Should Omar Khadr—or his mother—be tried for treason? In a past issue, C2C Journal commissioned several authors to look at treason in Canada and how the concept declined. See https://c2cjournal.ca/past-issues/ and scroll down to Volume 4 Issue 1 – Whatever Happened to Treason?
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.
Celebrating the fact of one’s country’s existence, its survival through the adversities of history and its positive or uplifting attributes is a fact of life the world over, even in tyrannies and oligarchies. Nearly everyone can find something to love about the place they call home. Yet this is apparently not the case for many inhabitants of present-day Canada, who claim that what was once the self-described “greatest country in the world” has suddenly become a systemically racist hell-hole. Despite such pressure from the woke mob and their elite enablers, however, the editors of C2C Journal find much that is not merely defensible about Canada, but praiseworthy and downright glorious.
Aboriginal grievance and entitlement stories made a lot of news in Canada in June. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau renamed National Aboriginal Day as National Indigenous Peoples Day. He also renamed his office to erase its historic link to Hector Langevin, an architect of the residential schools system. And he gave the old American embassy in Ottawa to native groups. Still aboriginal activists weren’t satisfied. So they badgered an apology out of Governor General David Johnston for calling First Nations peoples immigrants. Which left the author of this story wondering, where on or off earth do these insatiably aggrieved activists come from?
In 1972 Lou Reed offended conservatives with his hit Walk on the Wild Side, an admiring ode to his transgendered friend Holly, who left Miami as a he and became a she on the way to New York. In 2017 the song has offended progressives as a transphobic example of cultural appropriation. In this article by C2C Staff, the Journal explains what a long, strange trip it’s been from conservative censorship to progressive censorship.
