s not statesmanship. That’s PR with a warrant.

They lecture you about being “tough on guns” while refusing to be tough on the people who actually bring violence into our streets. The minister himself says if he could do it over he’d target illegal guns and put criminals in jail — not law-abiding owners. Translation: the policy is ideologically driven and politically performative, not strategically intelligent. You don’t cure gang violence — which the cops tell you comes from illegal trafficking and cross-border smuggling — by borrowing billions to buy back legally purchased rifles. That’s like throwing sandbags into a burning house and patting yourself on the back for “doing something”.

And then there’s the logistics and the cost — the ugly part they don’t want on camera. The federal pot is capped at about $742 million and the program is rolled out in fits and starts. Major police forces are already saying “no thanks”, which means the feds must either stand down, contract a patchwork of municipal services, or try to outsource enforcement. Any of those choices blows up the promise in different ways: it becomes toothless, it becomes wildly more expensive, or it becomes a federal-provincial fight that will make the Notwithstanding clause dust-ups look like backyard squabbles. Pick your disaster.

Remember the math: a capped pool of cash plus a growing list of banned models (hundreds, then thousands) equals many owners getting nothing while the bureaucracy eats up the rest on administration, contracts, security, staffing, and political “bribes” (a nicer word for handouts to get agencies to play ball). If the fund runs out — and the minister openly says “it’s capped; when it’s gone, it’s gone” — you’ll have a bunch of people stripped of legal property, out of pocket, and the state triumphant only in optics. That’s confiscation without fair market compensation; it reads like policy designed by accountants and sold by televangelists.

Worst of all: while Ottawa gamely auctions off the idea of virtue, or was that “Canadian values”, real problems pile up. Fire seasons rage, hospitals are full, kids wait for surgeries, food banks are overwhelmed and the cost of living keeps rising— and Mark and Gary are borrowing money to offer coupons for now-illegal guns. If you wanted a textbook case of political misallocation, this is it: symbolic policy delivered with symbolic money so the party can say it kept a promise, while the public pays the bill and crime networks keep smuggling.

On the gun confiscation program in particular, thank goodness you can always depend on social media to find the funny side of any issue:

August 9, 2025

Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes

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

Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.

The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.

The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.

Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.

July 27, 2025

“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”

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

Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:

Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:

slay, girlboss

As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:

The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT

Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

    Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:

The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.

In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:

See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.

This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.

Update: Fixed broken link.

July 7, 2025

The federal government’s EV mandate cannot stand

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

Following its established pattern, the Canadian government will seek any possible path other than economic reality, especially when it comes to things like mandating that all vehicles sold in Canada must be EVs by 2035:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.

Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was a big fan of the attention-getting promise. Especially if it was a pledge timed well into the future when he was unlikely to still be around to be held responsible. Carbon reductions too ambitious to be realistic. Budget targets too unlikely to be believed. Statist planning projects that tended increasingly to the surreal.

Mark Carney is left with the detritus and the problem of what to do about it. As prime minister he’s already acted on a few of the problematic leftovers, ditching the carbon tax even though he’d previously supported it as a good idea; scrapping an increased tax on capital gains although the Treasury could certainly use the money; “caving,” as the Trump administration so tastefully put it, on a digital services tax that was a bad idea to begin with but pushed through by the Trudeau government anyway.

There’s an argument to be made, and not a bad one, that each retreat was the right move for the moment. And if there are mistakes that need abandoning, the early days of a new government is proverbially the best time to do it.

But righting wrongs has confronted Carney with a new predicament, in that there are so many Trudeau-era wrongs that need righting. Washington was still in the midst of its victory dance over its digital tax triumph when Canada’s auto industry came along to plead for similar treatment from Ottawa, insisting automakers couldn’t possibly meet previously-set electric vehicle targets and urging the new Liberal government to backtrack post haste.

Carney hosted the session with Canada’s chief executives for Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. Brian Kingston, chief executive of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, was blunt in identifying the targets set for electric vehicle (EV) production as the main topic.

“The EV mandate itself is not sustainable. The targets that have been established cannot be met,” he said on arriving for the meeting. Afterwards he told Politico‘s online news site, “At a time when the industry is under immense pressure, the damaging and redundant ZEV mandate must be urgently removed”.

July 2, 2025

“In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide”

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

In Quillette, Tristin Hopper provides some excerpts from his book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, published earlier this year:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.

This is the story of how, in 2019, Canada became the first (and, to this day, only) country to declare itself guilty of committing an ongoing genocide against its own citizens.

To outsiders, who (correctly) view Canada as a humane democracy, the tale will seem bizarre. But to Canadians, there was a certain twisted political logic to it — at the time, at least.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, back when my country was still ruled by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s progressive elites bought into then-ascendant social-justice manias with a born-again fervour that was arguably unmatched in any other nation. This was a time, readers will recall, when college students were busily confessing their internalised white supremacy and racist thought crimes to one another on social media. Seeking to ingratiate his Liberal Party with this young demographic, Trudeau extrapolated their cultish movement on a national scale.

