Last week’s bombshell announcement that BC United, the former provincial Liberal Party, was suspending its campaign for this fall’s election and throwing its support behind the Conservative Party of B.C. revealed just how dramatically the province’s political landscape has changed. In the fourth instalment of C2C’s series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts how John Rustad’s Conservative Party went in a breathtakingly short time from moribund to upstart to centre-stage and favoured to win, and lays out the issues that divide Canada’s third-biggest province and will dominate the coming campaign.

“You can’t go home again,” American novelist Thomas Wolfe once wrote. Should the same advice apply to the home of Canada’s most important political personality? Greg Piasetzki first visited Bellevue House, one-time Kingston abode of Canada’s founding father Sir John A. Macdonald, when he was a university student in the 1970s. Now, following a controversial renovation of the site by Parks Canada that aims to tell “broader, more inclusive stories about Canada’s first prime minister” – a makeover that includes signs denouncing Macdonald as “a monster” in his own home – Piasetzki returns to Bellevue House to take the measure of the changes.

Barely a year ago the Conservative Party of B.C. was a two-seat rump in the B.C. legislature with an untested leader. Now it has moved ahead in the polls and is positioned to pull off a massive upset in October’s election. In the third instalment of our series on British Columbia, Geoff Russ charts the rise of the Conservatives on Canada’s West Coast, showing how the party’s brand of populism is part of a longstanding political tradition in B.C. going back to the days of W.A.C. Bennett and his Social Credit powerhouse. Russ explains how the upcoming election promises to be a showdown between debt-addicted “progressive” leftist politics and prudent, fiscally-responsible conservative populism.

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.

Amidst Canada’s acute productivity crisis, declining per capita income and crushing public debts, one might think governments would at last refocus on opportunities to grow our economy – or at least not shrink it deliberately. But on the West Coast, activists and decision-makers remain fixated on coddling a few dozen iconic members of a non-endangered species even at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in foregone revenue. And the federal government has proved all-too willing to facilitate the devastation. In the second instalment of C2C’s series on Canada’s troubled Pacific Province, Vancouver Island resident Gwyn Morgan explains how environmental politics are creating a biological pecking order in which whales are at the top, salmon in the middle – and humans at the bottom.

B.C.’s election campaign officially kicks off in mid-September, but in some ways it feels like it has been underway all summer. There’s trouble aplenty in what was long regarded as Canada’s Pacific paradise, and B.C.’s partisan landscape is being reshaped almost before our eyes. With that in mind, C2C kicks off a special series on Canada’s troubled Pacific Province with James R. Coggins’ examination of B.C.’s burgeoning public debt, a worrisome development in what was once arguably the nation’s financially best-managed province. Coggins charts B.C.’s journey in barely a decade from balanced budgets and manageable debt to seemingly perpetual deficits and a potential tripling of the provincial debt.

It’s a central tenet of the free-market economy: a corporation’s job is to maximize investment returns to its shareholders. Bluntly, to make money. And “shareholder proposals” have been a powerful tool enabling investors to pressure a company’s board to take a particular action to increase its value. In recent years, however, activist groups have been weaponizing shareholder proposals to pressure companies into pursuing ideological goals, especially environmental and “progressive” social-welfare causes. In the case of the oil and natural gas industry, they’ve even pushed for companies to take actions that would drive them out of business. Veteran markets expert Gina Pappano examines this damaging phenomenon – and the new movement pushing back.

Amidst the jostling theories about the nature of education, the philosopher G.K. Chesterton once succinctly summarized it as “simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” But what if that soul is being torn apart from within? What if today’s kids are told to despise almost everything about yesterday, in order to prepare them to overturn society tomorrow? James Pew traces the path of so-called “critical pedagogy” from the fever-dream of a Brazilian communist, to the guiding doctrine of an internationally celebrated Canadian teacher-training institute, and onward to the classroom activities in a growing number of Canadian schools. Part I of an extended series on the state of education in Canada.

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.

