Prime Minster Mark Carney came into office promising to move fast to rebuild a Canadian economy suffering from 10-years of mismanagement. He vowed a more clear-eyed, businesslike approach. But since his election victory, his public statements have often been hedged and shrouded in ambiguity. In this incisive analysis, economist and veteran policy advisor Robert Lyman and C2C Editor-in-Chief George Koch look at the choices Carney faces on the big economic issues of the day and lay out the sensible decision in each case. Carney says he has the determination to turn the ship of state around. But does he have the courage to soften and even ditch the ideology that increasingly gripped the Liberal Party during the Justin Trudeau era?

A Prairie lawyer standing up for the common man. A stubborn loner undone by battles with his own party. Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker was both – and one of the most consequential prime ministers in Canadian history. A new biography of “The Chief” examines Diefenbaker’s many accomplishments – his Canadian Bill of Rights, his fair treatment of Indigenous people, his defence of Canadian sovereignty, his wide-ranging national economic development – and corrects the record on this frequently-misunderstood political giant. While it is best to avoid judging history’s great figures by contemporary standards, writes John Weissenberger in this incisive review of Freedom Fighter, Diefenbaker is one whose record stands up by any standard – and whose determination and ability to get things done would be welcome today.

Mark Carney’s repeated claims that he loves, understands and respects Alberta have been met with deep skepticism in that province. But what if we took him at his word? What if the former Bank of Canada governor’s bespoke persona as condescending globalist prone to “net-zero” proclamations is just an elaborate ideological smokescreen? What if the federal Liberal leader is really a political sleeper agent, sent East by a cabal of crafty Albertans intent on gaining their independence? Seen this way, certain things do begin to make some semblance of sense. In an upside-down, post-truth world where satire is almost (if not quite) impossible, George Koch ponders the imponderable: that Laurentian Carney is actually a deep-cover Alberta separatist on the verge of pulling off his ultimate mission.

“Parachute” candidates. Direct appointees. Mysterious disqualifications and rule changes. Elections with just one contestant. The nomination process used by political parties to select their candidates is one of the building blocks of Canadian democracy. And yet on close inspection, this system reveals itself to be profoundly and embarrassingly undemocratic. There must be a better way. Jake Melo Valinho examines the origins and key characteristics of the complex U.S. primary election system and discovers a possible remedy for Canada’s deeply flawed nominations contests: a bracing dose of transparency and vigorous competition.

Donald Trump launched his campaign to strengthen his country’s security with typical bombast. But does the U.S. President’s style entirely delegitimize the substance of his messages? Grave security threats are lapping at North America’s shores. Where others see only chaos and craziness in Trump’s approach, former Canadian Armed Forces officer Barry Sheehy detects coherence and good cause underlying an emerging continental security strategy. And as other countries bend to America’s will, warns Sheehy, Canada had better step up, begin repairing its neglected, decrepit military and national security apparatus, and start doing what it should have done long ago to secure its Far North.

When the Métis were included in Canada’s 1982 Constitution as “aboriginal peoples”, some members complained that they’d been handed an “empty box” compared to the ample rights and treaties offered to Indian and Inuit people. Since then, however, Canada’s court system has been hard at work filling up that box. Now, with the signing of a “nation-to-nation” treaty late last year, Manitoba Métis have a box that’s positively overflowing with new rights, powers and federal cash. Peter Best explores how Canada came to recognize a fractious, landless, fully-assimilated, colonial-era group – a group that is actually represented by a corporation – as a nation with an inherent right to self-government, as well as the deeply problematic consequences of this decision.

Canada’s beleaguered economy has become beset with strikes called by unions demanding double-digit wage hikes in an era of constrained budgets and slim profit margins. The latest one, by Canada Post, is already inflicting great damage and threatens to drag on, perhaps right up to Christmas. Yet recent legislation passed by the Liberal government (pushed by the NDP) has made it more likely that major strikes will occur, and even more difficult for employers to try to continue functioning. This, writes Gwyn Morgan, is increasingly dividing Canada into a nation of “haves” – overpaid unionized workers – and “have nots” – everyone else. It is time, says Morgan, that someone stood up for the millions of Canadians victimized by power-wielding union bosses and the governments that enable them.

