Collaboration No More: How the Powell River, B.C. Name-Change Debate Turned Nasty

Last week’s bombshell announcement that BC United, the former provincial Liberal Party, was suspending its campaign for this fall’s election and throwing its support behind the Conservative Party of B.C. revealed just how dramatically the province’s political landscape has changed. In the fourth instalment of C2C’s series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts how John Rustad’s Conservative Party went in a breathtakingly short time from moribund to upstart to centre-stage and favoured to win, and lays out the issues that divide Canada’s third-biggest province and will dominate the coming campaign.

“You can’t go home again,” American novelist Thomas Wolfe once wrote. Should the same advice apply to the home of Canada’s most important political personality? Greg Piasetzki first visited Bellevue House, one-time Kingston abode of Canada’s founding father Sir John A. Macdonald, when he was a university student in the 1970s. Now, following a controversial renovation of the site by Parks Canada that aims to tell “broader, more inclusive stories about Canada’s first prime minister” – a makeover that includes signs denouncing Macdonald as “a monster” in his own home – Piasetzki returns to Bellevue House to take the measure of the changes.

Barely a year ago the Conservative Party of B.C. was a two-seat rump in the B.C. legislature with an untested leader. Now it has moved ahead in the polls and is positioned to pull off a massive upset in October’s election. In the third instalment of our series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts the rise of the Conservatives on Canada’s West Coast, showing how the party’s brand of populism is part of a longstanding political tradition in B.C. going back to the days of W.A.C. Bennett and his Social Credit powerhouse. Russ explains how the upcoming election promises to be a showdown between debt-addicted “progressive” leftist politics and prudent, fiscally-responsible conservative populism.

If your only tool is a hammer, the old saying goes, then all you ever see are nails. In other words, if your beliefs are formed by ideology and prejudice, then all the “study” in the world will lead to you the same conclusion – the view you held all along. And so it is with the radical activists tasked by the Justin Trudeau government with formulating a “Black Justice Strategy”. Examining the report and its implications, Noah Jarvis finds a document infected with toxic racial animus, purporting to reform an imagined Canada that seethes with racial hatreds and injustice, and proposing to misapply U.S. “solutions” that have failed disastrously. Worst of all, Jarvis writes, it attempts to set the racial populations of a country of fundamental goodwill against one another.

Amidst Canada’s acute productivity crisis, declining per capita income and crushing public debts, one might think governments would at last refocus on opportunities to grow our economy – or at least not shrink it deliberately. But on the West Coast, activists and decision-makers remain fixated on coddling a few dozen iconic members of a non-endangered species even at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in foregone revenue. And the federal government has proved all-too willing to facilitate the devastation. In the second instalment of C2C’s series on Canada’s troubled Pacific Province, Vancouver Island resident Gwyn Morgan explains how environmental politics are creating a biological pecking order in which whales are at the top, salmon in the middle – and humans at the bottom.

B.C.’s election campaign officially kicks off in mid-September, but in some ways it feels like it has been underway all summer. There’s trouble aplenty in what was long regarded as Canada’s Pacific paradise, and B.C.’s partisan landscape is being reshaped almost before our eyes. With that in mind, C2C kicks off a special series on Canada’s troubled Pacific Province with James R. Coggins’ examination of B.C.’s burgeoning public debt, a worrisome development in what was once arguably the nation’s financially best-managed province. Coggins charts B.C.’s journey in barely a decade from balanced budgets and manageable debt to seemingly perpetual deficits and a potential tripling of the provincial debt.

It’s a central tenet of the free-market economy: a corporation’s job is to maximize investment returns to its shareholders. Bluntly, to make money. And “shareholder proposals” have been a powerful tool enabling investors to pressure a company’s board to take a particular action to increase its value. In recent years, however, activist groups have been weaponizing shareholder proposals to pressure companies into pursuing ideological goals, especially environmental and “progressive” social-welfare causes. In the case of the oil and natural gas industry, they’ve even pushed for companies to take actions that would drive them out of business. Veteran markets expert Gina Pappano examines this damaging phenomenon – and the new movement pushing back.