In our largely “post-truth” society, the validity of a given statement is increasingly assessed based on who is making it. There are even those who believe that only some should be allowed to say certain things – while others should be scorned or even imprisoned for uttering the same words. This increasingly describes the discursive landscape concerning Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and whether Indigenous children disappeared from and/or were murdered there. Drawing on his lived experience as a onetime residential school employee, on his long academic record and, not least, on his personal courage in the face of those who wish to criminalize “denialism”, Rodney Clifton presents a humbly argued plea for Canadians to judge their country’s residential school record according to the truth – the actual, factual truth.

We stand on the precipice of a new technological age. Artificial intelligence promises (or threatens) to upend every aspect of modern life – from employment to entertainment, manufacturing to warfare – as well as the very relationship between humanity and the machinery it creates. Given AI’s potentially cataclysmic consequences, D.C.C. Randell argues it is imperative that we set not merely regulatory and technical boundaries around its development, but ethical ones as well. Combining the warnings of current AI experts with the wisdom of philosophers and moralists from past ages, Randell explains the dangers posed by allowing the AI revolution to continue unfettered and proposes steps to bring it in line.

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.

An encounter with a nearly incomprehensible, seemingly absurd and coldly indifferent judicial body offering no apparent hope of resolution would surely cause most citizens to give up in disgust. Gleb Lisikh is made of different stuff; being patronized and rebuffed only makes him dig harder. In this continuation of his now three-year-long legal Odyssey (Part I can be read here), Lisikh provides a firsthand account of the worsening dysfunction of Canada’s court system – and makes the startling discovery that activist human rights adjudicators are attempting to exclude millions of Ontarians from the protection of the human rights code.

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.

The rupture of Calgary’s biggest water main revealed more than the problems of aging infrastructure. It showed a civic bureaucracy unable to provide basic services or fix things when they break, and a mayor eager to blame others and scold citizens for their selfishness in wanting city services in return for their tax dollars. Above all, it laid bare the increasing tendency of governments to neglect their core responsibilities in favour of social policy fetishes, and to sidestep accountability when things go wrong. Clear, competent, mission-focused public servants are a vanishing breed, writes George Koch, and governing a city is now mainly about keeping city workers, senior officials and elected politicians happy.

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.

Perhaps there is a certain twisted logic to the woke left’s attempt to convince schoolchildren that math is racist and that 2 plus 2 might well equal 5. For this may be the only way to get the “math” surrounding the Justin Trudeau government’s push to force Canadians into buying only electric vehicles as of 2035 to work in any way at all. Gwyn Morgan reviews the actual math of key elements of the EV transition scheme – the electric power needs, the subsidized purchases, the tax credits, the vast number of required charging stations, the maintenance of roads – and finds both the costs and the implementation obstacles to be a mixture of steep, dubious and prohibitive. So much so, Morgan concludes, as to cast the entire EV transition in doubt.

Canada’s military today has submarines that can’t submerge, nearly half-century-old fighter jets that should never be sent into combat, an unending recruitment crisis, a collapsed public image and barely enough combat-capable soldiers to fill an army brigade – in a G7 nation of 40 million people with a nearly $3 trillion economy. Eighty years ago the same country – much poorer and with a population 75 percent smaller – deployed six entire divisions fighting simultaneously in two different combat theatres, more than 500 warplanes and one of the world’s largest navies, and kept them all supplied across an ocean. Historian David J. Bercuson recounts a time when Canada was a country that got stuff done, that earned its seat at the table with the big nations, that knew its purpose, and whose people were able and willing to do whatever it took to win, most especially on the day – June 6, 1944 – when the fate of civilization hung in the balance.

The Roman Catholic Church is steeped in centuries of mystery and ineffable truths. Its time-honoured rituals and beliefs offer an important sense of comfort and continuity to its 1.4 billion worldwide adherents. Yet a mysterious “Sacred Covenant” signed recently between two Canadian Catholic organizations and the Kamloops First Nation concerning unproven allegations of human remains on the grounds of a former Indian Residential School will bring neither comfort nor continuity. Instead, it points to an existential crisis deep within the Church itself. Hymie Rubenstein takes a close look at what is known about this strange agreement, and what it means for the future of truth and reconciliation in Canada.