Most Canadians have come to agree that the federal carbon tax needs to go. But while the rallying cry “Axe the Tax!” has been a deadly partisan tool for Pierre Poilievre, it does not constitute a credible election campaign platform, let alone a coherent environmental policy for a new government. The Conservative Party needs to develop both, writes Robert Lyman. The election this past week of Donald Trump as U.S. President creates an urgency to remake Canada’s climate policy on more realistic, sensible grounds. Drawing upon the pragmatic, economics-driven approach of the Copenhagen Consensus, Lyman proposes a middle path that discards the uncompromising, self-destructive ideology of the Justin Trudeau government while recognizing that most Canadians won’t accept doing nothing.

More people are becoming painfully familiar with the expression “the process is the punishment” – a legal or regulatory matter of such cost, complexity, length and personal stress that, regardless of its formal outcome, the targeted person emerges damaged, sometimes irreparably. It is all-but impossible not to attach this label to the nearly three-year-long prosecution of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, which has included a marathon 13-month-long trial, now awaiting its verdict. In Part II of this series, Lynne Cohen takes readers inside the Ottawa Courthouse – talking to the defendants, their lawyers and other experts – illuminating the Crown’s relentless pursuit of the Freedom Convoy organizers. (Part I can be read here. )

Amidst the litany of grievances levelled by Indigenous organizations it is easy to overlook the genuine progress made by some First Nations. Democratically elected native governments have negotiated additional rights, expanded their lands and gained control over natural resources and major projects, creating a sustainable economic base. But that apparently isn’t the course desired by a vocal subset of politically charged Indigenous North Americans. They’re unsatisfied with incremental progress or compromise. They are all grievance, all the time. And they want it all. Michael Melanson examines the emergence of the Indigenous “Land Back” concept, its evolution into militancy and potential violence, and its recent metastasis into some of the darkest crevices of the human psyche.

If there is a politico-historical thread running from Louis Riel and the buffalo-hunting Métis rebels in Confederation-era Manitoba, via Ottawa’s creation of three second-class Prairie provinces, followed by decades of friction over resource ownership and taxation, all the way to the convoys of diesel-powered trucks that rumbled into Ottawa to protest federal vaccine mandates in the winter of 2022, few have taken note. David Solway is one. As the main convoy leaders await a court verdict, Solway is taking the long view. He asserts that the truckers’ protest is a powerful contemporary manifestation of a recurring theme – perhaps the defining theme – of how Canada is governed, and to whose benefit. But while Canada’s late-19th century leaders were flawed men who made mistakes, Solway finds, the country’s current federal leadership appears outright bent on destruction.

In 2019 the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity – defined as “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence…[and] self-reliance” – to be a “harmful” malady in need of diagnosis and correction. Since then, so-called toxic masculinity has cast a pall over all men by redefining male virtues as a danger to themselves and society. Lynne Cohen pushes back against this perspective, revealing the many ways in which acting like a man is not only normal but essential to societal success. In search of a way for men to be men again, Cohen promotes “tonic” masculinity as the necessary corrective to our era of anti-male hysteria. (Part II can be read here, and Part III, by Peter Shawn Taylor, can be read here.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

In their rush to strike a virtuous blow against plastic waste, the federal Liberals skipped a few important steps. The 2022 ban on plastic straws, shopping bags and other useful household items deliberately ignored the basic facts of waste disposal in Canada, as well as the economic reality of substituting other materials for cheap and effective plastic. What else got overlooked? Canada’s Constitution. With a court hearing set for later this month to decide on the fate of the ban, Christine Van Geyn takes a close look at the legal arguments involved in Ottawa’s efforts to phase out certain plastic items, and the vast constitutional threat this poses if allowed to stand.

