The famous gender-neutral washroom in the 1990s TV show Ally McBeal was a plot device meant for comedic purpose. These days it’s no laughing matter. Across Canada, separate men’s and women’s rooms are being replaced with unisex facilities in the name of “inclusivity”. And that leaves no place for the wall-mounted urinal. With this unloved male-only waste management device facing possible extinction, Peter Shawn Taylor takes a closer look. His wide-ranging research lifts the lid on the urinal’s remarkable efficiency and many other advantages. Whether they can use it or not, everybody should be standing up for the urinal.

“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss,” The Who’s Pete Townshend wrote back in 1971. Words that today might well apply to Mark Carney. Canada’s new Liberal Prime Minister says he wants to make Canada a “conventional and clean energy superpower”, and suddenly seems to support new oil and natural gas pipelines. But Gwyn Morgan, who devoted years as a CEO to defending Canada’s oil and natural gas industry, doesn’t buy it. Carney, he notes, spent years abroad on an ever-more-strident net-zero quest, and recently said he’s keeping his predecessor’s oil and gas emissions cap in place. In this incisive critique, Morgan takes the measure of the new PM and finds that the prospects of restoring the Canadian economy have dimmed further.

Segregation is a dirty word these days. But not every effort at separating individuals is a bad thing. And some attempts at enforced inclusion can yield provably disastrous results. A case in point is the treatment of gifted students in Canada’s rigid, DEI-focused public school system. Combining personal experience with rigorous academic research and recent education policy changes, Jonathan Barazzutti charts the damage being done to exceptional students – and to their average-ability classmates – by keeping them in classrooms where they clearly don’t belong. Barazzutti argues it is time for schools to let gifted students soar.

Canada’s recent federal election did not deliver what conservatives wanted. But after the obligatory post-mortems and doomsaying, what is most needed now is a look to the future. Conservatives can still work for a better Canada, one stronger and more prosperous, and over the next few weeks C2C Journal will present clear-eyed assessments by top authors of the issues that will drive Canada in the years ahead – the economy, citizenship, the federal structure, Alberta’s place within North America, and other important areas. In our series opener, Brock Eldon provides a young expatriate’s perspective on how Canada has changed, the opportunities Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives missed in speaking to our discontents, and what sort of leadership the country needs to move ahead.

Solving Canada’s continuing housing crisis requires an “all of the above” approach. And one item on the list that can no longer be ignored is what’s known as the New Town. With other countries eagerly embracing the idea of building brand new cities set apart from existing urban centres, John Roe argues it’s time for Canada to get on board as well; we’ve certainly got the room. While the track record for creating cities out of nothing includes its share of failures, Roe’s detailed research and reporting highlights important lessons that offer the chance to get it right this time. Properly executed, New Towns could help the legions of frustrated young Canadian families find a little bit of housing heaven they can afford to call their own.

Great Britain, once the cradle of free expression, now has the Western world’s most draconian anti-free-speech laws. Any British citizen can be investigated for a “Non-crime Hate Incident” instigated by any aggrieved “victim” who objects to anything they say or post on social media. Complainants needn’t provide evidence of harm or intent, and even if an accused person is not convicted, the incident remains on their record. John Weissenberger explains the rise of the UK’s dangerous legal regime and lays bare its troubling consequences. Massive resources are dedicated to policing speech and even thoughts – while real crime throughout the British Isles spirals out of control. Worse, those who protest the state’s indifference to increasing lawlessness find themselves in the justice system’s crosshairs. And Canada, Weissenberger warns, could soon travel down this same road.