Amidst the jostling theories about the nature of education, the philosopher G.K. Chesterton once succinctly summarized it as “simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” But what if that soul is being torn apart from within? What if today’s kids are told to despise almost everything about yesterday, in order to prepare them to overturn society tomorrow? James Pew traces the path of so-called “critical pedagogy” from the fever-dream of a Brazilian communist, to the guiding doctrine of an internationally celebrated Canadian teacher-training institute, and onward to the classroom activities in a growing number of Canadian schools. Part I of an extended series on the state of education in Canada.

The province of Québec has been a near-desert to the Conservative Party for most of the last 100 years. But the path to an enduring majority government for any federal party still runs through la belle province, argues Geoff Russ, and it represents an enticing opportunity for Conservatives today. Russ outlines how leader Pierre Poilievre should forge an alliance with the province’s moderate “nationalists” – non-separatists who are mainly concerned with the preservation of Québec’s French language and culture, as well as seeking more provincial autonomy – to win the next election, and without, Russ promises, sacrificing his party’s core principles.

In our largely “post-truth” society, the validity of a given statement is increasingly assessed based on who is making it. There are even those who believe that only some should be allowed to say certain things – while others should be scorned or even imprisoned for uttering the same words. This increasingly describes the discursive landscape concerning Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and whether Indigenous children disappeared from and/or were murdered there. Drawing on his lived experience as a onetime residential school employee, on his long academic record and, not least, on his personal courage in the face of those who wish to criminalize “denialism”, Rodney Clifton presents a humbly argued plea for Canadians to judge their country’s residential school record according to the truth – the actual, factual truth.

We stand on the precipice of a new technological age. Artificial intelligence promises (or threatens) to upend every aspect of modern life – from employment to entertainment, manufacturing to warfare – as well as the very relationship between humanity and the machinery it creates. Given AI’s potentially cataclysmic consequences, D.C.C. Randell argues it is imperative that we set not merely regulatory and technical boundaries around its development, but ethical ones as well. Combining the warnings of current AI experts with the wisdom of philosophers and moralists from past ages, Randell explains the dangers posed by allowing the AI revolution to continue unfettered and proposes steps to bring it in line.

The sight of a journalist getting roughed up and hustled off by police as he tries to ask a question of a public figure in a public place is one you might expect to witness in a banana republic or present-day Russia. But it has happened four times in Canada just this year to veteran journalist David Menzies of Rebel News. Menzies is an old-fashioned street journalist – right down to his trademark fedora – asking straight questions and digging for the truth no matter the consequences. In this instalment of C2C’s Courageous Canadians series, Associate Editor Brock Eldon sits down with Menzies to talk about his run-ins with the law, his determination to publish without fear or favour, and the state of Canadian journalism.

An encounter with a nearly incomprehensible, seemingly absurd and coldly indifferent judicial body offering no apparent hope of resolution would surely cause most citizens to give up in disgust. Gleb Lisikh is made of different stuff; being patronized and rebuffed only makes him dig harder. In this continuation of his now three-year-long legal Odyssey (Part I can be read here), Lisikh provides a firsthand account of the worsening dysfunction of Canada’s court system – and makes the startling discovery that activist human rights adjudicators are attempting to exclude millions of Ontarians from the protection of the human rights code.

Most everyone would agree the political movement led by Pierre Poilievre is not your parents’ Conservative Party. Then again, neither arguably was the government of Stephen Harper. Did the 50s-era populist John Diefenbaker embody “real” conservatism? For that matter, did Sir John A. Macdonald? One man who spent his life struggling to define Canadian conservatism and determine who measured up – and who fell short – was political philosopher George Grant. For Grant, conservatism was rooted in the pushback against the interconnected forces of liberalism, technology and the American superstate. Now, a group of (mostly young) conservatives have taken up the challenge of evaluating whether Grant himself knew what he was talking about, and how his ideas might be applied today. Barry Cooper examines their work.

The rupture of Calgary’s biggest water main revealed more than the problems of aging infrastructure. It showed a civic bureaucracy unable to provide basic services or fix things when they break, and a mayor eager to blame others and scold citizens for their selfishness in wanting city services in return for their tax dollars. Above all, it laid bare the increasing tendency of governments to neglect their core responsibilities in favour of social policy fetishes, and to sidestep accountability when things go wrong. Clear, competent, mission-focused public servants are a vanishing breed, writes George Koch, and governing a city is now mainly about keeping city workers, senior officials and elected politicians happy.