When – or perhaps if – Canadians think about “foreign aid”, they probably imagine idealistic aid workers treating patients in a remote health clinic, a technical expert designing a new bridge or perhaps an academic offering advice on operating fair courts of law. But these are all being pushed into the background as ideology takes over the planning and provision of Canada’s foreign assistance programs. Not only have bridges and tractors given way to morning-after pills and wind turbines, but aid programs are being shaped to serve only certain kinds of people. The kinds Liberals like. Anna Farrow charts the radical remaking of foreign assistance in which Canada uses foreign aid to interfere in the domestic politics and local cultures of recipient countries, turning the mild-mannered middle power into a practitioner of coercive diplomacy and cultural imperialism – arguably even neo-colonialism.

In China, minor security infractions are routinely punished with lengthy jail terms in dreadful conditions. In Canada, it’s just the opposite. Clear evidence of espionage is rewarded with a free pass back home after the mission is complete. Neglecting our national security in this way may suit the Justin Trudeau government, but it is doing great harm to Canada’s relationship with its most important allies. In the concluding instalment of his two-part series, Peter Shawn Taylor examines the many ways in which the spy scandal at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg has damaged Canada’s international standing and contributed to the growing perception that Canada is a foreign agent’s happy place. (Part I is here.)

In a breathless 1999 article on the opening of Canada’s top-security National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, the Canadian Medical Association Journal described the facility as “the place where science fiction movies would be shot.” The writer was fascinated by the various containment devices and security measures designed to keep “the bad boys from the world of virology: Ebola, Marburg, Lassa” from escaping. But what if insiders could easily evade all those sci-fi features in order to help Canada’s enemies? In the first of a two-part series, Peter Shawn Taylor looks into the trove of newly-unclassified evidence regarding the role of NML scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng in aiding China’s expanding quest for the study – and potential military use – of those virus bad boys.

The January 2021 riot in the U.S. Capitol generated a wave of moral panic in Washington – and, it seems, Ottawa, which a month later designated Proud Boys Canada a terrorist entity, placing them on par with Al-Qaida, ISIS and Boko Haram. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair claimed to have a “trove of evidence” showing a “concerning escalation of violence” by the group. But an exclusive investigation by John Kline, which unearthed its own trove of documents through Access to Information, shows the Trudeau government’s case was based not on hard evidence but ideological prejudice and media reports about a U.S. group whose small Canadian affiliate had nothing to do with the events in question. Kline’s research reveals a government motivated by clinging to power, cozying up to the Biden Administration and elevating “right-wing extremism” into a major national security concern.

A second “D” has been added to DEI. But where diversity, equity and inclusion use complaints of oppression and racism to seek power within existing social structures, decolonization seeks to tear down those very structures. It’s the most violent and dangerous threat yet to emerge from the left’s war on Western civilization. It’s showing up where you might expect – in Canada’s Indigenous politics and in the anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s atrocities – and in some places you might not, like grade 9 math classes where students are taught that 2+2=4 is just another subjective Eurocentric construct. Brock Eldon digs into decolonization’s European origin story and explains how it became such a pervasive and dangerous phenomenon in Canada.

To hear proponents tell it, proportional representation is the cure for all that ails Canadian democracy. It’s fairer, less divisive, more diverse, makes voters happier and is less prone to “strategic” voting. About the only thing it apparently can’t do is make childbirth painless. But could replacing our traditional first-past-the-post voting system really improve how Canada is governed – and how Canadians feel about their government? In his grand-prize-winning entry to the 1st Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest, Nolan Albert weighs the arguments for and against replacing first-past-the-post with proportional representation, and in doing so uncovers the real cause of voter dissatisfaction.

