Future of Science
Time was when nearly everyone – even schoolkids – understood and accepted that geologic time was measured in tens if not hundreds of millions of years, a barely-fathomable vastness that animated our awe over the Age of Dinosaurs or the mysterious arrival of intelligent, upright apes. So how to explain the small but determined scientific movement intent on winning acceptance that geology can now be measured in a comparative blink of an eye, and that humanity has entered a new geological epoch defined by…itself? Applying his professional geologist’s scientific rigour and his amateur cultural historian’s perspective, John Weissenberger urges scientists to maintain a measure of humility, to recall the bitter lessons of past pseudo-scientific fiascos, and to be wary of the pitfalls of activist science pursuing political ends.
Electoral Systems
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.
Public Finances
Ottawa’s post-pandemic $300 billion spending orgy was coupled with the pompous claim to “Build Back Better”. As it happened, most of that spending was recklessly borrowed – stoking inflation – while Build Back Better was a dud, was discarded in embarrassment and, if recalled at all today, is told as a sick joke. Far too many planned projects now sink into a quicksand of political haggling, regulatory overkill, mission creep, design complexity and, if built at all, bungled execution. Looking at specific examples, Gwyn Morgan presents the lamentable results: far less is actually getting built across Canada, nearly everything takes forever and – worst of all – costs routinely soar to ludicrous levels. Added to that, Morgan notes, are woke-based criteria being imposed by the Trudeau government that are worsening the vicious cycle.
Markets or Monopolies?
That Canada’s health care system is ailing is no longer news. That it is not only victim but perpetrator – killing patients through indifference and neglect – is also increasingly understood. But is Canada’s publicly funded and operated monopoly health care system an economy of sorts, a set of relationships that can be understood in economic terms, and one that might lend itself to reform by applying economic principles? In the second of three prize-winning entries from the 1st Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest to be published by C2C Journal, Alicia Kardos answers a resounding “Yes”. Drawing on key ideas and principles of the genius from Kirkcaldy, Scotland, Kardos envisions an overhauled health care system in which incentives are rational, self-interest is rewarded and the consumer – the patient – is king.
Politicized Culture
The shocking eruptions of Jew-hatred following the Hamas atrocity against Israel in October swept through streets, squares and universities, threatening individuals, businesses and communities in dozens of countries including Canada. That the evil phenomenon might soon fall upon the cultural scene seemed inevitable. The responses of cultural organizations weren’t inevitable, however, but a series of choices. And so with a pair of West Coast theatres recently facing the choice of proceeding with a long-scheduled, highly acclaimed play in which Jews are not portrayed as villains, or submitting to the bullying of pro-Hamas activists and a tendentious Palestinian graffiti artist. Examining the situation, Michael Posner finds one work dedicated to uncovering universal truths and shared humanity, the other employing untruth to advance a particularist political agenda.
Future of Media
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.
Government control
Low prices and high volumes can be a successful business model in the right hands. Just think Costco or Walmart. But should anyone trust government to pull off such a strategy? As the early returns on the Trudeau Liberals’ $10-a-day childcare program reveal, Ottawa is utterly incapable of delivering on such a promise. While offering childcare at a fraction of its true cost has led to a massive increase in demand, the country is now beset by disastrous childcare shortages and ever-lengthening waiting lists. In fact, more parents are looking after their own kids at home now than was the case in 2019. As Matthew Lau reports, there’s a solution to Canada’s childcare supply woes, but the Liberals refuse to consider it.
Origins of Covid-19
The idea that the virus that caused Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China rather than being passed from an animal to a person at a Chinese market has gained more and more support. Remarkable as that is, more worrisome is evidence that the secretive lab was designed to develop and tinker with dangerous viruses to make them more virulent and contagious — ostensibly in the name of medical research. Still more disturbing are the links between the Chinese facility and American scientists, government agencies and NGOs, and the possibility that the road to the pandemic actually began decades ago with efforts to weaponize medicine. Margret Kopala unpacks this tawdry tale and notes warnings from those at the centre of the story that another and possibly even worse pandemic is likely.
Opioid Crisis
Almost as many Canadians have been lost to drug overdoses in the last seven years as were killed in combat throughout the Second World War. Yet governments, health care professionals and addiction experts continue to quarrel over virtually every aspect of the opioid crisis – its causes, possible remedies and even whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents. And amidst this dithering and experimentation, the horrific death toll mounts. In search of hope, veteran researcher Susan Martinuk takes a close look at life in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside and compares it to the decidedly different approach taken by Alberta’s UCP government.