His rhetorical style became increasingly manic, as one social-justice slogan led to another; with each being rapturously liked and retweeted on social media. In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide.

In this regard, Trudeau’s first truly epic act of national self-incrimination took place at a 2019 women’s conference in Vancouver. The PM had just been handed the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a probe he’d authorised as a means to investigate the high rates of homicide committed against Canada’s female Indigenous population.

As it turned out, however, the MMIWG report authors’ most prominent demand had nothing to do with the technical details of criminal investigation. Instead, they were focused on language: They wanted homicides targeting Indigenous women and girls to be described as an ongoing “race-based genocide” perpetrated by Canadian society at large.

Murder wasn’t the government’s only instrument of genocide, the authors claimed. Higher rates of Indigenous heart disease and suicide attempts were also described as foreseeable results of Canadian policies that are “explicitly genocidal”.

Canadians tend to feel guilty about the genuinely shameful way their country treated Indigenous peoples at many historical junctures (more on this below). Because of this high baseline guilt level, it is often seen as taboo (especially among journalists) to push back against even the most obviously counterfactual claims made on behalf of Indigenous peoples. And the MMIWG report was a case in point: the inquiry’s insistence that Canada was in the midst of an active genocide was reported uncritically by most media outlets.

Some public figures did speak out against this hyperbolic use of language — such as Roméo Dallaire, the retired general who’d been in Rwanda during that country’s (actual) genocide in 1994. Yet Canada’s most important public figure — Trudeau himself — accepted the inquiry’s conclusions without reservation; even if this meant that he was now signalling his status as leader of a nation that, day in, day out, under his own watch, was committing a genocide against its own population.

“Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls experienced amounts to genocide,” he told his Vancouver audience. Trudeau then paused for nine seconds to accommodate his desired reaction — which consisted of cheers and applause.

May 27, 2025

Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.

May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.

Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.

Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.

All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.

The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.

Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.

The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.

As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:

    “According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”

Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.

There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.

April 25, 2025

Canada’s lost decade, 2015-2025

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

It’s quite remarkable how many economic charts show the US and Canadian economies tracking along similar paths up until “something” happened in 2015 that knocked the Canadian economy well below the US trend line. I wonder what happened in 2015 that could account for this quite visible change in fortune?

GDP growth in Canada fell off a cliff over the period from 2015 onwards. This kinda matters.

Throughout the 2025 campaign, the Conservatives have frequently referred to what they call the “Lost Liberal Decade”, a reference to the fact that Canada has lagged dramatically on virtually every available indicator since the Liberals first came to power in 2015.

In sum, the economy is worse, crime is worse, public services are worse, affordability is worse — and there’s a whole galaxy of niche indicators, such as firearms incidents, refugee backlogs, even life expectancy, that are worse than they’ve ever been.

Below, a quick guide to the fact that, whatever you think of the Liberals, the last decade has really not been great for Canada.

In the year the Liberals took office, 604 people were murdered across Canada. This was already a slight uptick from the year before, when murder rates hit a low not seen since the mid-1960s.

Just seven years later, in 2022, homicides would hit a high of 874. In raw numbers, that’s 270 more murdered Canadians.

But even when accounting for population growth, there are way more murders happening now than in 2015. The homicide rate in that year was 1.71 murders per 100,000 people. As of 2023, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has released data, it was 1.94.

Put another way, if Canada had stuck to the homicide rates of 2015, we’d have had 94 fewer murders in 2023, 216 fewer murders in 2022, and about 150 fewer murders in 2021.

And it’s a similar story when it comes to virtually every other category of crime. Statistics Canada maintains a “crime severity index” that attempts to aggregate the raw amount of criminality each year in Canada. The index bottoms out just before the Liberals came to power in 2015, and has been on the upswing ever since.

Unfortunately, this is particularly true when it comes to violent crime. For one thing, the number of guns being turned on people each year in Canada has never been higher.

In 2015, for every 100,000 Canadians, there were 28.6 incidents of firearm-related violent crime. By 2022, the last full year for which data is available, this had surged to 36.7 incidents — nearly a 30-per-cent increase in just seven years.

The Correctional Service of Canada publishes annual statistics on incarceration rates, and a noticeable trend begins to emerge starting in 2015: The prison population begins to plummet.

April 21, 2025

Bonus QotD: Pierre Poilievre

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

… Canada’s governing class is not popular. For years now, all across the country Canadians have defiantly hoisted the black flag of Fuck Trudeau as precursor to their intent to start slitting political throats the next time they’re allowed to vote. Such vulgarity is unheard of in Canadian politics. It takes a great deal for Canadians to be impolite.

However, this widespread dissatisfaction has so far failed to coalesce into any meaningful populist insurgency opposing the Laurentian elite. Until recently, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, was coasting towards an easy electoral landslide on the back of this simmering popular anger, with his primary and indeed only selling point being that he is not Justin Trudeau. That is not to say that he is terribly different from Justin Trudeau. For American readers, Poilievre can be best described as vaguely reminiscent of Pete Buttigieg, with politics a hair to the right of the left of the right of Buttigieg’s left.

