2018

First Nations
Ottawa’s promise to rescue many dozens of dying Indigenous languages and effectively give them equivalent status with English and French has billion-dollar boondoggle written all over it. Peter Shawn Taylor makes a powerful case for letting lost tongues die a natural death.
Alberta Politics
One of the sillier narratives competing for traction in the Alberta election is that Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are modern incarnations of, respectively, Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein. This ignores the fact that Alberta boomed under Lougheed and has been a bust under Notley, and that Kenney is a philosophical conservative while Klein was flexible populist. Paul Stanway sorted much of this out in his review of Mark Milke’s timely book Ralph vs Rachel.
Asia & The West
Huawei makes great smartphones with the potential to be weapons of cyberwar between China and the West. That may partly explain why Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou for possible extradition to the U.S. As Mathew Preston reports, we’re being forced to take sides.
Energy Legislation
The current Canadian government claims the assessment process for deciding the fate of major natural resource projects including pipelines will be much improved if Bill C-69 becomes law. Andrew Roman has studied the proposed legislation in depth and arrived at the opposite conclusion. Considering all the new opportunities the law creates for litigation by environmental advocacy and Aboriginal opponents – including a special new right of First Nations to present evidence in secret – Ottawa’s claim brings to mind the words of the old Scottish proverb: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Charter Rights
Canadian conservatives blame the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms every time the courts render a Charter decision they don’t like, which is most of them. But the Charter’s not the main problem, writes Ben Woodfinden, and even if it were, it’s almost impossible to change. If you want to stop activist judges from using the Charter to enact progressive policy, the solution is to develop an “originalist” legal movement in Canada that will eventually produce judges who bring diversity of thought to constitutional cases, interpreting the Charter with restraint and respect for the supremacy of Parliament – just as its Framers intended.
Immigration
The number of Mexican visitors to Canada claiming asylum from rising criminal violence in their home country is way up since the Trudeau government dropped the visa requirement in 2016. That move may have helped Canada-Mexico relations but it puts domestic security at grave risk because it makes it easier for Mexico’s powerful drug cartels to expand their operations in Canada. As criminal violence spirals out of control in Mexico and the evidence of it spilling into Canada mounts, Greg Purdy contends a review of the visa-free policy is urgently needed.
Energy & Liberal Governments
Gwyn Morgan retired as CEO of Encana Corp. in 2006 after building it into Canada’s largest energy company and the largest of all Canadian companies by stock market value. It was the defacto flagship of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s vision of Canada as an “global energy superpower”. Now, a dozen years later, that dream lies in the ruins of current national energy policy, and Morgan’s successors have effectively moved Encana to the U.S. to escape Canada’s self-destructive business climate.
Read More
C2C Journal is pleased to announce that thanks to the loyal and generous support of our readers, contributors and donors, the Journal is immediately increasing volume and frequency of original stories and essays, expanding staff, unveiling a redesigned website, and launching a sustained social media marketing push on multi-media platforms. Editor Paul Bunner has the details.
Energy Hypocrisy
Steve Larke and Adam Le Dain hold up the mirror to our digital culture and reveal the breathtaking hypocrisy of everyone who condemns carbon energy while using all the technologies that increase hydrocarbon demand. If they really want to save the planet, they would give up their smart phones, forsake air travel, and stop buying cool stuff on Amazon that has to be delivered from all over the world – or acknowledge they won’t do any of that and instead support responsible energy resource development in Canada.
First Nations
Canadians got a glimpse inside the country’s racially segregated justice system this fall when they learned that one of the perpetrators of a hideous child rape-murder had been quietly transferred from a prison to an Aboriginal “healing lodge”. The public outcry forced Ottawa to put Terri-Lynne McClintic back behind bars, but raised all kinds of questions about Canada’s efforts to reduce the “overrepresentation” of Aboriginal Canadians in jail. The obvious big one is, are they working. And the answer, reports Josh Dehaas, is no.

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