Clear skies in once-smoggy L.A. Wildlife wandering through cities and bedding down in parks. Deserted streets. Idled factories. For the left, the pandemic has created a convenient waypoint on their path to utopia. To the rest of us, it has furnished a nightmarish vision of a potentially destitute future, and a wakeup call to focus on what it might take to revive our economy. For Matthew Lau, the choice is clear. And while news media reports continue to promote fanciful progressive agendas, Lau sees encouraging signs that the imperatives of survival will enable practicality and common sense to prevail.

When the Canada-U.S. land border (“the world’s longest undefended border”) was largely closed in March because of Covid, few expected it to last this long. Mathew Preston writes that the virus’s rapid spread has reinvigorated the debate about borders – national and provincial. History shows that when a country closes its gates, they take a long time to reopen.

Canadians have been hectored into essentially hunkering down in their homes. Nearly all of us at least have a home. But what if you found yourself halfway around the world, with nowhere to live, the situation changing almost hourly, and lacking even the legal rights of a local citizen? Patrick Keeney not only maintained his equanimity but found time on the fly to explain how one man adapted to the life of an expatriate vagabond. Keeney shares his observations about the pandemic’s impact on a vulnerable culture and shows us all how, amidst the many exigencies, it’s possible to continuing finding joy.

Canada has so far ducked the extreme growth in the Covid-19 hospitalization and mortality rates afflicting some other countries. The worst is certainly still to come, however – and when it does, the shortfall in Canada’s health care capacity will be laid bare. The vulnerability was largely avoidable, points out Gwyn Morgan, if Canada like nearly all other countries had only allowed private health care delivery alongside its public system. When the nation comes out the other side of the pandemic, Morgan writes, a health care policy reckoning will be long overdue.

How should the conservative mind respond to the coronavirus pandemic? Panic and despair are in ample supply, and the urge to succumb appears widespread. Others have steered, via deliberate ignorance, to fatalism, though the walls are closing in on such rebels. Both extremes are beneath thoughtful conservatives. C2C Editor-in-Chief George Koch counsels that however dark today might appear, the eternal search for objective truth – the foundation for all conservative thought – is the first necessary step along the path to seeing humankind through to brighter days.

The UN wants the world’s “migrants” – 258 million of them, by its own count – free to move about the world, presumably from poor countries to rich countries. It demands that those rich hosts not only open their arms, but make all their generous social programs instantly available. And, to help this process along, that countries clamp down on any “intolerance” – policing public speech, news media and even academic research. In short, it wants to shut down debate about immigration. In Part II of this special two-part report, with a federal election just weeks away, Lloyd W. Robertson illustrates the importance of talking about immigration while we still can.

A new Canada-U.S. agreement could see illegal migrants immediately returned to their countries of origin. This has raised concerns about Canada’s commitment to “non-refoulement”, i.e., keeping refugees away from countries where they could face torture or persecution. With an estimated 258 million migrants worldwide, Lloyd W. Robertson urges Canada to have a realistic conversation about immigration.

In Part I of our special two-part report, published on July 3, C2C Journal’s Mathew Preston looked at the nature and successes of populist movements in Denmark, Italy and Australia. Contrary to the elites and establishments who castigate populism as eruptions of alt-right extremism, Preston illuminated how in embracing policies from across the political spectrum, populism defies ideological lumping. In Part II, Preston profiles additional countries and evaluates just how and why populism got where it is today.

Remembrance Day ceremonies were much reduced this year because of fears about Covid-19, but our collective memory remains strong. Chuck Strahl retraced the path of I Canadian Corps in the Italian campaign, vividly recounting how our army defeated Wehrmacht forces in a series of bloody battles.

The election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit and the eruption of the gilets jaunes movement in France exemplify the global rise of populism. It’s a phenomenon the international commentariat has condemned as a dark and dangerous political disorder arising from the far right end of the political spectrum. In the first of a special two-part series, Matthew Preston examines successful populist movements in Australia, Italy and Denmark. They are more complex and politically diverse, Preston’s reporting reveals, than can be contained in a simplistic left-versus-right, sensible-versus-extreme narrative.