Yes, social media companies have succeeded in grabbing the vast bulk of advertising dollars that once supported Canada’s legacy news industry. But is offering a better product to eager consumers really “stealing”, as media companies and politicians now allege? And should new media titans Meta/Facebook and Google be forced to compensate their old-school competitors for failing to adapt to changing realities? In the first of three prize-winning entries from the 1st Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest to be published by C2C Journal, Clayton DeMaine examines the Justin Trudeau government’s much-fought-over Online News Act, its devastating impact on Canada’s news business and how the imbroglio is affecting his own dreams of becoming a journalist.

To be successful and enduring, a government must firmly establish its own legitimacy as the sole sovereign power within its boundaries. Anything else brings chaos. So why are Canadian governments so meekly accepting of the ongoing erosion of their authority by the courts? Taking a close look at a recent B.C. Supreme Court case that threatens to demolish the 164-year-old legal foundation of the province’s mining industry, Peter Best examines the practical and legal implications of this court-ordered diminution of Canada’s national sovereignty at the expense of the rapidly growing and vaguely defined notion of Indigenous sovereignty.

The term “rule of law” gets used a lot but, judging by how it is used, many people seem to misunderstand its meaning – including politicians at the highest levels. Appearances to the contrary, it does not refer to political governance by the courts, a country ruled entirely by lawyers, every disagreement triggering litigation or governments addressing every issue with more and more laws. Fundamentally, it means a system in which all – including the highest rulemakers – are bound equally by the law, no person or organization is above the law and governance never occurs outside the law. In this pre-publication excerpt from their new book launching at month-end, Joanna Baron and Christine Van Geyn chart Canada’s worrisome deterioration into a country no longer entirely under the rule of law, the resulting encouragement of lawlessness and the grave damage being done to the lives and liberties of Canadian citizens.

In its fanatical drive for “net zero,” the Justin Trudeau government is eviscerating Canada’s manufacturing sector and imposing massive costs on Canadians, while dancing along to China’s charade that it intends to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions, even as the Communist regime oversees record construction of new carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. The economic wellbeing of Canadians is, in other words, being progressively destroyed – and for nothing. It is time to wake up from this absurdist slumber, writes Gwyn Morgan, and also offers a formula for Canada to assign the costs of carbon emissions where they actually belong, rescue the nation’s manufacturing sector before it’s too late, lift the carbon tax burden from Canadians and, perhaps, even help the global environment.

For many Canadians, figuring out the differences between a savings account and chequing account is all the banking knowledge they really want. Understanding how Bitcoin works or what a blockchain does seems overwhelming and irrelevant. Yet knowing your way around these digital banking innovations may soon prove vital to protecting your privacy and pushing back against government overreach. Using the experience of last year’s Freedom Convoy as his guide, Gleb Lisikh explains the nuances of cryptocurrencies, their strengths – and weaknesses – as bulwarks against financial censorship and why the Bank of Canada is suddenly so interested in creating its own cashless currency.

Few Canadians know the story: thousands of black slaves taken west of the Mississippi by their Indigenous masters – who themselves were forced there on the Trail of Tears expulsion – faced continuing persecution when Oklahoma became a state. So a thousand of them pulled up stakes and headed to Canada, “where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as one of them put it. In telling their inspiring story, Tom Flanagan recounts how they faced resistance both from some white settlers and, notably, from Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government, which banned black immigration. In an era when Conservative historical figures are decried as racist oppressors, it’s worth knowing the truth. It’s even more important to celebrate the determination and ultimate success of a freedom-loving people who came north.

Free trade and economic liberalization have been bedrock beliefs of Canadian conservatives and official Conservative party policy since the 1980s. But in the past few years, conservatives in the United States and Europe have charged that these policies destroy manufacturing jobs, promote national economic decline and cede authority and influence to bad actors like China. What’s a Canadian conservative to do? Samuel Routley traces the evolution of conservative thinking on free trade and draws lessons for how it should change now. Conservatives, Routley argues, should dislodge free trade from ideological orthodoxy and redirect attention to a renewed engagement with social and cultural institutions.