On a policy level the Conservatives are practically identical to the liberals; indeed, on immigration, after the LPC was forced by overwhelming weight of public opinion to slightly reduce the rate at which they lavished student visas and temporary foreign worker visas on their clients, Poilievre’s Conservatives essentially allowed the Liberals to outflank them to the right on the immigration issue, despite mass deportations being a very clear electoral winner.

Only very recently did Poilievre finally pledge to reduce immigration to “only” a quarter of a million a year … still a far cry from the clear necessity to reverse the flood that Trudeau and the rest of his World Economic Forum Young Global Leader alumni unleashed on the country.

John Carter, “Maple Maidan”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2025-02-15.

March 13, 2025

“Canadian liberalism has been regime ideology since at least Lester B. Pearson in 1963”

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

Fortissax on “Leaflibs & Puckstick Patriots”:

The past week has been very special because something happened in Canada. This something is not anything I could have anticipated, but I find myself not particularly surprised. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau propped up the husk of Jeff Douglas like an old Fisher King from some retelling of Arthurian legend. Jeff Douglas is famous for his appearance in the Molson Canadian beer commercial, released in the year 2000. This commercial was possibly the hardest-hitting, if not among the top hardest-hitting, propaganda pieces ever produced in service of regime ideology. That regime ideology is Canadian liberalism — a form of left-liberalism that emerged out of the Second World War, in direct contradiction to American right-liberalism.

Many American correspondents have asked me to explain why it seems like liberals are patriotic in Canada, while conservatives are not. The answer is simple: Canadian liberalism has been regime ideology since at least Lester B. Pearson in 1963, Pierre Trudeau’s predecessor, who laid the groundwork for a sinister, transformative cultural revolution — the likes of which I can only compare to the USSR or Communist China.

What occurred in this era was a complete and total restructuring of society — an absolutely Orwellian mind-wipe of Canadian identity, a retconning of Canadian history, culminating in the explicit purpose of erasing the historic Canadian nation. So successful was this cultural revolution that, for my entire 30 years of life, the narrative has been that Canada is an illegitimate, post-national state on stolen land. Paradoxically, the people are viciously patriotic toward the hollow state, whose newfound identity obsesses over its own dissolution, its symbols and icons mostly channeled into corporate brands and products, like Canadian Tire, fast food chains like Tim Hortons, and the timeless bread and circuses of hockey.

Canada was transformed into an international economic zone of individuals with relatively maximal allotments for personal fulfilment — including the most licentious, disgusting, and degenerate, as long as it remains acceptable within the Overton window of the time.

A cornerstone of this identity is precisely outdoing the U.S. in how liberal it can be — true to the end goal of transnational liberals like Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. In this 63-year era, there are two archetypes of the average man or woman. These archetypes manifest as more moderate, more common versions of the populist American wannabe or the neurotic DEI cultist I discussed in my other article. These are what I’ve coined “leaflibs” and “puckstick patriots”. They represent the centre-left liberal and centre-right liberal majority of Canada.

There is often overlap between the two, but what they have in common is an extreme ignorance of Canadian and world history and national identity. Both regularly partake in the communion of the left-liberal civic religion but do so in different ways. They are also united in that the vast majority of information they obtain about local, regional, and national politics comes from legacy media outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (state-owned, publicly funded broadcaster), CTV, and Global News — old-school news outlets whose private owners and shareholders differ little in belief.

What the Canadian ruling classes have in common is that they are extremely insular and scarcely interact with the public. In many ways, Canada resembles European countries. Canadians were, for a long time, educated along stratified British class lines, and everyone knew their place. Canada’s national value is Order, not Liberty, and traditionally, society functioned as a collective, organic whole in a proper communitarian model, where the social expectation of the enlightened and powerful elites was to tend to their responsibilities of responsible government.

Let’s discuss these two “normie” archetypes. International readers, especially Americans, may notice parallels with their own mainstream liberal and conservative, yet otherwise ill-informed, media-consuming relations.

March 11, 2025

“In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere”

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

In spiked, Fraser Myers expresses incredulity that Canadians have “chosen” yet another technocratic globalist as our next Prime Minister to succeed Justin Trudeau:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Canadians have a new prime minister. After a leadership election in the ruling Liberal Party, it’s out with the woke globalist, Justin Trudeau, and in with the woke globalist, Mark Carney.

Extraordinarily, in an age where justified populist rage against an out-of-touch establishment is spreading across the globe, Canadians have ended up with a leader who embodies that very establishment. In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere.

The new Canadian PM’s CV reads like a parody of an archetypal Davos man. He has been governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and a United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. Before he entered the public eye, he worked for Goldman Sachs – in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Yet he has never once held any form of elected political office. He does not even currently hold a seat in Canada’s House of Commons.

Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.

Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.

More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.

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