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.

Two of the basic things governments and public health officials needed to know to gauge the dangers of Covid-19 and plan the response were: how many transmissible cases were out there, and how lethal the virus really was. It turns out they didn’t really know either. Perhaps, gripped by their narrative of panic, they didn’t want to know. Gleb Lisikh reveals how skewed interpretation of the standard Covid-19 test combined with public health policies of inflating Covid-19 death numbers led to massive overestimation of the pandemic’s scale. If there is a next time, then before they shut down the world economy and destroy personal freedoms, they might want to make sure they get the numbers right.

Canadians are regularly harangued about how their nation and its institutions, including the RCMP, ostensibly brutalized Indigenous people to the point of “genocide.” But the fact is, the RCMP proved among the best friend Indigenous people had. Robert MacBain tells the near-forgotten story of how its predecessor force, the North-West Mounted Police, saved one of Canada’s largest groups of Indigenous tribes from a terrible fate. Drawing from contemporaneous accounts, including the words of prominent chiefs, MacBain recounts how the force protected the Blackfoot from the depredations of the whiskey trade, winning their friendship and trust. It was about as far from genocidal behaviour as can be.

Many Canadians retain a sentimental attachment to the RCMP born of its long and, until recently, distinguished record of public service. Even as crime rates rise worrisomely across Canada, however, the force’s crime-fighting competence has increasingly come into question and its image has been tarnished by a series of fiascos. In this comprehensive look at a force under fire, Doug Firby investigates why so many jurisdictions, most notably Alberta, are considering dropping the Mounties to build their own police forces – and why the strongest impetus for change might end up coming from Ottawa.

Many are concerned about Big Tech’s increasing censorship, manipulation and left-wing bias – sometimes openly admitted. But that doesn’t mean Facebook, Google et al are always wrong, nor that their enemies are necessarily our friends. In this instance, Canada’s legacy newspapers, which are waging an increasingly unctuous campaign for legislated subsidies both from government and the unwilling tech giants. Peter Menzies believes Canada’s media companies are dead wrong. The former newspaper publisher and media regulator regards their demands as unfair extortion by a dying sector – “palliative care for zombies.” Even worse, signal an increasing dependency upon and subjugation to the censorship-happy, control-obsessed Justin Trudeau government.

It has been one year since Gwyn Morgan’s article The Dictator and the Truckers: A True Canadian Folk Tale appeared in C2C. The saga did not end there – unfortunately. The Liberal dictator’s targets continue to endure the whims of Canada’s increasingly politicized justice system. While habitual criminals with dozens of past convictions are allowed to roam free only to commit multiple horrific murders, the peaceful if outspoken organizers of the Freedom Convoy barely gain bail and have their conditional liberty revoked on the flimsiest of pretexts. Now, as key Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich contemplates her criminal trial later this year, Morgan sets forth the grotesque violations of constitutional rights that brought us to this point.

It hardly seemed the stuff of “professional misconduct and incompetence.” The wrong kind of hand towel hung in a patient washroom. An incorrectly worded report. Some pointed Tweets. Pushing the bounds of patient advocacy. Yet these are among the triggers used by Ontario’s medical college to destroy the careers and livelihoods of physicians who departed from the official Covid-19 narrative and exercised independent professional judgment in treating their patients. In so doing, the regulatory body also robbed patients of their doctors amidst a worsening physician shortage. Jason Unrau reports on three suspended Ontario doctors who – like psychologist Jordan Peterson – are waging a spirited defence. There are many more like them across Canada.

Too much Hollywood can damage your understanding of Canada’s legal system. When Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she was thinking of “pardoning” many who were charged with violating Covid-19 public health orders, her critics claimed that was something only U.S. governors could do. Then they accused her staff of contacting Crown prosecutors for a similar purpose – violating the purportedly iron ring of prosecutorial independence (another American concept tied to elected Attorneys General). But as Grant A. Brown explains, Smith is well within her powers to hand out pardons and deliver guidance to Crown prosecutors. In fact, there’s ample precedent federally and in Alberta. If handled correctly, both are entirely proper practices.