Value of Leisure
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.
Surging Population
It is arguably forgivable for a government long in office to allow one problem to deteriorate into a crisis. Waving off two or three crises at once would require a voter of rare goodwill – or perhaps naïveté or indifference. But four? Especially after said government ignored ample warning signs, years of deteriorating numbers and no shortage of sound external policy advice. That is where Canada finds itself today, governed by a party fixated on riding out the political fallout while Canadians endure the economic hardship and at-times literally deadly effects. Gwyn Morgan examines the entwined crises in housing affordability, health care, immigration and economic productivity, a vicious cycle that the Justin Trudeau government shows few signs of understanding and none at all of resolving.
Freedom to Read
Libraries have served as storehouses of diverse knowledge since ancient times and over the centuries blossomed into bastions of intellectual freedom. So why did one of Canada’s largest school boards recently decide to remove most of the books from its own libraries? Children’s book author and retired schoolteacher Marjorie Gann examines the discreditable politics behind the Peel District School Board’s plan to send books written before 2008 to the landfill, and the literary carnage caused by this shocking decision. With Canada’s entire children’s book industry – publishers, librarians and writers’ groups – now apparently in the thrall of wokism, it has fallen to a small group of outraged parents and teachers to defend students’ freedom to read.
National Narrative
“I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling.” So said Pierre Berton, Canada’s most successful popular historian, two years before his death in 2004. Today, Canadian popular history appears to have little to do with honest storytelling and even less with patriotism. Rather than a “National Dream” – the title of Berton’s most famous book – the telling of Canada’s story has descended into a “National Nightmare” full of accusations of genocide and evil characters who must be purged from public view. Stephen R. Bown, one of the country’s few remaining practitioners of the craft, charts the recent trajectory of popular history, the many fascinating tales it has to tell, and its importance to creating Canada’s national narrative.
Indigenous Reconciliation
The most dangerous myths are those everyone claims to be true. Set in motion by the evidence-free “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Canada’s myth of the missing children has come to dominate native discourse at home and abroad. And anyone who asks for proof of this tale of officially-sanctioned mass murder is now labelled a “denialist.” Seeking to bust this myth is the important new book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). In an exclusive preview, co-editor Tom Flanagan explains how the “missing children” narrative first took shape and how this book sets things straight.
Education
Universities in Canada rely almost entirely on high school transcripts to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. Yet the marks on those transcripts are often unreliable. A single, standardized test – like most developed countries use – would make the process fairer and more accurate. But Canadian schools (as well as more and more American colleges) see them as elitist and even racist. Gordon Lee looks at the history and the evidence and finds standardized tests help lower-income and marginalized students, working against racial and economic discrimination. And they could form a bulwark against emerging “holistic” admissions policies that would further embed woke ideology in our education system.
Pandemic Aftermath
Despite the wreckage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic – social disintegration, ruined lives, physical and economic tolls – the governments and public officials who “managed” the emergency have been decidedly uninterested in assessing their performance. Except in Alberta, where a government-appointed panel just released its Final Report. Though predictably attacked by politicians, media and “experts” who can abide no dissent, the report makes many sensible recommendations, Barry Cooper finds. The report calls for emergency management experts – not doctors or health care bureaucrats – to be in charge when such disasters strike, with politicians who are accountable to the people making the key decisions. Most important, the report demands much stronger protection for the individual freedoms that panic-stricken governments and overbearing professional organizations so readily quashed.
New Books
To his fans, former Ontario premier Mike Harris is a conservative icon, a leader who cut taxes, reduced government spending, made sensible education and welfare reforms and put Canada’s biggest province back on the road to prosperity. To his enemies he was a ruthless ideologue whose “Common Sense Revolution” ignored the weak and punished the poor. A new book of essays by seasoned political campaigners and prominent policy experts re-examines this polarizing figure and finds both strengths and weaknesses. Harris’ success on the big issues of the day, finds reviewer Sam Routley, shows that when it comes to actually governing a democracy, what matters most is a clear-headed willingness to just get things done.
Community Attachment
Everyone wants to protect children. Everyone also appreciates the benefits of a robust and engaged volunteer sector. We should be able to have both at the same time. Yet many long-time volunteers are quitting and potential new entrants are skipping the experience altogether. With safety precautions overwhelming the volunteer sector, it is becoming increasingly difficult to give away one’s own labour. Using his personal experience as a guide, Peter Shawn Taylor takes a close look at the charitable sector’s current mania for police checks and other safety measures, the costs they impose on volunteers and whether they’re actually protecting our kids from sexual predators.
