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.

Art class was once among the most straightforward high school courses to teach. Show the students how to paint, mold, sketch or craft, and then let them explore their world. Today, however, like the rest of the teaching experience, art class can be a terrifying, even life-threatening event. Recounting the case of a young high school art teacher who was attacked by a student with a large pair of scissors, Brock Eldon looks into the recent and dramatic increase in violence in Canadian schools and asks what’s behind it. While teachers’ unions steadfastly claim insufficient education funding is the culprit, Eldon reviews the evidence and comes to a different, and far more worrisome, conclusion: it is teachers themselves who are largely to blame – reaping the woke whirlwind they have sown.

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.

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.

As mid-winter takes hold, millions of Canadians are planning a getaway to someplace warm or mapping out a bucket-list trip for next summer. Travel has long provided both an escape from everyday life and a way to experience different cultures. Now it’s under attack from the “ethical tourism” movement that sees travel as shallow and destructive. It wants tourism curtailed in the name of social justice, postcolonial redress and ecological mindfulness. Some environmental think-tanks and at least one “ethical” tour operator even advocate “carbon passports” that would minimize the amount of travel people are allowed each year. Drawing on his personal journeys in Southeast Asia, Brock Eldon takes apart this phenomenon and makes the case for the beauty, tradition and economic value brought to the world through the mutual engagement enabled by tourism. Wanderlust is a deep human impulse, Eldon observes, part of what sustains us, carrying the promise of enlightenment and the spark of joy.

Back in Canada and midway through his M.A. in literature at an elite university, Brock Eldon has almost fallen apart, bottoming out during fruitless therapy. He finds solace in trusted family, reviving his determination to return to campus and confront his tormentor. Things don’t go as planned, as woke professors roil the department in a slow-rolling intellectual coup while M.A. and PhD students virtually beg to be shielded from the world’s greatest literature. In the concluding installment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon’s conviction solidifies that wokism is little more than remixed radical Marxism and that, to survive, he simply must not give in. (Part I is here and Part II is here.)

The purpose of great art and literature is to nourish the human spirit on an individual level. Or so Brock Eldon saw it. What he encountered in graduate school at an elite Canadian university was literature warped into a political tool of intimidation and compulsion, debauching even Shakespeare and destroying nearly everything in its path. Eldon watched the descent of PhD students into angry shouting nihilists and the incipient disintegration of a literature department. He descended a long way himself, fearing for his sanity and for civilization. In the second instalment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon melds his years spent in East Asia, where he found greater intellectual freedom than in Canada, into a penetrating and original take on the Vietnam War’s centrality to the postmodern/neo-Marxist capture of Western culture and institutions. Part I is here.

Brock Eldon entered Canada’s elite universities a true believer in everything they represented: the integrity of these institutions of higher education, the quality of their professors, the rigour of their scholarship, the purposefulness of their syllabi, and the meaningfulness of the degrees he would earn. He left confused, disillusioned and disgusted. Rebuilding his life in East Asia, Eldon clung to two things: an unshakeable conviction that the truth exists to be discovered – that two plus two really do make four – and a burning determination to tell his story. In the first instalment of his nonfiction novella – published here for the first time – Eldon recounts his youthful faith followed by his first, worrisome encounters with a graduate department in the throes of wokist nihilism.