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. )

In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.

The recent collapse of the power grid in Cuba, plunging the island nation into darkness and grinding its meagre economy to a halt, served as a reminder of electricity’s centrality to modern civilization. That dependency is only expected to increase as more electric vehicles take to the road – and, writes Gwyn Morgan, as the tech sector’s voracious appetite for electrons expands unabated. Morgan pours a pail of cold water on the much-mooted “nuclear revival” that has yet to deliver any actual new electricity. He argues instead that what’s needed is clear-eyed recognition that the most reliable, most abundant, most flexible and most affordable energy source is a fossil fuel located in vast quantities right beneath North Americans’ feet.

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.

The devil’s greatest trick, the saying goes, is in convincing the world he doesn’t exist. You could say the same thing about cancel culture. Supporters of this poisonous phenomenon often deny its very existence, claiming those who find themselves fired or publicly ostracized for running afoul of wokist demands are simply being held to account for their own actions. Yet Collin May is proof cancel culture is a real and dangerous thing. Combining rigorous scholarly research with his own personal experience as a target, May reveals how a cancellation takes shape, the characters involved and the roles they play, as well as how – and how not – to defend oneself against this modern-day scourge.

Climate change has ingrained itself so deeply in the public consciousness that it’s likely an article of faith that the foundational science was all conducted, tested and confirmed decades ago. Surely to goodness, exactly how carbon dioxide (CO₂) behaves in the atmosphere is “settled science”, right? That more CO₂ emitted equals more heat and higher temperature is a cornerstone of the ruling scientific paradigm. And yet, finds Jim Mason, the detailed dynamics of how, when and to what degree CO₂ transforms radiation into atmospheric heat are anything but settled. So much remains unknown that recent academic research inquiring whether CO₂ at its current atmospheric concentrations can even absorb more heat amounts to breaking new ground in climate science. If it can’t, notes Mason, then further changes in CO₂ levels not only won’t drive “global boiling”, they won’t have any impact on climate at all.

Among the fundamental freedoms guaranteed to all Canadians is the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression.” The liberty to speak one’s mind and engage in public discussions forms the very foundation of Canada’s democracy. And it is under attack. Investigating a prolonged and often vicious debate in Powell River, B.C. – which includes the denunciation of white British Columbians as “subhuman” – Frances Widdowson reveals how residents have had their basic freedoms denied by a group of well-placed “reconciliation” activists determined to change the name of their city regardless of public opinion or historical fact. As Widdowson discovers, expressing oneself in Powell River has become a risky business.

If one were to rank contenders in the global trade wars, Canada would likely sit somewhere between pint-sized and pipsqueak. Then why would such a nation’s government choose frontal assault against the world’s biggest and most ruthless economic combatant, one wielding a range of weapons and tactics to organize a counter-attack? Yet this is just what the Justin Trudeau government has done in imposing massive import taxes on electric vehicles from China, writes Gwyn Morgan. And worse, Morgan notes, Trudeau & Co. are sacrificing farmers from western Canada on an altar dedicated to eastern auto workers – while taxing those farmers to help pay for the vast subsidies needed to keep the auto workers employed.

In a 2017 TV interview, then British Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip caused a collective gasp when they admitted to splitting up “boy jobs” and “girl jobs” around the house. May went on to win the subsequent election, so her frankness did her career no harm. But the idea that tasks or occupations might be divided on the basis of sex can still cause public apoplexy. Unless, of course, the evidence shows women are better at something than men. In Part III of a special series on “tonic masculinity”, Peter Shawn Taylor looks at recent research suggesting female surgeons outperform male surgeons, and wonders what that means for life outside the operating room. (Part I can be read here and Part II can be read here.)

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.

What good is a man? Not much these days. With traditional male traits such as strength, competitiveness, independence and stoicism widely condemned as evidence of “toxic masculinity”, no one seems willing to celebrate manliness these days. Lynne Cohen is an exception to the rule. In Part II of a special series on the essential aspects of masculinity, Cohen offers a sensitive female perspective on what makes men timelessly irresistible. From gruff leather-clad bikers to balding, tie-wearing office workers and from university frat bros to selfless Ukrainian miners, Cohen finds something to adore about them all. Gather round, fellas, this love letter is to you. (Part I can be read here.)

“Environmental racism” is frequently tossed about Canadian society these days. But what does it actually mean? It’s not about favouring white spruce trees over black spruce trees. Rather, it involves the twisting of basic economic principles into a vicious, politically loaded accusation. The same sense of confusion is sown with other linguistic tricks such as “organizational elder abuse”, “excessive net profits”, “renovictions” and “stakeholder capitalism”. As left-wing politicians and activists seek to redefine fundamental economic and financial concepts as malign forces and to recast socialist objectives as free-market values, Peter Shawn Taylor offers puzzled readers a practical guide to navigating the etymological fog.

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.

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.