Cashless Society?
Most of us might think that, what with credit cards, e-transfers and online banking, money has pretty much already gone digital. But the Bank of Canada is busily working on a much bigger transformation. Canada is one of more than 100 countries worldwide that are studying, developing or even implementing central bank digital currency (CBDC). CBDC is marketed as a convenient replacement for cash once it disappears from use, as a way to provide access to financial services for the “underbanked,” and as a bulwark against volatile cryptocurrency. Gleb Lisikh untangles this little-known phenomenon and finds that, contrary to its billing, CBDC is both unnecessary and dangerous.
Constitutional Referendums
In a historic national vote last month, Australians decisively rejected a constitutional amendment that would have created a permanent Indigenous group — the Voice — to advise government. It was a nasty fight. Opponents argued the measure would divide the country by race when all should be equal, would add another unelected layer of government with undefined and possibly untrammelled power, and would fail to grapple with the real problems suffered by Australia’s Indigenous people. The “Yes” camp merely attacked, calling anyone who disagreed ignorant and racist. Eric Hughes, a Canadian dual citizen living in Australia, recounts the bitter referendum campaign and its ultimate, heartening result.
Health Care Crisis
Among the most painful aspects of Canada’s worsening health care crisis is the sheer lack of doctors, especially general practitioners or family physicians. One reason for this is the education system’s scant production of medical school graduates. Defects in Canada’s method of medical residency – professional apprenticeship – add further obstacles to the flow of new doctors. Drawing upon research into the numbers and nature of the medical education system plus personal experience, Gwyn Morgan lays bare the challenges faced by young residents and offers practical solutions that could help Canada produce more family doctors.
Stories
The Hamas attack on Israel was horrific and depraved, but at the same time foreseeable and explicable. The goal of Hamas and its allies in terror is not an independent state for Palestinians but the eradication of Israel and of Jews themselves. While many are now demanding that Israel hold back and negotiate for peace, some argue it is the “peace process” itself that facilitated the conflict. Lynne Cohen charts what she considers the only road to a durable peace – one that begins with uncompromising action by Israel and ends with an international effort borrowed from the post-Second World War era.
Indigenous Rights
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.
New Books
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.
Society and Culture
Pornography is as old as art itself. But unlike previous iterations distributed via painted vases, printing presses, movie theatres or video, the internet offers unlimited hardcore sexual content that is easily accessible, anonymous for viewers and nearly always free. As Elie Cantin-Nantel explains, this dramatic increase in availability creates serious problems for the physical and mental health of users, their families and society at large – with children and young women at greatest risk. And if that sounds like a public health crisis everyone can rally around…you’d be wrong. Cantin-Nantel asks why so many governments, public health organizations and academics are ignoring the porn problem. 
Censorship and Free Speech
Its leaders are avowed leftists and even “trained Marxists.” Its central creed is an oppression narrative revolving around race, gender and other elements of identity. It loathes capitalism, middle-class society and traditional institutions, and wants to topple all of them. Whatever else it might be – even if you sympathize with some of its ideas and goals – it seems undeniable that wokism is a feature of the political left. Not so, says a small but vocal and apparently growing group of left-wing theorists. John Weissenberger explores the claim that wokism is actually a right-wing phenomenon stemming from the historically foreordained problems of “late-stage capitalism.”
Health Policy
Canadian smokers have seen warning labels on their cigarette packs for more than half a century, part of an ever-expanding government effort to convince them to quit. While these labels have metastasized in size and grotesqueness over the years, millions of Canadians still haven’t kicked the habit. Now Health Canada thinks one more warning – this time on every individual cigarette – will finally do the trick. Mustering ample scientific and international evidence, Ian Irvine argues there’s a better way to help smokers improve their health. But doing so will require a major reversal in how Ottawa regards smokers and the entire nicotine industry.
Canadian Economy
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a good chart can explain billions. With just a few simple lines, a chart can bring complicated economic facts into sharp focus – revealing, for example, the growing gap in living standards between Canada and the U.S. since 2015. Or the $127 billion in excess spending by the federal Liberals even before the pandemic hit. Or the impact of the recent spike in inflation. Using seven custom-created charts, Matthew Lau illustrates and explains the financial devastation wrought by the Trudeau government’s fiscal policies throughout the Canadian economy. Troublingly, Lau’s final three charts suggest the worst is yet to come.
Carbon Politics
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.
Nonfiction Novella
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.)

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