“We hold these truths”: The U.S. Declaration of Independence at 250

Artists once understood they were serving something greater than themselves – truth, beauty, memory – things universal and transcendent. No longer. In a culture where imagination is cast as “cultural appropriation” and exploitation, what matters is not art but the artist. Ego, self-regard and “lived experience” are paramount. In this searing critique, T. G. Kelemen uses recent examples of cancellation in the arts to explain how “progressive” pieties have inverted the very foundation of the arts, fuelling not just a culture war, but a war on culture.

You may not be much interested in politics, but politics – to borrow from the famous dictum on war by Leon Trotsky – is most definitely interested in you. With land acknowledgements to stand up for, rainbow-coloured sidewalks to stride over, garbage to sort and slogans like “Elbows up!” to recite, politics in today’s world is virtually inescapable. But is there any point in even trying? David Solway argues that the answer is an emphatic “Yes”. In a transcendent essay that ranges from idyllic Aegean islands to crumbling 19th-century communes, Solway paints a vivid portrait of the nature and meaning of apolitical life in its full sense, charting its evolution and blind alleys in literature, art and real-world attempts – and issuing a rallying cry for its centrality in building and, he still hopes, saving the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

As if the mayhem created by the 2025 Cowichan decision regarding property rights wasn’t enough, the B.C. court system has now declared its readiness to undermine legal contracts as well. As Peter Best reveals, a January 2026 decision to allow a contentious Indigenous lawsuit to proceed threatens to upend centuries of contract law. At issue is a small B.C. First Nation’s claim it has an aboriginal title right to export propane on an industrial scale, one that should overrule a signed, legal contract between the port of Prince Rupert and a billion-dollar energy project that itself is providing major aboriginal benefits. Acceding to such an outrageous demand, Best warns, will plunge relations between natives and the rest of Canada further into chaos and mistrust.

Canada’s immigration system was once the envy of the world. Based on the notion that those who get into the country are those who determine its future, the system chose people best able to contribute. Then the Trudeau Liberals blew it up, opening the gates to just about anyone – including literal terrorists – wreaking economic havoc and breaking Canadians’ faith in the value of citizenship. John Weissenberger, who served as chief of staff to the federal immigration minister in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, has watched it happen with growing dismay, and argues for a return to sanity – centred on the sensible “points” system that served Canada so well for decades.

Waiting lists stretching years. Plummeting quality. Outraged parents. Providers slowly strangled by red tape. The federal Liberals’ vaunted $10-a-day childcare program has proved an expensive disaster. Five years in, Matthew Lau digs into the many problems and inequities this landmark social policy has delivered. Lau finds B.C., which had a three-year head start on the rest of the country and an enthusiastic NDP government leading the way, in the worst straits of all. With an irretrievably flawed system clearly failing Canadian families, Lau argues that Prime Minister Mark Carney should pivot to a fairer, cheaper and more effective alternative.

After decades spent pursuing net-zero dreams at great cost to their economies and social fabric, most of the world’s industrialized nations are waking back up. War with Iran and the threat of tanker blockades have everyone worried about oil and natural gas supplies and clamouring for energy security. Or nearly everyone. Not Mark Carney, though. Canada’s prime minister keeps pushing industrial carbon taxes higher and insists on wasting taxpayers’ money on windmills that make no difference. Gwyn Morgan recalls his own observation of the global warming movement’s original rise, its morphing into the radical “net zero” cult – and its spectacular global disintegration. It is high time, Morgan writes, that Canadians demand Carney also drop his delusions.

Indigenous land acknowledgements have become so common that many Canadians no longer give them a second thought – simply accepting a kind of tuneless new national anthem before events of all sorts. And that’s why they’re so dangerous. The enforced conformity and compelled speech they depend on are not just threats to individual freedom, writes George Ramsay, they also create a divisive moral hierarchy based on race. In this originally reported story, Ramsay delves into the dangers posed by Canada’s broader shift to enforced verbal compliance, reveals the inspiring stories of a few brave souls who have dared to challenge this social tyranny and offers practical tips on how the rest of us can fight back too.

