Restoring Canada Special Series
Part I: The Long Defeat

Art class was once among the most straightforward high school courses to teach. Show the students how to paint, mold, sketch or craft, and then let them explore their world. Today, however, like the rest of the teaching experience, art class can be a terrifying, even life-threatening event. Recounting the case of a young high school art teacher who was attacked by a student with a large pair of scissors, Brock Eldon looks into the recent and dramatic increase in violence in Canadian schools and asks what’s behind it. While teachers’ unions steadfastly claim insufficient education funding is the culprit, Eldon reviews the evidence and comes to a different, and far more worrisome, conclusion: it is teachers themselves who are largely to blame – reaping the woke whirlwind they have sown.

Quebec’s CAQ government was elected on the promise it would not hold another referendum on independence, but it has been engaged in nation-building all the same. The CAQ’s latest effort to defend Quebec’s identity has it demanding that all immigrants adhere to a “common culture” – one that both insists on the absolute primacy of the French language and is anti-religious at its core. The CAQ government is even musing about banning all prayer in public. Anna Farrow deconstructs this determined agenda and discovers not a benign civic nationalism, but a national project that bases inclusion on a difficult-to-access, narrowly-defined common culture – and excludes those who don’t fit.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are thoroughly entrenched at Canadian universities, and the harm they cause – from squashing free speech to destroying the merit principle to propagating outright discrimination – is widespread. But there is a path back to sanity. Jonathan Barazzutti lays out concrete steps universities can take to restore intellectual diversity, which should be a pillar of any academic institution and would, as a byproduct, support demographic diversity as well. Barazzutti’s proposals would enable universities to correct current abuses and turn back to their true mission: the pursuit of innovation, knowledge and truth.

With a blunt and determined president south of the border and an election in the offing, Canada is at a crisis point – one that has come after a decade of disastrous policies from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government that have transformed Canada into an economic weakling. In this devastating critique, Gwyn Morgan lays out the main reasons for Canada’s self-inflicted economic decline and the steps that must be taken to get serious in this new reality. And Morgan offers a stark warning: Mark Carney may seem more sophisticated and competent than Trudeau, but he has spent much of his career as a champion of the same destructive agenda. It’s time for real change.

“Parachute” candidates. Direct appointees. Mysterious disqualifications and rule changes. Elections with just one contestant. The nomination process used by political parties to select their candidates is one of the building blocks of Canadian democracy. And yet on close inspection, this system reveals itself to be profoundly and embarrassingly undemocratic. There must be a better way. Jake Melo Valinho examines the origins and key characteristics of the complex U.S. primary election system and discovers a possible remedy for Canada’s deeply flawed nominations contests: a bracing dose of transparency and vigorous competition.

Concerns over Canada’s eroding free speech rights were eased when the Justin Trudeau government’s Online Harms Act died with the prorogation of Parliament. But this is no time to relax, writes Morrigan Geleynse. The authoritarian impulse to criminalize more and more types of speech still animates Canadian governments. As Geleynse explains, the threat stems from the rise of “legal positivism”, a doctrine that strips morality and higher authority from the time-honoured link between human purpose, individual rights and written law. The solution lies in rediscovering the wisdom and advice of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of history’s greatest and most humane thinkers.

People, cultures and landscapes vary greatly around the world, but totalitarianism’s black heart is basically the same everywhere. And so it is in long-suffering Myanmar – or Burma – where for most of the last 35 years a military dictatorship has frustrated democracy, crushed dissent, murdered opponents and sought to snuff out the very will to resist. In one of C2C’s occasional forays into global affairs, Patrick Keeney travels to the Thailand-Myanmar frontier to visit a place where long-suffering Burmese are tending to their physical and mental wounds and keeping alive the flames of justice, freedom and hope for a better future.

A state monopoly over mail delivery has long been the status quo in Canada. But it wasn’t always that way. During the pre-Confederation era, a range of feisty stagecoach and shipping companies delivered letters in competition with colonial government operations. And in the 1920s, a few enterprising aviators offered their own private air-mail service throughout Canada’s North – sometimes even issuing their own stamps. Today, with Canada Post facing the prospect of bankruptcy, Peter Shawn Taylor argues it’s time to let the market reassert control over delivering the mail. Taking a close look at successful privatization efforts around the world and talking to experts in both Europe and North America, Taylor considers the best way to ensure taxpayers don’t end up on the hook for a mail service few of them use anymore.