Most Canadians surely believe their society is governed by the rule of law. We all have rights and freedoms, safeguarded by the courts, that protect us from the tyranny of the state. All of that is mirage, argues Bruce Pardy. In this provocative essay, Pardy describes how authority in Canada is now vested in a managerial elite. They supervise our speech, employment, bank accounts and media. Controlling vast sectors of the economy and society, they track, direct, incentivize, censor, punish, redistribute, subsidize, tax, license and inspect. Elected legislatures delegate them authority, and courts let them do as they like – including infringing on Charter rights – to achieve whatever social goals they deem in the public interest. The rule of law has melted away; rule by law now prevails. It is time, Pardy says, for Canadians to correct the naïve constitutional mistake that started us down this road.

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.)

Canada’s western lands, wrote one prominent academic, became provinces “in the Roman sense” – acquired possessions that, once vanquished, were there to be exploited. Laurentian Canada regarded the hinterlands as existing primarily to serve the interests of the heartland. And the current holders of office in Ottawa often behave as if the Constitution’s federal-provincial distribution of powers is at best advisory, if it needs to be acknowledged at all. Reviewing this history, Barry Cooper places Alberta’s widely criticized Sovereignty Act in the context of the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens. Canada is a federation, notes Cooper. Provinces do have rights. Constitutions do mean something. And when they are no longer working, they can be changed.

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.

It took almost no time after the Hamas attacks of October 7 for the world’s compassion towards the Jewish victims to dissipate. First came the sniping at Israel’s government, then “pro-Palestinian” rallies protesting the Gaza offensive and soon an unmasked anti-Semitism that included praise of the Hamas atrocities. Some of the worst hostility took place during the recent Jewish holy period of Passover, with the eruption of illegal encampments at university campuses across North America. Many Jews are experiencing the shock, pain and fear brought by naked anti-Semitism for the first time in their lives. Lynne Cohen explores the history of this appalling mindset and seeks to explain how, in a modern, pluralistic world with the Holocaust just slipping out of living memory, we are seeing a return of the world’s oldest hatred.

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.

It is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contention there’s no “business case” for exporting Canada’s abundant, inexpensively produced natural gas as LNG. But Canadians might do well to politely decline management consulting advice from a former substitute drama teacher who was born into wealth and has never had to meet a payroll, balance a budget or make a sale. Bluntly stated, someone who has shown no evidence of being able to run the proverbial lemonade stand. And one whose real agenda, the evidence shows, is to strangle the nation’s most productive and wealth-generating industry. With the first LNG ship finally expected to dock at Kitimat, B.C. over the next year and load Canada’s first-ever LNG export cargo, Gwyn Morgan lays out the business and environmental cases for ramping up our LNG exports – and having them count towards Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.

One of the worst aspects of totalitarian societies is the pressure exerted on individuals to betray and ultimately denounce friends, relatives, even their own parents or spouse. This odious practice is now being demanded by some Canadian Indigenous leaders and local activists in a northern B.C. town – under the guise of “reconciliation”. The crime? A prominent local woman purchased an unapproved book and dared to suggest that a few acquaintances read it. Now her husband – the local mayor, who had nothing to do with it – is being pressured not only to resign his office but to denounce his own wife for her thought-crime. That is some reconciliation. Tom Flanagan reports on the insanity gripping Quesnel, B.C.

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.

Equity has lately become the quintessential goal of all government policies. Every Canadian, regardless of position, place or identity, must be seen to be treated fairly by their public institutions. But how can a tax system – surely the most central of all government activities – be considered fair if it requires some families to pay thousands more in taxes than other families with exactly the same income? With Ottawa eagerly adding to the bloat of its ludicrously-complex and costly Income Tax Act, it’s time to confront the glaring inequity at the heart of Canada’s tax system. Peter Shawn Taylor looks back to the last time someone offered a solution to this problem – and finds we need this wisdom now more than ever.