Near the end of Elizabeth Truss’ disastrous 45-day stint as British Prime Minister, the Daily Star tabloid famously asked readers if Truss could outlast a head of lettuce. After six days, the lettuce won. Elizabeth May has had a considerably longer run as head of Canada’s Green Party. Since returning to the job in November after a previous 13 years at the helm, she’s the longest-serving leader of any current federal party. Yet the wilt is unmistakable. Riven by internal dissension, plummeting election results, troubling allegations of anti-Semitism and a platform that’s been stolen by other, more credible parties, can May refresh a Green Party that appears well past its best-before date?

In normal times, it would be a relatively simple matter to agree on clear and factual information about the people, places and events that shaped our country’s history. But these are not normal times. In our angry and judgmental woke world, the past must be repeatedly condemned, if not erased altogether. The latest example of this skewed and politicized process comes from the federal government’s ongoing review of the plaques and official designations that commemorate Canada’s most important historical figures and sites. Taking a close look at some of the giants from our past, historian Larry Ostola considers this latest threat to Canada’s collective memory and how his discipline has been led astray by “presentism.”

What sort of politician deliberately avoids learning economics while purporting to personify fiscal responsibility? Harbours socially liberal to left-leaning views but can’t bring themselves to join the Liberals or NDP? Disdains principled members of their own party more than politicians on the other team? And loses election after election while insisting their never-changing approach is the sure path back to office? Why, a Progressive Conservative, that’s who. Drawing on his over 40 years in and around politics, John Weissenberger offers a rollicking overview of the alternately odd, amusing, infuriating and just plain self-defeating bundle of contradictions that are Canada’s Red Tories.

Was the nadir of the Trudeau government’s foreign policy when the prime minister beclowned himself in donning an Indian folk costume while on an official state visit? Or when he declared Europe’s acute energy supply crisis would be solved through more wind and solar power? Each became emblematic of the sad slide in Canada’s international credibility. So it has been encouraging to see all the Conservative Party leadership candidates thinking seriously about foreign and defence policy. While they differ in detail and disagree about significant aspects, it seems certain whoever wins the race will put the Liberals on notice that under a Conservative prime minister, there’d be no more Mr. Dress-Up. Mathew Preston reviews and compares each candidate’s positions – and agrees it’s time for Canada to put its Big Boy Pants back on.

The knives are out for Pierre Poilievre. Virtually everything about him displeases not only the hard-left but soft conservatives and ostensibly well-meaning centrists who believe – or claim – that he is an ideologue (or opportunist) mesmerized by (or perhaps merely exploiting) populism, a word raised in their minds to the power of incantation signalling everything bad in the human soul. Samuel Routley conducts a detached and good-faith evaluation of Poilievre’s policies, style, messaging and background, setting the Conservative leadership candidate’s meteoric rise against the context of an increasingly disgruntled electorate with a potential “change” election on the horizon.

Perhaps the Liberal Party of Canada’s new tagline could become a play on an old song, something like “Up, up and awaaaaay, in our magical, our magical balloon.” As they waft ever-higher, the rest of us will be left behind to deal with the remains. The Liberals’ magical thinking, notes Gwyn Morgan, largely revolves around the fantasy that Canada’s transition to “net zero” can simply be declared, demanded and decreed while Canada’s oil and natural gas sector is regulated out of existence. This is worse than naïve, Morgan argues, it is colossally irresponsible, already doing real damage by indirectly enriching Russia’s war machine. And if not reversed soon it portends even worse for Canadians and others around the world. Morgan offers a bracing list of facts to puncture the Liberal airship.

With Canada’s Conservatives possibly inclined to select a discernibly conservative candidate as their next leader, the nation’s opinion leaders and news media have swung into action to convince them of the error of their ways. And if Conservatives still decline to choose an all-but unelectable Liberal-lite/Red Tory who, even if they reach office, won’t upset the establishment’s applecart, then the alternative candidates must be discredited. If they aren’t a religious throwback, then surely they are sinister, or have a hidden agenda, or would destroy health care. And if that doesn’t stick, then reach for the secret weapon: accuse them of populism! John Weissenberger explores the favoured narrative-du-jour of our governing elites and proposes that the true source of their angst lies in their own woeful underperformance.