For years the Justin Trudeau government was hostile to the very idea of new oil or natural gas pipelines – right up until U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Canadian exports and an all-out trade war loomed. Now Ottawa suddenly thinks west-east pipelines enabling Canadian crude to access global markets are a good idea. Or claims to. Industry veteran Gwyn Morgan, for one, is skeptical. First of all, it’s unlikely that pipeline companies would even want to invest in a country that has become incapable of getting anything done. And the Liberals’ record of quashing development and forcing Canadian oil to be sold at a discount to the U.S. shows they lack basic economic intelligence. Even with Trudeau soon gone, why would they do the sensible thing now?

Gender-affirming “care” may be many things, but whatever foisting life-altering chemical treatments, irreversible surgeries and lifelong infertility upon schoolchildren without their parents’ knowledge or consent may be, it isn’t health care, argues John Sikkema. More and more countries across the Western world are recognizing that fact and are rolling back the radical ideology that pushes kids and teen-agers to commence gender “transitioning”. While the drive to wrest control over children’s development away from transgender activists who deny biological reality, and restore authority to parents, is also gaining momentum in Canada, notes Sikkema, much more still needs to be done.

Donald Trump launched his campaign to strengthen his country’s security with typical bombast. But does the U.S. President’s style entirely delegitimize the substance of his messages? Grave security threats are lapping at North America’s shores. Where others see only chaos and craziness in Trump’s approach, former Canadian Armed Forces officer Barry Sheehy detects coherence and good cause underlying an emerging continental security strategy. And as other countries bend to America’s will, warns Sheehy, Canada had better step up, begin repairing its neglected, decrepit military and national security apparatus, and start doing what it should have done long ago to secure its Far North.

The secret to every good magic trick, Michael Caine’s character explains in the 2006 movie The Prestige, is a willing audience. “You want to be fooled,” he says. Anyone watching the Oscar-nominated documentary film Sugarcane could find themselves slipping into a similar act of self-deception. Focused on a residential school in northern B.C., the Canadian-made Sugarcane withholds key facts, arranges other evidence in confusing ways and encourages viewers – already primed to think the worst of residential schools – to reach unfounded conclusions about what they’re actually seeing. Even professional movie critics have been fooled. Documentary filmmaker Michelle Stirling pulls back the curtain on the dark magic behind Sugarcane.

When the Métis were included in Canada’s 1982 Constitution as “aboriginal peoples”, some members complained that they’d been handed an “empty box” compared to the ample rights and treaties offered to Indian and Inuit people. Since then, however, Canada’s court system has been hard at work filling up that box. Now, with the signing of a “nation-to-nation” treaty late last year, Manitoba Métis have a box that’s positively overflowing with new rights, powers and federal cash. Peter Best explores how Canada came to recognize a fractious, landless, fully-assimilated, colonial-era group – a group that is actually represented by a corporation – as a nation with an inherent right to self-government, as well as the deeply problematic consequences of this decision.

Buildings and other public structures, the ancient Roman architectural master Vitruvius wrote, need to be sturdy and long-lasting, must efficiently fulfill the uses and serve the users for which they are intended – and should be pleasing to the eye. Today’s architecture, writes Michael Bonner, is none of these things. In most cases, it’s the opposite – and that is usually by intention, as “starchitects” foist awful designs on an increasingly unwilling public. Thankfully, writes Bonner, there are glimmerings of a way back towards public architecture that not only does its job but reflects timeless principles of form, function, quality and beauty.

Rather than breaking barriers to knowledge, these days universities seem more adept at breaking the norms of academic conduct. An apparently endless stream of cases involving data manipulation, plagiarism, retractions and other errors and deceptions by researchers ranging from obscure graduate students to world-famous scientific names is plaguing academia in Canada and around the world. But is this avalanche of academic malpractice – what one scientist bemoaned as “corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research” – a sign of weakening standards? Or are we now just paying more attention? Examining several troubling examples and interviewing experts from the frontlines, Lynne Cohen probes the dark underbelly of academic fraud.