Generation Z should know better than anyone the risk that technology poses to personal privacy. They are after all the first generation to grow up entirely in the digital age. Jessica Nwaefidoh knows from personal experience how vulnerable your most intimate information can be. With companies anxious to profit from everyone’s personal data, politicians happy to play along for their own selfish reasons and most people willing to sacrifice their own privacy for convenience, amusement or just to get by, Nwaefidoh argues that it’s time to fight back. The right to be left alone, she finds, requires constant vigilance – and she offers some practical tactics to reclaim that right.

Older generations often roll their eyes when young people seek to blame them for their woes. But if Canada’s Gen Zers feel betrayed by the Boomers, they are right to do so, argues Gwyn Morgan. Years of irresponsible fiscal and regulatory policies have hamstrung the Canadian economy and left younger generations facing a bleak future of stagnant wages, rising taxes and shrinking opportunities. A former business leader who created more than his share of jobs and prosperity during his long corporate career, Morgan casts a worried eye over the next generation – and offers sympathy for the situation they’re inheriting.

Ireland’s Ryanair will fly you from London to Geneva for $49. Flying from Calgary to Vancouver – a shorter trip – likely will set you back four times as much. Canadians suffer some of the highest-priced, least-convenient and most unpleasant airline service in the world, and mainly for one reason: forestalled competition. In fact, creating barriers to prevent any meaningful competition has been the main goal of Canadian airline policy since the formation of Trans-Canada Air Lines in 1937. Simon Michell explains how this sorry situation came to be and reveals how opening up our skies – as so many other countries have already done – would make things much better for us all.

Canada, the old saying goes, suffers from too much geography and too little history. That ratio is getting even more out of whack. Since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 and gathering speed following allegations of mass graves in Kamloops in 2021, many of Canada’s most important historical figures have been erased in a tidal wave of cancellations and repudiations – all driven by a mob of woke activists uninterested in the true facts of Canada’s past. But as Jerry Amernic discovered while researching a book on historical revisionism, there are still those who believe Canadians can handle the truth. And they’re working hard to rescue our nation from the history hijackers.

For years now the Left has shown itself eager to claim hatred as the motive for anyone who opposes its worldview. This impulse has become a poisonous social force – elevating identity politics, quashing freedom, driving cancel culture and threatening the very foundation of Western liberal democracy. But where did it come from? Collin May, a former Chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission who himself experienced cancellation, explores the deep origins in this thoughtful and wide-ranging essay. From Ancient philosophers and early theologians through Renaissance scholars and fashionable modern intellectuals, May traces this dark pathology’s evolution and explains why it’s so dangerous.

It’s a rare and beautiful thing to see Canada’s courts strike a blow for individual freedom, but that’s what happened in an Ottawa courthouse last month. In a ringing and powerfully-reasoned decision, the Federal Court of Appeal found the Justin Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests violated the law and the Constitution. Civil rights lawyer Christine Van Geyn, who was in the thick of the nearly four years of litigation the event triggered, explains why the court agreed that Trudeau’s actions constituted a draconian abuse of power – and why its ruling could prove a historic victory for Canadian civil liberties.

B.C.’s decision to abandon letter grades in favour of four vague “proficiency” categories is the latest example of the move to do away with objective standards throughout Canada’s public education system. Traditional grading methods are too hard on the tender egos of young students, the logic goes. And the possibility of failure is outdated, if not downright racist. Christina Park reveals how this new system is failing parents, who have a right to know how their child is doing, and harming students, who may be denied the help they need. She also uncovers some “gritty optimism” about the possible return of coherent educational standards.

Germany was postwar Europe’s most successful nation – until it was seized by an arrogant leftist ideology that led it down a ruinous path. Its government abandoned safe, zero-emission nuclear power for inefficient wind and solar plus natural gas from Vladmir Putin. It threw open its borders to millions of asylum-seekers with barely a thought to the enormous costs or the difficulties of social integration. Today, at the 11th hour, Germany is at last struggling to turn around its decade of economic decline and social disintegration. In this cautionary tale, Gwyn Morgan sees a profound warning for Canada.